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3: Conflict: Warfare and Captivity, 1850–81
- Ohio University Press
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74 3 w Conflict Warfare and Captivity, 1850–81 From the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, a fairly consistent model of manhood runs through Baté’s historical narratives. Baté’s male elites are depicted as devout Muslims, often as clerics, sometimes as merchants. They are not remembered as warring men who rely on organized violence to accumulate power and authority. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a new form of masculinity surfaces in the local narratives. At that time, Baté becomes home to the armed soldier, skilled on the battlefield, and ready for combat. These soldierly men reveal that warfare and violence overtook the pacifist principles of tolerance and nonviolence that had for so long guided Baté’s external relations. This change shows that Baté’s Suwarian Islamic roots did not constitute an inalienable, incontrovertible charter of governance , and it further indicates that Baté’s political history followed a path that has been well documented in other parts of West Africa. Historians have demonstrated that the nineteenth century was an era of intense violence. The decline of the transatlantic slave trade did not eliminate the demand in Africa for servile labor, nor did it put an end to the political economies of warfare that fed the internal market for slaves. In addition, increased sectarian conflict, in the form of militant jihad, also contributed to the conflicts that took place in the interior savannas of West Africa. Approachingthiseraofstatecraftwithaneyetotherelationshipofhouseholdmaking and state-making allows for a more intimate and nuanced perspective to emerge, one that is sensitive to internal dynamics as well as to the broader context, to household and gender roles as well as to political economy and religious strife. This analysis demonstrates that the emergence of warfare as a domain of wealth production tore away at the carefully constructed households Warfare and Captivity, 1850–81 w 75 and hierarchies that had long been managed by Baté’s male gerontocratic elites. Armies created new opportunities for young men with guns to assume positions of power and authority, and battlefields and military offensives opened new fields of political production. This process did not just imperil and antagonize Baté’s polytheistic neighbors, who now fell subject to raids and offensives, and who retaliated in kind. It also sparked generational and gender conflicts in Baté, and changed yet again the relationship of the household to the state. With warfare and militarization, the household ceased to be the building block of statecraft, but rather an expression of it. That is, the household became a site where male elites articulated the power and wealth that they accumulated elsewhere—households became showcases of slaves and booty, the bounty of warfare—while women served increasingly as pawns in the conflicts of men. As in previous periods of Baté’s history, the local accounts that circulate about the mid-nineteenth century focus on specific people who offer dense representations of complex process of change. This chapter is anchored by an investigation of three such figures. The first man on which the chapter focuses is Alfa Mahmud Kaba, who is credited with centralizing the state’s governance structure in the early 1850s. Narratives about his life illuminate the external pressures and larger religious debates that facilitated Baté’s militarization in the mid-nineteenth century. The second figure is that of Umaru Ba Kaba, the son of Alfa Mahmud Kaba. He headed up Baté’s military and is widely remembered as a brutal and violent man who fought arbitrarily and enslaved many. Umaru Ba emerges from the oral narratives as a personalized explanation for why, as historian Patrick Manning has remarked, “the last half of the nineteenth century was the period in which slavery expanded to its greatest extent in Africa.”1 Finally, there is the story of Dandjo, a woman who was taken captive in one of Baté’s wars and became the object of a heated dispute among some of Baté’s male elites. Her story shows how warfare as a mode of statecraft changed the composition of Baté’s households and the political significance and influence of women within them. Taken together, these narratives expose the causes for the shift to militarization, while they also show how organized violence reconfigured the relationship of the household to the state. alfa mahmud: baté’s firs t mans a The man who steered Baté toward a militant approach to statecraft is Alfa Mahmud Kaba. Alfa Mahmud, a man who was both a scholar and a warrior, emerges from the historical...