Our New Husbands Are Here

2: Growth: Warfare and Exile, Commerce and Expansion, 1750–1850

49 2 w Growth Warfare and Exile, Commerce and Expansion, 1750–1850 Around 1770, a warrior-chief, named Condé Brahima, violently attacked the Muslim enclave on the banks of the Milo River Valley. As a result, the state of Baté disintegrated: many of its residents were killed, others fled, and yet others were taken captive and enslaved. But Condé Brahima’s assault did not destroy the state altogether. After living in exile for some years, a number of Baté’s residents made their way back to the Milo River Valley, where they rebuilt their households and renewed their commitment to a pacifist mode of statecraft. The period of demographic and economic expansion that followed in the early nineteenth century transformed what had been an inward-looking clerical enclave into a mercantile Islamic state that engaged readily with the wider world through commerce. As with Baté’s early years, it is not possible to understand this period of crisis and growth in the Milo River Valley by focusing simply on the workings of the state’s leadership and on its formal political structures. It is also necessary to investigate how male elites used their households to make and maintain the state. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Baté’s male elites charged their female relations with carrying out, through marriage and motherhood, a complex mission that combined the state’s domestic, diplomatic , and foreign policy goals. As a result, women’s household roles continued to be weighted with political significance. But the power and authority of male household heads also increased in this era, for the new economic activities that took place in the state favored men. Long-distance trade was a male-dominated sector, and the wealth that resulted increased the practice of slavery in the state and rendered men less dependent on the contributions and cooperation of their female relations. In short, households continued to serve 50 w Growth as a centerpiece of the political system in the mercantile era of statecraft, but commerce and trade rigidified the gender relations and social hierarchies that operated within those households. This process meant that fewer conflicts and debates took place in this era about the meanings and implications of womanhood, and that male elites felt less anxiety about the capacity of women to either do great good or great ill to the household and to the state. The economically dynamic and politically pacifist mode of householdmaking and state-making that took root in the Milo River Valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries furthermore presents a vantage point to consider a series of transformations that took place more generally in West Africa at this time. The attack that Baté suffered at the hands of Condé Brahima offers testimony to rising sectarian violence and increasing warfare brought about by the intensification of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. Likewise, changing terms of trade along the coast, sparked by the abolishment in 1807 of the overseas slave trade by the British, also influenced the economic pursuits undertaken by Baté’s elites. Baté and, specifically, the urban center of Kankan thus offer an illuminating case study on how the transition from the transatlantic slave trade to “legitimate commerce ” refracted into and affected the interior savannas of West Africa. alfa kabiné kaba and the attack of condé brahima The sources that relate to this period of crisis and rebirth in Baté’s history are mostly oral, and they tend to focus on the life of one of Baté’s great heroes, a chief named Alfa Kabiné Kaba. Alfa Kabiné is credited with guiding a surviving group of Muslims back to the Milo River Valley after their flight from the assault of Condé Brahima in the late eighteenth century. He is also said to have built a new town, Kankan, which he called Kankan nabaya, or Kankan Welcome, to signal its open-armed embrace of merchants and migrants, whom he integrated into the households of the state through marriage. Unlike other celebrated leaders of the Mande world, Alfa Kabiné is not remembered as a hunter-king skilled in warfare and the occult. Rather, he is commemorated as a devout and learned Muslim who rejected violence as a means to resolve conflict. And while Alfa Kabiné assumes mythic proportion in local historical accounts—stories of his life swirl with genies and spirits, jinn—narratives about him are also studded with references to specific processes, people, and places.1 Alfa Kabiné’s...