When France marched into West Africa in the 1880s, its generals expected a quick campaign. Instead they met Samori Touré, a ruler who had built an empire from nothing and an arms industry to defend it. For sixteen years he held the most powerful colonial army in the region at bay, and when his capital finally fell, he simply moved his entire empire east and kept fighting.
From captive to emperor
Samori Touré was born around 1830 near Sanankoro, in what is now Guinea, into a family of Dyula traders. As a young man he watched raiders seize his mother, and he offered himself in her place. He spent seven years serving her captors, the Sise, and in that time he learned the two skills that would define his life: how to fight, and how to use firearms.
By 1878 he had united the Wassoulou region and proclaimed himself faama, or military leader, of a new empire. From his capital at Bissandugu he ruled a state that stretched across present-day Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, northern Côte d'Ivoire and southern Burkina Faso, with tens of thousands of infantry and some 3,000 cavalry under his command.
An arms industry in the bush
What set Samori apart was not only his army but how he armed it. He traded gold and ivory through British Sierra Leone for the newest European rifles, and he put his own blacksmiths to work copying them. His workshops reverse-engineered captured French rifles and turned out about twelve guns a week, so that every soldier in his army carried at least one firearm, while his elite troops fought with modern repeating rifles.
He also signed a treaty with Britain in 1890 that kept the rifles flowing. France, which wanted the same trade routes and goldfields for itself, found itself facing an African army that was learning to match European firepower with workshops of its own.
Sixteen years against France
The first clash came in February 1882, when Samori refused a French order to withdraw from the trading town of Kiniéran and drove off the French column sent against him. Treaties in 1886 and 1887 bought him time to rearm, but in 1891 France launched a full offensive under Colonel Louis Archinard. Kankan fell in April 1891, and Bissandugu was captured the following year.
Most rulers would have surrendered. Samori burned his own capital rather than hand it over, and moved his entire empire east toward the Bandama and Comoé rivers, building a second Wassoulou state around the trading city of Kong, which his forces captured in 1895. His soldiers fought a scorched-earth war, destroying everything they left behind so the French would inherit nothing. He was not the only African commander to shatter a European army: at Isandlwana in 1879, Zulu warriors destroyed a British column in a single day.
Capture, exile, and legacy
The end came on 29 September 1898, when Captain Henri Gouraud surprised Samori's camp at Guélémou in present-day Côte d'Ivoire and captured him. He was exiled to Gabon, where he died of pneumonia on 2 June 1900.
French officers who fought him called him the Black Napoleon. Colonel Baratier, who served in the campaign, wrote that they were fighting "a strategic genius and a spirit that refuses to surrender." A century later, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori after him.
Samori Touré never surrendered his empire. France took it from him piece by piece over sixteen years, at a cost in men, money and time that no other West African ruler imposed. The rifles his blacksmiths built in the bush are the reason the conquest of West Africa was never the easy march Europe expected.
