Collaboration, Modernity and Colonial Rule: Sidiyya Baba and Mauritania
By David Robinson
The Desperation of the Sidiyya in the Late 19th Century
Things went badly for the Sidiyya in the late nineteenth century. Sidiyya al-Kabir died in 1868 and was succeeded by his son, a noted poet. A cholera epidemic swept the poet away in 1869, leaving Baba to be raised by other members of the family as well as a Kunta shaikh. The family kept a low profile for the next two decades. In the late 1880s Baba began to resurrect the family tradition. He was a brilliant student of the Islamic sciences and Sufism; he soon projected a career on a broad canvas similar to that of his grandfather, and assumed the name "Shaikh Sidiyya." He launched his diplomatic career in 1886, when he gave sanctuary to the two sons of the recently assassinated Trarza Emir, Mohammed Fal.
Baba faced a more precarious situation than his grandfather: the increasing violence and disruption of bidan society. To the east, in Tagant, Sidiyya influence was threatened by Bakar wuld Su`aid Ahmad, the head of the Idaw `Ish coalition. Bakar maintained an active network of war, production, trade, and protection extending from the Senegal River into the Adrar. He took a clear stand of opposition to the growing influence of the French in Mauritania, particularly their elimination of the "customs" payment which he had long received for transporting and protecting gum caravans along the Senegal River.
In Brakna Sidiyya hegemony was contested by the Ijaydba, a zwaya group that had long-standing claims on key resources in the region, including wells, pasture and fields ranging from the river to the desert. They opposed the Sidiyya claims to religious and legal supremacy in southern Mauritania. The Ijaydba tended to ally with fractions of the emiral houses of Brakna and Trarza opposed to Sidiyya interests.
The broader context was the Trans-Saharan trade, which was changing rapidly. Warriors, herders and traders pressed increasingly into the southern zones, closer to the river, the source of grain and gum, and to the French trading sphere headquartered in Saint-Louis. The Abyayri and their Sidiyya leadership encountered increasing competition for resources at the end of the nineteenth century. In this connection their worst enemies were the Awlad Bu Sba`, a group with origins in southern Morocco where they worked in tandem with another group called the Tekna.
Both groups defied the usual division between hassan and zwaya. They claimed descent from the Prophet, engaged in Trans-Saharan trade and provided their own protection. By the end of the century the Awlad Bu Sba’ had moved with force into the Adrar and all of the coastal region down to Saint-Louis. They acquired modern weapons that were readily available along the coast, from Spanish, German and French sources. They had a particular hostility to the Kunta network, which was very important to trade and production in Mauritania, and they classed the Sidiyya as part of the Kunta system. By the position which they acquired in Saint-Louis and across a wide range of central and southern Mauritania, they could not be ignored.
Sidiyya Baba was also preoccupied with the situation in the reigning house of the Trarza. The emiral confederation of southwestern Mauritania played a large role in control of river traffic, farming in the lower river valley, the supply of gum, and access to central and eastern zones of Mauritania. The royal family was related by marriage to the ruling house of Walo in the Lower Senegal valley, where they maintained claims to tribute and lands despite the "renunciation" clauses in a treaty signed with Governor Faidherbe. They had similar interests in Jolof and Cayor, and they monitored closely the French construction of the railroad from Dakar to Saint-Louis in the 1880s.
Emir Mohammed wuld Lhabib, remembered as a great foe of Faidherbe, dominated the Trarza confederation until his assassination in 1861. Thereafter his descendants engaged in a bitter struggle for the succession. Sidiyya Baba and other zwaya provided sanctuary and mediation, but they were not able to unify the family around any one figure. Lhabib's son Sidi maintained a semblance of unity until his own assassination in 1871. A decade of struggle followed, until another son, Amar Salum, emerged in the 1880s as a candidate capable of bringing peace to the disrupted region. But a grandson of Lhabib, Ahmed Salum, assassinated Amar and became the leading contender in the 1890s. A minister and diplomat such as Khayroum, shown here, could provide continuity across all of these changes. During most of the 1880s and 1890s Baba supported another candidate, one to whom he had given sanctuary some years before. When Ahmed Salum married the sister of Ahmeddu, the emir of the Brakna confederation, Baba feared that he would be overwhelmed by a vast coalition uniting all of his enemies: the Awlad Bu Sba`, the Ijaydba, and the fractions of the two emiral houses where he had the least support.
It was this threat and strife, expressed as fitna or “civil war,” which propelled Baba to action. By the late nineteenth century, he was prepared to explore radical options for the stabilization of his fiefdom. He was desperate to save the Sidiyya heritage. The Ijaydba, allied with the Brakna emiral fraction of the Awlad al-Sayyid, almost captured him in 1896. Baba considered migration with his entire camp to the left bank of the river, in search of security. In this context the French intervened in 1897-8. They were concerned about the stability of their trading interests in the Trarza and Brakna zones. They helped establish some order in the emiral houses and in the distribution of wells contested by the Ijaydba and Sidiyya.
The French were already thinking about enlarging their presence among the bidan north of the river, and they sensed a potential ally in Sidiyya Baba. They invited him to visit their capital of Saint-Louis in 1898. As emissary and escort, they sent an important official, the interpreter and translator Dudu Seck. Ethnically Wolof and Muslim in religious identity, Dudu had received his education among the Awlad Daiman Moors, like his father and his brothers. He spoke Arabic and the local Hassaniyya dialect better than his native language and much better than French. His father was Bu El Mogdad (d 1882), a recipient of the medal of Officer of the Legion of Honor for his long service to the French cause. Dudu acquired equal distinction during his own lifetime, and often went by the name Bu El Mogdad also, or Bu El Mogdad II as I call him. He helped prepare the ground for the “pacification” and then conquest of Mauritania. He was thoroughly committed to the French cause and “modernization,” and convinced that European domination would pose no problem for Muslims. For him it would provide conditions of greater security that would enhance the spread of Islam. No better apostle of the French cause and Western modernization could have been chosen. No other black Muslim could have so easily bridged the chasm between white and black. No one else could have better cultivated Sidiyya Baba, this future ally for the acquisition of Mauritania.
Sidiyya Baba’s visit to Saint-Louis marked the beginning of his long and consistent cooperation with the French authorities, and Dudu Seck was the perfect guide for the beleaguered cleric. The French governor provided horse drawn carriages for the whole stay. One of the first stops was the headquarters of the artillery of the island, where Baba saw the concentrated fire power that French could bring to bear on their foes. After several more days of visiting the capital, Sidiyya Baba was a firm ally. He was impressed with the freedom of religious practice, the respect for Islam and the support of Islamic institutions. In a memoir which Dudu Seck wrote a few years later, he quoted Baba’s concluding judgment:
If my father [sic; grandfather] Shaikh Sidiyya al-Kabir had known the French and seen what I witnessed today with my own eyes, he certainly would not have given his benediction and prayers to the Moors in their quarrels with Faidherbe.
The visit prepared the way for active collaboration at the time that the French embarked on the “pacification” of Mauritania in at the end of 1902. Baba represented an important breakthrough for the Europeans, since the maraboutic or zwaya classes of bidan society were traditionally more hostile to “infidels” or “Christians” than the political elite. Baba also shared similar racial attitudes to the French. He confided to Dudu Seck his respect for the Islamic civilizations of North Africa, and emphasized his disdain for the little "black kinglets" in the south which had never known civilization. Baba’s visit and developing relations also laid the groundwork for the modernizing changes in Trarza society during the 20th century.
In 1900 Baba played a minor role in the liberation of a French mission in the Adrar. The following year he was again on the defensive. The Abyayri, Daiman and Idawali, all zwaya groups in the bidan classification, had to take refuge from the Awlad Bu Sba`. A bit later Xavier Coppolani, a Frenchman trained in Algeria and fresh from a tour of the Timbuktu area, came to Saint-Louis as a great Islamicist to take up the challenge of extending hegemony among the bidan. He sketched out a model of "pacification" of a new territory, to be called Mauritania and to be constructed with the support of the zwaya, the clerical "pacifists" of bidan society. In Sidiyya Baba he found an immediate ally - indeed someone that I have called a “co-architect for colonial Mauritania.”