Conclusion

Summary

When Faidherbe published his “Note on the History of Cayor” in 1883, he invoked the eighteenth-century cliché of the king who raided his own people, recast to suit the Victorian and imperial tastes of the period. When the Dammel of Kajoor was offered a magnificent horse by a marabout from the desert, he desired it at any price. The marabout asked for “one hundred virgins.” Immediately the ceddo in the king's entourage mounted on horseback and pillaged a dozen villages. The cliché, first used by slave traders to justify the slave trade as the only possible commerce with Africans, later served as a justification for colonial conquest. In the late 1850s, when Faidherbe sought official approval for his plans to conquer Kajoor, he combined the European stereotype of the king who raided his own people with an emphasis on the tyranny of drunken warriors that echoed one of the main themes of Muslim resistance to the Wolof old regime. In the reports he sent back to Paris Faidherbe promised that French military action would liberate the hard-working Muslim peasantry of the Wolof kingdoms from brutal tyranny and allow a dramatic expansion of French commerce. But there was a deep cynicism embedded in the ideology of conquest. The first French military “expedition” in Kajoor was an unprovoked attack on three large Muslim villages in Njambur in 1858. The villages were burned to the ground. A year later the French raised false hopes that they would aid Muslims who rebelled against the monarchy. When the slaughter between Muslims and partisans of the old regime ended, the French began their first attempt to assert colonial sovereignty over the Lower Senegal.