This chapter explores how the Tārīkh al-fattāsh affected the political history of the Middle Niger in the nineteenth century and describes how the work was circulated and received. By focusing on the reception of the chronicle, the chapter pays attention to the efficient circulation of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. Then, it focuses on the reception of the chronicle and concentrates on the debates that it generated in the Middle Niger, and beyond. It concludes by following the decline of the political relevance of the chronicle with the disappearance of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in the 1860s, and the later repurposing of the chronicle during the colonial period, when the Tārīkh al-fattāsh served another political project: that of production of knowledge for the use of French colonial administrators who aimed at better understanding the past of the colonized peoples in order to control them more effectively.

This chapter follows the fluctuating relationship between the caliphates of Ḥamdallāhi and Sokoto, which moved from being amicable to tense, then regularized, and eventually tense again in the late 1840s-1840s. It shows that the Fodiawa leaders of Sokoto constantly questioned the role of Aḥmad Lobbo as both a religious and political authority, even claiming sovereignty over Ḥamdallāhi. This tension took the shape of dialectical disputes over Aḥmad Lobbo’s claims to rule a sovereign Islamic state independent from Sokoto. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a political project disguised as a historical work, took shape in the 1840s as response to these challenges.

This chapter presents the reader with the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, an indispensable source for understanding the Middle Niger in the nineteenth century. It first introduces its author, Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir, and his writings. Then, it exposes Nuḥ b. al-Ṭāhir’s skillfulness in embedding new pieces of writing into an older chronicle, the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of Ibn al-Mukhtār,” to produce a masterful work in support of his patron, Aḥmad Lobbo. The latter is portrayed as sultan, the authoritative ruler of West Africa and the last of a long line of legitimate rulers modelled on Askiyà Muḥammad, the foremost Askiyà emperor of the Songhay; as the twelfth of the caliphs under whom the Islamic community would thrive, according to a ḥadīth ascribed to the Prophet; and as “renewer” of Islam, who, according to another Prophetic tradition, is sent every one hundred years by God to prevent the Muslim community from going astray.

This chapter explores the expansion of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in the Niger Bend in the 1820s. Aḥmad Lobbo exercised his control over these areas by a combination of coercion, the appointment of local representatives, and the installation of functionaries sent from the capital; but also by seeking, with varying degrees of success, the cooperation of the powerful Kunta scholarly clan of the Niger Bend and Azawād. However, while the Kunta had accepted the rule of Ḥamdallāhi, their support for Aḥmad Lobbo was only partial and limited to political domain. The Kunta never gave up their role as the ultimate religious authority of the region, and tension flared at times between them and Ḥamdallāhi, as in the case of the never-resolved tobacco dispute and that of the Kunta’s mediation with the leaders of rebellions against the caliphate.

This chapter addresses crucial historiographical, philological, and historical questions concerning the nature of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a widely circulated yet misinterpreted primary source for West African history. By reviewing a hundred years of scholarship on the topic and exploring West African manuscript libraries, the chapter demonstrates that the current understanding and uses of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh are radically impaired by scholars’ dependence on a defective colonial confection that passes as a critical edition produced by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. This flawed edition and translation in fact conflates two different works: the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of the son of al-Mukhtār” and the nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh written by the Fulani scholar Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir from the entourage of Aḥmad Lobbo, the funding leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.