How African Muslim Clerics Led the First Mass Revolts Against the Slave Trade—More Than a Century Before British Abolition
The standard story of abolition begins in Britain: William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, the Slave Trade Act of 1807. It is a story worth honoring. But it is not where organized resistance to the Atlantic slave trade begins. More than a century earlier, on the Senegambian frontier of West Africa, Muslim scholars—the marabouts—were already raising mass movements against the slave traders and the predatory regimes that fed them. They did so not on Enlightenment grounds, but on the authority of Islamic law, which forbade the enslavement of free Muslims and condemned rulers who sold their own people for European guns and liquor.
This is a history that deserves to be told plainly—and told honestly, including its limits. What follows is the documented record.
The Toubenan Movement: A Holy War Against the Slavers (1673)
In 1673, a Mauritanian scholar named Nasir al-Din—his adopted name means “the helper of the religion”—launched a reformist movement known as the Toubenan (from the Arabic tawba, “repentance”). It swept across the kingdoms north and south of the Senegal River in what historians call the Marabout War.[1]
Boubacar Barry, the leading historian of the region, is unambiguous about its cause. The upheavals of the slave trade, he writes, were the origin of a powerful protest and resistance movement led by the marabouts—the first time the principal victims of the trade had been politically mobilized against it.[2]
Nasir al-Din sent preachers to the kings of Futa Toro and the Wolof states, demanding that they govern justly, observe the Sharia—and, decisively, stop pillaging and enslaving their own subjects to feed the Saharan and Atlantic trades. When the satigi of Futa Toro rebuffed him, Nasir al-Din condemned him as an unfit ruler precisely because he exploited and enslaved his own Muslim people and failed to protect them from raiders.[3]
For the first time, the marabouts and the Muslim communities had succeeded in mobilizing the principal victims of the violence of the slave trade.
The response of the slave-trading interests tells us everything about which side these clerics were on. The coastal European trading posts threw their armed support behind the threatened aristocracies—because the insurgents were hostile to the Atlantic trade and bad for business.[4] The slavers understood the marabout movement as a threat to the trade itself. So should we.
Not One Revolt, But a Century of Them
Nasir al-Din was killed and his movement militarily defeated. But the cause did not die with him. Barry documents how his defeat gave rise to a chain of underground Islamic movements opposed to the ceddo (warrior-aristocracy) regimes and the slave trade that sustained them, spreading across the whole of Senegambia.
These movements surfaced as a series of theocratic revolutions, each one overthrowing a slave-raiding regime:
At the end of the seventeenth century, Malik Sy founded the Muslim state of Bundu. In the early eighteenth century, Karamoko Alfa led the revolution in Futa Jallon. And in the later eighteenth century, the marabout Sulayman Bal and the Toorodo movement overthrew the Denyanke dynasty in Futa Toro—a regime they accused of pillaging its own subjects to supply the slave trade. This triple success, Barry notes, testifies to the continuity and solidarity of a single marabout movement across the whole region.[5]
By the time Wilberforce gave his first major abolition speech in the British Parliament in 1789, West African Muslims had already been overthrowing slave-trading governments for more than a hundred years.
The Sokoto Reform and the Principle Beneath It (1804)
The most famous of these movements came in 1804, when the scholar ʻUthman dan Fodio led a reform movement in Hausaland that became the Sokoto Caliphate. Among his central charges against the Hausa kings was that they unjustly enslaved free Muslims and taxed them illegally. One of his first acts upon the outbreak of the conflict was to free Muslim captives.[6]
The principle at work here is the key to the whole history—and it is older than any of these movements. Classical Islamic law held that the natural condition of a human being is freedom. The great Timbuktu jurist Ahmad Baba (d. 1627), in his legal treatise on slavery, stated the rule directly: al-aṣl huwa al-ḥurriyya—the original, default state of humankind is liberty—so that enslavement is the exception requiring justification, never the assumption.[7]
It was this legal principle—freedom as the default, enslavement of free Muslims as a grave wrong—that gave the marabouts their grounds to declare the slave-raiding kings illegitimate and to take up arms against them. Their abolitionism, such as it was, did not wait for the European Enlightenment. It grew from within the Islamic legal tradition itself.
An Honest Reckoning: What This Does and Doesn’t Prove
Intellectual honesty requires a clear boundary, and stating it openly only strengthens the case. These movements were not abolitionist in the total, modern sense. They did not declare all slavery everywhere to be ended. Several of them continued to enslave non-Muslims and those they deemed unbelievers, and the Sokoto Caliphate itself later became one of the largest slaveholding societies of the nineteenth century.[8]
To claim these clerics abolished slavery would be false, and a serious critic would dismantle the claim in seconds. So that is not the claim.
The claim is narrower and survives scrutiny: African Muslims, on explicitly Islamic legal grounds, led the earliest organized mass movements against the Atlantic slave trade and against the unjust enslavement of free people—generations before any comparable movement arose in Europe. They identified the slave trade as a moral and legal evil, named the kings who profited from it as tyrants, and went to war to stop it. That is a real and documented chapter of anti-slavery resistance, and it has been largely written out of the popular story of abolition.
The Long Echo: From Senegambia to Bahia
The story does not even end in Africa. The reformist ideas of ʻUthman dan Fodio crossed the Atlantic in the minds of the very people the trade enslaved. His teachings inspired the Muslim slave leader Muhammad Kaba in Jamaica in the 1820s, and the famous Malê uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil—a revolt planned and led by enslaved Muslims, many literate in Arabic, who drew on the same tradition of Islamic resistance to unjust bondage.[9]
The men who fought the slavers on the Senegal River in 1673 and the literate Muslim rebels of Bahia in 1835 belonged to a single, transcontinental thread of resistance—one rooted in the conviction that the original state of the human being is freedom, and that no king has the right to sell a free soul.
A note on sources
The historical spine of this article rests on Boubacar Barry’s Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press), the standard scholarly history of the region, supported by the work of Philip Curtin, Murray Last, Paul Lovejoy, and João José Reis. Full references appear in the footnotes.
References
[2] On the Toubenan movement and the Marabout War (1673–74) as a protest against the slave trade, see Barry, Senegambia; and Philip D. Curtin, “Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Inter-relationships with Mauritania and Senegal,” Journal of African History 12, no. 1 (1971).
[3] Nasir al-Din charged the satigi of Futa Toro with being an unfit ruler because he exploited and enslaved his own (Muslim) people and failed to defend Muslims from raiding. See “Jihad in Senegambia,” EBSCO Research Starters (summarizing the historiography).
[4] The coastal slave-trading posts gave armed support to the threatened aristocracies precisely because the insurgents were hostile to the Atlantic trade. Barry, Senegambia; cf. the account of the Char Bouba / Marabout War.
[5] Malik Sy founded Bundu at the end of the seventeenth century; Karamoko Alfa led the Futa Jallon revolution in the early eighteenth; Sulayman Bal and the Toorodo movement overthrew the Denyanke regime in Futa Toro in the later eighteenth century. Barry, Senegambia, ch. 7.
[6] On the Sokoto reform and the prohibition on enslaving free Muslims, see the historiographical review of the causes of the jihad citing Ahmad Baba and al-Amin al-Kanemi’s critique that the Fulani had been enslaving free people of a land long recognized as Muslim. Cf. Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (London: Longman, 1967).
[7] Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (d. 1627), Miʻraj al-Suʻud, a legal response on slavery holding that the default condition of human beings is freedom (al-aṣl huwa al-ḥurriyya) and that origin, not color, governs licit enslavement.
[8] On the limits and contradictions of these movements—including the enslavement of non-Muslims and the later scale of slaveholding in the Sokoto Caliphate—see Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2011).
[9] ʻUthman’s teachings (e.g., the Wathiqat ahl al-Sudan) later inspired the Muslim slave Muhammad Kaba in Jamaica in the 1820s and the Malê (Muslim-led) uprising in Bahia, Brazil, in 1835. See João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).