Imamate of Futa Toro

The Imamate of Futa Toro was a theocratic state of the Fula-speaking peoples in the middle valley of the Senegal River, in the region known as Futa Toro. From 1495 the country had belonged to the Denanke kingdom, whose non-Muslim rulers were increasingly resented by the Muslim majority, who suffered raids by Mauritanian nomads. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Mauritanian reformer Nasir al-Din had briefly united the Torodbe scholars against the warriors, but his movement was defeated in 1677. A century later, between 1769 and 1776, the Torodbe cleric Sulayman Bal led a jihad that overthrew the Denianke dynasty. He died in 1776 and was succeeded as first Almamy by Abdul Kader, a learned teacher and judge, who built mosques, pressed the French to stop trading Muslim slaves and to pay customs, and defeated the emirates of Trarza and Brakna. After his death in 1806 power was shared among a few Torodbe families, and the elected Almamy governed with a council of eighteen electors. Threatened by the Toucouleur Empire and by France, Futa Toro was annexed in 1859; a cholera epidemic in 1868 killed a quarter of the population.