El Hadj Umar ibn Sa'id Tall (Arabic: عمر بن سعيد طعل), (c. 1797 - 1864 CE), born in what is now actual Senegal was a West African political leader, Islamic scholar, and Toucouleur military commander who founded a brief empire encompassing much of what is now Guinea, Senegal, and Mali.
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Umar Tall's name is spelled variously: in particular, his first name is commonly transliterated in French as Omar; the patronymic, ibn Sa'id, is often omitted; and the final element of his name, Tall (Arabic: طعل), is spelt variously as Taal or Tal.
The honorific El Hadj (also al-Hajj or el-Hadj), reserved for a Muslim who has successfully made the Hajj to Mecca,[1] almost always precedes Umar Tall's name.
Born Umar bin Sa'id in Halwar in the Kingdom of Fouta Tooro (present-day Senegal), Umar Tall attended a madrassa before embarking on the Hajj in 1820. When returning from the Hajj he camped near Damascus there he met Ibrahim Pasha, Umar Tal befriended the Pasha healed his son from a deadly fever, Umar Tal was highly inspired by the trends set by the Pasha. In 1826, after many years of scholarship, Umar Tall returned with the title El Hadj and assumed the caliphate of the Tijaniyya sufi brotherhood in the Sudan.
Settling in Sokoto, he took several wives, one of whom was a daughter of the Fula Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammed Bello. In 1836, El Hajj Umar Tall moved to the Kingdom of Fouta Djallon and then to Dinguiraye, in present-day Guinea, where he began preparations for his jihad.
In 1848, El Hajj Umar Tall's Toucouleur army, equipped with European light arms, invaded several neighboring, non-Muslim, Malinké regions and met with immediate success. Umar Tall pressed on into what is today the region of Kayes in Mali, conquering a number of cities and building a tata (fortification) near the city of Kayes that is today a popular tourist destination.
In April 1857, Umar Tall declared war on the Khasso kingdom and besieged the French colonial army at Medina Fort. The siege failed on July 18 of the same year when Louis Faidherbe, French governor of Senegal, arrived with relief forces.
After his failure to defeat the French, El Hadj Umar Tall launched a series of assaults on the Bambara kingdoms of Kaarta and Ségou. The Kaarta capital of Nioro du Sahel fell quickly to Umar Tall's mujahideen, followed by Ségou on March 10, 1861.
While Umar Tall's wars thus far had been against the animist Bambara or the Christian French, he now turned his attention to the smaller Islamic states of the region. Installing his son Ahmadu Tall as imam of Ségou, Umar Tall marched down the Niger, on the Massina imamate of Hamdullahi. More than 70,000 died in the three battles that followed until the final fall and destruction of Hamdullahi on March 16, 1862.
Now controlling the entire Middle Niger, Umar Tall moved against Timbuktu, only to be repulsed in 1863 by combined forces of Tuaregs, Moors, and Fulas.[2] Meanwhile, a rebellion broke out in Hamdullahi under Balobo, brother of executed Massina monarch Amadu Amadu; in 1864, Balobo's combined force of Fulas and Kountas drove Umar Tall's army from the city and into Bandiagara, where Umar Tall died in an explosion of his gunpowder reserves on February 12. His nephew Tidiani Tall succeeded him as the Toucouleur emperor, though his son Ahmadu Seku did much of the work to keep the empire intact from Ségou. However, the French continued to advance, finally entering Ségou itself in 1890.
El Hadj Umar Tall remains a legendary figure in Senegal, Guinea, and Mali, though his legacy varies by country. Where the Senegalese tend to remember him as a hero of anti-French resistance, Malian sources tend to describe him as an invader who prepared the way for the French by weakening West Africa. Umar Tall also figures prominently in Maryse Condé's historical novel Segu.
| Preceded by none |
Leader of the Toucouleur Empire 1850 - 1864 |
Succeeded by Ahmadu Tall |
| Preceded by Bamana Empire |
Faama of Ségou 1861 - 1864 |
Succeeded by Ahmadu Tall |
This article is based on a translation of the corresponding article from the French Wikipedia, retrieved on July 1, 2005, which in turn cites the following sources: "The Holy War of Umar Tal" by David Robinson (Oxford University Press)
English language source: