Amadou Bamba - Facing Colonial Rule

Facing Colonial Rule

As his fame spread, the French colonial government worried about Bamba's growing power and potential to wage war against them. He had converted a number of traditional kings and their followers and no doubt could have raised a huge military force, as Muslim leaders like Umar Tall and Samory Touré had before him.

The French sentenced him to exile in Gabon (1895–1902) and later in Mauritania (1903–1907). However, these exiles fired stories and folk tales of Bamba's miraculous survival of torture, deprivation, and attempted executions, and thousands more flocked to his organization. On the ship to Gabon, forbidden from praying, Bamba is said to have broken his leg-irons, leapt overboard into the ocean and prayed on a prayer rug that appeared on the surface of the water, so devout was he. Or, when the French put him in a furnace, he simply sat down in it and drank tea with Muhammad. In a den of hungry lions, the lions slept beside him, etc.

By 1910, the French realized that Bamba was not interested in waging war against them, and was in fact quite cooperative, eventually releasing him to return to his expanded community. In 1918, he won the French Legion of Honor for enlisting his followers in the First World War and the French allowed him to establish his community in Touba, believing in part that his doctrine of hard work could be made to serve French economic interests. His movement was allowed to grow, and in 1926 he began work for the great mosque at Touba where he is buried. After his death in 1927, he has been succeeded by his descendants as hereditary leaders of the brotherhood with absolute authority over the followers.