First Battles With The French
The French began to expand in West Africa in the late 1870s, pushing eastward from Senegal in an attempt to reach the upper reaches of the Nile in what is now Sudan. They also sought to drive southeast to link up with their bases in Côte d'Ivoire. These moves put them directly into conflict with Samori.
In February 1882, a French expedition attacked one of Samori’s armies besieging Keniera. Samore was able to drive the French off, but he was alarmed at the discipline and firepower of the European military.
Samore tried to deal with the French in several ways. First, he expanded southwestward to secure a line of communication with Liberia. In January 1885 he sent an embassy to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, offering to put his kingdom under British protection. The British were not interested in confronting the French at this time, but they did allow Samori to buy large numbers of modern repeating rifles.
When an 1885 French expedition under Col. A. V. A. Combes attempted to seize the Buré gold fields, Samore counterattacked. Dividing his army into three mobile columns he worked his way around the French lines of communication and forced them to withdraw in haste.
Read more about this topic: Samori Ture
Famous quotes containing the words battles and/or french:
“Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)