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the Gambia, Senegal, and Niger Rivers begin. The resulting migratory drift of nomads followed north/south transhumance patterns that led to the progressive eastward movement of the Fulbe across West Africa as far as Lake Chad.

      The headwaters of the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers and the gold fields of Bambuhu and Buré encompassed a region traversed by cattle nomads whose ethnicity as Fulbe, Ful, and Peul meant an underlying common tie to ecologically based production and marketing. Their language, Fulfulde, was akin to Wolof, and in a certain sense the only difference between Wolof and Fulbe was whether a person owned cattle or not. The reality was far more complex, however, because evidence of the presence of Fulbe existed virtually everywhere in West Africa north of the forest where cattle could be bred. Transhumance migration, whereby herds followed the pattern of the seasons, moving north during the rainy season and toward groundwater or wells for the herds in the dry season, often resulted in a north/south migratory pattern. Herds were taken to pastures and sources of water rather than being watered and fed in restricted spaces. The owners of the herds were powerful men who also controlled settled slave plantations where grain could be secured and where herds could be pastured during the dry season, thereby fertilizing fields and increasing crop production.

      An initial explanation for the spread of the Fulbe across West Africa is both religious and ecological, in which people from the Senegal River valley moved across West Africa, filling a niche in the economy through specialization in pastoralism. Islam and ethnicity were factors in the formation of a diaspora conception of identity as Fulbe, Fulani, Pula, Ful, and Fula who spoke a common language, Fulfulde. As reflected in the names Fuuta Bundu, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro, the prefix Fuuta indicates the ethnic association with Fulbe. Since the sixteenth century, at least, the Fulbe had been considered Muslims, with the exception, according to Aḥmad Bābā of “a certain section of the Fulbe south of Jenne.”²⁰ The Toronkawa clan, in particular, was associated with Islamic learning and with sedentary communities that provided an anchor to the migratory patterns of the pastoralists. The Toronkawa, affiliated with the Qādiriyya ṣūfī brotherhood, was one of a number of clans who built their influence and authority on the basis of belonging to the Qādiriyya brotherhood. The Kunta and the Saghanughu were two other such clans: the Kunta were centered on Timbuktu and the region to the northwest, and the Saghanughu were scattered in communities throughout the region of the upper Niger. The Kunta were ethnically Arab by descent, while the Saghanughu were Soninke in origin, as was al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwari; however, by the seventeenth century the Saghanughu and other Jakhanke were often considered Mandinke, as in the case of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, who came from Bouka in the Tinkisso River valley, one of the tributaries of the Niger River, approximately twenty kilometers south of Dinguiraye, which was also on the Tinkisso.²¹

      The enforced travels of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu provide an insight into the age of jihād in what is sometimes called “greater Senegambia,” which includes Fuuta Jalon and its borderlands to the south and east of the highlands. In his Kitāb al-ṣalāt, written in Jamaica around 1820, Kabā Saghanughu reveals the range of knowledge of the literate elite of West Africa (plate 6). Indeed, Kabā’s association with the Saghanughu connects him with one of the most scholarly families in the western Bilād al-Sūdān.²² He had studied the basic subjects, the Qur’ān, Ḥadīth, and fiqh, and referred to the Ṣaḥīḥs of Muslim and Bukhārī, both books on ḥadīth, and to the anonymous commentary Kitāb al-Munabbihāt. He also cited Shaykh Bābā al-Fakiru, who seems to have been one of his teachers, besides his uncle, Mohammed Batoul.²³ The style of scholarship to which Kabā was exposed was the standard education taught by the Qādiriyya, which focused on a core curriculum consisting of the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik, the Shifāʾ of Qāḍī ʿIyaḍ b. Mūsā, and the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn.

      Because it is very clearly evident that Muhammad Kabā was a Muslim, it is reasonable to speculate that his enslavement was connected with the resistance to Islam. It is likely that he was enslaved by non-Muslims who did not have access to ransoming circuits. He clearly fell into the hands of enemies of Fuuta Jalon. Kabā does not seem to have passed through the Muslim commercial networks and hence was likely traded south of Fuuta Jalon to Bunce Island on the Sierra Leone River or possibly the islands off the shore of the Sierra Leone Peninsula, either the Bananas or Sherbro. In any event, he ended up in Jamaica in 1777 on one of the several ships that went from the upper Guinea coast to Kingston in that year. The friction on the frontiers of jihād that exposed Muslims to enslavement impelled people to travel in caravans; there is no evidence about what happened to the caravan that Kabā must have been in, but it must have suffered more than his enslavement. He was on his way to Timbuktu to study law, following a route from the Tinkisso River to the northeast. The caravans from southern Fuuta Jalon that were going north and northeast were usually laden with kola nuts and at least some gold from the alluvial deposits of the tributaries of the Niger River. The merchants in the region passed between towns that connected with the kola producers of the forest region, and Kabā’s enslavement most probably occurred in one such area, among people who were apparently not Muslims and who would have had commercial contacts along the Sierra Leone River or at departure points farther south as far as the Gallinas.

      Someone of Kabā’s stature usually would have been ransomed. Why he was not is a mystery; however, he was not the only freeborn Muslim who was not thereby rescued from slavery. Ransoming was common because the ransom price was usually higher than the purchase price of a slave—often twice the price—and ransoming was favored under Islamic law and practice.²⁴ Ayuba ibn Sulaymān Diallo of Fuuta Bundu, known to the Europeans as Job ben Solomon, was probably the best known of the early Africans in the Americas (plate 7). He was captured during a commercial venture to the Gambia in 1731 and was sold as a slave to Maryland before he could be ransomed. He learned only after he arrived in North America “that his father sent down several slaves, a little after Captain Pike sailed [from the Gambia River], in order to procure his redemption; and that Sambo, King of Futa [Bundu], had made war upon the Mandingoes, and cut off great numbers of them, upon account of injury they had done to his schoolfellow.”²⁵ In a letter that Ayuba wrote to his father after his capture, he stated that “there is no good in the country of the Christians [for] a Muslim.”²⁶ There were other instances, too, of important individuals ending up in slavery and failing to be caught by the ransoming net. It is likely that Big Prince Whitten, studied by Jane Landers, was another example. Enslaved in the Gambia valley, apparently, he was taken to Charlestown in the 1770s, although he subsequently escaped and made his way to St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, where he served in the Spanish militia for 26 years under the name Juan Bautista after his conversion and baptism. He was identified as “Mandinga,” which meant that he was Muslim by origin and probably a Mandinke from Kaabu or one of the principalities along the Gambia.²⁷

      The impact of the transatlantic slave trade can be assessed in terms of the number of people who left from ports of the upper Guinea coast, from roughly Cape Mount and the Gallinas to the Senegal River. The peculiarity of this coast hid the Muslim interior from the eyes of the ships trading along the rivers and lagoons behind the bar along the Gallinas coast, the swampy island of Sherbro stretching northward to the Sierra Leone Peninsula, and the islands of Bananas and Plantain offshore from the Sierra Leone Peninsula; however, the coast provided convenient bases of operations for such non-Muslim merchant families as the Clevelands and the Corkers.²⁸ The Sierra Leone River was an ideal anchorage on an African coast that has few natural harbors; however, the river could not be navigated farther inland beyond Bunce Island. The main river was only an inlet of the sea that was fed by several small rivers that provided minimal transportation links with the interior. Kabā probably would have been brought to the coast south of Fuuta Jalon, or he might have been ransomed, but in any event, his path avoided Muslim centers where his status might have secured his freedom.

      There are reports of Muslims in the Americas who came from Senegambia in the eighteenth century that arose because of the enslavement of Muslims and in turn the response of the Muslim reformers in calling for jihād and in propagating the consolidation of Islamic states based on Sharīʿa law.²⁹ Bilali Mahomet had come from Timbo in Fuuta Jalon, probably in the 1790s. In 1813 he was assigned as head driver on a plantation on Sapelo Island.³⁰ Other examples of

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