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 Muslims who reached the Americas in the eighteenth century include Ayuba, who came from Fuuta Toro, and Richard Pierpoint, whose Muslim name is not known, but who came from Fuuta Bundu sometime around 1760. Pierpoint was apparently captured in a war that involved an invasion of Fuuta Bundu from Kaarta or Segu. He almost certainly was Fulbe, but most references that have survived refer to him as Mandingo, that is, Mandinke.31 Similarly, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, who was of Soninke origin, was referred to as Mandingo in Jamaica, as were other Muslims from West Africa, such as a man called “London” and others from St. Domingue, Antigua, and elsewhere.32 Samba Makumba from Fuuta Toro reported in Trinidad that
the Mahometans are forbidden to make slaves of those of their own faith, and when any of their people are concerned in this traffic, they believe their religion requires them to put a stop to it by force. It was for this purpose a war was commenced by the Fullahs against these other tribes, and in this war Samba was taken prisoner and sold as a slave.33
Samba, who was sixty in 1841, observed that “he belonged to the tribe Fullah Tauro [Fuuta Toro], which engaged in a war with six other tribes in Africa to prevent them, as he said, from carrying on the slave trade.” Ṣāliḥ Bilali of Timbuktu, who was born in Masina around 1770, had been enslaved by Bambara and sold from Segu to Asante; subsequently, from Anamobu he went to the Bahamas before arriving finally in South Carolina.34 Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” which indicates that she was Fulbe, is another example of a Muslim who was enslaved in this period.35 According to Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard, she was probably born around 1767 and enslaved sometime after 1780. Rosalie was unusual in being one of the very few Fulbe females reported to have been enslaved. It is also possible that she was actually enslaved as early as 1775 or 1776, when the Moors invaded Waalo and enslaved many people, and when the jihād state of Fuuta Toro was being founded.36 Although there were Fulbe women reported in the Americas, they represent only a small portion, except in Louisiana, where they constituted about 25 percent, and in Maranhão, where they were about half the total.37
In the case of Fuuta Jalon, the Islamic state attempted to control the course and direction of the slave trade, not only because it dominated the highlands inland from the coast but also because it forced trade to flow to the north via the Gambia River or southward toward the Sierra Leone River. The relatively few Muslims who reached the Americas included those from Fuuta Jalon, but overall, the Muslim interior of West Africa was underrepresented in terms of the numbers of slaves who moved as part of the transatlantic migration. In fact, Zachary Macaulay reported in 1793 that there was strong opposition in Fuuta Jalon to involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that the succession crisis after the death of Almami Sori was a consequence of this opposition, which is probably an exaggeration but is nonetheless significant as an indication of attitudes toward the enslavement of Muslims.38 With the onslaught of jihād, there were attempts to suppress the sale of slaves who might be Muslims to non-Muslims. Fulbe clans established their political dominance over the Jalonke population in the highlands to which the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers trace their origins. Centered at Labe and Timbo, the Fulbe developed a vibrant plantation economy based on slave labor and otherwise maintained commercial links with the Muslim interior through connections with the Mandinka towns, such as Dinguiraye, Kankan, Sikasso, and others that were on the route to the inner Niger basin. In Fuuta Toro, Almami Abdul Kader reached an accord with the French at St. Louis in 1785 that allowed French merchants to pass up the Senegal River to obtain gum arabic and slaves upon payment of a tax but prohibited the purchase of slaves in Fuuta Toro itself.39
