The political economy of colonial conversion

The colonial transformations of the political, economic and social domains of West African society were far more important in explaining the expansion of Islam than the intentional religious policies of the colonial powers. The most immediately afiected were military elites, who were rendered redundant by the colonial state’s monopoly on violence. The status of chiefs was not always adversely afiected; those who were astute (and unscrupulous) enough to broker efiectively between the colonial administration and local populations actually augmented their power. Difierences between French policies of 'direct rule’ and British 'indirect rule’ mattered less than the capacities of individual rulers to make themselves useful without provoking unrest.

The activities of merchant and clerical elites were less obviously afiected. However, for those who depended on slave labour, the abolition of slavery constituted a serious economic disruption. Indeed, the French, fearing a Muslim uprising, delayed the official liberation until 1908, although many slaves had already taken the initiative; in the region of Banamba in the Niger Valley, thousands walked ofi in 1905 and 1906. The efiects of liberation were tempered by the fact that many ex slaves had neither places to which to return nor the means to support themselves independently. In some regions, espe cially in the Sahara and the Sahel, ex slaves remain to this day socially and economically subordinate as clients to their ex masters. This was especially true of northern Nigeria, where slavery was not legally abolished until 1936. Even so, the impossibility of acquiring new slaves through purchase, raiding or warfare radically altered the dynamics of dependence.

At the same time, the colonial economy was acquiring its own dynamics, geared towards the export of raw materials. Well before the conquest of much of the interior, the 'legitimate’ trade in tropical oils supplanted the transatlantic

22 Hiskett, Development of Islam, pp. 261 75; Muhammad Sani Umar, 'Muslims: Intellectual response to British colonialism in northern Nigeria, 1903 1945’, Ph. D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1997.