1878–1905: (Violent Resistance Across the Continent — The French Exploiting Tukolor-Mandinke Rivalry to Conquer the Western Savannah, Samori’s Mobile Resista…

1878–1905: (Violent Resistance Across the Continent — The French Exploiting Tukolor-Mandinke Rivalry to Conquer the Western Savannah, Samori’s Mobile Resistance Until 1898, the Rapid Defeats of Dahomey 1893 and Benin 1897, the Sokoto Caliphate Resisting Until 1903, De Brazza’s Treaties in the Congo, Leopold’s Congo Free State with Tippu Tip as Eastern Governor, Karl Peters in Tanganyika, the Swahili Coast Uprising of 1888–1889, and the Maji Maji Revolt of 1905 Against Forced Cotton Cultivation): The French exploited local rivalries in the western savannah — the Tukolor and Mandinke empires under Ahmadu Seku and Samori could not set aside their competition, and the Tukolor made agreements with the French they believed would protect them. The French built forts across southern Tukolor in violation of the agreements, attacked in 1889, and subdued the state by 1893. Samori commanded thirty thousand well-armed soldiers and kept up mobile resistance for several years, but his scorched-earth tactics brought agricultural ruin and he was forced to sue for peace in 1898. Compact centralized states were often easiest to crush — Dahomey fell rapidly in 1893, Benin in 1897. The Sokoto Caliphate offered prolonged resistance from 1900 to 1903. In the Congo, de Brazza concluded a treaty with the Tio chief Makoko in 1880, while Stanley established Leopold’s Congo Free State — a vast personal empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, where Tippu Tip accepted the governorship of the eastern provinces and the ivory trade now flowed west instead of east. In German East Africa, Karl Peters gathered treaties and Germany declared a protectorate in 1885, but demands for tax and labor provoked resistance across the territory — a major Swahili uprising along the coast in 1888–1889 was only crushed with reinforcements, the Hehe fought until the end of the 1890s, and in the southeast the Maji Maji revolt erupted in July 1905 against pressure to grow cotton for export, with farmers forced to abandon their own cultivation at critical points in the agricultural calendar.