Ahmadu Bamba and Decolonization: The Power of Faith and Self-Reliance

Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba MBacké resisted the forces around him in Senegambia without taking up arms. Cheikh M. Ndiaye reads the founder of the Murid Sufi order as a reformer of minds as well as spaces: a man who answered violence by founding new villages and marking them with original signs, revaluing the Wolof language, encouraging self-reliance and preaching khidma, the ethic of service. Ndiaye sets all this against the history of the region and of Islam within it.

Working across disciplines, the study shows Bamba challenging French colonialism, local African aristocratic states and Islamist jihadism alike, and places him beside Gandhi, King and Mandela as a pioneer of nonviolence. It is a thoughtful read for anyone drawn to African history, Sufism or the long, inward work of decolonisation.