Fulbe

The Fulbe, singular Pullo and widely called Fulani or Fula, are a pastoral people of the West Atlantic language group, spread in cattle camps and settled towns from the Senegal River to Lake Chad, forming West Africa's largest nomadic pastoral community. Their earliest traditions and linguistic evidence point to Futa Tooro on the Senegal as their homeland, where cattle-keeping migrants from the drying Sahara mingled with the farming peoples of the valley to form the old kingdom of Takrur, one of the first sub-Saharan states to adopt Islam. From the 1000s to the 1300s Fulbe groups drifted east along the Sahel, and by the 1400s their clans were established in Hausaland. In Futa Tooro itself the chief Tenguella built up his power in the 1450s until Songhai arms defeated him in 1512, after which his son Koli turned against Jolof and his heirs, the Denianke, ruled the Empire of Great Fulo until 1776.

From the late 1600s Muslim Fulbe clerics turned this dispersed nation into a series of jihad states: Malick Sy founded Bundu in 1690, an imamate rose in Futa Jallon with its capital at Timbo, and in 1776 Sulayman Bal overthrew the Denianke to create the imamate of Futa Toro. The scholar Usman dan Fodio then built the Sokoto Caliphate from 1803 over the Hausa kingdoms, while Seku Amadu founded the Massina imamate in the Niger inland delta in 1818, leaving Fulbe rulers and Fulfulde-speaking subjects across most of the Sahel by the mid-1800s.