PRELUDE

Most of the Sahel was colonized by France. The process of French conquest and consolidation began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with expansion up the Senegal River. It did not end until the 1920s, when French forces finally established control over the remotest corners of the Sahara Desert. The French military campaigns that led to the conquest of the territory that would be called Soudan Français, and that would become the postcolonial country of Mali, began in 1879 from bases in Senegal. For the next twenty years, French officers led battalions of African soldiers in the slow conquest of the new colony, which only gained a separate administrative structure in 1891. By the time that the original capital located at the Senegal River town of Kayes had been moved to Bamako on the Niger River in 1899, French rule was well established in the southern parts of the territory. Beginning in the late 1880s, attention turned to the as yet unconquered Niger Bend, and in particular the famous town of Timbuktu. After a few years of delay while French forces consolidated their control over southern and western Soudan, the first French military forces arrived in the town of Timbuktu in December 1893.

Colonial forces spent much of the next decade attempting to win the acceptance and recognition by the seminomadic pastoralist populations of the Niger Bend to the fact of French rule.