The first half of the twentieth century was a period of dramatic socioeconomic change in West Africa. European colonial rule, which sounded the death knell for slavery, witnessed profound transformations that affected the social stratification of West African societies and provided a number of subaltern groups with opportunities for emancipation. Some of those groups, as shown by Jean Loup Amselle's work on Wahhabism in Mali, and the reviewer's study on Izala in Northern Nigeria, reinterpreted various Islamic doctrines to articulate an ideology of emancipation from oppressive social orders. As suggested by the title of Hanretta's book, a similar argument is made in his study.
Its central character, Yacouba Sylla, was born in Nioro in 1906, and died in Abidjan in 1988. He claimed to derive his authority from Shaykh Hamaoullah, a persecuted Tijani dissident, who was exiled by the French colonial administration to Montluçon, France, where he died in 1943. However, the experience of Yacouba Sylla's community was very different. Hanretta shows that Yacouba's millenarian movement, after being suppressed in Kaedi, Mauritania, in 1929 (many members being killed and others exiled to Côte d'Ivoire), was able to reorganize itself in Côte d'Ivoire to become one of the most prosperous communities in that country. Yacouba owned movie theaters, transport companies, butcheries, plantations, and more. He also built close political alliances with the ruling elites of postcolonial Côte d'Ivoire, while maintaining transnational ties with disciples from different parts of West Africa.
Part I of the book, which comprises three chapters, stands on its own as a rich historical ethnography of the rise and development of the Yacoubist movement, while Parts II and III, consisting of six chapters, are more analytical and interpretative. Unlike Hamaoullah, whose story is well known thanks to Alioune Traore's book Shaykh Hamahoullah, homme de foi et resistant: Islam et colonization en Afrique, the Yacoubist movement has not yet received adequate scholarly attention. In his analysis of the Yacoubist odyssey, Hanretta pulls together a variety of sources, including colonial administrative documents and secondary sources in French, English, and, to a much lesser extent, Arabic. His review of the extant literature on the issues central to his research is wide-ranging. He makes extensive engagement with previous writings on African Islam, as well as with conceptual frameworks developed to analyze colonial relations elsewhere.
The localization of agency is central to the discussion in the book. Hanretta challenges the tendency in the dominant historiography to locate agency within the colonial state. In Chapter 4, ‘Ghosts and the grain of the archives’, he shows that African intermediaries have played an important role in shaping what is referred to as the colonial archive. Because many colonial administrators did not have a good command of African languages, they relied on local informants, who not only provided them with information but also helped them interpret it. Thus, African informants have contributed as much as Europeans to the production of the so-called colonial archive.
Another dimension of agency explored by the book is the role of women in the rise of the Yacoubists. The dominant narrative is that, at least from the perspective of action, women have been marginal in this movement. However, in Chapter 6, Hanretta demonstrates convincingly that women have been instrumental in setting the agenda of the movement, particularly in the early years.
The author makes extensive use of secondary sources on African Islam to compare and contrast Yacouba Sylla's community with other Islamic movements in West Africa. He points out that Yacouba never competed for followers, unlike most leaders of Sufi orders (or, for that matter, religious movements more generally) in West Africa. Another difference between Yacoubist and other Sufi orders is that the former were very accommodating of their non-Muslim neighbors and countrymen in Côte d'Ivoire. For example, the Zawiya of Ganoa offered alcoholic drinks to visitors, while Yacouba's butcheries offered pork to non-Muslim customers. Of course, Yacoubists themselves did not eat pork or drink alcohol. However, settlement in a predominantly non-Muslim environment and efforts to accommodate colonial rule prompted them to make such compromises.
Hanretta only refers to a few written sources in Arabic, and occasionally to Soninke folklore; and a comprehensive bibliography would have been helpful. Nevertheless, this book is a valuable contribution both to African colonial and postcolonial history and also to the sociology of religion. In addition to providing a history of a movement about which little is known, it raises a number of important questions pertaining to African historiography.
