Samori Toure

Samori Toure was a West African Muslim leader who built the Wassoulou Empire, a powerful state spanning parts of present-day Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast, and led one of the most sustained African military resistances to French colonial expansion during the late nineteenth century. He organized a disciplined, well-armed standing army, including infantry units equipped partly with domestically produced rifles, and fought French forces intermittently for roughly fifteen years from the early 1880s, repeatedly relocating and rebuilding his empire eastward as French pressure mounted, at one point burning his own capital rather than let it fall intact to the French. He was finally captured by French forces in 1898 after they overran the remnants of his territory, and he was exiled to Gabon, where he died in 1900. Samori Toure is regarded as one of the most militarily effective African rulers to resist nineteenth-century European colonial conquest, and he remains a celebrated nationalist figure in Guinea and across the wider region.