Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The precolonial State of Bundu.(Brief Article)

Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu. By Michael Gomez (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 252 pp. $59.95

Bundu was a small state in the upper Senegal River, which probably never numbered over 30,000 people. It is interesting because it was located at a point that was strategic for both French and British efforts to penetrate the Western Sudan. It was also probably the first of a series of Muslim states founded in West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gomez has used a wide variety of documentary and oral sources. He is a careful scholar who treats his oral sources with a healthy skepticism, analyzing each …