Toucouleur

Toucouleur refers to the Futa Tooro people of the Senegal River valley and to the West African empire founded by the jihad leader Al-Hajj Umar Tall in the mid-nineteenth century. Accounts of the Sokoto Caliphate note that Umar Tall's Toucouleur conquests of the 1850s and 1860s drew intellectual and ideological inspiration from the Sokoto model. The resulting state controlled much of the upper Niger region until French conquest.