Following his defeat by French forces in 1898, the revolutionary West African leader Samory Touré, was stripped of his possessions and marched to the heart of the French empire. Touré, his retainers, family members, and material wealth were paraded through villages across Guinea and Senegal—their defeat made public through this violent act of captive display. In the metropole thousands of kilometers away, the French press declared that West Africa had been pacified. Touré's empire, the Samorian State, was the final West African-ruled entity to fall to French colonial forces.1 Touré, the “despot,” was ousted after years of hard fighting (Rouil 1897). The new empire was officially safe from recalcitrant African rulers.2
After Touré's defeat, the Samorian State's cultural system was largely destroyed and can only be recreated by piecing together documents, material objects, and oral histories. In this article, I reconstruct this system of regalia and...