Abstract A famous West African soldier and empirebuilder of the late nineteenth century, Samori was known to his French enemies as “The Bonaparte of the Sudan.” French soldiers considered him the most formidable military opponent they faced in West Africa, while historians have also stressed his role as a force for dynamic political and social change in the region, as progenitor of what has been called the “Dyula Revolution,” seen by some as an African equivalent to the “bourgeois revolution” that had transformed European politics and society.