Sheikh Mohamadou Mustapha Mbacke (1885-1945)
When the colonial power grew tired and decided to bring Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba back home to Senegal, following an iniquitous and horrible exile in Central Africa, it has totally failed in its attempts to physically eliminate the Shaykh and his ideas. But it did not give in at all: the battle was shifted on the cultural field. The new strategy undertaken is to erase from the collective memory the Shaykh’s name through an elaborate brain wash education agenda of the children, with its corollaries, cultural uprooting, and westernization by assimilating them to the western culture and way of life. They expected Muridiyya was going to fall apart with the disappearance of its founder, undermined, they think, by dissensions subsequent to quarrels of succession, and also by the charms and glitters of the material world.
