Nioro reached its first great height in the eighteenth century as the capital of Kaarta, a kingdom of the Bambara people. Sitting on the routes that linked the upper Senegal to the broader Sudan, the town grew rich as a trading center - a place where caravans, languages, and goods converged on the dry plains. Power in the Sahel was never settled for long, but for a stretch of the 1700s Nioro was a seat of one, the political and commercial anchor of a kingdom that controlled a swath of what is now western Mali. The mud-walled town on the savannah was, in its day, a capital worth conquering.

In the early 1850s the conqueror came. El Hadj Umar Tall, founder of the Toucouleur Empire, invaded Kaarta and forced its conversion to Islam, raising a great mosque at Nioro in 1854 as a mark of the new order. The town passed into his empire - and then, a generation later, became its refuge. When the French took the Toucouleur capital of Segou in 1890, Umar Tall's son Ahmadu Tall fled to Nioro to make a stand. His army was led by an exile from elsewhere, the Wolof king Alboury Ndiaye, driven from his own kingdom and now defending another man's last city. In January 1891 the colonial army arrived, and the defense failed. Nioro fell, and with it the empire's final hope in the west.

Out of conquest grew something colonial guns could not touch. Early in the twentieth century, Shaykh Ahmadou Hamahoullah - a sharif of Nioro - founded the Hamawiyya, a branch of the Tijaniyya Sufi order that drew followers from across French West Africa and unsettled the colonial authorities enough that they exiled him repeatedly. The brotherhood endured, and Nioro became its headquarters. Today the lineage is led by Mohamed Ould Cheikh Hamallah, known across Mali as Chérif Bouyé - so influential that his blessing is courted by politicians from distant Bamako. Pilgrims pour into Nioro each year to pay homage and seek favor, and the town that was once a kingdom's capital and then an empire's grave has become, in the end, a place people travel hundreds of kilometers simply to pray.