Surviving sources describe troop strengths for individual engagements such as the Battle of Noukouma rather than casualties, and Sanankoua's specialist study drawing on family papers and regional archives does not attempt a running total across the jihad's founding, the Diina's four decades as a state, or its 1862 fall.
What would resolve this A systematic reconstruction from Arabic-language chronicles, oral tradition and colonial-era administrative records of the Inner Niger Delta region, of the kind that could establish at least a documented floor for the jihad's opening campaigns and the Diina's 1862 fall.
OpenWest African history; Arabic and oral-tradition source criticismBintou Sanankoua, Un Empire peul au XIXe siecle: la Diina du Maasina