Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke was born in 1853 in the village of Mbacke in Baol, in what is now Senegal, into a family of Muslim scholars of the Qadiriyya line. He distinguished himself early as a jurist and poet, but his path bent away from courts and politics: after the fall of the last Wolof kingdoms to the French, men of the sword and men of ambition alike gathered to him, and what he offered them was neither jihad nor collaboration but tarbiya, spiritual training through submission to a sheikh, prayer and work. In 1887 he founded Touba, the village in the wilderness that his order would make a holy city.
The colonial administration, alarmed by any following it could not read, deported him to Gabon in 1895. The seven years of that first exile became the sacred core of Mouride memory, elaborated in story and painting: the sheikh praying on the waters when forbidden to pray aboard ship, unharmed in every trial. Returned in 1902, he was exiled again to Mauritania the next year, then held under residence at Diourbel until his death in 1927. Each exile enlarged his legend and his following. He never raised a hand against the French, and by his last years the administration that had feared him found the Mouride work ethic indispensable to the colony's groundnut economy, a paradox his biographers have savored ever since.