The history of work in West Africa is obscured by scholarly practices that divide studies of religion as ideational and rhetorical from the analysis of religious “networks” as social institutions of forms of cultural capital, and that, more generally, isolate the history of colonial social change from that of African intellectual traditions. The Yacoubists explicitly understood their religious and economic practices as of a piece. Rather than linking their experiences to stories similar only in their “shared relationship to [some] relevant European category” like “commoditization” or “labor,” and thereby reinforcing the implicit coherence of European knowledges and the fragmentation of all others, the Yacoubists' visions of their own history call into question the very categories of economic activity and individualization that define the colonial era for most scholars. By the late 1930s, when the community had come fully into being both in Côte d'Ivoire and Kaédi, its defining features were the collective organization of work, the sharing of all property, and the successful accumulation of wealth.