A connection between Muhammad ibn Abdil-wahhab and Usman dan fodio

Many have purported a direct connection between Muhammad ibn Abdil-Wahhab and Usman dan fodio. The first to have claimed that Usman dan fodio actually met with students of Ibn 'Abdil-Wahhab is Thomas Arnold a western academic who like his peers among the orientalists often establishes a theory and forms facts to fit it or simply makes them up. He claimed that Dan Fodio while on hajj met with "the Wahhabi's" and was influenced by them returning to west Africa full of fundamentalist fervor. this theory is easily discredited by the fact that neither Dan Fodio or any of his relatives or students have ever mentioned him as having made hajj. Orientalists seem to wish to ascribe any revivalist effort at the time of Muhammad ibn 'Abdil Wahhab back to him, and often as the french and British colonialists called any opposition to their authority violent or peaceful as Wahhabi. This is such a norm that colonial french administrators referred to sufis opposed to them as "wahabite" and British east India officers named the deobandis as wahhabis.