Balancing Written History with Oral Tradition

The Legacy of the Songhoy People

Hassimi Oumarou Maiga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135227029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Geschichte

By balancing written history with the African oral tradition, this book conceptualizes the integrations among diverse peoples of Africa and specifically among the Songhoy people. Drawing from a number of academic disciplines and original research that documents the oral and literate traditions of the Songhoy people, Hassimi Oumarou Maiga offers a unique interpretation of indigenous Songhoy-African perspectives on African history, culture and education from antiquity to the present day and from continental Africa to the worldwide African Diaspora. In explaining the cosmology, philosophy, values and process of indigenous, non-Muslim education, this book also corrects and balances the perception of the Songhoy as a wholly Muslim society. The legacy of the Songhoy Empire, Maiga argues, is as a model of African integration through its administrative and political organization, which remains relevant even today. This book is an essential addition for scholars and students of African history.

1 A Long Journey from East Africa to West Africa

“If we wish to live for eternity, we must build for eternity.”

—Maulana Karenga

This chapter draws on a number of sources that balance the written history of the Songhoy people with African oral tradition. It conceptualizes the integrations among diverse people of Africa and specifically among the people who eventually became the Songhoy. This population is said to have migrated from Philae Island in ancient Nubia to the Sahara. This chapter will explore archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as written history and oral tradition that support this account of Songhoy history. To articulate this history from an African perspective also requires the use of sources recorded by renowned African scholars like Boubou Hama, former president of the National Assembly of the Niger Republic. His book, L’Histoire des Songhay (History of the Songhay), which was sponsored by UNESCO, draws from oral testimonies and original research as well as written history in ancient tarikhs (chronicles), for example, reports, and observations of Berber scholars and French colonial administrators, travelers, and traditional story tellers, in addition to his interpretation of original historical documents in French and Arabic (Hama, 1968b). This chapter highlights important developments in this long journey of the Songhoy people from Nubia and Aïr to Gao, but not necessarily in a linear or strictly chronological pattern.¹

In prehistoric Africa the Sahara was not a desert. In fact, from 15,000 B.C.E. to 7,000 B.C.E. the Sahara was a great aquatic civilisation inhabited by the Nilo-Saharan people. Lakes were larger and more numerous; swamps were more extensive; rivers and streams were fuller and longer. Around 8,000 B.C.E., our ancestors appeared in what is now the area of the Niger River. From the 7^th century B.C.E. to 5,000 B.C.E., sand dunes began to form. Consequently, as a result of the increasing dryness of the Sahara, these early African populations began moving toward the south, which was more humid, and to the west along the Niger River’s valleys and banks. It was in this geographical period that these migrations took place and that is where Africans built the villages, kingdoms, and empires in West Africa the whole world would come to know. After the rise and fall of the three classical civilisations in East Africa, Axum (Ethiopia), Nubia (Sudan Anglo-Saxon), and Kemet (Egypt), history records the rise and fall of the last three classical African civilisations: Ghana, Mali, and Songhoy. These West African empires developed in a distinctive geographic and human framework, as discussed briefly below.

1.1 THE GEOGRAPHIC AND HUMAN FRAMEWORK

Continental Africa offered to living beings what geologists called an asylum, a space where they could complete a continuous evolution sheltered from maritime aggressions and orogenic upheavals.

1.1.1 The Geographic Framework

According to André Berthelot (1927) in L’Afrique Saharienne et Soudanaise, two distinct parts of the continent can be distinguished: the Sahara and the Sudan. A brief description of these constituent parts follows:

A. The Sahara, which consists of four areas: Western Sahara, Central Sahara, Eastern Sahara, and the Desert of Libya:

The Western Sahara, which lies between 5º and 16º Longitude West, 30º and 17º Latitude North, stretches along the Atlantic Ocean from the oasis of Southern Morocco to the steppes of northern Senegal. This is also called the Moroccan Sahara.

The Central Sahara, located between 10º Longitude East and 5º Longitude West of the Greenwich Meridian, 33º and 17º Latitude North, stretches along the southern versant of the Atlas of Niger. This area is also known as the Algerian Sahara.

The Eastern Sahara, situated between 20º and 10º Longitude East, 32º and 16º Latitude North, extends from the Tripolitan littoral of the Great Syrte to the basin of Lake Chad. This area is known as the Tripolitan Sahara.

The Desert of Libya, which lies approximately between 30º and 20º Longitude east of the Greenwich Meridian, 28º and 17º Latitude North, reaches the tertiary Mediterranean plateau as far as the Egyptian Sudan.

B. The Sudan which, comprises Eastern Sudan, Western Sudan, and the maritime region:

Eastern or Egyptian Sudan develops from 30º to 20º Longitude east of the Greenwich Meridian, in the south of the Libyan Desert and belongs to the hydrographical basin of the Nile.

Central Sudan is situated nearly 20º to 10º Longitude East and south of the Eastern Sahara forms the hydrographical basin of Lake Chad.

Western Sudan is situated from 10º Longitude East to 8º Longitude West in the south of the Central Sahara and forms the hydrographical basin of the Niger River.

The Maritime Region (Senegal and Guinea), which lies between western Sudan and the Atlantic Ocean, differs greatly from the inland countries by the amount of rains, the great number of rivers, and the abundance of vegetation.

1.1.2 The Human Framework

Africa’s Mediterranean zone and the Sahara are inhabited by white-skinned Africans or Berber peoples who represent the oldest White population in North Africa. This population resulted from crossbreeding among contingents of European immigrants and Semites from Syria (Phoenicians and Jews). Today, Berbers are found in Morocco, part of Algeria (Kabyles), and in the Central Sahara (Tuaregs). On the other hand, Tripolitan (Lybia), the area south of Algeria, and the Western Sahara (Morocco) are populated by Arab groups intermixed with Berbers (Arabo-Berber mulattoes). It is believed that Arabs migrated into Africa from Asia around the 7^th century A.D. In addition to the migration of Arabs and the crossbreeding that occurred with the indigenous population, the Sudan region now consists of four distinct racial populations that are very different from each other; but the one that predominates has been historically characterized as the “Negro race.”

These historical characterizations of the “Negro” have included, for example, what Maurice Delafosse (1927) reported in his book Le Haut-Sénégal-Niger. Delafosse stated that, according to the famous Greek doctor Galien (2^nd century A.D.), Negroes can be distinguished from Whites by ten main features:

• their fuzzy hair
• their poor beard
• their flat nose
• their thick lips
• their sharpened teeth
• their stinking skin
• their black colour
• the gap in their fingers and their toes
• the length of the male sex organ and
• their great love for rejoicing.

Likewise, Berthelot (1927) described the “Negro race”—the Negrilles (of the Forest), the Tibbous (of the Desert), and the Negroes (of the Savannah)—in these terms:

… The color of the skin is not the essential feature; it can be very dark for people of the white race … The Negro is identified by his frizzy, woolly hair, large flat nose, thick lips … forward, prognathous face … stressed dolichocephalism … generally tall with a curved receding forehead … (pp. 52–55)

Commercial relations were frequent between Tripoli, that is, North Africa, and the inner continent, which explains the presence of these “Negroes” on the littoral. However, the large majority of those who presently live in the Tripolitan were brought there as slaves by Arabs.

… Any caravan from Africa had its galleys of slaves; the numbers of black people who were thus imported to Tripoli can be estimated in hundreds of thousands … They grouped in small villages composed of huts … and black women withstood the hard climate better than their husbands … (cf., Berthelot, 1927, p. 72, Reclus, XI, as told by Maltzan)

Indeed, the empires of West Africa experienced various aggressive attacks by White people who came across the desert devastating cities and cutting the throats of indigenous farmers. Both Islam, brought by Arabs from the East, and Christianity, brought by Europeans who arrived from the Atlantic Ocean (between the 15^th and the 19^th centuries), organized systems that trafficked in the capture, enslavement, and sale of indigenous Africans. So effective were these systems that the African continent was decimated and depopulated, creating the biggest manhunt for captives and sustaining the robbery of Africa’s natural resources for centuries. As Berthelot (1927) noted:

It was under this form … for three centuries, that hard working black people (Africans) were initiated into White civilisation, upon whom guns conferred an irresistible superiority … And Arab slave hunters, moving with the Koran … and the knife for castration … penetrated beyond Lake Chad, exterminating millions of human beings. (p. 82)

The African American anthropologist/sociologist St. Clair Drake’s description of the events after the defeat of the Songhoy Empire in 1591 as a “watershed” period in African history is particularly illuminating:

If the defeat of Spain’s armada in 1588 marked a climax in European history that affected the Black world profoundly, an event in west Africa three years later marked a climax in Black history of great symbolic import. The Songhay Empire, largest and most stable of the black Sudanic kingdoms, was defeated by Morocco in 1591 and divided into a group of small warring states. The way was thus opened for eventual French and British imperial penetration. (Drake, 1987, p. 297)

In sum, the historical trilogy of the gun, religion, and mercantilism is one way to understand the economic, moral, and spiritual degradation of the African continent, which continues today including the vestiges of slavery on the continent.

1.2 THE IMPERIAL EMPIRE OF GLOBALIZATION

Today, the third parameter, that is, mercantilism, better known as globalization, has become an imperial empire that has facilitated the emergence of a unique mode of universalized thinking, being, and imperialist culture, which furthers the destruction of Africa in this modern era. Consequently, Africans today must be prepared to generate forms of autonomous and endogenous thinking based on a positive appreciation of African history and culture, a new epistemology, and the know-how to confront the problems of this era—problems that are as difficult as those the gun bearing and knife wielding champions of cosmopolitan religions and mercantilism brought into Africa with the arrival of the Arabs in 7^th century and the Portuguese in the 15^th century. Africans have not been able to establish a framework for the protection and autonomous development of the continent and its people since the momentous defeat of the Songhoy Empire in 1591. That is one reason why an understanding of the origins and legacy of the Songhoy Empire is so important to the future of the continent and humanity. But who are the Songhoy people? Where did they come from? What did they accomplish in Africa? What inheritance did they leave for humanity? What is their future in so far as the global destiny of the whole of Africa is concerned?

1.3 EAST TO WEST MIGRATIONS OF THE SONGHOY PEOPLE

The very first human civilisations emerged successively in East Africa beginning in Axum (Ethiopia), Nubia (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), and Kemet, which the Greeks called Egypt. After the rise and fall of these oldest human civilisations, West Africa experienced the succession of the Ghana, Mali, and Songhoy Empires.

1.3.1 Archaeological Evidence

Archaeological evidence as well as the European written record of human prehistory attest to the presence of humans in the Sahara 600,000 years ago in the “Erg du Ténéré,” the vast “dune sea” (erg) in the south central region of the Sahara that stretches from present-day Niger to western Chad. For example, the works of Henri Lhote, cited by the African historian Boubou Hama (1968b), cast a particular light on humanity’s African past during the quaternary period or water phase of the Sahara. The following passage from Lhote’s book on the Tassili in what is now northern Algeria (Tassili-n-Ajjer) provides a keener insight into this period of human history:²

Right in the Erg—in the Tenere, I found remains of settlements of fishermen with … huge accumulations of fish bones—the volume of several tombs of bones of hippopotamus … elephants mingled with residual ashes … Farther south … more than ten relics of settlements … with fish bones, tortoise and mollusk shells … amongst which lay human skeletons … (H. Lh...