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New evidence on the origins of the Kunta—II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Thomas Whitcomb
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Extract

It would seem that the genealogy given in the fragment of the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy might be more authentic than the one given in the Ghallāwiyya. While the importance given to ancestresses in the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy and its attempt to explain an individual's origins in terms of diversity rather than by a single patriline descending from one important ancestor certainly set it apart from later western Saharan genealogies and from Arab and Muslim genealogies in general, it is obviously a more realistic picture of origins, as a person's ancestors double with each earlier generation rather than becoming fewer. Also, the text of Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkāy, which is older than the Ghallāwiyya, does not take the genealogies back as far as the later work which, however, is not convincing because of many apparent errors and illogicalities.

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Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 403 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1975

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References

1 Page numbered 17.

2 Page numbered 18. Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Drāwī is known in the genealogy of the Zlāmṭa branch of the Tajakānet. He may have lived in the tenth/sixteenth or the eleventh/seventeenth century, as Tajakānet tradition says that he emigrated from Tinīgi before or at the time of its abandonment, which was probably during this period. The admission by the compiler that he had forgotten a name would seem unlikely in a forgery.

3 Al-Ḥājj Ya'qūb Yabnī, said by the īdaw al-Ḥājj to have been the founder of the īdayqūb branch of the īdaw al-Hājj, and Sīdī Ahmad Ayd al-Qāsim, a descendant of the former, but for whom a slightly different lineage is given. Both lineages are also much too short for the time they are said to span.

4 Wüstenfeld,Genealogische Tabellen der arabischen Stämme und Familien, Göttingen, 1852–3, charts O to Z.

5 Aḥmad ibn al-Amīn al-Shingītī, al-Wasīt fī tarājim udabā' Shinqītī, Cairo, 1329/1911, 356.

6 Musa Kamara, al-Majmū' al-nafīs sirran wa ' alāniyya fī dhikr ba'd al-sadāt al-Bīdāniyya wa 'l-Fulāniyya. Unpublished Arabic text, archives of IFAN, Dakar, fol. 6.

7 Muhammad Sa'ād al-Yadālī, Kitāb shiyam al-zawāya, in Hamet, I. (ed. and tr.), Chroniques de la Mauritanie Sénégalaise, Paris, 1911, Arabic text, 70, French translation, 229Google Scholar; Hamet, I., ‘Villes sahariennes’, Revue du Monde Musulman, xix, 1912, 265.Google Scholar

8 This is the title given to it by Norris, H. T., who gives a résumé in Saharan myth and saga, Oxford, 1972, 110–16. I am grateful to Mukhtār wuld Ḥāmidun, who gave me a copy of the text, and to Fuad Kardosh, of Rabat, Morocco, who assisted in correcting the copy and translating it.Google Scholar

9 Musa Kamara, op. cit., fol. 6.

10 Gwarzo, Hassan Ibrahim, Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1972.Google Scholar

11 Fernandes, Valentim, Description de la côte d'Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal, ed. and tr. Cenival, P. de and Monod, T., Paris, 1938, 79–81Google Scholar; and Pereira, Duarte Pacheco, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, ed. and tr. Mauny, R., Bissau, 1956, 43.Google Scholar

12 Duarte Pacheco Pereira, op. cit., 41, mentioned a group which he called the Ezarziguy in connexion with Wadān. This may have been the Znāga tribe which claimed Lamtūna origins called Anyārzīgi in Znāga and Anyārzig in Ḥassāniyya. This identification is supported by the tradition that the Anyārzīgi once had a branch named īdawbaj or īdawbja (there are few or no Anyārzīgi left), and by the existence of a branch of the īdaw al-Ḥājj, who claim to have been the founders of Wadān, bearing the same name, who also claim to have been of Lamtūna origin. It may be that Wadān was built or belonged to the Anyārzīgi, or the īdawbaj/īdawbja branch of the Anyārzīgi, which absorbed others and assumed the name of īdaw al-Ḥājj in the ninth/ fifteenth or tenth/sixteenth century, which would explain the disappearance of the Anyārzīgi, and it would parallel the possible transformation of the īdaw Yidder branch of the Anyādis into the īdaw 'īsh (see pt. I of this article, BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, p. 121–2, n. 110).

13 According to a couplet attributed to ‘Abd Allāh ibn Muhammad ibn Rāzqa al-'Alawi (Mukhtār wuld Ḥāmidun).

14 The story appears in Ahmad ibn al-Aīn al-Shingītī. op. cit., 148, but he does not identify the girl and says that it was her brothers who avenged her. This is the oldest written version I have seen, which was probably learned by the author before he left the Sahara in the late nineteenth century and it appeared in his work which was published in Cairo in 1329/1911. Ṣhaykh Sīdyā Bāba (d. 1924), ‘A history of the western Ṣanhāja’, translated in H. T. Norris, Saharan myth and saga, 206–7, said only that it was a young woman who was avenged by her maternal uncle. Musa Kamara (d. 1946), op. cit., fol. 8, said that it was the daughter of Sīdī Muhammad al-Kuntī al-ṣaghīr, and that she went first to her father, who sent her to her maternal uncle, whom Musa Kamara calls A'mar Agīlāl (see pt. I of this article, BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, p. 119, n. 80), probably incorrectly, who avenged her.Google Scholar

15 Monteil, V., Notes sur les Tekna, Paris, 1948, 18.Google Scholar

16 Duarte Pacheco Pereira, op. cit., 43.

17 el-Chennafi, Mohammed, ‘Sur les traces d'Awdaghust: les Tagdāwest et Ieur ancienne cité‘, in Tegdaoust. I: recherches sur Aoudaghost, edited by D. and Robert, S. and Devisse, J., Paris, Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1970, 106.Google Scholar