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The Old Shaiqi Language in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Jay Spaulding
Jay Spaulding*
Affiliation:
Kean College
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Extract

The Shaiqiya are the northernmost Arabic-speaking community of the modern riverain Sudan, residing in the Nile bend below the Fourth Cataract as far as the borders of Nubian-speaking Dongola. Independent confirmation of the existence of the Shaiqiya under that name can be found in European sources of the sixteenth century, while charters, chronicles, saints' lives, and orally-preserved traditions allude to their participation in the political and cultural life of the wider kingdom of Sinnar, of which they formed a part. In November 1820 the Shaiqiya made one of their most dramatic contributions to the historical record by offering determined resistance to the invading Turkish armies of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt. When they were defeated twice in quick succession, their homeland was subjected to six weeks of concentrated vengeance before the invaders marched on south. The erstwhile Shaiqi elite took service with the Turks as mercenary colonial troops and departed forever, slave revolts flared on the princely demesnes adjoining their vacant castles, and the servile entourages of the old lords disbanded and decamped. The survivors who remained, largely non-slave peasant cultivators, set out to build a new society under the tutelage of Turkish colonial officials. It is this nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial society, as popularized internationally by the Shaiqi novelist al-Tayyib Salih and the Shaiqi ethnographer Haydar Ibrahim, that is usually understood today to constitute the traditional, historically authentic, pre-modern reality of the Shaiqiya experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 283 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. O'Fahey, R. S. and Spaulding, J. L., Kingdoms of the Sudan (London, 1974)Google Scholar and Spaulding, Jay, The Heroic Age in Sinnar (East Lansing, 1985).Google Scholar

2. Salih, Tayeb, The Wedding of Zein and Other Sudanese Stories (London, 1969)Google Scholar and Ibrahim, Hayder, The Shaiqiya: the Cultural and Social Change of a Northern Sudanese Riverain People (Wiesbaden, 1979).Google Scholar

3. For an extended discussion see Lidwien Kapteijns and Spaulding, Jay, “The Orientalist Paradigm in the Historiography of the Late Precolonial Sudan” in Roseberry, W. and O'Brien, J., eds., Imagining the Past (Berkeley, in press).Google Scholar A more recent Orientalist interpretation of the Shaiqiya and other “Jaali” groups has been given by Bjørkelo, Anders in his Prelude to the Mahdiyya: Peasants and Traders in the Shendi Region, 1821-1885 (Cambridge, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Bjørkelo, , Prelude, 7.Google Scholar

5. Adams, William Y., “The Coming of Nubian Speakers to the Nile Valley” in Ehret, Christopher and Posnansky, Merrick, eds., The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (Berkeley, 1982), 11–38.Google Scholar Adams' major statement is his Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar

6. This study draws upon documents from the Miscellaneous files of the Sudanese National Records Office (NRO) in Khartoum. I am grateful to Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Salim, Director of the NRO, for permission to consult these documents. Cited here are NRO Misc. 1/27/371 of 1280/1863-64 and NRO Misc. 1/27/429b of 1302/1884-85.

7. For example, see NRO Misc. 1/27/460b of 1265/1848-49.

8. The Nidayfab archive comprises NRO Misc. 1/27/361-468.

9. Group I comprises NRO Misc. 1/27/383, 437, 450, 451, 458, 461, and 462.

10. NRO Misc. 1/27/460b.

11. Group III comprises NRO Misc. 1/27/364, 456, and 460a.

12. Group II comprises NRO Misc. 1/27/369 (1249/1833-34), 438, 447, and 453.

13. Popenoe, Paul, The Date Palm (Coconut Grove, 1973), 51.Google Scholar

14. For the destruction of the conquest see English, George Bethune, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar (Boston, 1823), 46, 52, 55Google Scholar, and Cailliaud, Frédéric, Voyage à Méroé (2 vols.: Paris, 1826), 2:34, 37–38, 58–59, 63.Google Scholar For the ensuing famine, see de Bellefonds, Maurice-Adolphe Linant, Journal d'un voyage à Méroé dans l'années 1821 et 1822 (Khartoum, 1958), 39, 42.Google Scholar

15. O'Fahey/Spaulding, Kingdoms, 28n14.

16. The examples given derive from Murray, G. W., An English-Nubian Comparative Dictionary (London, 1923).Google Scholar

17. Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne, “Sprachliche und historische Rekonstruktionen im Bereich des Nubischen unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung des Nilnubischen,” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, 5 (1984/1985), 7–134.Google Scholar

18. An evaluation of this longstanding problem may be found in Adams, “Nubian Speakers.”

19. Ibid., 35.

20. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Ali Osman for the ideas mentioned here, which were conveyed orally in Khartoum in 1977. The relevance of the Nidayfab archive to this question was not noticed at that time.