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Of Slaves, and Souls of Men1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

H. J. Fisher
H. J. Fisher
Affiliation:
S.O.A.S., University of London
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Extract

These two volumes are the long-awaited results of a conference on ‘Islamic Africa: slavery and related institutions’, held at Princeton in 1977. Of the ten papers in the first volume, four are geographically located in Africa, while the others relate to Africa and Africans in various ways: in the second volume, all nine papers are specifically about Africa. Rather than listing the papers here, I shall try to say something about each in the following discussion.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 141 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

2 Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J. F. P., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 1981), 347–8.Google Scholar

3 Hunwick, J., ‘Notes on a late fifteenth-century document concerning “al-Takrūr”’, in Allen, C. and Johnson, R. W. (eds.), African Perspectives (Cambridge, 1970), 13; see also p. 17, and 11, 20 of Slaves and Slavery.Google Scholar

4 Referring to the Tarikh es-Soudan of Abderrahman…Es-Sacdi, tr. Houdas, O. (reprinted Paris, 1964), French pp. 109–10, Arabic p. 67, lines 11–15.Google Scholar

5 Rattray, R. S., Hausa Folk-lore, Customs, Proverbs (Oxford, 1913), II, 20–2, my italics.Google Scholar

6 Alojaly, Ghoubeïd, Histoire des Kel-Denneg avant l'arrivée des français (Copenhagen, 1975), 22;Google Scholar for the sixteenth-century date, see the ‘Communication’ of Norris, H. T. in the Bulletin of Information, nos. 7/8, of Commission XXII:Google ScholarFontes Historiae Africanae, of the International Academic Union, p. 60.Google Scholar

7 The possibility of persons falsely claiming to be slaves is perhaps not quite as unlikely as it seems: it is mentioned by al-Nāsirī, writing in the nineteenth century in Morocco, and the passage is quoted by Musa Kamara in Senegal in the twentieth (11, 178).Google Scholar

8 'al-Naqar, Umar, The Pilgrimage Tradition in West Africa (Khartoum, 1972), 54, 142.Google Scholar

9 Nachtigal, G., Sahara and Sudan, vol. III, The Chad basin and Bagirmi (London, 1986), 425.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., vol. IV, Wadai and Darfur (London, 1971), 67.

11 Ibid., 231.

12 Ibid., 235.

13 The long al-Nāsirī quotation is not indexed under a1-Nāsirī, but under his book title, ‘Istiqsā (al-Nāsirī)’: such split index entries are frequent. A shorter and partly overlapping quotation from al-Nāsirī occurs in the Introduction (1, 7), but nothing has been done to align the two quotations, nor it seems has either been checked against the Arabic original. Indeed, for the full bibliographical details of al-Nāsirī's book we must turn to Batran's bibliography in the other volume (11, 15): but Batran has not been concerned with the identical passage, for which, therefore, no precise reference seems anywhere to be given. The Istiqsā is at least seven volumes long.Google Scholar

14 Fisher, A. G. B. and Fisher, H. J., Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (London, 1970), 43,Google Scholar citing Blyden, E. W., Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (London, 1887, reprinted 1967), 175–6.Google Scholar

15 Fisher and Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society, 44, referring to the Tanbīh al-rāqid, an unpublished ms. cited in al-Naqar, U. (or O. el-Nager), ‘West Africa and the Muslim pilgrimage’ (Ph.D. thesis, London, 1969), 367, 384–5.Google Scholar

16 For some preliminary discussion of ‘mixing’, see Fisher, H. J., ‘The juggernaut's apologia: conversion to Islam in black Africa’, Africa, LV (1985), 153–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 For another attempt to review what has often been dismissed as material of doubtful historical value - in this case the legend of origin of the Saifawa dynasty, the ancient legitimate dynasty of Bornu - in terms of the categories of thought prevalent in earlier times, see Smith, Abdullahi, ‘The legend of the Seifuwa: a study in the origins of a legend of origin’, in Usman, Bala and Alkali, Nur (eds.), Studies in the Pre-colonial History of Borno (Zaria, Nigeria, 1983), 16–56.Google Scholar

18 See n. 13 above for yet another example.Google Scholar