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The Mecca Pilgrimage By West African Pastoral Nomads

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

J. S. Birks
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Each dry season many Um Borroro or nomadic Fulani set off eastwards to Mecca. They are some of the 5,000 or so West Africans who make the pilgrimage (the haj) each year by travelling along the savannas through Cameroun, Chad, and the Sudan.1 About four-fifths of them come from what is generally called Hausaland and Bornu in Nigeria and Niger, but some pilgrims from all the West African savanna countries travel overland.2 Although they comprise only about six per cent of the total arriving in Mecca from West Africa (the majority come by air and sea), they represent an important relict movement which earlier this century involved more than 15,000 migrants per annum.3

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 47 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

Page 47 note 1 King, R., ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca: some geographical and historical aspects’, in Erdkunde (Bonn), 26, I, 1972, pp. 61–73Google Scholar; and Tweedy, O., ‘Central African Highway’, in Geographical Journal (London), 75, 1930, pp. 2–15.Google Scholar

Page 47 note 2 Birks, J. S., ‘Aspects of Overland Pilgrimage to Mecca, with Special Reference to Darfur Province, Republic of Sudan’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1975Google Scholar; and ‘Overland Pilgrimage in the Savanna Lands of Africa’, in Kosinski, L. A. and Prothero, R. M. (eds.), People on the Move (London, 1975), pp. 297–308.Google Scholar

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Page 48 note 1 Stenning, D. J., Savanna Nomads (London, 1959).Google Scholar

Page 48 note 2 Sudan Government, Darfur Province Diaries, Khartoum, 1921.

Page 49 note 1 Graham, op. cit.

Page 51 note 1 Stenning, D. J., ‘Transhumance, Migratory Drift and Migration Patterns of Pastoral Fulani Nomads’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (London), 87, I, 01–06 1957, pp. 57–73.Google Scholar

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Page 56 note 1 Davies, loc. cit.

Page 57 note 1 Prothero, R. M., ‘Migration in Tropical Africa’, in Caidwell, J. C. and Okonjo, C. (eds.), The Population of Tropical Africa (New York, 1968), pp. 250–63.Google Scholar

Page 57 note 2 Shamma, S. O. Abu, ‘International Aspects of Public Health’, in The Health of the Sudan (Khartoum, 1960), pp. 101–6Google Scholar; and Maurice, G. K., ‘The Entry of Relapsing Fever into the Sudan’, in Sudan Notes and Records (Khartoum), XV, I, 1932, pp. 97–119.Google Scholar

Page 57 note 3 Sudan Government, Darfur Province Diaries, Khartoum, 1943.