Day 1 Thursday 6th September

Highlights from the West African Manuscript collection of the British Library

Paul Naylor, PhD Student, DASA, University of Birmingham

The latter half of the 19^th century marked a proliferation of exchange in written manuscripts between the western and central Sudan. The works exchanged reflected the preoccupations of the time: a continued enthusiasm for the Sokoto Caliphate and purification of the faith by jiḥād coupled with an increasing Sufi spirituality, as well as a growing sense of unease at European presence in the region.

A collaborative project with the British library has given me access to previously unstudied material originally held in private libraries in the Senegambia region. Drawing on the growing field of West African manuscript studies, I will demonstrate the breadth of material encountered in such libraries and unearth some of their treasures. As I am still going through the manuscripts, this is very much a work in progress. However, a letter from an irate scholar demanding the return of his book, a talisman for the safe return of a run-away wife, a diwān of pre-Islamic poetry and copied works of the Sokoto jihadists have been among the material encountered so far.

This paper will place these manuscripts in the context of historical scholarship for this period although the main aim is to disseminate this material to a wider audience of West Africanists.
6. IDEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS
Europe/Africa/America circuits to time and silenced Stories

Elias Alfama Vaz Moniz, Pró-Reitor de Extensão na Universidade de Santiago, Ilha de Santiago - Cabo Verde

The present study focuses on the processes that triggered the formation of the African Diaspora, at the dawn of modernity, defining a space of reference, in historical terms, the archipelago of Cape Verde, which, for a period of eighty-five years, received and fertilized seeds of modern African Diaspora, to be transformed into receptacle and factory for "domestication" of enslaved men and women, for further export to the Americas. This is a historical-cultural analysis of one of the most relevant issues for the understanding of modernity and relational processes between Africa, Europe and America, both in the framework of the meeting of peoples and cultures, from the mid-fifteenth century, and also in terms of the trajectory of Africa itself, in the context of political, social and cultural transformations in the period after the fifteenth century. In this context, what is at stake here is the possibility of launching other looks over relational processes triggered from the fifteenth century, based on historiographical traditions and epistemologies of differentiated knowledge, seeking to find the threads of a cross history of people from different backgrounds.
Religious appropriation and rivalry: Ṣàngó and Islam in Ọ̀yọ́ from the mid-18^th to the early 20^th century

Insa Nolte, University of Birmingham

This chapter explores the relationship between Islam and the Ọ̀yọ́ deity of Ṣàngó from the 18^th to the early 20^th century, a period when the importance of Islam both in Ọ̀yọ́ and its neighbouring polities increased steadily. Based on written and oral histories as well as other historical genres, the chapter emphasises the ambivalent political role of Ṣàngó, which reflected both an appropriation of Islam and its rivalry.

The chapter discusses the role of Ṣàngó in Ọ̀yọ́’s political organisation. From the 1770s, Ṣàngó provided divine legitimacy to Ọ̀yọ́’s rulers and thus helped to consolidate their power after a period of political instability. Through political reform, Ṣàngó was closely linked to trade, the provision of justice, imperial control and military expansion. Closely associated with social and political fields increasingly linked to Islam in other parts of West Africa, Ṣàngó was indeed often identified as a Muslim, albeit a transgressive one. However, the deity’s appropriation of social and political fields associated with Islam also pre-empted the Islamisation of Ọ̀yọ́’s political structures. Indeed, Ṣàngó continued to shape Ọ̀yọ́’s political landscape even after the empire’s collapse. Apart from the rebel town of Ilorin, no Ọ̀yọ́ town adopted Islamic political structures: instead, the growing number of Muslims organised along lines of the ‘traditional’ community.

The chapter also explores the relationship between Ṣàngó and Islam in the practices of individuals and communities. In many Ọ̀yọ́ towns, Ṣàngó was linked to the introduction of commodities and practices associated with Islam or the Muslim world, and sometimes even to the introduction of Islam as a ’client’ religion. In a productive engagement with Matory, one could even argue that the (political) gender relations mobilised by Ṣàngó were not completely different from those advocated by Islam. But as conversion to Islam became increasingly popular from the second half of the 19^th century onwards, the importance of private Ṣàngó worship declined. In this new context, the notion that Ṣàngó was a Muslim no longer provided an ambivalent form of legitimacy to Islam, but instead claimed such legitimacy for Ṣàngó. As Ṣàngó continued to occupy an important position in most towns’ political calendars, many Muslims accepted this claim.

In conclusion, the chapter argues that the relationship between Islam and Ṣàngó remained deeply ambivalent throughout the period under discussion. Characterised both by the desire to benefit from the resources associated with Islam and to contain its potentially revolutionary impact, Ṣàngó allowed or even facilitated the spread of Islam as a private religion but prevented its transformation of Ọ̀yọ́ structures of authority.

SATURDAY 14 NOVEMBER
7. INQUISITION AND CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS IN PRECOLONIAL AFRICA

Organiser: Filipa Ribeiro da Silva

Chair/Discussant: Toby Green
Panel Abstract

In recent years, scholars working in the fields of African History and African Diaspora in the Americas and Europe have shown a great interest in the use of sources produced by the Inquisition, in particular, by the Iberian Courts. These materials proved to be of great value for studying African religious and belief systems, the creolisation of African practices transferred elsewhere or adopted by Europeans in the African and American continents, African politics and economies, and gender roles, among other topics. This new stream of research is producing an exciting body of scholarship which is simultaneously unveiling the potential of Inquisitorial sources for the study of African History and Diaspora and related subjects, the main methodological problems faced by researchers trying to study Africans at home or abroad or European contacts and interactions with African societies, cultures and religions using Inquisitorial sources and examine possible strategies to overcome these difficulties. Individual Abstracts

Reconstructing African Voices from Inquisition Sources: Methodological Questions

Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, University of Macau, SAR China

The Iberian Inquisition Courts in Europe, the Americas and Asia produced an extensive body of primary sources, which have valuable data to reconstruct African Voices in Africa and in the Diaspora during the early modern period. In recent years, scholars working on African History and the study of African Diaspora in the Americas have started to explore these source materials to rebuilt material, religious and spiritual dimensions of African livelihood. Although these primary resources have a great potential for the study of African past and its legacies in Europe and the Americas, they also pose multiple challenges to the scholars. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which Inquisition sources were produced and discuss how the modes in which they were written raise serious problems to scholars interested in using them to reconstruct African trajectories. To do so, I will focus on the following main questions: i) how did the social standing of Africans influence the value given by these courts to their eye-witness accounts in cases against other Africans and Europeans; ii) how did the prejudice of Inquisition agents and European eyewitnesses shape the accusations made against Africans before these courts; iii) how did the personal interests of eye-witnesses (either political, economic or social weight on their accusations against Africans? iv) how did translators and clerks that mediated communication between Inquisitors and the Africans unable to speak European languages influence the recording of the accounts we have at our disposal today? v) how did the lack of knowledge of eye-witnesses, Inquisition agents and Inquisitors about African cultural practices and belief systems informed or misinformed their accounts, their writings and their understanding of African realities? vi) how did the views of the Inquisitors and the Inquisition agents on Africans influence the outcome of the court-cases against Africans? Our analysis will be based on a wide selection of source materials from the Inquisition Court of Lisbon portraying African either as targets of the Inquisition or as witnesses against other fellow Africans or Europeans, based in Africa, the Americas or Europe.
Religious Instruments, Instrumentalism, and Belief: the challenges of reconstructing colonial religious history using Inquisition records

Joanna K. Elrick, Vanderbilt University, USA

The definition of “belief” presents one of the greatest methodological dilemmas for investigators of religion. Historians of African religion in the colonial period regularly confront this quandary. West African and West Central African religions are, in the majority of instances, transmitted from one generation to the next via oral instruction, initiation, and ritual demonstration. Further, individuals who stood accused of engaging in African religious practices had overwhelming motivation to deny such beliefs and practices. Institutions tasked with the maintenance of the colonial order, such as the Inquisition, often had the power to imprison the accused parties indefinitely, seize their property, and sentence them to death. Thus, descriptions of religious objects and ritual actions in archival records provide much of the evidentiary basis for religious exchanges between Africans and Europeans. However, to what extent are these objects emblematic of actual belief on the part of the persons accused? Are present-day historians in a position to speculate about the internal belief structure of individuals who lived in the Early Modern period? This paper will analyze these challenges.
Death in Inquisition Sources on Angola in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Kalle Kananoja, University of Helsinki, Finland

Popular characterizations of Africa as a white man’s grave abound in literature about the continent. While scholarly studies of European migrants’ mortality prior to advances in tropical medicine in the late nineteenth century confirm this view, we know much less about precolonial Africans’ conceptualizations of death. There has also been very little discussion of early modern European settlers’ attempts to adapt to African disease environments. This paper seeks to fill these lacunae by discussing Portuguese and African views on death in Angola. It argues that interpretations of death not only generated conflicts but also connected people. The Inquisition sources discussed in this paper demonstrate that Portuguese and African views on death were not far apart but resembled each other to the extent that people found common ground in negotiating the proper ways to handle rituals connected to afterlife. Portuguese attempts to sanitise funeral practices had little effect until the end of the eighteenth century and African burial rituals continued to dominate Angolan religious life.
The material aspects of the Christian education system in the Kongo Kingdom (16^th-18^th century)

Inge Brinkman, Ghent University

By the end of the fifteenth century, the king of the Central African Kongo polity had converted to Christianity, and diplomatic relations were established between the Kongo kingdom and Southern Europe (later also with the Dutch).

Under the Kongo king Afonso I – who ruled from 1509 to 1542 – a school system was introduced. Supervised by the Portuguese clergy – who were closely associated with the royal court – firstly youngsters in the kingdom’s capital were trained. These literate Kongo people were then sent out to all the provinces to establish schools for boys and girls separately, to teach the Christian faith, grammar, reading and writing. Ever more people in the kingdom came to know Latin, Italian, and especially Portuguese.

In this paper I want to trace the history of this formal Christian educational system in a diachronic perspective up to the end of the eighteenth century, thereby focusing on its material aspects. Learning is obviously a mental process, and in this particular case, the educational system had clear religious and political implications. Yet, educational systems also always have a material component that has hitherto received little attention in history. The spatial lay-out of the buildings, the classroom design, the use of paper and books, the materials used for writing, etc. will all be discussed as far as the sources permit.

8. 
   MALI, SONGHAY, AND THE WESTERN SAHEL
   

Pour en finir avec la charte du Manden

Francis Simonis, Université d'Aix-Marseille

La charte du Manden, ou charte de Kurukan Fuga est sans cesse évoquée aujourd’hui comme un élément fondamental de l’Afrique soudanaise médiévale. Bien mieux, elle a été classée au patrimoine immatériel de l’humanité de l’Unesco en 2009. Elle semble cependant reposer sur des bases scientifiques très douteuses, au point qu’il est nécessaire aujourd’hui de se poser une question simple mais essentielle: et s’il ne s’était jamais rien passé à Kurukan Fuga?
Subsidiarité et dialogue des sources: réflexions sur Mâli et Sijilmâsa à partir du cas d’étude du royaume songhay

François-Xavier Fauvelle, TRACES, Toulouse, France

L’opus magnum de Paulo F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (2003), est un chef-d’œuvre d’érudition, et restera longtemps, pour les africanistes, un modèle d’édition de sources. Au-delà de l’exceptionnel corpus documentaire qu’il offre aux chercheurs, ce livre résulte également d’un effort visant à réécrire l’histoire du royaume Songhay, situé le long de l’arc oriental de la Boucle du Niger. Une telle ambition n’est réalisable qu’au prix d’un authentique dialogue entre des sources qui appartiennent à des régimes documentaires différents, en l’occurrence l’épigraphie funéraire médiévale et les chroniques de Tombouctou du XVII^e siècle, les fouilles archéologiques et les sources arabes externes, les matériaux oraux songhay et berbères.

Un tel dialogue, qui est l’idéal de la recherche africaniste sur les périodes historiques, n’a cependant rien d’évident. Comme le montre P.F. de Moraes Farias, il suppose d’abord d’avoir mesuré la valeur heuristique de chaque catégorie de sources, et de cesser de considérer certaines d’entre elles comme des données ancillaires parce qu’elles seraient strictement factuelles. L’ouvrage de P.F. de Moraes Farias constitue de ce point de vue un changement de paradigme important en histoire de l’Afrique.

Ce changement de paradigme doit être appelé de nos vœux dans le dialogue souvent encore impossible entre archéologie et sources arabes. A partir des exemples de la capitale du Mâli médiéval (celle décrite par Ibn Battûta et al-Umarî) et de Sijilmâsa, deux sites liés au commerce transsaharien et à l’histoire de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, nous montrerons comment une démarche archéologique non assumée visant à « confirmer » ou « infirmer » les sources écrites a jusqu’à présent, dans les deux cas, produit des connaissances qui s’avèrent résolument fausses. Mais renoncer à la subsidiarité de l’archéologie par rapport au texte ne fait-il pas courir le risque d’avoir à constater leur incomparabilité?

Rethinking the place of Timbuktu in the intellectual history of Muslim West Africa

Bruce Hall, Duke University

The Malian town of Timbuktu is widely understood as the epicenter of Muslim intellectual history in West Africa. The ever-expanding numbers of Arabic manuscripts which are claimed as extant in Timbuktu has only further cemented the idea of the town as the font of a late-medieval high intellectual culture which rivaled other famous Muslim intellectual centers in Morocco and Egypt. Among the most important lessons that P.F. de Moraes Farias has taught us in his writings is how to read our sources for pre-colonial West African history in more careful and critical ways. In this paper, I propose a critical reevaluation of the place of Timbuktu in the intellectual history of Muslim West Africa on the basis of an analysis of the extent to which scholarly production in Timbuktu was incorporated into other writings produced by Muslim scholars elsewhere in the West African region. For practical purposes, my paper will focus on a selection of jurisprudential texts produced across the region between the 16th and early 20th centuries. I will argue that the degree of the intertextuality in West African jurisprudential writing—in other words, how often West African writers cite other West African writers—is an indication of the influence, and the extent, of organic, interconnected reading communities historically. The evidence suggests Timbuktu, after its zenith in the 16th century, ceased to be an especially important site in the intellectual tradition which was centered in Mauritania. My paper will attempt to re-situate Timbuktu in the intellectual history of Muslim West Africa.
New reinventions of the Sahel: Reflections on the tārikh genre in the Timbuktu historiographical production, 17th-20th centuries

Mauro Nobili, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

One of the most important lessons that scholars of African history draw from Prof. Paulo de Moraes Farias' work is to critically approach the famous Timbuktu chronicles - tarikhs. These chronicle are often studied as simple records of raw information written down by tape-recorder-like scholars, supposedly lacking of any intellectual agency. Prof. Paulo de Moraes Farias' research has proven this assumption wrong and has underlined the politico-ideological purposes which frame the chronicles.

An innovative study based on several manuscript copies of the so-called Tarikh al-fattash inscribes itself in this new scholarly trajectory. The current edition of the chronicle dating 1913 is a problematic work, insofar as it conflates - in the opinion of the presenter - a 17^th century's untitled tarikh written by one Ibn al-Mukhtar and a work written in the 19^th century by Nuh b. al-Tahir al-Fulani serving political purposes of his time. The latter, although based on Ibn al-Mukhtar's chronicle, is an apocryphal work ascribed to the 16^th century scholar Mahmud Ka'ti and is the only work truly called Tarikh al-fattash. This paper analyzes how Nuh b. al-Tahir al-Fulani reworked Ibn al-Mukhtar's tarikh and explores the politico-ideological motivations that underline this literary falsification.

9. FOCUS ON SPECIFIC TYPES OF SOURCES
Facts and Fatwas: Assessing the Usefulness of Legal Sources for Saharan History.

Ghislaine Lydon, University of California at Los Angeles

Since the publication of the co-edited volume by Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, The Law in Colonial Africa, historians have increasingly looked to legal sources for writing African history. Historians of the Middle East, North Africa and Mauritania have made great use of fatwa literature as windows into the past (Ould El-Bara, 1991; Wuld al-Sa‘ad, 2000; Powers, 2002). This paper examines a body of legal opinions written by Muslim jurists. It assesses the usefulness of fatwa literature as a historical source for writing Western African social, and economic and political history. I first describe the profession of the mufti or jurist responsible for the writing of legal opinions and the typical format of the legal documents before presenting an overview of the different topics they address. The second half of the paper focuses on the place of legal evidence in Islamic legal practice, the legal validity of fatwas and their political use. The overall position of this paper is that despite their very rich informational value, there are limits to the usefulness of fatwas, especially when the business of producing them is motivated by political interests.
Sahelian book collectors into the twentieth century

Shamil Jeppie, University of Cape Town

In this paper I shall try to demonstrate what might be gained from investigations into how a book collection was constituted over time.  The use of archives is central to the practices of the historian but detailed examination of the making of an archive (as collection, a network of collections, or even one work) deserves much more attention. The history of the archive in the Sahel presents us with many possibilities to read the making of collections over time. While this paper focuses on the activities of the early twentieth century collector in Timbuktu, Ahmad Bularaf, it goes back into earlier styles of collecting, to the time of Ahmad Baba (d.1627). One of the abiding myths about the history of Africa is the relative insignificance of the written word. However, there are large stores of written materials across the Sahel available for multiple uses by historians with various interests. The study of the making of collections is one such approach. What is achieved through this type of study is at once a contribution to intellectual history and to the history of objects. Prof de Moraes Farias’ work is a major and inspiring contribution to the study of the intellectual worlds of the Sahel. He has opened up a huge archive for us and my paper is a modest contribution inspired by his work to take the intellectuals of the Sahel seriously as “colleagues” from the past and not merely as inanimate sources about the past.
The Secret Language of the Tuareg as a Source

Anja Fischer, University of Vienna

This paper examines the use of Tagenegat, which is a special type of speech among the Tuareg nomads in the Algerian desert. I do not focus on the language code in my paper, but rather on the social function of the speech. The use of Tagenegat is not restricted to specialized groups, unlike how the secret language Tenet is restricted to artisans among

Tuareg. I will analyse the social context of Tagenegat. What does the secret language tells us about the society?  Why did nomads in a very remote area develop a secret language at all? What is the function of this language in the past and present? Does the settlement of many Tuareg influence the maintenance of the speech? To summarize, the main issue of the paper is the analysis of the secret language as source of knowledge about the social life among Tuareg nomads.

Dreamworlds: Cultural Narrative in Asante Visionary Experience

Tom McCaskie, University of Birmingham

I have known Paulo Farias for forty years, as friend, colleague and inspiration. His is a daring and supple intellect, an instrument for making unexpectedly illuminating connections across a range of ideas and perspectives. He and I have a mutual interest in inner selfhoods, the ways in which individuals construe their lives in dreams, visions, nightmares and (so-called) 'madness'. All such experiences are personal, but their frameworks, their cues, are cultural and historical, however distant these might appear to be from lived reality. This paper addresses and analyses matters of this kind among Asante people, and it is grounded in a rich fieldwork by others as well as myself. It is not a contribution to the barren impasse known as 'psychohistory', but rather an attempt to come to grips with the ways in which Asante culture and history shape, seep into and colour the dreamworlds authored by the inner selfhoods of Asante individuals.

10.