Day 1 Thursday 6th September

What you see

Daniela Moreau, Historian, Director of Acervo África, São Paulo, Brazil

In 1906 the Dakar-based French photographer and picture editor Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) arrived at Timbuktu. He traversed West Africa diagonally in a SW-NE direction, departing from Conakry and then following the Niger River’s course from its source to the desert. Over five hundred photographs from this journey were published by Fortier in postcard format. The negatives have disappeared: printed on fragile pieces of paper, these images, which constitute a precious record of the region’s history, were scattered around the world. Inspired by Paulo Farias’ teachings and with his encouragement, I decided to assemble and study this wealth of material. The reconstitution of this visual corpus, which was fragmented and had not existed in effect, allowed me to bring to the fore precious information about a specific moment during the colonial period in the history of this vast region. 

In this paper, I intend to address the obstacles and challenges I faced while working with Fortier’s oeuvre, and to present the methodology employed to extract historical information from these early twentieth-century postcards. To demonstrate the potential offered by this material as a research avenue for West African studies, I will analyse the sequence that portrays a Tuareg group, led by the amenokal Chebboun, at the French administrative Bureaux at Timbuktu. I will also show what are certainly the oldest photographs of Sanke mon collective fishing at San, and of the Kôrêdugaw rite at Ségou – both being cultural expressions from the Republic of Mali registered by UNESCO as world heritage, requiring permanent protection. To reflect upon the importance of precise sorting and dating of Fortier’s series, I will turn to the question of the photographer’s postcards purported influence in Picasso’s work.

Materials and Mythology: Making History

The Emil Torday Expedition to the Belgian Congo, 1907-1909

Rebekah Sheppard, PhD Candidate, Sainsbury Institute for Art, University of East Anglia

The Emil Torday Expedition left for the Kasai in 1907 and spent two years in the former Belgian Congo (modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo). The expedition members were Emil Torday, Merville Hilton-Simpson and the artist, Norman Hardy. They collected over 3000 artefacts for the British Museum, as well as a further thousand or so for museums around the UK, Europe and the United States. They took photographs (numbering over 1500) and, most significantly, spent considerable time with the Nyimi (loosely translated as King, or Emperor) of the Bushong-Kuba, recording and transcribing oral histories. The wax cylinders that held these historical sound bites and music have disappeared from the archives, but what remains are material remnants of conversations and dialogue that are revealing of a political ideology on both sides of the exchange. The “encounter” was made up of performances; a corpus of interconnecting materials, objects, people and orality. This paper attempts to reinvigorate the active properties of artefacts (what they do, or did) within this encounter context. The reason for the inclusion of this contextual information is to re-invigorate the active and contemporaneous properties of historical texts and museum collections -especially their orality- that can be said to remain despite their supposedly external and distant authorship. These artefacts and performances mobilised history, and connected the material to the immaterial world in both Europe and Africa.


6. ILORIN AND YORUBA

Chair/Discussant: Manuel Barcia Paz

The early beginnings of the Ilọrin Emirate and the perils of its historiography
Stephan Reichmuth, Ruhr Universitat Bochum
Ilorin emerged over a period of about thirty years as one of the successor states of the Old Oyo Empire and, at the same time, as an emirate within the Islamic realm of Sokoto/Gwandu, in a turbulent interplay of military and religious actors of diverse origins that remained highly enigmatic to contemporary observers. No wonder, then, that the historiography of this process still remains charged with tensions and contradictions. The paper reviews the sources and historiographical topoi which have prevailed in the description of the rise of Ilorin. Making use of some less known written sources and, at the same time, relying on oral and topographical material collected in Ilorin mainly during the late 1980s, it will attempt to open some new inroads into the thorny domain of a past that has continued to shape Ilorin society until the present. The problems of the unavoidable involvement of the latter-day field-working researcher in the local dynamics of identity formation will also be highlighted. 
Political and Historical Projects: Elite Slaves in Ilorin, Nigeria

Ann O’Hear, independent scholar

Imitation and creativity in the establishment of Islam in Oyo 

Insa Nolte, University of Birmingham

This paper explores the establishment of Islam in the towns of the former Oyo empire in southwest Nigeria through a focus on imitation and creativity in community-making. It argues that the establishment of Muslim communities at the town level, the creation of Muslim compounds, and the emergence of the chief imam as the leader of the Muslim community reflect a wider capacity in Yorubaland for the generation of structures of governance modelled on the larger structure of the town. The creation of Muslim communities was duplicative in that it reflected central hierarchies associated with the town, but it also remained open to modular adaptations which, drawing on practices of Yoruba community-making ‘from below’, reflected the religious practices and concerns of their members. 
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
   

Chair/Discussant: Jan Jansen

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?
The 'Pays Do' and the Origins of the Empire of Mali

Kevin MacDonald & Nikolas Gestrich, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Research for this paper has been done in collaboration with Seydou Camara (ISH Bamako) and Daouda Keita (University of Bamako)
In Autumn 2013, British and Malian archaeologists and historians worked together to document the past of ‘Do’ region of Tamani/Dugubani – notionally, a confederation of villages which formed one half of the nucleus of the Empire of Mali (c. AD 1230-1500). Heretofore, knowledge about the so-called three regions of 'Do' have been drawn from the great oral epics of Mali recited by griots hailing from the 'heartland of Mande' some 200km or more to the south-west. Indeed, on the basis of such accounts, the location of the ‘Do’ of Sogolon (mother of Sundiata) has been contested. This new work provides complex and interlinked oral accounts and archaeological data reinforcing arguments for a more easterly situation of the core and heartland of early imperial Mali (see also the 13^th-15^th c. ‘power centre’ of Sorotomo, near Segou, excavated by this same team). The organisation of the heterarchical ‘Do’ polity, formed both for mutual defence and the coordination of ritual activities, will also be discussed.
Archaeological survey documented a number of settlement mounds from different periods, including the notional capital of this early confederation: Dodugubani. However, another remarkable discovery was a massive 75ha tumulus field, with over 250 monumental tumuli, recorded at Teguébé, near the modern Malian town of Baroueli. Survey on the ground and by remote sensing has revealed the existence of hundreds, if not thousands of further tumuli in the region, on a scale heretofore unknown in this part of Africa. On the basis of surface ceramics, we provide an approximate temporal context for these sites. The potential implications of the Do region’s unique and extensive necropolis are also considered.
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, 17^th-20^th 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

Chair/Discussant: Murray Last

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.

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. 
    ANALYSING AND REPRESENTING SAHARAN SOURCES AND SOCIETIES
    

Chair/Discussant: Berny Sebe

L'ash‘arisme d'al-Murâdî al-Hadramî

Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, Université de Lorraine

Au tout début de sa carrière de chercheur, P. F. de Moraes Farias s'est livré à une enquête d'une remarquable érudition sur les débuts sahariens du mouvement almoravide (XI^e siècle), recherche qui fut notamment à l'origine de son article : "The Almoravids. Some questions concerning the character of the movment during its periods of closest contact with the Western Sûdân" (Bulletin de l'IFAN, t. XXIX, serie B, n° 3-4, 1967, pp. 794-878). Plus de trente cinq ans avant la parution de son monumental Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (2003), qui renouvelle complètement, comme l'on sait, l'approche de l'histoire médiévale ouest africaine issue des grandes chroniques de Tîmbuktu, P. F. de Moraes Farias avait déjà introduit les germes d'une lecture tout à fait nouvelle des phases initiales de l'aventure almoravide dans l'article que je viens de citer. Parmi les personnalités les plus emblématiques de la période initiale de l'histoire des Almoravides évoquées dans ledit article figure un théologien du nom d'al-Murâdî al-Hadramî (m. 489/1095-96) dont le profil incertain associe mythe et histoire, les traits d'un théologiens "rationalisant" adepte du kalâm et ceux d'un saint au parcours "souterrain" miraculeux (sa "tombe" est réputée avoir été "découverte" six siècles après sa mort par un homme qui se disait "habité" par son œuvre...). Alors que les Almoravides passent pour avoir été plutôt hostiles au kalâm et à l'ash‘arisme, voilà que les œuvres connues de l'une de leurs principales figures au Sahara, al-Murâdî al-Hadramî précisément, manifeste clairement son adhésion à cette école théologique musulmane.

J'aimerais, dans la communication que je propose, revenir sur ce personnage d'al-Murâdî à partir notamment d'une "profession de foi" qui lui est attribuée et qui a été récemment publiée au Maroc (‘Aqîdat Abî Bakr al-Murâdî al-Hadramî, Rabat, Dâr al-Amân li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzî‘, 2012).