West African Food in the Middle Ages: According to Arabic Sources

279 Pages·2009·3.24 MB·English

by  Tadeusz Lewicki

WEST AFRICAN FOOD IN THE MIDDLE AGES

West African Pood in
the Middle Ages
ACCORDING TO ARABIC SOURCES
TADEUSZ LEWICKI
Professor and Director of the
Institute of Oriental Philology
University of Cracow
with the assistance of
MARION JOHNSON
Research Fellow
Centre of West African Studies
University of Birmingham
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521086738
© Cambridge University Press 1974
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1974
This digitally printed version 2008
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 72-88615
ISBN 978-0-521-08673-8 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-10202-5 paperback
CONTENTS
Foreword by J.D. Fage vii
Acknowledgements xi
Map of West and North Africa in the Middle Ages xii
Transcription and pronunciation of Arabic words xv
Introduction 1
1 Arabic sources for the history of the foodstuffs
used by West African peoples 13
2 Vegetable foodstuffs 19
The Middle Ages and subsequent changes; grain;
seeds (and roots) of various wild grasses; foods
made from cereals and from wild grasses; yams;
earth nut; leguminous plants; vegetables;
Cucurbitaceae; fruit; truffles; manna
3 Meat and fish 79
Domesticated meat animals; game; fish;
preservation of meat and fish; meat and fish dishes
4 Other foodstuffs 105
Fats; cheese; eggs; honey; sugar cane and sugar;
salt; spices; kola; beverages
5 Utensils 132
Cooking utensils; dishes and plates;
receptacles for food storage
Conclusion 134
Notes 135
Bibliography 227
General index 242
Index of authors etc.. cited

FOREWORD
No one can gainsay the importance of Arabic sources for the
history of West Africa. While the Negro peoples of other parts
of the continent were often cut off from effective contacts
with the outside world until they became caught up in the
great movement of European expansion which began in the
fifteenth century, those of West Africa — or at least of its
northern fringes — were able throughout history to maintain
contact through the pastoral peoples of the Sahara with the
civilizations of the Mediterranean. Following the Arab conquest
of North Africa in the seventh century, the trans-Saharan links
with West Africa became a subject of interest alike to the
traders and the geographers of the world civilization of Islam.
The earliest surviving Arabic reference to the West
African Bilad as-Sudan, "the land of the black man", south of
the Sahara, dates, it would seem, from the eighth 'century.
From the ninth and tenth centuries onwards, there is a
considerable corpus of Arabic geographies, histories and
travellers' accounts containing information about the Bilad
as-Sudan. This information has its limitations. The Arab world's
knowledge of West Africa was effectively limited to the savanna
lands of the Sudan that were accessible from the Sahara, and
hardly extends at all to the southerly, forested region
commonly known as G-uinea. Much of this knowledge was not first
hand. We cannot be certain that, prior to Ibn Ba^uta (1352-3),
any North African or Near Eastern writer ever himself visited
the lands south of the Sahara described by him. Moreover Arab
scholars were inclined to incorporate uncritically into their
own writings, and sometimes without acknowledgement, what they
had read in earlier works. Then, as Muslims, they were apt to
be cpntemptuous of pagan societies, and sometimes indeed said
little about such in the Sudan except to comment unfavourably
on what struck them as their more outrageous customs. Finally,
after about the fourteenth century, there was a general decline
in the spirit of scientific enquiry in the Muslim world.
References to West Africa in the mainstream of Arabic writing
became less frequent and less original, though to some extent
this is offset by the fact that some West Africans were now
(vii)
viii Foreword
literate in Arabic and were themselves producing chronicles and
other literature, some of which has survived.
Despite these imperfections, the fact remains that
Arabic writings constitute virtually the only written source
for the history of West Africa from the eighth century to the
fifteenth, when European mariners began to bring back accounts
of the coasts they had started to explore. Furthermore, since
Europeans hardly penetrated inland before the nineteenth century,
and did not effectively establish themselves in the western
Sudan much before the present century, Arabic documents continue
to be a prime source of information for the history of the
interior generally and for the Sudan in particular for a further
500 years.
Nevertheless, despite the great strides which have
been made during the last twenty years in the reconstruction of
West African history, these Arabic sources have been relatively
neglected compared with the sources available in European
languages or, for that matter, the evidence of archaeology or
oral tradition. There are perhaps two main reasons for this.
The first is that in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries West Africa came to be dominated by western Europeans,
and the modern historians who have explored its history, black
as well as white, have almost invariably been brought up in
European traditions of scholarship, especially in French and in
English. It is true that within, these traditions there is a
place for the study of Arabic and of the Islamic world, but
this study is both specialized and localized. It is the work,
virtually, of a lifetime to acquire a mastery of Arabic
sufficient to be able to read and to interpret medieval Arabic
manuscripts with any assurance. Relatively few scholars acquire
such mastery, and those that do have tended to concentrate
their attention on the major centres of Muslim culture in the
Near and Middle East. For obvious historical reasons, French-
based scholars have also concerned themselves with the western
Muslim lands in North Africa, but, hardly more than their
anglophone colleagues, have they extended their interests south
across the Sahara to the peripheries of the Islamic world in
West Africa.
It is thus fair to say that to date few Arabic
scholars of the first rank have become sufficiently interested
ix Foreword
in the history of West Africa and its peoples to have acquired a
competence in its study to match their competence in Arabic or
in Muslim history. Conversely —- though the situation is now
changing with the growth of universities in West Africa which
have departments of history and of Arabic — very few of those
who have first-hand knowledge of West Africa and its history
have acquired sufficient mastery of Arabic to be able to make
much use of the Arabic sources for this history. For the most
part they have had to rely on whatever may be available in
translation, usually in French or English. These translations
are haphazard, and were often made by men with little interest
in or knowledge of West Africa, and made before much significant
understanding of its history had been achieved.
Secondly, historians of West Africa who do have
Arabic, together with those who are confined to the use of
translations, have for the most part looked at the Arabic
sources from a very limited standpoint, as evidence for the
obvious themes of the expansion of Islam into West Africa and of
its interaction with the major political dominions erected by
western Sudanese peoples from the time of ancient Ghana onwards
to that of al-Hajj cUmar and Samori. Little thought has yet been
given, for example, to the use of Arabic documentation to"1 throw
light on the economic and social history of the West African
peoples.
It is against this background that an especially warm
welcome must be given to this book by Professor Tadeusz Lewicki,
with assistance in the preparation of its English edition from
Marion Johnson. Professor Lewicki is a Polish Arabist of
international fame whose work on North African history, and in
particular on its Ibadite communities, led him to make a close
study of trans-Saharan relations during the early Muslim period,
and so has brought him to a meticulous evaluation of the early
Arabic sources for the western Sudan in relation to the modern
studies which have been made of its history, archaeology,
geography and ethnography. In the present work he has chosen to
use this precious combination of talents and experience to
explore an important aspect of the social and economic history
of West Africa in the period before the opening of its maritime
contacts with the outside world. It is a commonplace that a high
proportion of the foodcrops of modern West Africa are introduc-