Sahara and to adventure as far as the Negroes to buy from them
principally gold-powder in exchange for various sorts of
merchandise. Among this merchandise, Arab geographer, Yakut
mentions copper rings and blue glass beads as being very much
in honour at his time, that is to say, at the beginning of the 13th
century. More recently, the Negroes most admire and value
“aggry beads” made of blue glass.
PPhhooeenni icci iaann aanndd CCa ar rtthhaaggi inni iaann IInnf flluueennccee
We have, therefore, the right to suppose that these beads,
perhaps of Phoenician manufacture, but in any case abundant
among the Phoenicians, were first imported by them into the settle-
ments that they had founded as early as the 12thcentury BC on
the Mediterranean coast of Africa; that their colonists,
Carthaginians and others, later introduced them into the Sahara
even as far as Sudan; that Berber merchants, and then Arabs and
Arabo-Berbers of Tripolitania, Tuat, Tafilalet and Dara or Draa
continued this traffic, and that, after all, the men with long hair and
of light colouration, of so-called celestial origin, mentioned by the
Negro traditions, may have been successively Phoenicians, Punic,
Berber, and Moorish caravan merchants.
As for the trace of Egyptian influence that voyagers have claimed
to find in the houses of Djenné and in the pyramidal minarets of
Sudanese mosques, it is useless to demonstrate its non-existence
otherwise than in recalling that the constructions in question are
subsequent to the Islamisation of the country of the Negroes and
remind one singularly of a type of architecture which is widely
spread in the Arabo-Berber country north of the Sahara. It is
necessary to mention again the fantasy of those who have tried to
discover the origin of the name Fula, Fulbe, or Fulani in that of the
fellah of Egypt, without considering that fellah is an Arabic word
serving to designate the peasants of any country and of any
nationality and that there is no more a fellah of Egypt than of
Morocco or Syria or any other place where there are people
given to the cultivation of the land.
On the contrary, an attentive study of the facts leads me to
formulate a hypothesis which, without doubt, will be verified with
time and which would tend to attribute to the Phoenician
colonies of North Africa, notably Carthage, a very considerable
influence on the development of Sudanese civilisations, much
more considerable and also much more direct, at least in that
which concerns western and central Africa, than the influence
having its point of departure in Egypt. This hypothesis does not
rest only on simple conjectures.
In studying the words of Semitic origin which have acquired
rights of citizenship in most of the Negro languages of Sudan
and its hinterland, I have ascertained that, on the whole, they
are divisible into two large categories which are very distinct
from each other. The one relates almost exclusively to the
dogmas and rites of the Muslim religion or to legal notions,
hagiography and magic, which constitute the accessory
baggage of all Islamisation; these, because of their meanings
and the ideas which they represent, could not have been intro-
duced except subsequently to the Hegira, they have not been
borrowed from spoken Arabic but from written Arabic, and
have passed into the Sudanese languages with the form –
altered only by the Negro pronunciation – that they have in
grammatical Arabic; they are thus words of scholarly formation.
The other category comprises words serving to designate
material objects – for example, pieces of harness, arms, uten-
sils, clothing, etc. – or general ideas which are most often
abstract, objects and ideas which the Negroes did not possess
and hence borrowed at the same time as the vocables meant
to represent them. These words have corresponding forms in
Arabic, since, as I have said, they are incontestably Semitic;
but they never answer to the grammatical form and they often
depart enormously from the popular form Between the Arabic
word and the word incorporated into the Sudanese languages,
one does not find the alternating phonetics which are the law
for the passage from Arabic into the Sudanese dialects of the
words belonging to the first category: it seems, then, that the
borrowing has been made from a Semitic language other than
Arabic and, apparently, at a date far anterior to the introduction
of Arabic into Africa. May not these words have been
borrowed from Phoenician or Punic?Whatever has been the scope of maritime expeditions undertaken
by the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians and no matter how far
Hanno and his companions may have gone towards the south,
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, it is improbable that Carthage and
other Phoenician colonies of Africa should have been able toGelede mask (Yoruba), Nigeria.
Wood, pigment, 36 x 35 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.The Yoruba wear the geledemask on their head. The lower part represents a
face while the upper part depicts a scene.