“Mande Kaba,” the Capital of Mali: A Recent Invention?

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 127-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Green
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Political Control ◽  
French Translation ◽  
French Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Town

Historians who work in certain diaspora areas of the Mande people are frequently told by Mandekan speakers that their ancestors came from “Mande Kaba” (Kaaba). When reporting this, they usually then proceed to explain that Kaba is the Mande term for the French-named town of Kangaba, capital of the Mali empire. However, in my work on the precolonial state of Kong in northeastern Côte d'Ivoire, it became important to question exactly what this phrase means in the context of oral traditions and chronology.The hypothesis equating Kaba, Kangaba, and the capital of the Mali empire dates back in print to the early French studies of ancient Mali, and particularly to Maurice Delafosse, that prolific writer on West African oral traditions, religion, and languages. In his 1912 magnum opus, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, Delafosse cited Kangaba, “sans doute” as the capital of the pre-Sunjata “royaume” of Mali. In his annotation of the French translation of the mid-seventeenth century compilation, Ta'rikh al-Fattash, Delafosse again presented this idea. The Ta'rikh stated that “[t]he town which served previously as the capital of the emperor of Mali was named Diêriba [jāriba]; following, there was another named Niani [Yan.”In a note Delafosse explained that Diêriba “is also the name of the town called Kangaba on our [French] maps, which after having been the first capital of the manding empire, is still today the chief town of the province of Manding or Malli.” He was most likely relaying information from his interpretation of traditions as well as his own personal observations of early twentieth-century Kangaba. The Keita family, claiming descent from Sunjata Keita, the founder of the Mali empire, enjoyed political control of Kangaba, and were recognized as having held this position for some time.

Historical Change in an Ibo Polity: Asaba to 1885

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Isichei
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Town

Asaba is an Ibo town, which, because of its position on the Niger, came into relatively early contact with Europeans. This means that we have materials for its history in European records for more than a hundred years. This article is based on these records, and on present-day oral traditions. It begins with an account of Asaba's traditional social and political structure, and its former role in the economic life of the lower Niger.Asaba traditions relate in detail how the town was founded by a man from Nteje, east of the Niger, called Nnebisi. There is less information about its subsequent history, though it seems that it went through a significant changefrom the rule of a single Eze to a system of personal titles, like that found in eastern Iboland. Some attempts have been made to make a king list for Asaba, but it does not seem possible to establish either this or any other useful chronological framework other than that provided by family genealogies. These suggest that Nnebisi lived in the seventeenth century. The main theme in Asaba's external history is her changing relationship with her powerful neighbour, Benin.The choice of Onitsha, rather than Asaba, as a missionary and trading centre, meant that Asaba went through a period of relative eclipse. The first C.M.S. missionaries came to the town in 1875, but they had little impact on Asaba life. In the middle eighties, Asaba became the administrative capital of the newlyestablished Royal Niger Company. The impact of the Company on Asaba, though great, was short-lived. But one result of its choice of Asaba as a capital was the renewal of missionary endeavour, both Catholic and Protestant, in the town. This in its turn was to have a very great impact on Asaba's way of life.

scholarly journals Ballads as Vessels for Collective Cultural Memory: A Critical Comparison of Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” and Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo”

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Maria C. Fellie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Critical Comparison ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
The Way

Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” (1906) and Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo” (1928), two early twentieth-century ballad poems, serve as literary vessels for the collective memory of historical periods and share aesthetic and narrative similarities. Common images and colors (red, green) also illustrate both texts. The shared imagery calls attention to the ballads’ roles in preserving and transmitting collective memories. This study references the way that ballads stabilize in cultural memory, in line with David Rubin’s assessments of memory and literature in Memory in Oral Traditions (1995), as well as the studies of other scholars (e.g., Benjamin, Boyd, Connerton).

Synthesis of the Current Knowledge Concerning the Construction of French Traditional Cob Building for Giving Recommendations

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Bonnet ◽  
Darwish Alzeort ◽  
Philippe Poullain
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Linear Shrinkage ◽  
Dune Sand ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Town

The museum of the “Bourrine du bois Juquaud” is a tourist site located in the town of Saint Hilaire de Riez in France. It presents the daily life of the inhabitants of the marsh in the early twentieth century and their traditional earthen houses called Bourrine. The Bourrine is a cob construction with reed roof. The earth used for walls is soil from marshlands added with dune sand and straw fibres but some part are without fibres like coating applied on walls. By now, the knowledge acquired on the implementation of these mixtures for the lifting of the walls are oral knowledge and it is necessary to ensure the preservation of this traditional heritage. Currently the done reparations present cracks due to shrinkage. This study aims at well defining the mixtures by a scientific approach. The earth and dune sand were analyzed by taking cores from different existing bourrines and also by extracting soil on site. Different mixtures were produced by varying the proportion of earth sand and water. The linear shrinkage were measured. Corrections were done to get the best mixture for manufacturing and repairing the Bourrines.

In Search of One Word's Meaning: Zaman in Early Twentieth-Century Kano

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Christelow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Oral Discourse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Do So

When Caliph Attahiru of Sokoto chose flight over submission to the British in March 1903, it was left to the blind and aging Waziri, Muhammad al-Bukhari, to provide those who remained behind with an explanation of how they could remain good Muslims while accepting infidel rule. Citing a text of the caliphate's founder, Shehu ʿUthman Dan Fodio, he argued that one could befriend the British with the tongue, without befriending them with the heart. It remained for others to develop the vocabulary that their tongues would need for this task.A particularly intriguing item in the vocabulary that emerged during the turbulent first decade of colonial rule was a new usage of zaman(time, era) that occurs in the records of the Emir of Kano's judicial council in such terms as hukm al-zaman (rule of the era) and ʿumur al-zaman (things of the era). It is worth noting that the judicial council did not keep written records before being instructed to do so by British Resident C.L. Temple in 1909, so the records might be seen as preserving what was essentially oral discourse—expressions of the tongue. These terms occur uniquely in relation to legal matters in which the British had intervened. Understanding them can shed new light on the religious and political adaptation of northern Nigerian Muslim leaders to life under British rule. To explore their meaning requires a threefold process of examining various usages and understandings of zaman in non-legal sources; describing how the judicial council used the word; and then analyzing how this usage may have been related to any of a number of influences, ranging from British officials to West African Islamic scholars to Western-educated North Africans passing through the region.

Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tārīkh al-fattāsh

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Nobili ◽  
Mohamed Shahid Mathee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article advances a new theory about the composition of the chronicle generally referred to as Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, allegedly written in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, is one of the most famous chronicles on which scholars have relied for information about West Africa’s pre-colonial history. However, there are still many puzzling issues and unsolved problems associated with this work, as edited by Octave V. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse in the early twentieth century. This analysis uses unexplored manuscripts that were either unknown or unavailable to previous scholars, and advances a new theory on the genesis and authorship of the chronicle: that the edited text in fact conflates two texts, a seventeenth-century chronicle and a nineteenth century one.

scholarly journals SPEAKING IN MEDIAS RES: MODERNISM VERSUS MODERNITY IN SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S WINESBURG, OHIO

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Yonca DENİZARSLANI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Times ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Individual

Since the times of Homeric epics, speaking in medias res has been the most suitable form of storytelling, leaving the threshold of narrative ajar in the present, upholding a historical sense. This ancient historical sense of time, inherent in oral traditions revived in early twentieth century literary Modernism as T. S. Eliot stated in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent:” “… And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” Be it a messianic revival or primitivism, calling for a coherent context for all, the Modernists were in urge for new narrative techniques overcoming the devastating traumas of the World Wars, representing the shared experiences worldwide. In this respect, early twentieth-century. Modernism provided a literary niche for a new generation of storytellers engaged in the momentous grasp of time coalescing with an epiphany. Thus, regarding the present global crises of humanity against which we need to retreat to our local worlds, a review on literary Modernism would suggest a solution as it had once achieved as an internationalist current by gathering the minds and shared experiences in recovering from the overwhelming forces of modernity. This article aims to review literary Modernism and its correspondence with ancient forms of storytelling and sense of time in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stories regarding the shared thematic motifs transcending the cultural and national boundaries in representing the overwhelming traumas of early twentieth century modernity.

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and its Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.

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