The Script

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Black Body ◽  
West African ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
African Music ◽  
West Africans ◽  
Cultural Expressions

This chapter examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American travel journals to reveal the manner in which they portrayed West Africans in order to create the moral and social justifications for slavery and racial stereotypes. It argues that European travelers often ignored the ritualistic purpose of West African music and dance and instead reduced West Africans to servants, prostitutes, and entertainers. These societal positions were developed on the premise of European hegemony and aimed to create an African commodity. Throughout West Africa, music, song, and dance were important cultural expressions. However, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, European and American travelers distorted these expressions in order to project and fulfill their own desires. This chapter shows how travel narratives presented the identity of West Africans as malleable and capable of being shaped according to the desired purpose of the gazer. Through their creation of the innate dancers and singers, it contends that travel journals contributed to the subjugation and reconfiguration of the black body through its neglect of the actual culture and tradition of the performing arts.

Jihad in West Africa: early phases and inter-relations in Mauritania and Senegal

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Religious History ◽  
West African ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Early Phases

The tradition of religious revolution directed against partially Muslim rulers is traced to the religious reform movement among the zwāya of Mauritania in the 1660s, and to the jihad that brought them briefly into control of Futa Toro, Cayor, Walo, and Jolof in the 1670s. In spite of the reconquest of these states by their secular rulers and the re-establishment of Hassānī control in southwestern Mauritania, the tradition of religious revolt and the aim of establishing an imamate under religious leadership lived on, to reappear in other Fulbe states. It came a generation later, with the jihad of Malik Sy in Bundu during the 1690s, and direct connexions can be traced between the leadership in Bundu and the leadership in the later jihad in Futa Jallon. The jihad in Futa the 1770s and 1780s followed in the same tradition. This evidence suggests that the external influence of the mid-eighteenth-century revival of Islam in Arabia and the Middle East has been overemphasized in West African religious history. Forces working for the reform of Islam based in Africa itself were already at work.

scholarly journals Islam in West Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-93
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sheikh Bangura
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Volta Basin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Systems

Islam in West Africa is a collection of nineteen essays written by NehemiaLevtzion between 1963 and 1993. The book is divided into five sections. dealingwith different facets of the history and sociology of Islam in West Africa.The first section focuses on the patterns, characteristics, and agents of thespread of Islam. The author offers an approach to the study of the process of thatIslamization in West Africa that compares pattems of Islamizacion in medievalMali and Songhay to patterns in the Volta basin from the seventeenth to thenineteenth centuries. He also assesses the complex roles played by Africanchiefs and kings and slavery in the spread of Islam.Section two focuses on the subject of lslam and West African politics fromthe medieval period to the early nineteenth century. Levtzion identifies twotrend in African Islam: accommodation and militancy. Islam's early acceptancein West African societies was aided by the fact that Islam was initially seen asa supplement, and not as a substitute, to existing religious systems. Levtzionanalyzes the dynamics of Islam in African states as accommodation gave wayin time to tensions between the ruling authorities and Islamic scholars, callingfor a radical restructuring of the stare according to Islamic ideals. The tensionsbetween the Muslim clerics of Timbuktu and the medieval Songhay rulers. andthe ultimately adversarial relationship between Uthman dan Fodio and the Gobirleadership in eighteenth-century Hausaland, are singled out for sustained analysis ...

A poisonous plant of the genus Datura (Solanaceae) in an eighteenth-century Danish garden in West Africa

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-159
Author(s):  
Daniel Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Ornamental Plant ◽  
Poisonous Plant ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

There was disagreement among colonialists about whether the Africans around the Danish West African forts made use of native poisons in the early nineteenth century, but it appears that the Danes themselves may have introduced a poisonous ornamental plant of the genus Datura in one of their own gardens on the Guinea Coast.

Takrūr The History of a Name

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
'Umar Al-Naqar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
West African ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
West Africans ◽  
History Of

The generic term Takarīr (also Takarna) is a popular Middle Eastern concept applied to all West African Muslims. The progenitor of the name, to which the attribution Takarīr is made, is the ancient state of Takrūr, which existed briefly on the Senegal basin from ca. a.d. 1OOO and which was the first West African chieftaincy to accept Islam. This paper suggests that probably the earliest West African Muslims to be seen in the Middle East in recognizable numbers may have come from that state. Because the milieu of the Hijaz and the diversity of races frequenting the annual pilgrimage ceremonies encouraged generalizations, the name Takarīr was conveniently applied to West Africans. The ambiguity of the term may thus be seen to have progressively increased with the expansion of Islam in West Africa, while the name itself became sufficiently entrenched in popular usage for it to survive the fame of great West African empires like Mali and Songhay. The term ‘Bilad al-Takrūr’ is essentially the extension of the Middle Eastern concept of Takrūr and has therefore received various territorial definitions.

The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century

1980 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Coastal Areas ◽  
West African ◽  
Sharp Reduction ◽  
Intense Competition ◽  
West India Company

The records of probably the biggest Birmingham gun-making firm specializing in the African trade and records of the Dutch West India Company are used in this article to throw more light on the quantities, types and quality of the guns imported into West Africa and on their effects in the eighteenth century. Inikori's estimate of 45 per cent as the proportion of English firearms in the total annual West African import of between 283,000 and 394,000 guns per annum is probably an underestimate because of the unknown quantities of English guns which were re-exported from Continental ports to West Africa. It is estimated tentatively that 180,000 guns per annum were being imported into the Gold and Slave Coasts by 1730, and that some of the most dramatic effects of the import of guns occurred between 1658 and 1730. A revolution in warfare began in the 1690s in the Senegambian coastal areas and along the Gold and Slave Coasts. The trebling of slave prices and the sharp reduction in gun prices between 1680 and 1720 enabled large militarized slave-exporting states to develop along the Gold and Slave Coasts. There was a strong demand for well-finished and well-proved guns as well as for the cheapest unproved guns, and the dangerous state of many of the guns imported into West Africa has been exaggerated. The reputations of European nations for the quality of their guns fluctuated. There was probably no steady deterioration in the quality of English guns imported between 1750 and 1807, but the quality of the cheapest guns deteriorated during periods of intense competition.

The Mecca Pilgrimage By West African Pastoral Nomads

1977 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. Birks
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Dry Season ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
African Savanna ◽  
Pastoral Nomads ◽  
West Africans

Each dry season many Um Borroro or nomadic Fulani set off eastwards to Mecca. They are some of the 5,000 or so West Africans who make the pilgrimage (the haj) each year by travelling along the savannas through Cameroun, Chad, and the Sudan.1 About four-fifths of them come from what is generally called Hausaland and Bornu in Nigeria and Niger, but some pilgrims from all the West African savanna countries travel overland.2 Although they comprise only about six per cent of the total arriving in Mecca from West Africa (the majority come by air and sea), they represent an important relict movement which earlier this century involved more than 15,000 migrants per annum.3

scholarly journals The English Establishments on the Gold Coast in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1922 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 167-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eveline C. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
National Pride ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.

Archaeological Research in West Africa

Antiquity ◽  
1944 ◽  
Vol 18 (71) ◽  
pp. 147-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Arkell
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Tropical Forest ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
West African ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
West Africans

The pilgrimage to Mecca made on foot across Africa from west to east between the desert and the tropical forest keeps many West Africans in close touch with the valley of the Nile. The pilgrims follow a route along which culture must from the earliest times have been spread by refugees, traders, military expeditions and the like. (In these latter days motorized convoys of West African troops and aerial reinforcements for the Middle East have followed the same route).Over twenty years’ service in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (of which twelve years were spent in Darfur, where the cultural and political influence of West Africa was strong in medieval times, and is still felt today), has left me much interested in West Africa, although I have never been there.

Visual Symbols and Military Culture in Britain’s West African Colonial Army (c.1900–60)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Timothy Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Military Culture ◽  
West African ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Military ◽  
Visual Symbols

Visual symbols like uniforms, emblems and ceremonies became central in inventing British military culture among West African forces reflecting orientalist and ornamentalist interpretations of empire. While uniforms fostered military identity, the versions devised for West African soldiers reproduced racial stereotypes and military fashion trends. Granting insignia and Colours to West African units transformed them from simplistic paramilitaries to honoured members of the British imperial milieu. Colours served as ritual objects enabling West African forces to recreate pivotal cultural events of the British regimental system. The public presence of uniformed West African soldiers promoted a sense of imperial majesty that reinforced British rule. Travelling to Britain, West African troops participated in parades and exhibitions initially displaying the epic scale of the empire, but eventually these military visitors became symbols of colonial reform. With independence, Britain’s former colonies in West Africa retained Western-style military symbols altered to highlight republicanism and modernist aspirations.

African Power

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Amber Gemmeke
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
West Africans ◽  
African Soil

This paper explores how West African migrants’ movements impacts their religious imagery and that of those they encounter in the diaspora. It specifically addresses how, through the circulation of objects, rituals, and themselves, West Africans and Black Dutchmen of Surinamese descent link, in a Dutch urban setting, spiritual empowering and protection to the African soil. West African ‘mediums’ offer services such as divination and amulet making since about twenty years in the Netherlands. Dutch-Surinamese clients form a large part of their clientele, soliciting a connection to African, ancestral spiritual power, a power which West African mediums enforce through the use of herbs imported from West Africa and by rituals, such as animal sacrifices and libations, arranged for in West Africa. This paper explores how West Africans and Dutchmen of Surinamese descent, through a remarkable mix of repertoires alluding to notions of Africa, Sufi Islam, Winti, and Western divination, creatively reinvent a shared understanding of ‘African power’.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document