African Manuscripts Rewriting History-
Northwestern professor uncovers 16th Century writings by a Black African that
contradict many Western preconceptions
By Ron Grossman
It was the kind of day of which every scholar dreams. Professor John Hunwick
was in Timbuktu, and a young man who knew of his interest in African history
invited him to see the family library.
Leading the professor into a small room in his modest house, the man lifted
the lid on an old trunk filled with manuscripts.
"By the third one, my eyes were popping out of my head," recalled Hunwick,
sitting in his office at Northwestern University. "I'd never seen anything
quite like them before."
Nor had any other Westerner -- and, precisely for that reason, the contents
of that trunk are expected to profoundly alter long-accepted views of African
history and civilization, many shaped by racial prejudice rather than
scientific inquiry.
Even among scholars, Africa often is dismissed as a continent lacking written
records, one of the hallmarks of civilization. For decades, Hunwick has been
patiently hunting evidence to the contrary. Now, with the help of the
Timbuktu manuscripts he first saw on Aug. 24, 1999, he is poised to give the
death blow to the view that writing was absent in black societies.
The Ford Foundation is helping too: It recently gave Hunwick and Northwestern
$1 million to establish an institute for the study of written traditions in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Hunwick himself has too much scholarly reserve to boast of his find,
especially publicly. But his academic peers have no such reticence in talking
about the hoard: 3,000 manuscripts ranging from letters and fragments of
works to complete books and covering a range of subjects that include
theology, jurisprudence and history.
Sean O'Fahey, a colleague at Northwestern, even likens Hunwick's discovery to
the recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"Or, you could think of it as like coming upon another Anglo-Saxon chronicle
that gave us a new view of the early history of England," he said.
"It really is monumental," said David Robinson, professor of African history
at Michigan State University.
Until recently, even distinguished scholars would have pooh-poohed the idea
that such a cache of historical documents could exist in the heart of Africa.
To be sure, a tiny group of specialists recognized that Africans had a
written tradition. But even such a celebrated historian as H. Trevor-Roper
wrote in 1963: "Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to
teach. But at present there is
none: There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness."
The centerpiece of Hunwick's find in modern-day Mali was a book by Mahmud
al-Kati, an African historian who wrote in the 16th Century. Timbuktu was
then the center of a flourishing culture, and its strategic position on the
Niger River made the city the
commercial hub of West Africa.
The version of al-Kati's chronicle that Hunwick found contained previously
unknown material from al-Kati's predecessors--which now pushes our historical
knowledge of that part of the continent back to the mid-15th Century.
Ismail Haidara, the young man who showed the work to Hunwick, is descended
from al-Kati, whose family has handed the manuscript from one generation to
the next ever since his death in 1592.
As his name might suggest, al-Kati was a Muslim, like many people in
Timbuktu, and he wrote in Arabic, the holy language of Islam. But he wasn't
an Arab.
He was a black African -- a fact many Westerners would find difficult to
reconcile with their preconceptions. Black Africans were supposed to be
illiiterate, at least until 19th Century Christian missionaries taught them
how to read and created written forms for native languages.
*** Oral traditions ***
In recent years, anthropologists have helped scholars in other fields to
recognize the importance of oral traditions, both as markers of culture and
as a way to establish the history of non-literate peoples. Yet that very
recognition also can contribute to the misconception that peoples with rich
oral traditions couldn't, at the same time, have a written history.
"Europeans liked to think of Africa as a continent of song and dance,"
Hunwick said. "Black Africans weren't supposed to know about writing, which
is how Trevor-Roper could think them as lacking a record of the past and thus
without a history."
As Islam spread across Africa during the Middle Ages, Hunwick said, knowledge
of writing passed from the Arabs of the continent's northern regions to black
societies farther south. For the most part, those converts read and wrote
Arabic, but in some cases they also used the Arabic alphabet to created
written forms of local languages, such as Fulani.
The process, he noted, was remarkably similar to the transmission of writing
among European peoples. The Romans adapted their alphabet from the Greeks,
for example, and in turn the Latin alphabet was adopted by French, Spanish,
English and German speakers and others to give written form to their
languages.
But the role of Arabic in African literacy was largely overlooked until
recently, even by Africans themselves.
Early in his scholarly career, the British-born Hunwick taught at the
University of Ibadan in Nigeria. "There was a classics department where Latin
was taught, because the university had been established by the British when
the country was their colony,"
Hunwick recalled. "But there was no department of Arabic studies. I convinced
the dean to establish one on the argument that Arabic was the Latin of
Africa."
*** Slaves in America ***
One piece of evidence for that statement is that a number of black Africans
brought to North America as slaves were literate in Arabic. One of the
earliest autobiographies by an American slave was written in Arabic by Umar
ibn Sayyid, who was held in bon
dage on a North Carolina plantation.
The thought that blacks could read and write was as troubling for American
slaveholders as it was for European colonialists, Hunwick noted. So if a
slave was literate, both ruling groups reasoned, that must mean that he or
she wasn't really a black African but a "Moor" -- that is, a darker skinned
Arab.
When a white American published an account of another literate slave, Abdul
Rahaman, he went to great pains to establish the slave's identity as a Moor
-- in face of contradictory evidence, such as Rahaman's extremely dark skin.
"Constant exposure to a vertical sun for many yeaars, together with the
privations incident to the lower order of community, and an inattention to
cleanliness, will produce a very material change in the complexion," the
author assured his white readers.
It was the need to combat just that kind of racial prejudice that drew
Hunwick into African studies. When he was a young man in the 1950s, Great
Britain still had compulsory military service, which he served in Somalia, in
eastern Africa.
"I was an officer but not a gentleman," Hunwick said, explaining that
contrary to prevailing colonialist mores he socialized with the African
troops under his command. He was impressed by the egalitarian quality of
their society, which contrasted sharply
with the rigid class lines he had seen in England.
He also discovered how wide the compass of writing was in Africa, despite
what history books of the day said.
*** 400 manuscripts ***
In 1964, he began traveling through northern Nigeria, searching out
manuscripts in private hands and microfilming them. Eventually, Hunwick
located and filmed some 400 such manuscripts, making them available for the
first time to Western scholarship.
Hunwick's infectious enthusiasm has influenced two generations of younger
Africanists, noted University of Illinois history professor Charles C.
Stewart. Those scholars continue to battle the older image of Africa as a
continent where civilization was unknown before the coming of the white man.
"Materials like those Hunwick has uncovered," Stewart said, "are the building
blocks for redressing the racism still inherent in many Westerners' views of
Africa."
Copyright © 2001, Tribune Interactive, Inc.
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