Liptako Speaks: History from Oral Tradition in Africa

by Paul Irwin

Overview

Although historians today turn increasingly to oral tradition as a source of data on the history of non-literate peoples, Paul Irwin cautions them against uncritical use of such evidence. In an attempt to determine how much historians can learn about the past from oral traditions, he studies those of Liptako, now a part of Upper Volta hut in the nineteenth century an emirate in one of West Africa's great imperial systems.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691615172
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #715
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

Liptako Speaks

History from Oral Tradition in Africa

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By Paul Irwin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05309-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Characters

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

I am an invisible man. ... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. ... That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Abdussalaami Usmaan was what Liptako people call a "wise old man" — old because he was well into his seventies, wise because he knew his traditions like few other men, young or old. I had heard about him for months by the time I went to Bani to see him in late 1971. He had heard about me too, and as we settled down on grass mats laid in the shade of a tree in a quiet courtyard off the Bani market, he launched right into his stories without the usual preliminary hesitancies of other wise old men trying to make up their minds how best to deal with a prying foreigner. His stories ranged in time from the era of the Prophet Muhammad to the present, and in space from Bani and Liptako to Diagourou, Hombori, and even distant Fuuta Tooro almost 1,500 kilometers away.

Bani, Liptako, Diagourou, Hombori, Fuuta Tooro — these names and those of the people that live there and in neighboring places are household words in Liptako. They are part of everyday geography. To foreigners searching out these names on maps they have no special value. They are just labels pinned on places. To the people of Liptako these names are not neutral: they call up associations, they carry values. These reflect historical experience; they also affect traditionists' judgments on what in historical experience is important enough to remember for the future. From their point of view the histories of some peoples and places are more worth knowing than others. Here is the first of the "subtle biases" that permeate their thinking.

The wise old men think Liptako history is worth knowing. Even though many of them know smatterings of histories from the world beyond Liptako, and some know a great deal, Liptako's borders nonetheless define the territory within which most of the events that traditions describe took place. All the country's present-day inhabitants say their ancestors came from somewhere else, mostly from Mali and other parts of Upper Volta in the course of the nineteenth century. They must have arrived in Liptako with memories of generations spent in other places, but these memories are dim now, and current traditions leave the impression that history started up as the migrants set foot across the border. Abdussalaami Usmaan recalled the names of four generations of his Pissilaabe ancestors who founded his village, Bani Kallo, but most traditionists could go no further than the names of the migrant ancestor. Abdussalaami could even remember the details of a crisis in Pissilaabe history that occurred well before they moved on to Liptako; very few traditionists could do the same. Events in pre-Liptako history were generally forgotten as people chose to use their energies for remembering their Liptako past instead.

The migrants swelled Liptako's population and pushed its boundaries outward during the nineteenth century. The emirate that was founded about 1810 was a tiny state of only a few villages — just twelve, aver the traditionists — and all but one of them lay within fifteen kilometers of the Yaayre, a large pond spreading west and north of Dori. By the time of the French conquest of 1897, the number of villages had more than quadrupled. In 1904, the year of the emirate's first census, the colonial administration counted 37,700 people, probably fewer than actually lived there. Some of the nineteenth-century migrants had joined the first settlers in the core area around the Yaayre, but others had founded new villages outside it, particularly to the east, south, and west where agricultural and pasture land was more readily available. In 1897 Katchirga, seventeen kilometers from Dori, was the easternmost settlement, and Diobbou, thirty-five kilometers away, was the westernmost. The country between them is a sandy, sparsely vegetated plain. The people who founded villages south of Dori moved into a different sort of terrain, the increasingly lateritic or clayey, often hilly country that stretches from about M'Bamga to Bani and beyond. Bani, which lay about forty kilometers from Dori, was the southernmost village. The region north of Dori was less favorable for settlement. A large sand dune rises along the north side of the Yaayre within sight of Dori. Villages were built on the dune even before the emirate existed, but expansion beyond it was discouraged by the decreasing quantity and reliability of rainfall to the north and especially by the danger of Tuareg raids. The colonial peace put an end to the Tuareg danger and some new villages were founded north of the dune. But most colonial and post-colonial settlement has continued to take place in the more favorable physical environment east, south, and west of Dori. By 1968 Liptako included 129 officially recognized villages occupied by 74,073 people. Despite its growth, Liptako was still sparsely populated, only 8.2 persons to the square kilometer, to be compared within Upper Volta to the average density of 51 in the rural areas around the capital of Ouagadougou some 250 kilometers to the southwest and 5 in the bordering Oudalan to the north.

The decreasing density of population as one moves within Upper Volta from Ouagadougou to Liptako to the Oudalan correlates with decreasing rainfall. At Ouagadougou rainfall averages 854 millimeters annually; at Dori, 567; at Gorom-Gorom, in the Oudalan, 459. Dori's 567 puts Liptako within the Sahel, a climatic zone lying south of the Sahara and stretching east-west across West Africa that is defined in terms of rainfall as land receiving between 100 and 600 millimeters per year. If only every year were an average year, 567 millimeters would be enough for the crops Liptako farmers favor, but, as is typically the case in the Sahel, all too many years deviate from the average. In the fifty-three years between 1921 and 1973 annual rainfalls ranged from a low of 245 millimeters in 1926 to a high of 783 in 1953. And even if the total quantity of rain is adequate, its distribution in space and time is frequently inadequate. Most of the annual rain usually falls between the middle of June and the middle of September. Farmers plant immediately after the first large rain, but sometimes the first is not followed quickly enough by a second, so the seed is lost. Or the rains may fail in the midst of the growing season, and then once-healthy plants shrivel in the sun and yield nothing at all or not enough to feed their owners for the coming year. While some villages enjoy sufficient rainfall, well-distributed over the growing season, others may not. Localized drought, crop failure, and famine are yearly occurrences in Liptako. Sometimes, as in the early 1970s, when natural disaster brought the Sahel to the attention of the non-African world as it had never been before, they devastate the whole country.

Like rainfall, drinking water is a scarce resource. Liptako's first villages were located near the Yaayre, where, once the pond had filled during the rains, abundant surface water could be found for the villagers and their animals. Even if the pond dried up during the long rainless months, and sometimes it did not, its bed was a favorable place for digging waterholes. Away from the Yaayre water was often hard to find until quite recently. Now Liptako has an increasing number of deep, concrete-lined, machine-drilled wells that assure a fairly regular water supply for many villages. The shallower, hand-dug wells and waterholes that were once the primary source of water were less reliable. They kept some of the villages that had them through the dry months, but the inhabitants of less fortunate villages sometimes had to go long distances to find drinking water, which they hauled home in skin bags slung across donkeys' backs. In the dry season cattlemen often have to drive their herds far from home in search of water, sometimes even out of Liptako to Mossi and Gourmantche country to the south where water is generally more plentiful. In 1904, H.C.E. Bouverot, one of the first in the long series of Frenchmen who administered the cercle of Dori from the 1897 conquest until Upper Volta's independence in 1960, asserted that "lack of water is the real stumbling block that will always block any major development of the natural riches of the country." Modern observers still agree.

Many Westerners have thought Liptako unpromising. Heinrich Barth, the great German traveler, was the first European to visit the country. He passed through on his way from Sokoto to Timbuktu in July 1853, a time of year when the rains are usually well under way and Liptako is green with crops and grass. But 1853 was a year of "extraordinary drought," and even in July vegetation was sparse. As Barth approached Dori, he saw an "immense plain, which was scarcely broken by a single tree, with the exception of a few stunted monkey-bread-trees [baobabs]." Everything "bore ... the character of extreme drought and barrenness." All in all, Barth thought Liptako "an extremely dry and uncomfortable place." Parfait Louis Monteil, who was there in 1891, was no more favorably impressed. He wrote feelingly of "the monotony of the thorny, grey bush," "monotony" being a word that Barth had used to describe Liptako's landscape almost forty years before and that Bouverot, some years later, was to use again, qualified and intensified as "heartbreaking monotony."

The people of Liptako do not see the landscape around them as either monotonous or heartbreaking; they see it with the eyes of a culture that finds beauty and variety in the plains. They would agree that Liptako is very dry: I often heard people wish water and rain were more plentiful and crops and forage more abundant. Nonetheless, they think Liptako not at all an "uncomfortable place," and their migrant ancestors must have thought the same, or they would never have come and stayed in such numbers. As one man told the king who ruled Liptako before the emirate was founded: "This land is a land of sandy plains, a land of streams, a land for cattle. It is a land for [us]."

According to the census of 1904, the settlers had founded fifty-four villages, ranging in size from 44 inhabitants to 4,400 and averaging 696. Today most of their houses are round, built of mud-brick walls topped with conical straw roofs, but in precolonial times most were made entirely of straw. Then, as now, each family had a number of houses grouped together in a compound fenced with millet stalks. Agricultural land surrounded the village, and during the growing season the crops were protected from wandering, hungry animals by low fences of thorns that were taken down once the crops were in so animals could graze on the stubble and fertilize the fields with their manure for another growing season. Millet was the preferred grain, and the cow the preferred animal, although the villagers also grew other crops, such as beans, peppers, and maize, and kept other animals, particularly sheep, goats, donkeys, and horses.

Nowadays Dori looks very different from the villages. It has broad thoroughfares and the flat-roofed, rectangular, high-walled, mud-brick houses characteristic of urban architecture in the Western Sudan, to say nothing of electric-light poles, telegraph lines, gas stations, bars, concrete-block government offices, and assorted other visual reminders that Dori is an administrative and commercial center at the hub of culture change in northeast Upper Volta. But the town has not always looked this way. Dori's precolonial architecture earned it the Hausa nickname of Birnin Bukka, "the city of straw houses." Its streets were narrow paths that tortuously wound their way among the family compounds, just as village paths still do. Shortly after the occupation the French cut the first motor road straight through the town. Late in the colonial period urban planners embarked on a more ambitious venture. They laid out wide, straight streets, intersecting, for the most part, in square corners that the French, if not the residents of Dori, thought orderly and attractive. Then the administration sent in bulldozers to push down walls and houses which stood in the way of achieving the grand design, thereby producing a sense of achievement in the overlords but adding to their subjects' already long and bitter list of grievances.

In 1968 Dori had 5,235 residents, making it the most populous place in Liptako. In 1904 it had 3,031, 42 percent fewer, and both Bani, with 4,400 inhabitants, and M'Bamga, with 3,080, were larger. But populousness is not the only thing that makes a town. Neither Bani nor M'Bamga had Dori's status. Dori was Liptako's only town, a fact that a late-nineteenth-century traveler would have appreciated at the sight of the high, mud-brick wall, now long since fallen and crumbled, which surrounded and fortified Dori and which had its like nowhere in the region. The emir and his court were at Dori for most of the nineteenth century, and messengers moving back and forth between the capital and the villages provided the communicative links that bound the periphery to the center. The judge to whom the emir delegated his judicial powers lived at Dori too, and disputants came from throughout the emirate to solicit his judgments on cases too knotty or contentious to settle at home. Liptako's only Friday mosque was in the capital, so then, as now, pious Muslims streamed to Dori every Friday to worship.

Dori had special economic importance as well. Now there are many periodic markets in Liptako, but before the French came the Dori market was the only one. The French later moved it from its old location southwest of town beside the pond that still is called Ngayka Luumo, "the pond of the market," to a new location north of the main residential area, and, once again exhibiting a penchant for remaking Africa in a European image, they laid out the stalls in neat rows which must have satisfied their sense of order more than the casual twists and turns of the old market. Despite its lack of symmetry, however, the old market did a thriving business. In the nineteenth century Dori was the major commercial center in the east and central Niger bend. According to one observer, the value of its transactions outstripped Say, Ouagadougou, Gao, and Bobo-Dioulasso even if it could not match Timbuktu, and it attracted traders and goods from great distances. Moors led salt caravans from Taodeni in the Sahara; Hausa brought Kano cloth and other goods from the east; Mossi transported cloth, kola, and slaves; Tuareg and Fulbe brought blankets. Dori itself manufactured cloth and blankets for export. Dori's importance as a center of international trade gave it importance well beyond its borders. Georges Mathieu Destenave, the French officer who masterminded the conquest of this part of the Niger bend, judged that the town "possesses political, religious, and commercial authority [that is] considerable and much more extensive than the smallness of its territory would seem to indicate." Destenave's next words perhaps tell as much about how he saw the significance of his exploits and hoped others would judge them as they do about Liptako: "Dori is the key to the north and the east of the Niger bend. He who rules Dori, says tradition, holds the Tuareg and all the lands to Say, and can rule the left bank of the Niger to the gates of Sokoto."

Liptako's involvement in regional affairs is reflected in the traditions, which often range beyond the emirate's frontiers. But most of what the traditionists know of other states is nonetheless Liptako-centric: it focuses on points of intersection between the history of the emirate and the histories of surrounding polities. For instance, just south of Liptako lay Koala, a small kingdom ruled and inhabited by Gourmantché. In the eighteenth century Koala's ruling dynasty ruled Liptako; in the nineteenth the new emirate was in frequent conflict with Koala. In both centuries the people of Liptako must have known a good bit about these Gourmantché, but by now Liptako's traditionists recall only crisis points in their relationships. They have almost nothing at all to say about Koala history as a thing of importance in itself, irrespective of whether or not Liptako interacted with it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Liptako Speaks by Paul Irwin. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• List of Abbreviations, pg. xv
• A Note on Transcription, pg. xvii
• Introduction, pg. xix
• Chapter 1. The Characters, pg. 1
• Chapter 2. Transmitting Memory Down Through the Generations, pg. 22
• Chapter 3. A World of Lineages, pg. 42
• Chapter 4. Reckoning Time's Passing, pg. 67
• Chapter 5. The Jihad, pg. 90
• Chapter 6. The Style of Politics, pg. 133
• Conclusion, pg. 162
• Notes, pg. 165
• Bibliography, pg. 203
• Index, pg. 219