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Historical Writing in Nineteenth Century Segu: A Critical Analysis of an Anonymous Arabic Chronicle

All too often Africanist historians use Arabic sources without serious consideration of the circumstances surrounding their composition. Many historians have used the Kano Chronicle, for example, as a primary source for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Hausaland. Since it is a history of the kings of Kano, organized by reign, one could assume that successive writers, contemporaneous with the reigns, produced a documentary record of their era which was perpetuated by subsequent contributors to the chronicle. Murray Last's recent analysis reveals, however, that one man compiled the Kano Chronicle during the mid-seventeenth century, and that it was updated by subsequent writers a few reigns at a time. Although many historians found it convenient and advantageous to assume that the Kano Chronicle was a reliable primary source, Last clearly demonstrates the need for close textual analysis of any Arabic source used for historical reconstruction. B.G. Martin errs in the opposite direction. He attributes a nineteenth-century Arabic chronicle to a twentieth-century cleric, Cierno Malik Diallo of Kidira, Senegal. Diallo is actually the custodian of one of several versions of this anonymous Arabic account of Umar Tal's jihad (hereafter Chronicle X). The Umarian chronicles, of which Chronicle X is merely an example are one group of written materials generated in the aftermath of the jihads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa. Host of the efforts in documentary analysis have focused on the writings of Uthman dan Fodio, Muhammad Bello, and other members of the Sokoto elite.