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Historical Metaphors in the Kano Chronicle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Murray Last
Murray Last*
Affiliation:
University College, London
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Extract

“There is a story that the Prophet appeared to Abdu Rahaman in a dream and said to him, ‘Get up and go west and establish Islam.’ Abdu Rahaman got up and took a handful of the soil of Medina and put it in a cloth and brought it to Hausaland. Whenever he came to a town, he took a handful of the soil of the country and put it beside that of Medina. If they did not correspond, he passed that town. So he journeyed until he came to Kano. And when he compared the soil of Kano with Medina soil they resembled one another and became as one soil. So he said, ‘this is the country that I saw in my dream.’” [xx]

I wish in this paper to treat the Kano Chronicle (henceforth KC) as a document of intellectual history, and not just as a mine from which to dig valuable ‘facts.’ The aspect of intellectual history I will discuss is the meaning of historical metaphors - or analogical geography - of which the above story is a rather special example. But first I will try and show that the first ‘edition’ of KC was completed in the mid-seventeenth century and was compiled from materials which had been developed since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - thus locating the intellectual history in a specific period. The texts used are discussed in the appendix.

In writing this essay I am treading where many have trod before. Abdullahi Smith's work on the Sayfawa and on the origin of the Hausa states and Mervyn Hiskett's publications on the Kano Chronicle and on the Song of Bagauda are the most notable examples.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 7 , 1980 , pp. 161 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1980

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References

NOTES

* The original version of this paper was given at the seminar on the History of the Central Sudan Before 1804, Zaria, 8-13 January 1979.

1. Smith's papers on the Saifawa have not yet been published; Hiskett, M., “The Kano Chronicle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1957), 79–81.Google Scholar

2. I am grateful to many both in Kano and Zaria who have lent me their copies, their ideas, or simply their attention, but I am particularly grateful to John Lavers.

3. Palmer, H.R., “The Kano Chronicle,” JRAI, 38(1908), 59–98Google Scholar; republished in his Sudanese Memoirs (3 vols.: London, 1928), 3:92–132.Google Scholar

4. Willett, F., “A Survey of Recent Results in the Radiocarbon Chronology of Western and Northern Africa,” JAH, 12(1971), 368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. For a more detailed discussion of Santolo and other sites see Last, Murray, “Early Kano: the Santolo-Fangwai Settlement System,” Kano Studies, n.s. 1/4(1979).Google Scholar

6. Palmer, , Sudanese Memoirs, 1:13, 71Google Scholar; idem, Bornu Sahara and Sudan (London, 1936), 74.