Two Bambara words in Gnawa songs of Meknes

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and medical functions, usually called Gnawa in Morocco, Diwan in Algeria, and Stambeli in Tunisia. Aguadé's Die Lieder der Gnawa aus Meknes provides the lyrics of an extensive corpus of Gnawa songs from Meknes in northern Morocco. These songs are primarily in Arabic, but characteristically include a number of words with no plausible Arabic or Berber source, presumed to derive from languages of the Sahel. Their identification, however, is generally difficult, although Aguadé ventures a few suggestions drawn from Hausa. Anyone can comb dictionaries for sound-alikes, but similar forms may be found across unrelated languages of the Sahel with very different meanings. It would be much easier if the meanings were certain, but the singers do not necessarily know the meaning of such words, and the context often hardly narrows it down. Nevertheless, some cases can be identified more confidently than others.

Aguadé's song number 88, Lalla l-Batul "Lady Virgin" (pp. 128-129), is dedicated to a female genie whose song cycle corresponds to the colour yellow. Its refrain (accounting for 5 out of its 8 lines) is a lalla l-batul, saysay "Oh Lady Virgin, saysay". The word saysay has no meaning in Arabic or in Berber. In Bambara, however, sáyi means "yellow"; the refrain would then be "Oh Lady Virgin, yellow, yellow".

In his song number 90 (pp. 130-132), the refrain is fufu dənba ya sidi "fufu dənba, oh master" (repeated 14 times, including the opening line of the song). Bambara dénba means "mother". The first verse after the initial refrain is ma bɣatək kda ya sidi "she didn't want you like that, oh master"; no feminine singular subject to which this could refer appears anywhere in the Arabic text of the song, but the Bambara interpretation allows this line to be better understood. I'd like to relate the preceding fufu to Bambara fò "greet" and/or fɔ́ "say, speak" - "greet Mother" would seem contextually appropriate - but I can't quite see how the grammar would hang together.

Addendum: In song 5, Sidi Gangafu "Mr. Gangafu", almost every couplet ends in Bambaṛa or shortened ya Mbaṛa, so a Bambara etymology seems worth considering (although an allusion to Hausa is also found). As Aguadé notes, Ganga is simply a kind of drum used by the Gnawa, whose name is shared across most of the Sahel, so one would expect this name to mean something like "drum-player" or "drum-maker". In fact, Gangafu can readily be interpreted as Bambara gàngan-fɔ̀ "play the ganga-drum". "Drum-player" should properly be something like gàngan-fɔ̀-la, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to suppose that the Bambara used by slaves among themselves would have had some non-standard features, given that for many of them it would have been a second language to begin with.

A Soninke loan in Songhay

There are a rather large number of words in Songhay, the language of the Niger River valley between Timbuktu and southern Niger, which are almost the same as in Soninke, the language of the semidesert regions around the Mali-Senegal-Mauritania borders well to the west. Since most of the basic vocabulary is very different, these must be considered loanwords. But how do we tell which language coined them and which one borrowed them from the other? In some cases, this can be tricky, but in others it's quite clear-cut.

Three years ago, I discussed a Songhay-Arabic poem including the Timbuktu-area word sete "caravan". This word is well-attested elsewhere in Songhay, from eastern Mali to northern Benin (though not in the Sahara proper):

• Gao šeta "(camels) go on caravan", šetete "go in single file" (Heath)
• Hombori sèt-ò "convoy, caravan", sétt-ó "pack of horses" (Heath)
• Kaado sété "village delegation sent to seek food in times of famine" (Ducroz and Charles)
• Zarma sátá "group, troupe, team" (White and Kaba)
• Kandi sété "row" (Heath)

The root is also found in Fulani, eg Gambian Fula sete "caravan" (Gamble), Pular seteejo "traveller, caravaneer", setagol "go on a trip" (Bah), and Heath glosses it as a Fulani loan in his Hombori Songhay dictionary. In neither language, however, does it have an obvious derivation from some shorter or more basic form. For that, we need to turn to a third language - Soninke.

In Soninke, setú is the normal word for "to ride", glossed by Diagana "to be on top, to ride, to perch". By applying the productive morphological process C1V1C2V2 > C1V1C2C2V2, normally used to form imperfectives, we get sètté "caravan, cavalcade, group on horseback, riding". This etymology is not possible in Songhay, where "ride" is kaaru, nor in Fulani, where "ride" is maɗɗ- / waɗɗ-. We thus see that this commercially and politically significant word must have been coined within Soninke. That fits some aspects of the known history of the region: the early Soninke kingdom of Ghana played an important role in the development of the trans-Saharan trade, and even after its fall a diaspora of Soninke traders, the so-called Wangara, played an important role in tying the region together economically.

Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara, finally out

Just a quick alert: my article about Islamic prayer time names that I discussed here almost two years ago (post) is finally out! If your institution has a subscription, you can view it at the following link:

Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara

Or you could email to ask me for a copy.

Diversity in Islamic prayer names and its roots

(Traduction en français)

Practically all Muslims whatever their sect or language, and all Arabs, refer to the five daily prayers of Islam by versions of the same names: Fajr / Ṣubḥ before sunrise, Ḍhuhr at noon, `Aṣr in the afternoon, Maghrib at sunset, and `Ishā’ in the evening. West of Egypt, however, things look very different: there we often find quite different names for the five prayers. For example, contrast the familiar names above with those used in the largest Berber language, Shilha (southern Morocco): ṣṣbaḥ, tizwarn, takʷẓin, tiwutsh, and tin-yiḍs. Except for the first, there seems to be no relation.

However, Middle Eastern Islamic prayer names haven't always been so uniform. Al-Bukhārī reports the following hadith (#516):

“... from Sayyār b. Salamah: “My father and I entered into the presence of Abū Barzah al-’Aslamī. My father asked him: “How did the Messenger of God, blessings and peace be upon him, pray the prescribed (prayers)?” He replied: “He used to pray al-hajīr, which you (pl.) call al-’ūlā, when the sun declines (from the meridian), and pray al-‘aṣr such that one of us could return to his home at the far end of Medina while the sun was still lively.” I forget what he said about al-maghrib. “And he used to prefer to delay al-‘ishā’, which you (pl.) call al-‘atamah, and he used to hate sleeping before it or speaking after it. And he used to return from the ghadāt prayer when a person could recognise the one sitting next to him, and read sixty to a hundred (verses.)””

Siwi, the Berber language of Egypt, still uses a series of mostly Arabic-derived prayer names that might as well be taken straight from this hadith: they call the five prayers sra (morning), luli, la`ṣaṛ, mməghrəb, and l`ətmət. Traces of these names are found further afield too: in Songhay (Mali/Niger), Dhuhr is referred to as aluula.

It turns out that this hadith also explains the Shilha name for Dhuhr: tizwarn literally means "the first ones (f.)", a literal translation of Arabic al-’ūlā. This form is not just widespread in Berber, but is also (via Zenaga) the source for Wolof tisbaar. In Soninké, the language of the medieval Ghana Empire between Mauritania and Mali, another literal translation yields sállì-fànà (“prayer-first”), which has been borrowed into Bambara and many other West African languages.

A similar, much less well-sourced hadith (Maṣḥaf `Abd al-Razzāq 2067) likewise explains the Shilha name for Isha:

“From Yaḥyā b. al-‘Alā’, from al-A‘mash, from Abū Wā’il who said: I asked for Ḥuḏayfa, and he said: Why have you asked for me? I said: For conversation. He said: “‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, may God be pleased with him, used to warn against conversation after ṣalāt al-nawm (the sleep prayer).”

Comparison to other versions makes it clear that the prayer being referred to is Isha. As it happens, Shilha tin-yiḍs means, literally "that (f.) of sleep". This form is widespread in Berber, and was literally translated into Soninke as sákhú-fó (sákhú "sleep", fó "thing"). The resulting form was borrowed into Songhay (saafoo) and several other regional languages.

All of this tells us three things:

• Berber Islamic terminology was created very early in Islamic history, before these variants disappeared from Arabic usage;
• Soninké and Wolof speakers adopted Islam in large part from Berbers, not directly from Arabs;
• Soninké speakers played an important role in the spread of Islam to other ethnic groups in Mali and Niger.

It also has a wider moral, though: that we shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss region-specific Islamic traditions as innovations.

(This post summarises about half of an article of mine which is forthcoming in the Bulletin of SOAS, under the title of "Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara".)

A note on Azer

In the unlikely event that you've heard of Azer, a northern dialect of Soninke formerly spoken in the now Arabic-speaking region of Tichit and Walata in southeastern Mauritania, you may well have formed the impression - as I did initially - that it was heavily influenced by Berber, like the Northern Songhay languages are. If you know anything about Berber, a look at Monteil's article on Azer is sufficient to dispel this idea. If you don't, then chapter 3 of Long's thesis on Northern Mande, which I just came across, clarifies the issue nicely. This rather highlights the Northern Songhay problem: if centuries of close contact with Berber left Azer so little changed, why is Northern Songhay so full of Berber words?

Kouriya

I finally got my hands on an article I had been looking for for a while about the "Kouriya" language of Gourara (around Timimoun, Algeria): Rachid Bouchemit, 1951. Le Kouriya du Gourara, Bulletin de Liaison Saharienne 5, p.46-47. While short, it's significantly more informative than the vague rumours to be found in other sources. "Kouriya", it turns out, was the general-purpose name given locally to any Black African language - "L'unité du terme cache la pluralité des idiomes: Haoussa, Bambra, Foullan, Mouchi, Songhai, Bornou, Boubou, Gouroungou, Minka, Sarnou, Nourma, Kanembou, Karkawi, etc...", in particular as spoken by ex-slaves in the region. Following the abolition of slavery, these languages, no longer reinforced by the arrival of new slaves, rapidly fell into disuse; the new generation learned Arabic and Taznatit instead. By 1951, the author could find only seven or eight speakers of a "Kouriya" in Timimoun, and only two of them spoke the same language, namely Bambara.

While the author leaves the etymology unexplained, I would add that the term "Kouriya", and the corresponding ethnonym kuri, probably derive from Songhay koyra "town, village", used to form the Songhays' own name for themselves, koyra-boro "townsman"; Songhay is, after all, the nearest major ethnic group in the Sahel to the Gourara region.

Manatees and bilingual compounds

In Djenné Chiini, the Western Songhay dialect of Djenné in Mali, the word for "manatee" is ayuumaa. This is clearly a compound of two elements: ayuu, the word for manatee throughout the rest of Songhay (as well as in Hausa), and maa from Bozo máa, which also means "manatee" (Bozo being the original language of the Djenné region.) It's as if the American English word for an elk were "elk-moose". I can't think of any other examples of this kind of half-borrowing, where a native word is "expanded" by adding on its translation into another language; can you?

(Sources: Daget 1953, La langue bozo; Heath 1998, Dictionnaire songhay-anglais-français, tome II: Djenné chiini.)

Songhay words in El Jadida, Morocco

Bulbul sent me a link I just had to post about: the article describes, among other things, a secret language used by the Gnaoua, descendants of West Africans brought to Morocco as slaves in precolonial times, in El Jadida, Morocco (on the Atlantic coast.) The author makes no attempt to seek an etymology for the words recorded, but a lot of them are immediately obvious to me - as Songhay. Thus:

* sindi "sommeil": Songhay cindi "rest"
* kuy barkuy "on s'en va": Songhay koy "person", koy "go"
* katihari "...apporter de l'eau": Songhay kati hari "bring water!"
* noro "money": Songhay nooru
* dangi bamatcin "tais-toi": Songhay dangey "be silent", ciine "speak"

Significantly, these words do not display any characteristics that would link them with Kwarandzie. To the contrary - noro and hari are unambiguously Southern, not Northern, Songhay in form, and most of the other words haven't survived in Kwarandzie.

A few words are clearly non-Songhay, and as such harder for me to identify, but these include some Bambara words:
* sgho "viande" - Bambara sogo
* dominika "nourriture" - Bambara dumuni ke

Elsewhere, I've read of Hausa words showing up in Moroccan Gnaoua music (I don't have the reference handy here in Tabelbala). The various sources of the vocabulary attest to the wide geographical range from which slaves were brought, and it's interesting that the words were preserved at all. I look forward to finding out where the other words come from... any ideas?