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30 June 2009
analysis
Abuja — A traveler-historian in the tradition of Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Jubayr, Leo was a man of many talents, occupations and adventures. He was, at various times, a diplomat, jurist, hospital administrator, geographer, teacher, political prisoner and international celebrity.
In the course of his travels from Timbuktu to Istanbul, he survived Atlas mountain blizzards and Nile crocodile attacks only to be kidnapped by pirates and presented to Pope Leo x in Rome, where he ostensibly converted to Christianity. Though it's believed he eventually returned both to Islam and to North Africa, he gained fame while in Italy for his knowledge of the Maghrib, or North Africa, and the African interior, which he set down in a book whose English-language version was called The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained.
Even though modern Moroccans are proud to claim him as one of their own, some admit he is not so easily pinned down. "His cultural and national identities can be hard to determine, because they were altogether subtle," said historian Lotfi Bouchentouf of Hassan II University at Ain Chok, near Casablanca. "He was a Muslim who lived as a Christian and wrote for a Christian audience about the world of Islam. He was a man of many levels."
No one, however, disputes the value of his writing. Titled Cosmographia & Geographia de Affrica in manuscript form, Leo's book was published in Venice in 1550 as Della descrittione dell'Africa it offered European scholars, explorers and mapmakers--not to mention gold-thirsty monarchs--detailed descriptions of the Barbary coast and the fabled, gold-trading kingdoms of Central Africa.
"It was a different vision of Africa and Morocco than had ever been set down before. It was completely new," said historian Ahmed Boucharb, former dean of the school of arts and sciences at Muhammad v University's Casablanca campus. "He was writing about things that hadn't attracted the attention of his contemporaries--how people lived, how they ate, how they dressed, their economy, their habits, superstitions, customs and cultural lives."
Such new information was highly prized at a time when western knowledge of the African continent amounted to little more than scattered medieval myths of monsters and classical accounts of headless men whose faces were on their torsos. In this respect, Leo is considered the last of the great Muslim intellectuals to pass along Islamic learning to the West--the final steward of a 500-year cultural exchange.
The gilding on that age had begun to fade at the time of Leo's birth in Granada, around 1494. Just two years earlier, the last of its Nasrid sultans surrendered Granada to the armies of the Reconquista before seeking refuge across the Mediterranean in Fez. He was followed by droves of his fellow Spanish Muslims, and Leo's family was among them.
Wealthy and well-connected, the al-Wazzans probably settled in Fez's Andalusian quarter, just across the Bou Khareb River from the Karaouine Mosque and its madrasa, the most important religious and intellectual center of a culture deeply devoted to learning.
"Those Arabians which inhabite Barbarie, or upon the coast of the Mediterran sea, are greatly addicted unto the studie of good artes and sciences," observed Leo in Book I of his History.
As a Karaouine student himself, Leo studied "Grammar, Poetrie, Rhetorick ... Cabala, Astronomie and other ingenuous sciences," according to John Pory, translator of the only English-language edition of the History, published in 1600. Leo was a good student, and earned the title of qadi, or judge, by the age of 14. While a student, he also held down a sort of work-study job, moonlighting as a notary and bookkeeper at a medical center for indigent pilgrims and the mentally ill.
Like his law career, Leo's travels and adventures began at an early age. As a boy he accompanied his father on post- Ramadan pilgrimages to visit various shrines in the Middle Atlas mountains. At 10 or 12 he also joined the elder al-Wazzan on a trip to the coastal trading city of Azaphi (Safi), probably on a commercial mission. (The surname al-Wazzan means a person assigned to weigh and certify trade goods, which indicates that his family was probably involved in commerce.) On one of his first solo trips, traveling among the Berber tribes of the High Atlas mountains as an itinerant qadi, Leo once found himself captive for nine days in a village of "base and witless people" who wouldn't let him leave before he heard a lengthy backlog of their legal disputes. The rich and pampered city boy from Fez complained about having to sleep on the ground and "eate of such grosse meats as ... barlie meale mingled with water, and of goats-flesh, which was extremely tough and hard by reason of the staleness and long continuance." On day nine, he was rewarded for his trouble not with gold, as he had expected, but with a chicken, some nuts and onions, "a handfull of garlicke" and--probably the last thing he needed--a goat. He fared much better in the mountain town of Medua (modern Algeria's Medea), where he earned nearly two hundred ducats in as many months and recalled being so "sumptuously entertained ... that had not dutie enforced me to depart, I had remained there all the residue of my life."
The wider world became Leo's oyster at about 16, when he accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission in the service of the Wattasid sultan of Fez, traveling to Timbuktu and Gao--the great imperial trading cities of the Songhai Empire, in what is now eastern Mali. Along the way, Leo so charmed a local mountain chieftain with verses he composed in the chieftain's honor that he was rewarded with "a stately breakfast, ... fifty ducates and a good horse."
Impressed with these and other reports of young Leo's diplomatic skills, Sultan Muhammad deemed him one of his most trusted ambassadors and eventually dispatched him back to Timbuktu, east as far as Istanbul and perhaps beyond.
Such missions were critical for ensuring Fez's political autonomy and economic stability at a time when the Portuguese and Spanish were rapidly colonizing Africa's coastline, rival powers were growing in the south and the Ottoman Empire threatened to engulf all of North Africa. Keeping track of shifting powers and managing alliances was the job of the sultan's ambassador. While the sultans of Fez were confident enough to keep the Portuguese and the Ottomans at bay, they were also clever enough to know that they were useful to both powers only as long as they retained control of the lucrative trans-Saharan caravan trade routes.
This ancient commercial network of rocky passes, desert treks and jungle trails crisscrossed more than 2400 kilometers (1500 mi) of Central and West Africa, from the foothills of the Atlas mountains through the western Sudan to the Gulf of Guinea. Along its well-worn camel paths flowed manufactured trade goods from the north--textiles from Europe, sugar from Sus in southern Morocco, leather-bound books from Fez, brass and copper vessels from the workshops of Marrakech--together with dates and horses, in exchange for the famed treasures of the Bilad al-Sudan ("Land of the Blacks"): gold, slaves, pepper and other spices, and civet cats, prized for their musk. These streams of commerce converged at major trading centers along the way, some of which now exist only in history books: Taghaza, Taodeni, Arawan, Walata, Gao and--that most fabled desert metropolis--Timbuktu, today still synonymous in the western imagination with the farthest of far-off exotica.
"The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 poundes and he keepes a magnificent and well furnished court," wrote Leo, who visited the city when the Songhai Empire was at its height, during the reign of Askia Muhammad I (1493-1538). As an ambassador, Leo would have been ceremoniously ushered into the king's presence and pushed peremptorily to his knees: "Whosoever will speake unto this king must first fall downe before his feete, & then taking up earth must sprinkle it upon his owne head & shoulders."
From Timbuktu to Hausaland (now eastern Mali and southern Niger), across the neighboring kingdoms of Borno (now in northeastern Nigeria) and Kanem (now in Chad and Libya), on up through Egypt, along the Nile to Aswan, Chana (modern Qena, where "cruell and noisome" crocodiles "lurking about the bankes of the river, do craftily lay waite for men and beastes ... and there devour them") and Cairo, and then on his trip back home via Tunisia and the Barbary Coast, Leo kept a meticulous account of everything he saw, smelled, tasted and heard. With characteristic thoroughness and attention to detail, he offered the good with the bad, the magnificent alongside the mundane, in an even-handed narrative that was clearly meant to inform rather than impress or flatter.
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