A merchant's remarkable travel account of an African kingdom
Muhammad al-Tunisi (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian
merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al-Tunisi was
raised in Cairo and a graduate of al-Azhar. In 1803, at the age of
fourteen, al-Tunisi set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his
father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days
Road, was reunited with his father, and eventually took over the
management of the considerable estates granted to his father by the
sultan of Darfur. In Darfur is al-Tunisi's remarkable account of
his ten-year sojourn in this independent state, featuring
descriptions of the geography of the region, the customs of
Darfur's petty kings, court life and the clothing of its rulers,
marriage customs, eunuchs, illnesses, food, hunting, animals,
currencies, plants, magic, divination, and dances. In Darfur
combines literature, history, ethnography, linguistics, and travel
adventure, and most unusually for its time, includes fifty-two
illustrations, all drawn by the author. In Darfur is a rare example
of an Arab description of an African society on the eve of Western
colonization and vividly evokes a world in which travel was
untrammeled by bureaucracy, borders were fluid, and startling
coincidences appear almost mundane. An English-only edition.
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