Early Semite Contact with the Sahel

Excerpts from Delafosse's Negroes of Africa, Washington, DC 1931;
pp. 33-34, 37, 38, 39, 40-41, 42, 44-47.

Note: I do not agree with terminology of Negro and negroid. These terms are very limiting in describing the dark skinned inhabitants of Afrika.

Also, in West Africa, the term white does not mean just European but can be applied to people of even dark brown skin tones when viewed as foreign.

Most historians dismiss the info written below. This serves two purposes at once. For the Europeans it masks the Israelite identity of certain Afrikans. For non-Israelite Afrikans it allows them to not acknowledge the contributions we made to their culture and civilizations. This is not to say that we, a foreign group, introduced pastoralism, farming, or civics to the Western Sudanese. All these things were in place millenia (herders appeared in the central Sahara by 5000 BCE and the Mande invented an agriculure before 3000 BCE) and centuries (Jenne was founded before 250 BCE) before our migrations.

If anybody wants to, I would be glad to enter into a critique and analyses of Delafosse's hypothesis written below. Just click on the Comments/Critiques hyperlink at the top of this page just below the logo banner.

In studying the words of Semitic origin which have acquired rights of citizenship in most of the Negro languages of the Sudan and its hinterland, I have ascertained that, on the whole, they are divisible into two large categories which are very distinct from each other. The one relates almost exclusively to the dogmas and rites of the Mussulman religion... they have not been borrowed from spoken Arabic but from written Arabic... The other category comprises words serving to designate material objects... or general ideas... made from a Semitic language other than Arabic and, apparently, at a date far anterior to the introduction of Arabic into Africa. May not these words have been borrowed from the Phoenician or the Punic?

...

Local traditions have conserved the memory of other Semites, whom they call by the name of Israelites (Beni-Israel)... Should they be identified with the Jews who, as a consequence of religious quarrels, emigrated from Tripolitania toward the end of the first century of our era in the direction of Aïr and toward the beginning of the following century in that of Tuat...?

...

However it be, and whatever name be given to the so-called "Beni- Israel," it appears very certain that they were Semites who were at once shepherds, farmers and artisans of a very advanced civilization, who were not content, like their congeners of Carthage and Abyssinia, to have commerce with the Negroes and to promote by radiation the development of their civilization but who lived in large groups in the country of the Negroes or at least at the Northern limits of this country, bringing with them the zebu or humped ox and the wool-bearing sheep, constructing in the Sudan houses of masonry and wells cemented by a special process, ...contributing in a certain measure to the population of the Sahel and the Massina and to the hybridization of the Negro populations already settled in these regions, forming perhaps the kernal of pastoral tribes who, under the name of Fulani... or Fulbe... later spread out... at Ghana, a State whose masters they long remained and which may be considered the cradle and the model of that which has been the most perfected in the civilizations of the Negroes of Africa.

Without either wishing or being able to commit myself on the mystery which up to the present surrounds the origin of these "Beni-Israel," or pretented such, the role which they played in Negro Africa, or at least the one that local tradition attributes to them, seems to me to be too considerable to be passed over in silence. Perhaps, after all, it is to them, rather than to the Carthaginians or concurrently with the latter, that we ought to attribute the importation into the Sudanese languages of the words of ancient Semitic origin above mentioned.

The Libyans or Berbers, more or less direct descendants -- and probably very mixed -- of the ancient autochthonous whites of North Africa, lived during many centuries in contact with the most Northern of the Negroes. However, it does not seem that they ever had an appreciable influence on the development of Negro society...

This is not as surprising as one might suppose at first sight. On the one hand, the nomad Berbers of the desert, the only ones who have been and who still are in contact with the Negroes, do not pass for ever having had a very advanced civilization: their mode of life was not adapted to it. ...the Negroes of Africa owe very few obligations to their Berber neighbors, whereas they are considerably indebted to the Semites, from the distant epoch when a first current of Semitic influence made itself felt among the prehistoric autochthones of North Africa up to the time of the Islamization of the same country by Arabs ... in passing by the periods of the Phoenician colonies, the splendor of Carthage and the Israelite or psuedo-Israelite immigrations.

We do not know at what epoch or exactly by whom was founded the kingdom which later gave birth to the empire of Ghana.

...

At that distant epoch when they lent themselves to tillage and a sedentary life, the Bagana or Wagadu and most of the sub-Saharan districts which we unite to-day under the name of Hodh in the East and Mauritania in the West, must have been inhabited by the Negroes, more or less mixed with Negrillos and white autochthones of North Africa. These Negroes form an ensemble, fairly disparate perhaps in certain aspects, which the Moorish traditions generally designate by the term Bafur; from them have doubtless gone forth, by ramification, the Songhoy or Songai toward the East, the Serers toward the West, and, toward the Center, a great people called Gangara (Gangari in the singular) by the Moors, Wangara by Arab authors and writers of Timbuktu, and comprising in our day, as its principal divisions, the Mandingo properly speaking or the Malinke, the Bambara and the Jula.

It is in this region and among these Bafur, doubtless already ramified, that the immigrants of the Semitic race treated in the last chapter probably settled... ...these immigrants probably included at the same time farmers and shepherds. However considerable their number, it was certainly very inferior to that of the Negroes in the midst of whom they settled... There must have been, from the very beginning, a number of unions between the whites and the blacks and of these unions were born, it seems, two very important populations, each of which in turn was to play a role of the first order in the history of the western and central Sudan and in the development of its civilization.

Even at Ghana, in the Wagadu, in the Massina and at still other places, the union of the Semites ... with the Wangara ... probably engendered the people who give themselves the name of Sarakolle, that is to say, "white men,"... They are called by several Sudanese tribes Soninke, by the Moors Assuanik; the Bambara denominate them Mara-ka or Mar'-ka (people of the Mara or Wagadu) and the Arab authors and the Songhoy of Timbuktu designate them by the term Wakore. ...