a brief note on African travel literature in history

a Swahili document on south-central Africa.

Travel writing constitutes a major primary source for reconstructing African history, and is especially important in supplementing internal accounts.

While much of the African travel literature that historians have access to was written by external visitors, a significant volume of travel literature was composed by African themselves, who were discovering and documenting different parts of their vast continent.

In 1338, the Ethiopian monk Ēwosṭātēwos' traveled through the Nubian kingdom of Makuria in Sudan with his followers, where they assisted the Nubian king Siti in defeating a rival king. This account of the political rivalries in Nubia which is included in Ēwosṭātēwos' hagiography, matches with internal Nubian records from the same decade, which mention a pretender at its capital of Old Dongola named Kanz al-Dawla and another rebel named Anenaka, both of whom challenged King Siti's authority.

13th-century painting in the church of Debra Maryam Qorqor in Ethiopia depicting a Nubian dignitary wearing the horned crown of Makuria.

In 1432, a family of Wangara scholars led by Abd al-Rahmán Jakhite left their home in the West African empire of Mali against the wishes of its emperor and reached the Hausa city of Kano in the late 15th century. The arrival of the Wangara in Kano and their influence on the city's scholarly community was documented by one of their descendants in the Wangara Chronicle written in 1650. The chronicle mentions that the Wangara were given patronage by the Kano king Muhammad Rumfa (r. 1463-1499), and that Jakhite won an intellectual duel with a visiting Egyptian scholar.

street scene in Kano, Nigeria, ca. 1925, Bristol Archives

In 1806, two Ovimbundu traders from the kingdom of Kasanje in west-central Africa traveled across the territories of the Lunda empire in order to establish a direct route to the Indian Ocean coast at Mozambique. Like many of their neighbors in the kingdom of Kongo, Ndongo, and Kahenda which had established written traditions, these traders were literate, and they left a detailed description of their journey to the court of the Lunda King Yavu (r. 1800-1820), and his subordinate king of Kazembe in modern Zambia.

The above examples come from African regions which had a long history of large centralized states, well-established travel routes, and an old tradition of writing. These three factors were central to the emergence of travel writing in Africa since antiquity, and provide crucial evidence for how Africans explored their continent.

In the 19th century, the emergence of large states, trade routes, and literate travelers across south-central Africa led to the production of detailed documentation of the region's societies by other African visitors. The description of south-central Africa written by a traveler from the Swahili coast is the subject of my latest Patreon article,

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Folio from the Gadl (hagiography) of saint Ēwosṭātēwos, monastery of Qorqor Māryām

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