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| Title: | The 'Narziguas', forgotten protagonists of Saharan history |
| Author: | Freire, Francisco |
| Year: | 2011 |
| Periodical: | Islamic Africa (ISSN 2154-0993) |
| Volume: | 2 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 35-65 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Mauritania Western Sahara |
| Subjects: | indigenous peoples historical sources 1500-1599 |
| External link: | http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.5192/21540993020135 |
| Abstract: | This article discusses the processes leading to an almost complete exclusion of some populations native to the western Sahara from oral tradition and historical writing. The author considers the Arabization of this context and its implications in the formation of contemporary identities, when evidence suggests precisely their complexity and non-linearity. In order to assess this argument he looks at a mid-sixteenth-century letter sent to Lisbon from the Arguin castle, off the Saharan coast. This document should prove particularly important as the population depicted there as the main interlocutors of the Portuguese in the region - the 'Narziguas' - is nowadays excluded from most historical accounts. The reading proposed of this letter explores the possibility of a Narziguas leadership in the coastal western Sahara prior to the seventeenth century; in this manner, questioning some of the well-established Arab-centred historiography and oral tradition. It is also argued that Islam has been ideologically and genealogically used as a privileged instrument in the reconfiguration of the region's social landscape. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |
