² Sing. Anufo, the men of Ano, whose region of origin is some 100 km. to the west of Bonduku on the Ivory Coast. Its principle town is generally designated Grumania, but is also known as Mango Tura. In the historical literature and in the official language of the Togolese Republic, the Anufom are known by their Hausa name, Tyokossi (English, Chakossi; German, Tchakossi)

³ Sansanne is a corrupt spelling of the Hausa sansani, ‘war camp’; Mango is the Manding name for Grumania. The Anufom themselves call the town N'Zara. George Ekem Ferguson, an African born at Anomabu on the Gold Coast, educated in Sierra Leone and later employed by the colonial administration of the Gold Coast, noted during a visit the name Nsraanu, which he translated as the ‘camp’ (see CO 96/277, Ferguson to the Governor of the Gold Coast, Enclosure in Gold Coast Confidential, 5th October, 1896. Public Record Office, London). In 1979, one informant suggested the translation ‘gathering’ for N'Zara but this was denied by others

⁴ Laura, Bohannan, ‘A genealogical charter’, Africa, XXII, 1952, 301–15Google Scholar; Paul, Bohannan, ‘Concepts of time among the Tiv of Nigeria’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, IX, 1953, 251–62Google Scholar

⁵ The chronology of oral tradition, Oxford, 1974, 39Google Scholar

⁶ ibid., 41

⁷ ibid., 53

⁸ Today, a small village to the south-east of the town of Dapaon in northern Togo

⁹ Descendants of whom still occupy one quarter of Sansanne Mango

¹⁰ Plur.: donzom ‘nobles’. Derived from the Manding donso ‘a hunter, or the hunter estate’

¹¹ Sing.: n'gye ‘commoner’. Originally an Agni-Baoule term signifying the red ant and said to have been used to describe the origins of the immigrants of Agni-Baoule in the Ano region, because of their large numbers

¹² Sing.: karamo, a member of the Muslim estate; from the Manding karamoko, a respectful, term of address to Islamic scholars

¹³ John, Ralph Willis, ‘Reflections on the diffusion of Islam in West Africa’, in John, Ralph Willis (ed.), Studies in West African Islamic history, I, The cultivators of Islam, London, 1979, 13, and p. 34, n. 92Google Scholar

¹⁴ Originally a Mantling term meaning the swordbearer or he who acquires power by military conquest. It contrasts with mansa, a hereditary ruler

¹⁵ In the absence of suitable candidates from Jabu, two grandsons of Soma, the founder of Sangbana, held the title between about 1875 and 1883. The approximate dates are drawn from von Seefried (a Bezirksamtmann, equivalent to a District Commissioner, of the district Mangu-Jendi), ‘Beitrage zur Geschichte des Mangu-Volkes’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, XLV, 1913, 421–35Google Scholar

¹⁶ Other attendant members such as the feme's drummer, his speaker and messengers, possessed no formal political authority

¹⁷ Muslims and chiefs in West Africa, Oxford, 1968, 81–2Google Scholar

¹⁸ Collected by Capitaine Schiffer, the commander of the French punitive expedition against the Ano in 1903, and published in Eaymond, Deniel, Une société paysanne de la Côte ďlvoire: les Ano, Abijan, 1978, 205–6Google Scholar

¹⁹ Traditions record two raids on this town, the second in order to provide wives for the slaves captured during the first raid who had been retained as ‘war-boys’ in Mango. The French scholar J.-C. Froelich believes that tribute was paid by the ruler of Fada N'Gurma to Sansanne Mango until 1905 (Les populations du Nord-Togo, Paris, 1963, 177)Google Scholar

²⁰ A favourite motif is that thickets of the nyere tree which can be found at the sites of such razzias or sieges indicate Anufo camp latrines. During the sieges, the Anufom were often so desperate for food that they ate the not very palatable fruit

²¹ Dr. Gruner, the leader of the German expedition which subdued Sansanne Mango, noted after the conquest that ‘the inhabitants of Mango do not work, are only idle and perform their ceremonies; they are therefore constrained to raid continually the industrious and affluent pagan population’, Archives Nationales du Togo, Fond Allemand (hereafter ANT/FA) 3/4077

²² The elders of Kambaya and karamo-Kajura tell another story: both the ancestors of Shirabu and Gono had fled from Kong to Mango as Samory's empire began to shift toward the east

²³ ANT/FA 1/373. Von Carnap-Quernheimb to Kayser, 18.3.1986

²⁴ ANT/FA 3/4077

²⁵ ANY/FA 1/82

²⁶ Although the original of the French treaty was discovered later in the Jabu compound, von Gruner omitted from his report to the governor of the colony a list of the signatories

²⁷ According to one informant in Sansanne Mango, the message carried to Thierry was that Byema refused to visit the German because he, Byema, was not a Fulani (a term of extreme insult among the Anufom) who could be ordered about by any fool

²⁸ A number of versions of the affair were collected as oral texts in Sansanne Mango. The informant who provided the most detailed account emphasized repeatedly that the incident was provoked by Anufom deception and not by a lack of patience on the part of the Germans. In the presence of a witness, he underlined the fact that the messengers were femebam, a title which, even at that time, could be claimed by the male descendants of parts of the Sangbana line (see note 15 above)

²⁹ Now Chereponi, some 20 km. distant from Sansanne Mango and today in the Republic of Ghana. At that time, it was one of the few villages whose inhabitants were Anufom. It served as an outpost on the route to Yendi

³⁰ On the death of Ajanda in 1900, another member of Sangbana, Tyaba, was appointed feme by the inexperienced deputy commissioner replacing Thierry, who was on leave in Germany. It was only after the death of Tyaba in 1912 that the title returned to Jabu under the aegis of Bezirksamtmann von Seefried (Von, Seefried, ‘Beitrāge zur Geschichte des Manguvolkes’, Zeitschrifl für Ethnologie, XLV, 1913, 423Google Scholar). On the death of Tabi, another member of Jabu, Issifu Nana, became feme. Since then, the title has alternated between Jabu and Sangbana

³¹ For the term ‘rotational succession’, see Jack, Goody, Succession to high office, Cambridge, 1966Google Scholar. Among the Gonja, the paramount title rotates among several lineages

³² ANT/FA 1/82

³³ Prior to the return of von Gruner and Thierry to Mango, the imām had committed some offence ‘against the station’, for which he had already been fined before Byema Asabi was killed

³⁴ Ahamadu is, of course, not regarded as the founder of Shirabu but the lineage's praisesong celebrates, not the founder ‘Alī, but the 'Garman limam’ (sic)

³⁵ The feme, or, in modern parlance, ‘chef suéprieur de la circonscription administrative de Mango’, is now elected by the population of the town as are the—non-Anufom and former tribute-paying— ‘chefs de canton’ of the whole administrative district. Despite such changes and the candidature of persons disregarding alternating succession, this system has always been adhered to

³⁶ The post-1917 French archives containing material referring to Togo are still closed to scholars

³⁷ E.G.N. would like to express his gratitude to Fr. Jon Kirby, whose interview with Sansusoma, a drummer from Chereponi, after E.G.N. had left the field, provided some of the details

³⁸ The karamom were also anxious to r id Sansanne Mango of this ancient challenge to their beliefs

³⁹ The foremost of the new scholars of the town is Anzumana, the feme during E.G.N.'s fieldwork. The son of feme Jambara, Anzumana left Togo in 1931 at the age of eleven and returned to Mango only in 1959, having spent 29 years studying and teaching on the Ivory Coast. He was called upon to return by the members of Sangbana during the violent conflicts in the town immediately preceding independence

⁴⁰ Today, literacy in French is an alternative to Arabic, but the latter language is of little relevance in the traditional social and political events of the society

⁴¹ A further copy is deposited in the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana at Legon: a photograph of this copy has been kindly sent to the authors of this article

⁴² The author refers to himself in the document as imām Anoru. In a personal communication, Emil van Rouveroy states that ‘the document was written by Omoru Dabla’ of karamo-Kajura ‘in commission of the imam Amadu Bandawiu’, the second imām of Sansanne Mango

⁴³ The verses have been written but the sheets have not been enclosed in pouches. Two ancient war jackets replete with talismans sewn into leather pouches are preserved in Sansanne Mango, but the documents themselves cannot be examined without destroying the pouches

⁴⁴ See p. 124 above. The translated text of one of these letters is preserved in ANT/FA 3/4077

⁴⁵ The establishment of primary and secondary schools in the district has meant that an increasing number of younger men are able to speak and write French. French is, however little used within the context of Anufo culture

⁴⁶ An accurate census of those able to read the Qur'ān was not taken. On the occasion of high Islamic festivals, the karamom are called upon to recite the entire Qur'ān. At such times, some thirty scholars—not limited to the lineage of the imām—divide a loose-leaf copy of the Qur'ān among themselves and, each reading the suwar of his own section aloud, they manage, in an unintelligible cacophony, to repeat the complete text in a few minutes. At least twice this number are able to read the texts

⁴⁷ Muavlrmns à Mango (Nord-Togo), n.d. [1974], 48. E.G.N. wishes to thank both Emil van Rouveroy and Jürgen Zimmermann for critical remarks on an earlier draft of this paper

⁴⁸ See note 34 and the text to which this note refers

⁴⁹ For a complete list of t h e a'imma of Sansanne Mango during the twentieth century, see Appendix 1

⁵⁰ According to the most important Kambaya informant, the document entrusted to Gasama is a copy of an original. Gasama's ‘father was called Waliu Issanfu. He died at Kankan. It is there that the original remained. He went to visit his maternal relatives, who were Fulani. He left the original with them so that it should not be lost. It still remains at Bafulata.’ Kankan, an important centre of Islamic learning in West Africa during the eighteenth century, lies some 650 km. to the north-west of Grumania, in the Republic of Guinea

⁵¹ A complete translation of the text is given in Appendix 2 and see also plates II-IV for photographs of the document

⁵² The opposition of the ‘14’ a'imma of Sansanne Mango—although the list only contains 12 actual names—and the ‘41’ a'imma of Ano suggests Arabic magical numerology, of which something is known by t he karamom

⁵³ Encyclopaedia of Islam, (2nd ed.), I, 1032Google Scholar

⁵⁴ For the term qaṣīda, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, (2nd ed.), IV, 713–17Google Scholar A partial translation of this work was published by G. S., Colin in Archives marocaines, XXVI, Paris, 1926Google Scholar

⁵⁵ See Appendix 3 for this section of the genealogy, which has been extracted from the oral text

⁵⁶ After the submission of the town to German colonial rule, a number of Hausa and Yoruba long-distance traders settled in a zongo, bringing with them their own Islamic traditions

⁵⁷ The donzom, insist, in their own traditions, that their forbears were brought to Ano in the pursuit of a jihād. Neither the campaigns that lead them to settle in Sansanne Mango nor their slave raids during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are dignified with this term

⁵⁸ Among the n'gyem, marriage only becomes possible at the fourth ascending generation

⁵⁹ Jack Goody, who in recent years has contributed much to the comparative study of oral and literate societies, treats in detail in his article ‘Restricted literacy in Northern Ghana’, Jack, Goody, ed., Literacy in traditional societies, Cambridge, 1968) the various uses of written documents, from charms to simple accounting and from divination to correspondence. Although he refers to the keeping of formal lists of past chiefs and their a'imma for historical and politicoreligious reasons, he does not record their conversion to genealogiesGoogle Scholar

⁶⁰ Claude, Lévi-Strauss, The savage mind, London, 1966, 16Google Scholar

⁶¹ Killed by soldiers of the German expedition

⁶² Removed from office by the colonial or state authorities

⁶³ After the accession of Anzumana, Yaya was removed from office, but Anzumana's choice of an imām was considered unacceptable by the modern administration. The ‘chef de la circumscription’ high-handedly appointed as imām a Hausa scholar from the zongo, who was rejected by the Anufo population. The ‘chef cir’, in his turn, was removed from his post but no solution had been found by July 1979

⁶⁴ The Arabic of this passage is obscure but as far as we have been able to establish, its meaning is as given above

⁶⁵ d. 1167; Benedict, Reinert, Die Lehre vom tavakkul in der klassichen Sufik, Berlin, 1968, 293Google Scholar

⁶⁶ d. 895; Richard, Gramlich, Die shiitische Derwischorden Persiens, 2 Vols., Wiesbaden, 1956–1976, 815Google Scholar

⁶⁷ d. 1197; Eva, Vitroy-Meyerovitch, Ontologie du Sufisme, Paris, 1978, 333Google Scholar

⁶⁸ d. 1168; Reinert, op. cit., 322

⁶⁹ d. 1118, Vitroy-Meyerovitch, op. cit., 343

⁷⁰ d. 1124, Encyclopaedia of Islam, III, 253 f.Google Scholar

⁷¹ See note 51 above