**A merchant's account of his travels through an independent African
state
**
Muhammad ibn 'Umar 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.
In Volume Two al-Tunisi describes 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 Africa 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.
A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
