CHAPTER 10
The King of Zâfûn
Enters Marrakesh
Morocco and the Western Sahel, around the
Second Quarter of the Twelfth Century
Marrakesh—Marrâkush in Arabic—the city that gave its name to Morocco in Western onomastics, was founded on the plain of the Wadi Tansift, then simple grassland, around 1070. Camp-capital become city, Marrakesh was the creation of the Almoravids. Yûsuf ibn Tâshfîn, commander of the Sanhâja Berber troops, wanted it to serve as a way station between the Adrar region of Mauritania, birthplace of the Almoravid movement, and the kingdom of Fez to the north. He provided it with a mosque, and certainly a castle, and nomads by the thousands came to join it. In 1126, his son and successor, Alî ibn Yûsuf, constructed a wall around what was then a city of tents, estimated, perhaps with some exaggeration, at one hundred thousand hearths.
The foundation of Marrakesh constituted the emergence from the desert of a religious movement that until that point had been devoted to consolidating and correcting the faith of the Western Saharan tribes. Conquerors of Aoudaghost in 1054 or 1055 (
6), summoned the same year by the people of Sijilmâsa (16) to get rid of their current masters, the men of ribât (ribāt)—a fortified monastery devoted to spiritual discipline, or al-murâbitûn, which has given us the terms “Almoravids” and “marabouts”—took over the gold route and could not resist the temptation to spread holy war to the prosperous plains: prosperous and thus, they judged, corrupted. They began to mint money at Sijilmâsa itself, and the abundant production of gold coins fueled their war effort. The Sous and the Drâa regions of southern Morocco were taken a few years later; central Morocco, from Aghmât to Fez, fell between 1063 and 1069; the Mediterranean coast, from Ceuta to Algiers, was incorporated into the nascent empire between 1081 and 1082; finally, Islamic Spain followed in 1086.
Around 1220, Yâqût al-Rûmî, a former Christian slave from Byzantium (which is shown in his nickname, “the Roman”), compiled a dictionary in Arabic whose entries covered the geographical lore then known in Iraq and Syria. His entry for Zâfûn contains the recollection of an inhabitant of Marrakesh, certainly drawn from another source, or else from a secondhand account. One day, a king of the Sûdân arrived in the Maghreb. En route to Mecca, he paid a visit to “the Veiled King of the Maghreb, of the tribe of the Lamtûna,” the “Commander of the Muslims.” “The Commander of the Muslims met him on foot, while the [King of] Zâfûn did not dismount for him.” Our nameless witness recalls how the monarch looked when he entered Marrakesh: “[H]e was tall, of deep black complexion and veiled. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot as if they were two glowing coals, and the palms of his hands were yellow as if tinted with saffron. He was wearing a cut (maqṭû‘) garment enveloped in a white cloak. He entered the palace of the Commander of the Muslims mounted, while the latter walked in front of him.”
If the mysterious king of Zâfûn, mounted in all his majesty, here makes a unique and brief appearance on the stage of history, it is easier to uncover the identity of the king who entered his own palace on foot. The title “Commander of the Muslims” was held by the Almoravid leader, always a member of the Sanhâja tribe of the Lamtûna, from whom the empire’s military elite was recruited. And if it is difficult to understand why this Berber leader rendered homage in this way—in his capital, no less—to a foreign sovereign, it’s because the Almoravid Empire was short-lived, a century at most. Bending before the growing strength of a new reform movement aimed at expansion, a movement that came from the Atlas Mountains, the Almohads, it was no doubt forced, as it drew to an end, to seek support, which one could buy with homage. This hypothesis allows us to date the episode to the second quarter of the twelfth century: that is to say, the final years of the reign of Alî Ibn Yûsuf (he repelled the Almohads’ first attack on Marrakesh in 1128 and died in 1143) or the years of political turmoil that preceded the city’s fall to the Almohads in 1147.
Not much is known about the kingdom of Zâfûn. Although its name was corrupt in his text, al-Bakrî certainly described this same kingdom in the middle of the eleventh century: “They are a nation of Sûdân,” he wrote, “who worship a certain snake, a monstrous serpent with a mane and a tail and a head shaped like that of the Bactrian camel. It lives in a cave in the desert. At the mouth of the cave stands a trellis and stones and the habitation of the adepts of the cult of that snake.” This is a classic example for this region of Africa of the worship of a subterranean monster—in this case a chimerical serpent—that is brought forth from its hole by offerings of milk and fermented drinks placed in large vessels.
The death of a chief provided an opportunity for summoning the serpent. The pretenders were brought together. “Then the Snake approaches them,” wrote al-Bakrî, “and smells one man after another until it prods one with its nose. As soon as it has done this it turns away towards the cave. The one prodded follows as fast as he can and pulls from its tail or its mane as many hairs as he is able. His kingship will last as many years as he has hairs, one hair per year. This, they assert, is an infallible prediction.” From the perspective of our twenty-first-century rationality—imagining the pretenders brought together before such a sanctuary dedicated to a mythological creature—we cannot say how the ceremony for choosing the sovereign was actually carried out. At most, we perceive hints of an original configuration in which the accession to power, or perhaps the confirmation of the royal line, was entrusted to a deity’s intervention in an ordeal, and the reign’s propects were subject to augury.
That is essentially all that can be said about the ancient history of Zâfûn—or rather, its ideological atmosphere. Is it possible to say more about its location? Certainly. There are good philological arguments on that score. It corresponds to what the oral accounts of the Soninke, the inhabitants of the western Sahel and likely heirs to several of the region’s political formations in the Middle Ages, know as Diafounou. If that is indeed the case, it is then necessary to place it in the region of the same name, on the upper Kolinbiné River, a tributary of the Senegal River, which it joins near Kayes. But the site corresponding to the capital of Zâfûn is still missing. Can it be assumed that there was not one or that there were several capitals, two expedient ways for predicting that one will not find what one is looking for? But if there is agreement to search first, before giving up if necessary, then one should attempt to find a ruined site whose material culture is compatible with the twelfth century: an ancient mosque since the king was Muslim; and a permanent merchants’ quarter for Muslim traders, quite large since the king was powerful and rich enough to go on pilgrimage.
Based on the black king’s entry into Marrakesh, it was once suggested that the people of Zâfûn had been “influenced” by the Berbers. The king was indeed Muslim, he rode a horse, and he wore a veil over his face, according to the custom, actually independent of Islam, practiced by several Saharan tribes and that we still find among the Tuaregs. This custom led medieval Arab authors to nickname them Mulaththamîn, literally “ wearers of the lithâm” (i.e., the veil that covered the mouths of adults, both men and women). Others have seen in the same vignette evidence of a time when the blacks “dominated” the Arabs, in other words, the whites. Symmetrical vocabulary, vague judgments. These were not the aims of the kings involved, both of whom certainly needed the roles they were playing—before the same audience, who, furthermore, transmitted their content to us without weighing it down with prejudice—to revive the modes of legitimization each for his own power. It was high time for the king on foot, the descendant of the ascetic warriors of the desert, who was soon to be under siege, and who was already menaced by the rise of a new doctrine critical of secular involvement, to reestablish his links with humility. As for the mounted king, whose skin color was still rare enough in those days for our unnamed witness to notice the saffron color on the palms of his hands, he desired to show through his bearing, in this time of rigor, that one could be black and a good Muslim.
Tadeusz Lewicki, “Un État soudanais médiéval inconnu: le royaume de Zāfūn(u),” Cahiers d’études africaines 11 (1971): 501–525, was the first to present the complete dossier pertaining to the kingdom of Zâfûn. This chapter leans heavily on his pioneering work. The translation of Yâqût’s text is taken from Nehemia Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2000), pp. 170–171. Al-Bakrî’s account may also be found in Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 78–79. Regarding the Almoravids, see H. T. Norris and P. Chalmeta’s entry “Murābitūn (al-),” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed.