Cooley, William Desborough
"The Negroland of the Arabs examined and explained" by William Desborough Cooley is a historical-geographical study written in the mid-19th century. It reconstructs the early geography and political landscape of Central/Western Africa (“Negroland”) from medieval Arabic sources, focusing on caravan routes, river courses, and the true location of key states such as Ghana. The work argues—against earlier misreadings—that medieval Ghana lay near the later site of Timbuktu, and it scrutinizes Arabic texts with a method that separates firsthand observation from later system-building.The opening of the work dedicates the essay to Pascual de Gayangos, credits his Arabic extracts as its spur, and sets out a preface that defines the aim: to fix the early geography of Central Africa by critically reading Arab writers (especially El Bekri, with Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, and Idrisi compared), while guarding against copyist errors, name-corruptions, and conjectural mapping. The introduction outlines two natural trans-Saharan corridors—Fezzan to Kanem/Bornu in the east and, more crucially here, the western route from the Atlas/Sus to the “Great River”—and explains why Andalusian-Arab ties to Almoravid Berbers made the western line the best documented. Cooley then uses El Bekri’s “Book of Roads and Realms” to retrace the caravan path from Sijilmasa via Támedelt across a sequence of wells and mountain passes into the belt of drifting sands (the desert of Tíser/Azawad), where Masufa guides and…
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