People of the veil

by Baron Francis James Rennell Rodd Rennell of Rodd

At a later stage, when the origins of the People of Air come to be examined, another reference will be found, in the writings of an authority in the Sudan, to the migration of a people from the east coast of the Red Sea into Africa. This Himyaritic invasion is so much insisted upon in various works that the presumption of a migration from that direction, with which the Tuareg were associated, is tempting, though it is not clear whether the Sudanese authority was merely copying Ibn Khaldun’s statements or whether he was working on independent information. I have mentioned the theory because it is one of the more usually accepted explanations of the origin of the Tuareg, but I do not think the problem can be so easily resolved. My own view is that the Tuareg are not Himyarites, but that the memory of an invasion from that quarter which undoubtedly did contribute to the population of Central Africa was adopted by their own traditional historians and accepted by Ibn Khaldun to establish a connection for the People of the Veil with the land of the Prophet. The migrations across the Red Sea are far more likely to have accounted for the early Semitic influence in Africa, especially in the Nilotic Sudan before the rise of Islam, and in Abyssinia, than for the origin of the Tuareg, who, I am convinced, were already in the continent at a far earlier date.

Ibn Khaldun now introduces a further classification which again emphasises the separateness or individuality of the Tuareg. He states that among the Beranes were certain divisions collectively known as the Children of Tiski. Among these were the Hawara, Heskura, Sanhaja, Lemta, and Gezula. The Hawara we know were the same as the Auriga; the Sanhaja and Lemta have already been mentioned. The Heskura and Gezula may therefore be subdivisions of the Ketama, and the Children of Tiski, therefore, probably a collective term for all the Muleththemin as a whole.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings are voluminous and have a baffling tendency to jump about from subject to subject. Having given us these explanations, which though complicated are comprehensible, he suddenly brings in a host of new names, and proceeds to inform us that the Muleththemin are descended from the “Sanhaja of the second race” and to consist of the Jedala or Gedala, Lemtuna, Utzila, Targa, Zegawa and Lemta divisions. It is not within the scope of this work to examine all the Tuareg groups in Africa in detail. To investigate the Zanziga of Leo’s second area or the Utzila or Jedala of Ibn Khaldun would only serve to complicate the issue which deals with the Tuareg of Air. But the Sanhaja, although they lived in the furthest west of the Sahara, played such an important part in the history of all the Tuareg that they must be briefly mentioned in passing.

At one period nearly all the People of the Veil were united in a sort of desert confederation under the dominion of the Sanhaja. The era terminated with the death of Ibn Ghania in about A.D. 1233, some 150 years before Ibn Khaldun wrote, even by which time, however, the inner parts of Africa had hardly recovered. The memory of the Sanhaja empire, which extended from the Senegal River to Fez and eastwards perhaps as far as Tibesti, survived in the additional classifications of Ibn Khaldun and in the stories about the Tuareg collected by his contemporaries. It is possible to suppose that the first ethnological systems he gives refer to the state of the Muleththemin before or during the Sanhaja confederacy, but that when he gives the list of names of six divisions descended from the “second race of Sanhaja” he is referring to the People of the Veil after the death of Ibn Ghania. At that time the name of the dominant group in the confederation had been given by the other inhabitants of North Africa generally to all the Tuareg. In the process of disintegration of the empire several truly Sanhaja tribes were absorbed by other Tuareg groups. It is difficult to accept the alternative view that the Sanhaja of the second race are a different people from the earlier Sanhaja, for such a conclusion would imply that the Muleththemin were made up of more than one racial stock, whereas their most obvious characteristic is unity of type and habit.

The Sanhaja division of Ibn Khaldun’s first grouping are obviously the same as the people of Leo’s first area on the western side of the great desert which extends between Beni Abbes and Timbuctoo. After their period of fame they came on evil days, and were reduced to the position of tributaries when they lost many of their Tuareg characteristics. Their remnants are the Mesufa and Lemtuna tribes. The relationship of the Sanhaja and Lemta noted by Barth either means nothing more than that they were both Muleththemin, or dates from their association with each other during the Sanhaja empire; for they were ever separate ethnic divisions of the People of the Veil.

Much trouble has been occasioned by the confusion of the names Lemta and Lemtuna. The apparent derivation of the latter from the former may also have been due to the association of the two main divisions: it is important only to emphasise that while the one is a subdivision of the Sanhaja now living in the north-west corner of the Sahara near Morocco, the other is a branch of the Tuareg race co-equal with the latter. It is in this confusion of names that the explanation is to be found of the statement so often heard and repeated by Barth, that the Lemta were the neighbours of the Moorish Walad Delim of Southern Morocco. The position of the Lemtuna makes this statement true of them, but not of the Lemta, whose home, both on the authority of Leo and on other evidence, was far removed from Mauretania, and, to wit, in the Fezzan. The erroneous association of the Lemta with the Walad Delim is largely responsible for the wrong account of the migrations of various sections of the southern and south-eastern Tuareg given by Barth and his successors.[326]

But let us return to the people who were the ancestors of the Air Tuareg. The Hawara, according to Ibn Khaldun, El Bekri and El Masa’udi, inhabited Tripolitania, the deserts of Ifrikiya, and even parts of Barca. They lived, in part at least, side by side with the Lemta, Wearers of the Veil, who were “near,” or “as far as” Gawgawa. It has been assumed that this Gawgawa was the Kaukau of Ibn Batutah’s travels, and consequently Gao or Gaogao or Gogo or Gagho on the Niger. But it is more reasonably identified with Kuka on Lake Chad, and if this is so, the Lemta according to Ibn Khaldun extended precisely as far as the place referred to by Leo, in speaking of his fourth area.[327] It is clear that Ibn Khaldun meant “as far as” and not “near,” for in referring to the Hawarid origin of a part of the Lemta people he says that they may be so recognised “by their name, which is an altered form of the word Hawara: for having changed the و (w) into a sort of k which is intermediary between the soft g and the hard q, they have formed “Haggar.” The latter are, of course, the Ahaggaren, who then, as now, lived in mountains called by the same name a very long way from Kuka on Lake Chad; even so they were coterminous with the Lemta, a point which coincides with the evidence of Leo and others. Further indications of the extension of the Lemta as far as Lake Chad will be dealt with in the next chapter; they are confirmed both by the sequence of events in Air and by the occupation of Tademekka by the Aulimmiden-Lemta, culminating in A.D. 1640 when the former inhabitants of that area were driven towards the west.[328] All this would be incomprehensible if Gawgawa were identified with Gao on the Niger, or if Ibn Khaldun’s “near” were not interpreted as “towards” or “as far as.”

It may appear strange to find Ibn Khaldun referring to the Hawarid origin of the Lemta when they are repeatedly given elsewhere by him as separate and co-equal divisions of the Muleththemin. It is possible that originally “Hawara” or “Auriga” may have been the national name of all the Tuareg, and that on the analogy of what we know happens in the case of tribes which have split up, one group may have retained the name of the parent stock. But if this ever did take place it must have happened long before the Moslem invasion, by which time the Tuareg had already become established in the divisions which we know; such an occurrence would have no practical bearing on conditions prevailing to-day. It is therefore easier to assume that all he meant to convey was the existence of a certain rather close connection between the Hawara and Lemta. We know in fact that, though not identical, the two groups have interchanged tribes, some of each division being found in the other one. This connection would account for the suspicious etymology of the word “Haggar,” which sounds uncommonly like an attempt on his part to prove philologically what is known traditionally to be the case.

The Hawara as we know them to-day are not all Tuareg or even Libyans, although they were included among the Beranes families under the name of Auriga, and were specifically numbered among the People of the Veil. They were described as an element of great importance among the pre-Arab Libyans and reckoned co-equal with the Sanhaja. Ibn Khaldun does, however, add that at the time of the Arab conquest of North Africa they had assimilated a number of other tribes of different stock, which probably explains the rapid “Arabisation” of a part of them. It was the non-Tuareg part which became readily proselytised and so passed under the influence of the new rulers of North Africa. The Hawara were much to the fore in the occupation of Spain and generally in the Arab doings of the Fatimite era. Some of them in common with other Libyans supported the Kharejite schism in Islam; yet another part which had become “Arabised” established itself under the name of the Beni Khattab in the Fezzan, with their capital at Zuila. But those of them who most retained their Tuareg characteristics represent the original stock. In referring to certain Libyans by the name of Hawara, Ibn Khaldun is obviously not speaking of Tuareg people; one may therefore conclude that he means the strangers whom they assimilated.[329] Consequently I prefer to use the name “Hawara” for the whole group, but when the section which preserves its Tuareg characteristics is indicated the name “Auriga” is more applicable.

It may be conceived that a people of such importance left some trace of their name among the Tuareg of to-day, in addition to the name “Haggar,” where Ibn Khaldun’s etymology seems suspicious. The name can be recognised in the form “Oraghen” or “Auraghen,” or in an older spelling “Iuraghen,” a tribe in the Azger group. The root also occurs in the name “Auraghiye” given to the Air dialect of the Tuareg language. These instances are valuable evidence.