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The Epic of Dausi, Part One
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15975 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
4,165 Words |
| Author
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Jan Knappert
Jan Knappert is a folklorist and specialist in African and
Oriental languages who is based in Belgium. |
Dausi is the name of a great complex of West African epic songs collected by the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius between 1899 and 1915. Unfortunately he did not record them in the original language, but he did realize that he had discovered that key section in the oral traditions of West Africa which linked the history of the Garamantes with the West African empire and city of Gana (Ghana), which flourished between the fourth and thirteenth centuries, and with the present city of Ouagadougou (also spelled Wagadugu), the capital of contemporary Burkina Faso.
The history of the Garamantes begins with twin cities called Garama, one inhabited by men and the other by women. Once a year the men and the women came together for one night, after which most of the women would become pregnant. This Amazonian situation lasted for many years until a great chief arose whose name was Ghasir (also spelled Rassir or Gassire) who defeated the female warriors and united the two city-states. In accounts of Alexander's campaigns we learn that Alexander visited a land of the warrior women in the heart of Africa and was told by a sage: "Sire, if you attack them and win, people will say, 'What a coward, he fights women!' But if you lose, people will say: 'what a weakling, he is defeated by women!' Therefore, leave them in peace!"
The Garamantes were known to Herodotus and the Roman authors of antiquity as a powerful class of rulers who controlled a large section of Africa, from Libya to the Niger. According to Herodotus they were Phrygians from Asia Minor who settled in the Sirte around the present Benghazi and founded a town, Agada, in the southwest. Later, after the Arabs occupied North Africa, the Garamantes migrated to the Niger. The word Garamantes is the Greek plural of Garamas of Garama, which in Africa became Jarama or Jarma. The present Jarma (also spelled Dierma or Dzarma) now live by the Niger River in Niger and in the neighboring states of Benin and Burkina Faso, though previously they lived upriver in Mali.
Frobenius hypothesized that Wagadu is the collective "ideal" for the four cities mentioned in the epic: Agada, Jerra, Ganna, Silla. In Jerra we may recognize Gara, the shorter form of Garama; in Ganna, Ghana, which is simply the Arabic spelling of the same name, which has also come to us as Guine or Jenne; and Fasa may have been Fas (Fez) or Faso as in Burkina Faso.
The four cities were founded one after another by different rulers in different parts of West Africa, but were destroyed by the sins of their kings: once through
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