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Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
1
CHAPTER 2
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN 18TH CENTURY
MOLIYILI (DAGOMBA) AND THE TIMBUKTU INTELLECTUAL TRADITION*
by
RAY A. KEA
Knowledge is the end product of a specific practice.
—Louis Althusser
Scarcely any attention has been paid to the history of science and technology in West Africa.
There exists nothing comparable to the comprehensive multi-volume histories of science and technology of
the ‘West’ by Charles Singer and his associates or of China by Joseph Needham and his collaborators. The
vast corpus of manuscripts in present-day Timbuktu libraries, written in Arabic and various West African
languages, have not been translated, edited, nor carefully and systematically scrutinised. Rethinking and
constructing histories of West African science and technology does not mean recuperating them in
universalist, rationalist, or Western humanist terms. The precise narrative and research strategies remain to
be determined, and the present discussion of the issues, given the current stage of research, is merely
suggestive.
INTRODUCTION
“This nation has the Turkish religion, and at Accra we have many Arabic books
(mange Arabiske bøger), which the Assiantes have plundered in the aforementioned city.
They have also taken as prisoners some Moors (nogle Mohrer), undoubtedly from Barbary,
who had come to that country to trade. Two of these Moors still live in Assiante.”
Thus wrote the Danish factor L.F. Rømer (1714-1776) who resided in Christiansborg Castle in
Osu from 1739 until 1750. He was an employee of the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company, a
mercantilist organisation actively engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.11 In this mixed cultural
moment of Arabic manuscripts and the Danish Company’s inventories and trading accounts what would
have counted as the factor’s frame of reference? What are the implications of his report? It refers to
episodes arising from the 1744-45 Asante military invasion of the Dagomba (Dagbon) Kingdom (‘this
nation’), a powerful and wealthy sub-regional centre along trade routes northeast of Asante. The plundered
“aforementioned city” can be identified as Yendi, the political capital of the kingdom. The “Turkish
religion” and the “Arabic books” were signifiers of Islam. Mid-eighteenth century Dagomba was a Muslim
polity. In alluding to the “many Arabic books,” Rømer, unknowingly, draws attention to a contemporary
* This chapter is an abridged version of Ray Kea’s “Science, Technology and Learning in the Eighteenth
Century Moliyili (Dagomba) and the Timbuktu Intellectual Tradition,” Chapter 18 of Volume II in History
and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer (2003, forthcoming) Ibadan: Hope
Publications.
1 L.F. Rømer, Tilforladelig Efterretning om Kysten Guinea (Kiøbenhavn, 1760), p. 220. For the English translation see
Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), (transl. and ed.) Selena Axelrod
Winsnes (Oxford, 2000), p. 171. Rømer obtained his information about the Asante campaign from Noi Afadi (d. 1745),
an Osu man in the service of the Danish Company (from 1729 to 1745). Sent on a trade mission to Kumase, he
accompanied the Asante army on its Dagomba campaign and returned to Christiansborg with an account of the
campaign and the Arabic manuscripts. See also Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century. The Structure and
Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1989repr.), pp. 21-22; Ivor Wilks, Nehemia Levtzion, and Bruce M.
Haight, Chronicles from Gonja. A Tradition of West African Muslim Historiography (Cambridge, 1986), pp.107, 130.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
2
and, from his coastal vantage point, geographically distant domain of scholarship, which included literacy
in Arabic, educational institutions, and a tradition of learning. In the late 1740s the “many Arabic books”
were taken to Copenhagen, the city of the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), where they were
consigned to historical oblivion. There are other frames of reference. The presence of Moors from
Barbary, that is North Africa, in Yendi indicate the existence of connections, assuredly commercial and
religious, between Dagomba and Mediterranean Africa. Various eighteenth and early nineteenth century
sources indicate that the Dagomba Kingdom was well known in North African commercial circles.
Transported from Yendi to Christiansborg via Kumase and, then, by slaving ship to Copenhagen
via the West Indies, the Arabic texts were, and are, emblematic of multiple histories and multiple cultures,
which can be said to have constituted the different sectors and circuits of the eighteenth century Atlantic
World. But these histories were not lived and narrated according to the same trajectories and telos.22 The
cultural problem of Rømer’s narrative about Arabic manuscripts is for the purposes of this study turned into
a historical problem about the production and organisation of systems of knowledge (and texts) in
Dagomba. The historical problem can be briefly stated. If authors wrote texts in answer to their needs
what questions did the history of their time pose for them?
. . . In textbook and general survey histories of Africa, the questions that follow are generally not
posed, let alone answered. For the purposes of this work, they will serve as organising propositions. What
can the historian say about the history and the tradition of learning, or ‘knowledge culture’, that produced
the “many Arabic books” that ended up, out of place, in a particular political realm in northern
Christendom? Did the discourses of the learned operate only within highly circumscribed and elite
contexts? What tradition of scholarship and what narrative agency (or agencies) produced the manuscripts?
If the manuscripts are viewed as a form of ‘speech’, who or what was speaking and who or what
established the authors’ right to ‘speak’? What was the relationship of the texts and their authors to their
surrounding practical structures and to a legacy of learning? The last question relates to the social function
of texts and the historically contingent nature of their social inscription. What did the learned have to say
about how things worked, that is to say what rationality (ratio) did they promote? Did the manuscripts deal
with science and technology? If so, how would present-day scholarship define and accommodate them
with reference to modern science and technology? The last two questions suggest another: How can we
think productively about ‘science and technology’ in view of the fact that these are powerful metaphors that
provide a master narrative, which is both coherent and comparative, about the uniqueness of the ‘West’ but
has no reference to the histories of science and technology in the ‘non-West’, in particular Africa? A final
question, which can be raised but, unfortunately, not elaborated upon, pertains to the social distribution of
scientific and technical labour in Dagomba in the period between 1660 and the early nineteenth century.
In treating these (and other related) questions one is obliged to consider several issues
simultaneously. The issues are historiographical, methodological, and conceptual. One central problem, for
example, entails reconstructing patterns of meaning and forms of knowledge in cultural and material
circumstances significantly different from the neo-colonialist and capitalist world-system contexts of the
twenty-first century. Thus, grasping the implications of a Sufi (mystical) conceptual structure as a social and
intellectual phenomenon is crucial, as it was this structure that determined the actuality of science and
technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dagomba formation. . . .
2 The Arabic manuscripts had their own history and discursive environment. They can be juxtaposed to the following
texts that pertain in different ways to the different histories and historical moments of the eighteenth century Atlantic
World and the systemic logic of their trajectories and social contexts: Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-
Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000;
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade. The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York, 1997); Robin
Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London and New York,
1997); Averroës and the Enlightenment, (ed.) Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna (Amherst, 1996); Philosophical
Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, (eds) Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy et al. (Cambridge
and London, 1992); Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse. Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge and London, 1989); Christian Degn, Die Schimmelmann im
atlantischen Dreieckshandel. Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster, 1974).
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
3
This study entertains a basic, working proposition. West Africa, historically speaking, constituted
a heterogeneous ‘site’ of knowledge production as well as a ‘site’ of science and technical innovations.
The underlying argument is that Mole scholars formulated their thoughts and ideas in a learned tradition
that encompassed the empirical, the technical, the magical, and the mystical. There is the general problem
of theorising the production of knowledge in a comparative Islamic context and there is the particular
problem of doing the same in the Moliyili/Dagomba context.39 If, in their intellectual practice, the
alfanema were engaged in the production of science and technology what can be said about the particular
historical conditions in which they were produced? More broadly, how does eighteenth century Moliyili
scholarship get articulated as part of the (universal) discourse of science and technology? There are other
pertinent questions to be posed. Suffice it to say that the questions derive from a broader critical project of
attempting to understand the ways in which reality was discursively and materially produced in a particular
‘non-Western’ social formation. This means, in effect, grasping the interdependence of
science/technology, culture/religion, and the sociology of knowledge.410 To appreciate the intellectual
enterprise of the ‘ulama’ it is necessary to consider the knowledge produced by them on its own terms and
within its own cultural and social setting as well as within the wider context of dar al-Islam.
Brian Turner offers a starting point. He argues that one of the general requirements of sustained
scientific and technological activity in ‘traditional societies’ is the availability of economic surplus to
patronize a scientific stratum. In his view, the extension of patronage at various points of history provided
the structural conditions for sustained intellectual activity.511 Turning to Moliyili, one sees that the
alfanema were closely tied to the Ya Nas and their court and the royal princes as clients and political
associates. They supported the consolidation of royal power and the centralisation (bureaucratisation) of
political administration. The installation of clerical praxis and skills in the state building project belonged
to a transformation spanning decades. Their influence was considerable and their settlements enjoyed
administrative and legal autonomy and immunity and their intellectual enterprise was vigorously
encouraged and materially supported by Ya Nas. In short, the Mole scholars benefited from substantial
economic and political support and, consequently, they could engage in sustained intellectual activity.
The wide-ranging subject matter of their manuscripts (including chronicles, biographies,
jurisprudence, route-books for pilgrims, Arabic grammars, and commentaries on the Qur’an) ‘reflects’ their
role as a semi-autonomous intellectual and spiritual ‘nobility’. The fact that some of their writings have a
‘scientific’ and ‘technological’ character—works on agriculture, medicine, pharmacology, and metallurgy,
for example—reflects not only their ‘independent’ economic status, but they also reveal that ‘ulama’
learning was a social phenomenon linked to other activities, organisations, and institutions in society. Such
scholarly pursuits clearly represented answers to ‘objective problems’ posed by the social exigencies of the
time. The logic of the social context in which the alfanema produced texts on these subjects was one in
which the Ya Nas and princes turned to ‘bureaucratic’ means in order to control and incorporate trade, craft
production, and specialised agricultural production.612 Commerce and an appreciable growth of craft
9 For two illuminating anti-Orientalist studies pertaining to some of the themes raised in this presentation see Peter
Gran, “Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History,” International Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies vol. 11 (1980), pp. 511-26; idem, Islamic Roots of Capitalism. Egypt 1760-1840 (Austin and London, 1979).
On ‘Orientalism’ as a science of Western/European imperialism see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
10 For some recent works that tackle some of the issues raised here see “Africa’s Indigenous Technology with
Particular Reference to Nigeria.” Edited by A. Ikechukwu Okpolo in West Africa Journal of Archaeology vol. 29, nos.
1-2 (1999); Supo Ogunbunmi and Henry M. Olaitan, “Elements of Physics in Yoruba Culture I” and idem, “Elements
of Physics in Yoruba Culture II” in African Philosophy, (ed.) Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Malden and Oxford, 1998),
pp. 163-70; Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails (ed.) Paulin Hountondji (Dakar, 1997); African Civilizations-
Technical, Social, and Political Dimensions; (ed.) Gloria T. Emeagwali (New York, 1997); The Historical
Development of Science and Technology in Nigeria, (ed.) Gloria Thomas-Emeagwali (New York, 1993); African
Systems of Art, Science, and Technology, (ed.) G. Thomas-Emeagwali (London, 1992); Science and Technology in
African History. Edited by Gloria Emeagwali (New York, 1992).
11 Bryan S. Turner, “State, Science and Economy in Traditional Societies: Some Problems in Weberian Sociology of
Science,” The British Journal of Sociology vol. 38 no.1 (1987), pp. 2, 13, 20.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
4
industries served as the social background for the alfanemas’ empirical scholarship. In various ways rulers
could benefit from the fruits of their endeavors.713 Scholarship in Moliyili cannot be separated, therefore,
from the practical politics and struggles involved in state building, the social relations of commodity
production and exchange, and the emergence of some alfanema as administrators, artisans, and landowners.
The dynamics, content, and the direction of Mole learning, specifically Mole science and technology, were
inseparable from these conditions and processes.
ARTICULATING THE PROBLEM: HISTORIES OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Standard textbook accounts of modern science typically trace its origins to the seventeenth
century European ‘Scientific Revolution’. The textbooks ascribe certain properties to the phenomenology
of science. They include instrumental rationalism, experimental verification, mathematical descriptions, a
critical value-free mode of inquiry, and a socially neutral knowledge. The pre-conditions for the
emergence of this ‘revolution’ are said to have been rational capitalism, an autonomous, enterprising
merchant class, free cities, and Protestantism. The hypotheses of science are based on observed facts,
which, when confirmed by criticism and experiment, are turned into descriptions of laws of Nature or, in
other words, an ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and the relations between them. The goal of
science is the rational interpretation of the facts of existence as disclosed by human faculties and senses.8
14
The conventional argument runs that, as a social institution, rational science assumed or required
an open society and an open discursive space, free from arbitrary political, ideological, and social
constraints. By definition, this particular construction and definition of science and the ‘scientific
revolution’ necessarily exclude the technical scholarship and the empirical rationality of the Mole ‘ulama’.
Their thought does not conform to the logical model of modern, ‘Western’ science. Turner counters the
standard textbook argument concerning modern science by making the point that the ‘uniqueness of the
West’ argument faces serious difficulties when presented with non-Western ‘patrimonial and bureaucratic’
societies in which innovative science is associated with magical beliefs.916 His specific references are to
the ‘medieval’ worlds of Islam and China where technology and science flourished. He and other like-
minded scholars readily acknowledge Muslim contributions to experimental science and to technology.
One can mention the following fields where these contributions are especially evident: chemistry, physics,
astronomy, mathematics, optics, medicine, geography, biology (botany; zoology), agriculture,
pharmacology. Technology in dar al-Islam included civil engineering (e.g., building technology and road
and bridge construction), military technology, chemical technology (e.g., alchemy, distillation, dyes),
agriculture and food technology, mining and metallurgy, the textile industry, papermaking, and leather
production.1017 Turner goes on to say that in China magic, divination, and science were historically
always closely inter-connected and in the Islamic world science and technology were often stimulated by
12 The “bureaucratic” means included the employment of Muslims and eunuchs in various administrative capacities
within the state apparatus. Ferguson, “The Islamization of Dagbon,” Chapters 3-4. The growth of market production
and the expansion of the circuits of trading capital were crucial to the developments discussed here.
13 Ferguson, “The Islamization of Dagbon,” pp. 192-215 passim.
14 For a critical study of the social and political context of the “scientific revolution” see David Dickson, “Science and
Political Hegemony in the 17th Century,” Radical Science Journal vol. 8 (1979), pp. 7-37. See also Richard W.
Hadden, “Social Relations and the Content of Early Modern Science,” The British Journal of Sociology 39. 2 (1988),
pp. 255-80.
16 Turner, “State, Technology, and Economy in Traditional Societies,” p. 1.
17 Ahmad Y. Al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, Islamic Technology. An Illustrated History (Cambridge, 1988 repr.); The
Legacy of Islam, (ed.) Joseph Schacht with C.E. Bosworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 2nd ed.), Chapter 10; Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Turner, “State, Science,
and Economy in Traditional Societies,” pp. 13-20. See also Sandra Harding, “Is Modern Science an Ethnoscience?
Rethinking Epistemological Assumptions” in Postcolonial African Philosophy. A Critical Reader, (ed.) Emmanuel
Chukwudi Eze (Cambridge and Oxford, 1997), pp. 45-70.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
5
social movements which, in Weber’s terms, were mystical, other-worldly, and irrational. The mystical
drive for personal salvation encouraged certain forms of empiricism towards natural phenomena, that is to
say, the concept of the mystical was itself the condition of possibility for certain forms of empiricism.1118
In the ‘patrimonial and bureaucratic societies’ there were no ‘scientific revolutions’, but there were
observational interpretations of the natural world and craft technologies of different kinds that operated
over an extended period of time. The conditions of possibility of science and technology in the ‘non-
West’—the terms of the problems posed and the principles of formation of their concepts—were bound up
with other historical episodes of learning and modes of theorising. Still, Turner’s approach does not
provide the means by which different expressive forms of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ knowledge can be
theorised. This remains an unresolved issue.
Nevertheless, Turner’s method is more than suggestive. His ‘model’ of the ‘patrimonial,
bureaucratic society’ would seem applicable to eighteenth century Dagomba. Moliyili can stand as a
counter-case to the conventional view about the history and the rise of science and scientific rationality and
as a fitting example of the sort of ‘non-Western’ science and technology that Turner refers to.1219 In this
scholastic centre empirical knowledge, based on observation and testing as well as trial and error, and
technology were historically and conceptually connected to the phenomenology of magic, divination,
astrology, and numerology. These non-equivalent elements, sites of ‘metaphysical’ influences, were not
unproblematic but were intellectual constructions and representations.1320 The Mole enterprise—the
production of facts (empirical knowledge) and artefacts (technology)—depended on a tremendous
accumulation of resources—just to begin with. Knowledge production on the Moliyili scale was an
expensive endeavour, hence the process necessarily involved the strategic linking of other social interests
(intéressement), namely those of the royal court and the political-military estate, to the social interests of
the Mole ‘ulama’. The social and political environment cannot be conceptualised as distinct from the
scholastic and the technical. This environment did not preclude the emergence of local expressions of
science and technology.
How and where does Moliyili fit into the story of modern science, a term that obscures the existence
of other sciences? Turner offers one response. He comments that we might think in terms of many discrete,
particular advances in technology and science, instead of thinking of one grand ‘scientific revolution’. This
line of argument, he continues, could suggest that no comparative, general sociology of science is possible,
since each case is unique and can only be analysed in its own right.1421
18 Turner, “State, Science, and Economy in Traditional Societies,” p. 7. See also Nasr, Science and Civilization, pp.
21-40. For Islam as a “community of discourse”-based world-system see John Voll, “Islam as a Special World-
System,” Journal of World History vol. 5, no.2 (1994), pp. 213-26.
19 For one view about the lack of technological advancement in ‘traditional and modern Africa’ and “the
incomprehensible inattention to the search for scientific principles by the traditional technologists” see Kwame
Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity. Philosophical Reflections of the African Experience (New York and Oxford, 1997),
pp. 242-52. For different counter arguments see Moseley, “Science, Technology, and Tradition,” p. 25; Paulin J.
Hountondji, African Philosophy. Myth and Reality, (transl.) Henri Evans (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996 2nd ed.),
pp. 98-100; Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and
Oxford, 1992), Chapter Six. For an informative discussion of knowledge organisation in Equatorial Africa see Jane I.
Guyer, “Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa,” African Studies Review vol. 39 no. 3 (1996), pp.1-28.
20 For a discussion of magic see, for example, Michael Buchowski, “The Rationality of Magic,” Philosophy of the
Social Sciences vol. 18, no. 4 (1988), pp. 509-18. See also Nasr, Science and Civilization, pp. 147, 152-56.
21 Turner, “State, Science, and Economy in Traditional Societies,” pp. 1, 13. Turner does not accept this skeptical
view. However, in his theorising of the historical epistemologies of Western sciences, Keith Tribe relates that “a
history of sciences can be neither general or eternal. Since there is no general Methodology on which to base a
reduction of scientific practices to a universal, each practice must constitute its own history.” Keith Tribe, “On the
Production and Structuring of Scientific Knowledges,” Economy and Society vol.2, (1973), p. 466. See also Michael
Donnelly, “Foucault’s Genealogy of the Human Sciences” in Towards a Critique of Foucault, ed. Mike Gane (London
and New York, 1983), pp. 15-32; Beverley Brown and Mike Cousins, “The Linguistic Fault: Foucault’s Archaeology”
in ibid., pp. 33-60. For a review of history of science textbooks with global perspectives see Philip F. Rehbock,
“Globalizing the History of Science,” Journal of World History vol. 12, no. 1 (2001), pp. 183-92.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
6
. . . Recognising the diverse origins of science depends on recognising the distinction between the history of
modern ‘Western’ rational science, on the one hand, and the histories of science and technology in the rest of
the world on the other. The distinction can help investigators to identify the plural origins of ‘innovative
science’, to use Turner’s term, and to identify alternative intellectual possibilities, whether realised or
unrealised. In this scenario, the Mole tradition of learning represented another site of empirical observation
and technology, a different form of epistemological and conceptual development, and an alternative
possibility . . .
I would theorize the domain of knowledge production in Moliyili in the following ways. At one
level, scientific and technological innovation and changes in intellectual paradigms may be regarded as
relatively independent of the social organisation of knowledge production and the community of scholars
who produced that knowledge. In this case the logic of scientific development is seen to be largely self-
contained and determined by the ideas and intellectual problems that are internal to science (cf. section I
above). The Moliyili connection to the intellectual-religious culture of the sixteenth century Timbuktu
patriciate can be examined at this level. At another level, knowledge production and innovative science are
regarded as shaped by social interests and by networks of different kinds. In other words, forms of
knowledge are analysed in terms of pre-given social conditions.1522 The Mole ‘ulama’ were engaged at
both levels—through their intellectual affiliation to the certainties of Sufism and to their social allegiance to
the rulers of Dagomba and their participation in the administration and the politics of nam (royal power;
authority to rule).
The ‘sciences’—branches of knowledge or modes of cognitive production—classified by Muslim
‘ulama’ in past historical periods, constituted an ‘infrastructure’ for the production and reproduction of
learning in Moliyili. Commonly called the ‘Islamic sciences’, they . . . specified the objects of study, the
relations that obtained among them, and modes of proof. They provided criteria for knowledge (truth and
significance) and methods (interpretation and analysis). They produced practitioners of knowledge or
‘knowers’ (‘ulama’). In different periods of Islamic history, various Muslim thinkers have addressed the
matter of the object and organisation of knowledge. They provided conceptual unity to the different forms
and objects of knowledge and modes of proof through the creation of systems of classification, which
defined the areas, or fields, of knowledge.
In his “Catalogue of Sciences” (Ihsa’ al-‘ulum), Al-Farabi (d. 950) classifies the totality of
sciences (‘ulum or branches of knowledge (scientia)) according to the following categories:
(1) science of language (e.g., grammar and poetry); (2) logic; (3) the propaedeutic sciences (e.g.,
arithmetic, geometry, optics, astrology, astronomy, music, and metrology); (4) physics (sciences of nature,
e.g., sciences of plants, animals, minerals) and metaphysics (sciences concerned with the Divine and the
principles of things); (5) science of society (e.g., jurisprudence and rhetoric). Another scholar, Ibn Sina, or
Avicenna (d. 1037), lists the various sciences in his philosophical work entitled al-Shifa (“The Cure”) as
follows: (1) logic; (2) physics; (3) mathematics; (4) metaphysics (includes all of the revelations contained
in the Qur’an) . . .
Mole pedagogy and scholarship was embedded in these branches of knowledge. But they
‘conjugated’ them with respect to their own particular circumstances, and these included service in
administration, collecting revenues, military campaigns and active proselytising. Thus, with their
knowledge of the ‘philosophical and transmitted sciences’, to use Ibn Khaldun’s classificatory categories,
Mole ‘ulama’ formulated particular conceptions of the world, interpreted texts, and organised learning.
These sciences need to be understood as a complex and heterogeneous historical process. They were not
timeless entities, but, in relation to particular social and political histories, were changing sets of ideational
elements (‘problematics’) . . .
22 Turner, “State, Science, and Economy in Traditional Societies,” pp. 1-2.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
7
SCIENTIFIC SCHOLARSHIP AND FORMAL STUDY IN DAGOMBA SOCIETY
Sufism and the tradition of learning in Muslim Dagomba can be located in the experiences and
practical life-activity of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century alfanema (Dagbane, sing. alfa, (from
the Songhay alfa): ‘scholars’, ‘learned’, ‘erudite’, Arabic (sing. ‘alim’: ‘ulama’) . . .
Who were the alfanema? They were the followers of Shaykh Sulayman Bagayugu of Timbuktu
and were known in Dagomba society as “Mole” (Arabic: muliyyu or ahl mulay). They lived in a town
named Moliyili (‘the settlement of the Mole’), which was situated a few miles from Yendi. The leader of
the town carried the title Yidan Mole, ‘Master of the Mole’. The alfanema were a historically distinct
social phenomenon as well as a powerful and prestigious group in a complex and layered social reality.
Producing treatises on a range of topics and imparting knowledge of different craft technologies were
essential and defining features of the alfanemas’ institutionalised intellectual and religious practices. As
subjects of a (clerical) hegemony, the Mole ‘ulama’ developed their own world view and chose their own
field of action by means of their own mental labour and critical attitude. There is another aspect. One of
the arguments advanced in this study is that Mole scholarship can be socially explained in a way that sees a
number of significant mediations between the Dagomba social formation and the content and organisation
of knowledge, or scholarship, in Moliyili.162b These relationships underlay the scholars’ intellectual and
practical experience of the world.
The cultural and ‘islamising’ roles of Mole scholarship can be interpreted as important elements in
the economic and political changes in seventeenth and eighteenth century Dagomba. There is an internal
history of their texts and learning, whose knowledge content and continuity can be analysed as a history of
ideas, an intellectual history, or as a Begriffsgeschichte (‘history of concepts and categories’). Mole
writings were inter-textual constructs, having meaning in relation to other texts that they took up, cited,
refuted, or transformed. In this sense, they belonged to an intellectual tradition and a discursive community,
which had extensions in space and duration in time. Or the texts and learning can be analysed as different
kinds of historical discourses (‘problematics’), and each discourse can be analysed as a question, historical
or intellectual, of the discourse’s questions (and answers). These modes of inquiry and analysis can help
identify the ‘levels’ of intellectual activity and textual scholarship. At one level such activity and
scholarship would appear autonomous and disengaged in relation to socio-economic and political
conditions. But at other levels their relationship to the social and political history of an era can be
recognised as definite and explicit.
The Moliyili educational system represented the social ‘inheritance’ of a tradition of learning that
is traceable to the patriciate.173 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the latter formed a macro-
regional (clerical) hegemony; the Mole ‘ulama’ formed a sub-regional one in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Hegemony is used in a broad sense to designate a dynamic ideological formation, which
characteristically manifested historical awareness, discursive consciousness, and creative activity. If
warfare expressed the particular form in which the Ya Nas (rulers) and nabihe (‘princes’) of Dagomba
wielded power and maintained a (military-political) hegemony, erudition expressed the particular form in
which the Mole scholars wielded a different kind of power and maintained a distinctly different
hegemony.184 In this regard, one must consider the function of the Mole problematic within the ruling
culture of the military aristocracy.
2b Phyllis Ferguson, “Islamization in Dagbon: A Study of the Alfanema of Yendi,” PhD, University of Cambridge
(1972), pp. xxii, 162-63.
3 For a detailed study of the patriciate see Elias N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and
Notables 1400-1900 (Cambridge, 1983).
4 The term ‘hegemony’ is used, with some modification, in a specific Gramscian sense. It refers to a particular
historical ‘stage’ within a political moment constrained by past historical development. It represents the ‘advance’ of a
class (social) and historical consciousness where class is understood not only economically, that is in terms of material
forces, but also in terms of an intellectual and moral awareness, a common culture. Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony
and Revolution. A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, 1983), p. 171.
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Moliyili was one of several clerical, or scholastic, settlements in the environs of the capital,
Yendi.195 Founded in the 1720s by Yidan Mole Buba (Abu Bakr), it functioned as a religious and
educational centre, a centre of scholarship, and as a centre of craft industries. It was also a place of refuge
and sanctuary for social outcasts, political refugees, and so on. The Moliyili educational project combined
an emphasis upon religious devotion, partly in a Sufi, or mystical, expression, and the acquisition of skills
in particular crafts. Students, male and female alike, were not only expected to become devout Muslims,
they were also expected to master a craft. Education entailed a practical and a theoretical knowledge of the
natural world. In other words, it sanctioned an empirical and experimental approach to nature, and this
orientation allowed the alfanema to produce works that can be designated ‘science’ or that can be related in
one way or another to ‘technology’.206 Knowledge production has to be understood as a totalising
process. The seeming naturalness of the ‘truth’ of knowledge can be an effect of accumulating acts of
cultural and symbolic power. The erudite of Moliyili were not only teachers and scholars, they also
exercised control over material production (agriculture, mining, and crafts) and were active in commerce.
They were thus in a position to accumulate wealth. They occupied positions of social and political
dominance by virtue of their direct control over the technical means of intellectual and material production
and their authority over the labour of students, commoners, and slaves. They enjoyed a relative autonomy
in society to the extent that their creative ethos and intellectual orientation constituted a structurally and
functionally differentiated social activity. Their organic praxis ‘synthesised’ the economic, the political,
and the philosophical (religious) spheres of social life. The coherence, viability, and lasting effects of the
Moliyili hegemony were always contingent upon a dialectical synthesis of this kind and on a certain level
of resources.
As a centre of learning, Moliyili represented a dynamic structure for producing, channelling, and
replicating the social and technical practices essential to the functioning of the political economy and
network of power relations of the Dagomba system. In their practice as intellectuals they produced
artefacts and events, that is written and oral texts, that were linked to questions of authority and legitimacy
and that mapped social and technical possibilities.
The period from about 1660 to 1760 was a time of political and social reform in the Dagomba
Kingdom. It was a time in which royal authority and ruling military and political elites took steps to bind
their diverse subjects more tightly together, seeking a more cohesive unit of rule. These steps were
achieved in the midst of intense political and military struggles that marked the changeover from an
agrarian ‘tributary’ state to a commercial ‘tributary’ state. Trade and crafts assumed social and political
5 It should be pointed out that the Mole alfanema represented only one of several clerical-artisanal groups that
constituted the Muslim estate in Dagomba society. These groups included Muslims from the neighboring Gonja
Kingdom and from different cities and towns in Hausaland. See Ferguson, “Islamization in Dagbon,” pp. 192-215
passim; Nehemia Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa. A Study of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the Pre-
Colonial Period (Oxford, 1968), pp. 101-2.
6 In this study ‘science’ is to be understood as various kinds of knowledge. Its meaning is not restricted to that given to
the natural sciences or the physical sciences of the early industrial revolution. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary has the
following glosses: ‘Science’ (from Latin scientia (from scient-, pr. ppl. stem of scire, to know) has different meanings
that are apposite to this study: (1) the state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of some thing specified or
implied; (2) knowledge acquired by study; acquaintance with or mastery of any department of learning; (3) a particular
branch of knowledge or study; a recognised department of learning. Three layers of signification can be ascribed to the
term ‘technology.’ First, there is the level of physical objects or artifacts, e.g., tools and weapons. Second, there is the
level of activities or processes, such as mining, and third, ‘technology’ can refer to what people know and do, e.g. the
know-how that goes into the making of an iron tool. See “Introduction” in The Social Construction of Technological
Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. (eds) Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and
Trevor Pinch (Cambridge and London, 1989), pp. 3-4. In the present study the three meanings of technology will not
be separated. I believe it is counter-productive to distinguish between science and technology. My perspective is that
science and technology are forms of material and cultural capital (to borrow the theoretical vocabulary of the
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) which has its own distinctive symbolic capital. Bourdieu refers to cultural, economic,
social and symbolic capital. For definitions see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital” in Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education, (ed.) John G. Richardson (New York. 1986), pp. 241-58.
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priority in the society’s surplus (‘tributary’) extraction process. That is to say, trade and crafts replaced
agriculture as a primary source of elite wealth. The relations of ruling in this socio-political process
included administrative centralisation, territorial conquests and consolidation, defence of boundaries
combined with policies for promoting greater cultural homogeneity through tighter social discipline. In this
period of transformation the dominant cultural questions over which contending social forces collided were
resolved through rulers’ commitment to a deliberate policy of ‘islamisation’. In the protracted (re-) making
of a social and political order, the growth of state forms and ‘stateness’ within a commercial ‘tributary’
system conformed to the doctrines of Sunni Maliki Islam. As specialists and agents of ‘islamisation’, the
alfanema were especially important. In their scholarship, they engaged in the systematic production and
organisation of learning. In their praxis, they addressed particular issues—economic, political, religious,
social, and technical—and the rational procedures to solve them. They attempted to reason logically about
a society moving from an agrarian-peasant system to a mercantile-artisanal one and in the process sought to
redefine the cultural and economic conditions of existence, principally for elite groups, and the political and
social distribution of power. The argument of this study is that Mole learning engaged and reflected this
situation, which was one of contradiction and ambiguity. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Mole scholarship can be said to have existed in a knowledge situation of problem solving.
Alfanema learning was simultaneously metaphysical (non-empirical) and esoteric, empirical (non-
metaphysical) and technological, abstract and concrete, and meditative and practical. If the ‘ulama’ offered
religious explanations and invoked magic in their texts, they did so not to engage in metaphysical
speculation or word play but to solve real explanatory problems. In other instances, they presented
naturalistic (empirical) explanations in terms of constituents and causes, for example, classifying different
kinds of water quality according to mineral content. Their empirical observations and practical
understanding of the natural world as well as their understanding of spirituality and the metaphysical were
not neutral but were complex constructs in whose fabric political practices were at work. Mole life-activity
raises the complex problem of the relationship between the rationality of domination, exploitation, and
hierarchy of the commercial ‘tributary’ system with its associated state building project and Moliyili as a
scholastic centre.217
Although Moliyili no longer exists, its last inhabitants having abandoned the place in the 1950s, its
archive still survives. The archive, it should be noted, was an institutionalised form of knowledge
organisation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Phyllis Ferguson conducted research for her doctoral
dissertation in Dagomba and through her contacts with Mole ‘ulama’, she had the opportunity to see some,
but by no means all, of the manuscripts in the archive. The archive is diverse in terms of subject matter and
voluminous. The language of the manuscripts, she notes, is lexically Arabic, but the syntactical form
seems more closely related to that of Dagbane. Ferguson relates that alfanema outside of the Mole
community possess substantial libraries.228 Her invaluable fieldwork and scholarship provide a starting
point for a more systematic and comprehensive investigation of science and technology in ‘pre-colonial’
West Africa. In this regard, it is tempting to imagine that the “many Arabic books” referred to by Rømer
included manuscripts whose authors hailed from Moliyili. If these now displaced manuscripts are ever
‘recovered’, they might hold a key to some of the queries raised in this study.
7 State building involved the construction and reconstruction of appropriate forms of power. It was a mode of
organising and re-organising society by means of the creation of certain forms of subjectivity, for example, through
conversion to Islam. An effect of the project was the image of the polity, or state, as a coherent agent acting upon a
separate society. The state appears as occupying a mental sphere—the realm of plans, rules, and intentions – with
society as their material application. Cf. Ferguson, “Islamization in Dagbon,” passim; Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs,
pp. 86-103. The methodological and conceptual problems of determination and autonomy, e.g., the autonomy of
knowledge forms and their relation to the forces of production, remain to be resolved.
8 Ferguson, “Islamization in Dagbon,” pp. xiii-xxix. The Mole archive still awaits a full systematic study.
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THE PATRICIATE AND THE LIBRARIES OF TIMBUKTU
. . . Fifteenth and sixteenth century Timbuktu was the most famous intellectual centre in the
Songhay Empire.2328 The Moroccan al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati, or Leo Africanus as
he is better known, who accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission to the empire sometime between
1506 and 1510, has an illuminating observation: “In Timbuktu there are numerous judges, scholars and
priests, all well paid by the king. Many manuscript books coming from Barbary are sold. Such sales are
more profitable than any other goods.”2429 The “manuscript books” were purchased by the “numerous
judges, scholars, and priests,” who enjoyed the patronage of the Askiyate (or ruling dynasty). Their
valorisation of books was closely connected to the city’s textual and discursive communities and the ways
these communities organised and produced knowledge (i.e. cultural and symbolic capital).2530 Libraries
enjoyed much prestige. They were a cultural and social priority. The library was the basic institution for
the organisation of knowledge.
The amassing of private libraries was a common phenomenon in Timbuktu. The famous
Timbuktu savant Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti (1556-1627) wrote that the poorest ‘alim had 500 to 600 works
in his library while the wealthiest owned as many as 2,000 books. He relates that among his relations his
own library of 1,600 manuscripts was the smallest. . . . Within the socio-cultural system, books signified
cultural capital. They were associated with the high status derived from education and patterns of
consumption. They possessed high monetary and prestige value and, hence, carried substantial symbolic
‘weight’.
The blossoming of intellectual life in Timbuktu was one of the consequences of the increasing
quality of material life and a reflection of the social distribution of power under the aegis of the Askiyate.
The increasing quality of material life was due to the intensification of agricultural production, the
expansion of commerce, and the appreciable growth of urban craft industries.2636 The main line of
sixteenth century Askiyate state culture was adherence to the Maliki madh’hab. The rulers’ application of
Maliki juridical interpretation to the principles of fiqh defined legitimate modes of governance.
Furthermore, the application of Malikism was deemed sufficient as a means of personal salvation for
devout Muslims.2737 A secure approach to maintaining a high level of scholarship and education was
achieved by giving the great ‘ulama’ a certain amount of state patronage and considerable political
autonomy. This policy allowed the learned and their students to carry on their studies in ‘ulum, in such
knowledge fields as jurisprudence and the sources of the law, Traditions of the Prophet, Qur’anic exegesis,
doctrinal theology, mysticism, Arabic grammar, poetry, lexicography, prosody, rhetoric, logic, medicine,
mathematics, and astronomy. Knowledge of these fields enabled the ‘ulama’ to produce texts and
discourses, to secure positions of authority and influence and to obtain patronage. Scholarship generated
prestige and economies of value2838. . .
28 According to Professor John Hunwick, the “high period” of Timbuktu commercial and intellectual history was from
the mid-fourteenth to the early seventeenth century. John O. Hunwick, “The Middle Niger,” pp. 14-17, 18-21. For a
detailed survey see Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, passim.
29 “Leo Africanus’s description of the Middle Niger, Hausaland, and Bornu” in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay
Empire, p. 281.
30 For the “Askiyate” see Hunwick, “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. xliv-liv. For the textual communities see
Hunwick, “The Middle Niger,” pp. 17-20. For Saad’s discussion of the “Askiate of Gao” and the textual communities
see Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, Chapter 2 passim, Chapter 3 and Appendices 4-10.
36 Hunwick, “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. xxii-lxv. Also S.M. Cissoko, “The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th
Century” in UNESCO General History of Africa-IV. Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, (ed.) D.T. Niane
(Berkeley, 1984), pp. 187-210; L.E. Kubbel, “On the History of Social Relations in the West Sudan in the 8th to the 16th
Centuries,” Africa in Soviet Studies. 1968 Annual, (transl.) Igor Gavrilov (Moscow, 1969), pp. 119-26. Cf. Alice
Louise Willard, “Rivers of Gold, Oceans of Sand: The Songhay in the West African World-System,” Ph.D dissertation,
The Johns Hopkins University, 1999.
37 Shari‘a in Songhay, Chapters 3-5; Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, Chapters 3-4 passim.
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PRESERVATION OF ARCHIVES
. . . The cultural achievements of the sixteenth century patriciate are (and were) validated in its
libraries. Contrary to widespread academic and popular views, these libraries have not all been lost.2944
Towards the end of the twentieth century scholars have ‘discovered’ a number of private libraries in
Timbuktu as well as others outside the city. Some of these collections date from the sixteenth century (or
earlier).3045 In a recent conference paper the Malian scholar Abdel Kader Haidara states that the works in
these libraries cover an extensive range of subjects: science, literature, architecture, art, industry, medicine,
pharmacology, arithmetic, astronomy, agriculture, mathematics, music, astrology, and other domains of
knowledge (et d’autres domains de la connaissance).3146 At present sixty to eighty private collections
have been identified, and they range in size from a few volumes to 5,000 manuscripts.3247 The subject
matter of these libraries can be compared to the subjects that were taught and studied in fifteenth and
sixteenth century Timbuktu.
A public institution, the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba (The National
Ahmad Baba Center for Documentation and Research), was established in the 1970s, and in 1977 began to
acquire the manuscripts of several private libraries. It now contains more than 18,000 items, mostly in
Arabic, but also in the Tamasheq, Fulfulde, and Songhay languages—subject matter ranges from single
folio trade documents and poems to 500 folio volumes on Islamic law.3348 Dr. Haidara believes that there
are 300 private libraries and perhaps as many as 300,000 manuscripts in the sixth and seventh
administrative regions of the Republic of Mali. Many have been handed down for generations and
manuscripts have been bought and sold as far back as the thirteenth century.3449 The Ahmad Baba Center
38 Hunwick, “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. lvii, lx; idem, “The Middle Niger,” pp.18-19; Penda Mbow, “Intellectuels
et Pouvoirs Politiques dans le Monde Musulman: Exemples Mamluke et Songhai (XIVe S.- Debut XVIe S.),” Annales de
la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines No. 19 (1989), pp. 113-23; Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, Chapter 3.
44 Thus, the statement of one historian on the legacy of Timbuktu scholarship is neither accurate nor adequate nor
acceptable. “Virtually nothing of the great intellectual activity of the fifteenth and sixteenth century has survived….
[Islamic culture] was fundamentally the culture of an urban elite, which affected only a minority. It was based on the
written language and did not absorb the native language and cultures. It remained marginal to society and collapsed
with the cities which gave rise to it.” Cissoko. “The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th Century,” pp. 209-10.
45 For example, the Mahmud Kati Family Library which began as the personal library of the early sixteenth century
historian Mahmud Kati, after whom the library is named, and which was handed down through his descendants to the
present. With its 3,000 manuscripts it has been described as “an extraordinary treasure” and its “discovery” has been
extolled as “the most significant event in the history of recovering the intellectual legacy of precolonial Muslim Africa
over the past half century.” “News and Research Reports,” Saharan Studies Association Newsletter vol. 8, nos. 1-2
(2000), p. 3.
46 Haidara, “Bibliothèques du Désert,” p. 3. See also “Timbuktu Manuscripts Project Proposal.” Compiled by Alida
Jay Boye, April 24, 2001.
47 The largest of the private collections is the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library with 5,000 manuscripts. For the
names of the different private libraries and the problems of funding, preservation, cataloguing, etc. see Haidara,
“Bibliothèques du Désert,” pp. 4-8.
48 A handlist (in Arabic) of the first 9,000 manuscripts has been published by Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation.
See Sidi Amar Ould Ely, Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed
Baba, Timbuktu, vol. 1. Edited by Julian Johansen (London, 1995); Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de
Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu, vol.3. Edited by ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Abbas
(London, 1997); Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba,
Timbuktu, vol.5. Compiled by Librarians of the Centre (London, 1998); John Hunwick, “Manuscripts I: Markaz Ahmad
Baba,” Sudanic Africa vol. 9 (1998); John O. Hunwick, “CEDRAB: The Centre of Documentation et de Recherches
Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu,” Sudanic Africa vol. 3 (1992).
49 For the names and locations of libraries outside of Timbuktu and the problems of preservation, etc. see Haidara,
“Bibliothèques du Désert,” pp. 5-6, 8-12. See also Attilio Gaudio, “Manuscrits du Sahara et du Sahel ignores ou en
Péril de Disparition,” La Nouvelle Revue Anthropologique (1999), pp. 38-46.
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may contain six per cent of the entire corpus of manuscripts in the two regions; this figure is tentative as
new collections are constantly being ‘discovered’.
THE TALAMIDH AND THE ALFANEMA
. . . Traditionally, close connections existed between royal princes and Muslim scholars, traders,
and mystics. . . . 3565 As traders, royal princes would have developed close relations with Muslim
merchants and scholars, converted to Islam, and learned to read and write Arabic. The princes’ social
experiences would have been one in which the order of learning (education/scholarship) and the order of
the discursive (texts) were reproduced in the order of the mercantile (trading capital) and the artisanal (craft
industries). These elements and connections identify the social content of the emergent commercial
‘tributary’ system. The clerical estate, as one of the foci of authority, was part of the collective negotiations
and accommodations that went into decisions about governance, relations of authority, conversion
practices, the construction of social categories, the politics of knowledge production, and so on. The way of
life of Shaykh Sualyaman’s talamidh was transformed into practical (i.e., political) forms of subjectivity,
sociality, and agency.3669 The central state apparatus of the kingdom deployed Islamic institutions
(religious, cultural, and legal) to create not just a commercial economy but a regulated set of Islamic social
forms of life. The reforming Ya Nas established a claim to legitimate power based on the ‘universalising’
of their interests in the name of social development. The effect of their reform measures was to redistribute
power among senior families/lineages among the ruling classes and not least among senior members of the
Muslim estate.
. . . The Mole provided society not only with a range of religious and ceremonial services but also
with medical and magical ones. They filled various positions in the administration; they founded their own
towns and settled in the various princes’ towns where they officiated at local celebrations and ceremonies.
They performed many other duties as well.3774 . . .
As part of the royal reform program, Ya Na Andani Sigili, awarded Yidan Mole Buba, leader of
the Mole talamidh, an absolute grant of land (waqf) as a reward for his and his talamidhs’ services during
the Dagomba-Gonja wars and the wars of expansion in the Oti River valley. Shaykh Sulayman’s talamidh
founded Moliyili on this property.3875 While the landed property of the Yidan Mole was used for the
reproduction of Moliyili, the reproduction of the town’s functions would seem to have been primarily
political and not economic . . .
THE WORK-STUDY IDEAL: CRAFTS, TEXTS, AND LEARNING
. . . The nature of Mole scholarship—what constituted it and what constituted its possibility—is an
issue of socio-historical analysis . . The production of ideas or knowledge was not a matter of pure
contemplation nor was it a matter of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Scholarship was not
untouched by social and political facts.
The texts represent sites of social engagement and interaction in a state-building process. Mole
experiences include scholars’ responses to the objective economic, social, and political conditions in which
they found themselves and the collective subjective practices—the ‘mental acts’, or ratiocination, and
signifying practices of the ‘ulama’—that helped to shape and mediate those conditions. Knowledge was
grounded in and responsive to the actuality of social relations, but it promulgated and was promulgated by
relations that were entailed in a complex historical process whose cultural and religious expression can be
65 Ferguson, “The Islamization of Dagbon,” pp. 72, 90, 218-19.
69 Ibid., pp. 192-215 passim.
74 Ibid., pp. 106-7, 155-56, 192-215.
75 Ibid., pp. 132-54, 156. The head of the Mole talamidh carried the title Yidan Mole, “Master of the Mole.” Shaykh
Sulayman was the first Yidan Mole. He and Musa, the second Yidan Mole, lived in the clerical town Sabari. Buba
succeeded Musa.
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defined as ‘islamisation’. . . Moliyili was organised around the social and cultural roles of the alfanema,
who formed a privileged and propertied stratum. The eighteenth and nineteenth century alfanema are to be
recognised as the ‘inheritors’ and ‘descendants’ of the seventeenth century talamidh social and religious
movement and organisation, the leader of which was Shaykh Sulayman Bagayugu . . .
A manuscript, attributed to Yidan Mole Nafa‘u ibn Kamshaghu Na Yunus, describes the range of
productive activities at Moliyili:
Moliyili means in the language of Dagomba ‘the meeting place or house of the learned man.’ From
Yendi to Moliyili is just three miles. It is under a hill and at this hill are many stones and trees, all
of them useful. And there were the craft school, and the (?) quarrying, and the farmland, and
vegetables and the like, and the making [of] cloth and weaving in colours. And they put the young
boys together in the school and they learned cloth making in the Qur’anic school . . . And this town
of Moliyili was under a hill and there were many stones and trees and grass and the stone was of
use to them. This stone yielded black iron. And these trees, then they were of use to them yielding
fruits and medicine. And the grass was of use yielding food for the cattle and the sheep and the
goats. And they made use of these trees by manufacturing cloth and then cutting the trees and
making things. And the juice of these trees was of many colours, and in it [were] yellow and black
and blue and (?) red: they used them in making cloths. And this was under the hill. And above this
hill everything was plantation: black cotton and white cotton newly introduced by the grace of God.
And under this hill there was pure cold water which helped the thirst.3987
. . . The different kinds of technology the text mentions presuppose several concrete practices:
observation, ‘problematisation’, and experimentation. The study of a specific craft, accompanied by a strict
work discipline, was a religious duty. Within this conception, the islam of the Moliyili community and the
islam of its natural locale—‘above’ and ‘under’ the hill—became counterparts (on the meaning of the
concept of islam in this context see section VI below). The text brings together a heterogeneous set of
categories that refer to different entities, processes, activities, techniques, and materials: textile technology
(producing cloth), mining technology (quarrying iron ore), chemical technology (dyeing), agricultural
technology (cotton production, arboriculture, and proper fodder for livestock). In addition, knowledge of
medicinal plants (pharmacology) points to a definable medical practice within the community. There are
two discernible aspects in all of this. First, the social construction of discourses on science and technology
was part of the process of ‘illuminating’ the ‘signs’, that is, the empirical phenomena of Nature.
‘Illumination’ in this sense belonged to the scholar-mystic’s efforts to develop inner spirituality. Such
discourses were embedded in everyday practices. Secondly, the social accumulation of knowledge (that is,
cultural and symbolic capital) from one generation to the next, through transmission and constant
observation and experimentation, marked the road toward the achievement of gnosis, or (ultimate) self-
knowledge. Writings on iron ore mining and iron production (smelting and smithing) presumably derived
from Mole experiences with the artisan and mining technologies and the work process in the Bassar
marchlands. This was a territory that was subject to periodic military incursions legitimated by the political
needs of the nam. If there existed a deliberate connection between Mole learning and the operation of
social processes related to long-distance trade and craft production, there was also a deliberate connection
to the realpolitik of the Ya Nas. Given their societal status, the Mole ‘ulama’ were able to write of the
‘world natural’ while they were being sustained by the ‘world politick’.
According to Ferguson “a number of manuscripts in the archives relate directly to the organisation
of production.”4088 One short work, “The Names of Foods in the Land of the Dagomba” (Ta’am asma’ fi
al-ard Daghumbawiyyu), lists the names of food crops and ‘industrial’ crops—cottons, dyes, and so
on—which could be grown in Dagomba. In addition, it identifies the range of animal husbandry and of
wild life in the land and “itemises the different sorts of water partly by mineral content.”4189 Another text
87 Arabic text and translation in ibid., pp. 165-69.
88 Ibid., p. 333.
89 Ibid.
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deals with the technology of paper production, “describing in detail the manufacture of a light paper known
[in Dagbane] as pulempun sabe from Sterculia Tomentosa, and of heavy paper from Ficus Tinctoria.”4290
Still another manuscript describes the technology of iron production and the ritual obligations and
prohibitions that smelters had to observe.
There are also works on medicine and eye diseases. For example, there is a description of
zondara. This ailment was a form of “blindness caused by cutting facial scars at the temple, thus severing
muscles and blood vessels leading to the eye. While this may not bring blindness in childhood, it may lead
to blindness in adulthood.”4391 Manuscripts on diagnostic medicine and pharmacology are associated
with two eminent Mole medical practitioners. One was Wali Ibrahim, son of Mukhtar, the seventh Yidan
Mole, who was also a teacher of medicine. The other was the nineteenth century Yidan Mole Yahya ibn
Salih (ca. 1800-1890) who was widely known for his skills in treating smallpox by vaccination.4492 One
of Ibn Salih’s popular medical treatises has three sections: preventative medicine, curative medicine, and
war ‘medicine’. A manuscript on the life of Wali Ibrahim described him in the following terms: “Ibrahim
Moli ibn Mukhtar Moli, master of medicine” (Ibrahim Muli ibn Mukhtar Muli sahib diwiyy).4593
There were other texts that instantiate hisb in combination with astrology and numerology as
explanatory categories and as modes of interpretation.4694 Paronomasia, that is breaking down an entity
into its component parts and then rearranging those parts to reveal a hidden meaning, and numerological
homologising were practiced by some of the alfanema. In contemporary ‘Western’ academic contexts,
neither is accepted as a viable interpretive mode. However, in Moliyili they were ways of speaking about
intellectual truths (or the production of truth in signs) as well as representational strategies entangled with
the social antagonisms, both spoken and unspoken, of the political status quo. The problematic of hisb was,
therefore, an answer not to its internal questions as an ‘ilm, but to the real problems of ruling, warfare,
trade, and competition as these obtained in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
There is an eighteenth century map in the Mole archive. It shows the location of seven mosques in
the Oti River Valley of eastern Dagomba and the chronological sequence in which they were built.
Ferguson reproduces it in her dissertation.4795 There are suggestions that the archive has more maps. It is
of more than casual interest that Mole scholarship included a cartographical tradition, the details and extent
of which have still to be determined (for example, an identifiable connection to the Timbuktu patriciate).
Undoubtedly, the tradition belongs to the realpolitik and routines of governance and administrative control
and the politics of religious conversion. Mapping the Oti Valley mosques cannot be described simply as a
symbolic discourse or text about a specific social geography. It delineates, according to certain codes and
rules, the spatial and temporal relationship between the alfanema’s conversion of ‘unbelievers’ and the Ya
Nas’ organisation of coercion and consent—the spatiality of political administration
(‘governmentality’)—among the converted and unconverted alike. The map ‘naturalises’ the ‘place’ of
Islam and political domination in the social landscape.4896 Mole cartography was part of the production of
difference in a world of economically and politically interconnected and interdependent spaces . . . Mole
map-making can be said to have belonged to the ‘technology’ of the political relations of nam, because it
thought the political and economic connection of the Oti River Valley population to the administrative
regime of the Ya Nas through a difference based on conversion and non-conversion, It was a specialised
technique in a network of domination.
OTHER LEARNING CENTRES IN DAGOMBA
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., p.109 n. 3.
92 Ibid., pp. 333-34.
93 Ibid., p. 334.
94 Ibid., pp. 334, 352.
95 Ibid., pp. 187-88 and p. 189 map 13.
96 Cf. op. cit., pp. 176-91 passim.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
15
Other Muslim clerics in Dagomba, who were not associated with Moliyili and the talamidh of
Shaykh Sulayman, played an important role in eighteenth century Dagomba. They, too, were scholars
(Hausa: malamai (sing. malam)), artisans, and technical specialists but they came from Hausaland. Among
them was a group responsible for introducing a water storage technology. This group, called the Asachiya,
was headed by a malam (= alfa), who carried the title Yidan Asachiya, or leader of the Asachiya (or cistern
builders). It was responsible for cistern construction . . .
The intellectual and technical accomplishments of the Mole (and other) ‘ulama’ did not depend on
the creations of a few brilliant minds. The recognizable achievements of their scholarship and technology
depended on a structured configuration of knowledge and learning, a complex of interacting institutions
(mosques, schools, and libraries), and specialisations that went hand in hand with an elaborate division of
labour. Mole praxis showed how social activities like religious observances and rituals, schooling,
craftsmanship, and writing could be carried out as a single enterprise. Their organisation of knowledge
production had four principal features. First, scholarship, or learning, was a collective and individual
activity. Secondly, it was hierarchically organised with regard to the producers of knowledge and
knowledge itself. Thirdly, it included specialisation, thus there were specialists in particular fields of
knowledge (as well as generalists). The fourth was that manual labour was not separated from mental
labour. In other words, intellectual engagement in learning presupposed the ability to work in a craft and
one’s skills in a particular craft implied a certain educational achievement. Finally, Sufism, or mystical
doctrines, guided the personal conduct of the community’s member and was the conceptual ‘vehicle’ for an
empirical form of scientific work (for example, the creation of classificatory categories and
experimentation) and technology. Mysticism was not a mere subject or field that was reflected passively
by culture, education, or institutions. It was an awareness of and an intention to understand the manifestly
different natural world. Practical activity provided the mediation between social relations, thought, and the
development of the inner self. There was an instrumental dimension to Mole learning as well as an
ontological and eschatological one. The Mole scholars were not only seekers after knowledge and
spirituality; they were also ‘entrepreneurs’ in the practical world of quotidian life.49101
It should be emphasised that Moliyili itself was a centre of commodity production and exchange.
Within the urban political economy, the social relations and praxis of entrepreneurship included exchange
value, trading capital, and currencies. Through the labour of subalterns (slaves among others) they
appropriated surplus wealth directly, and through trade they participated in the circulation and distribution
of societal and regional surpluses. Economically, they were separated from the ‘realm’ of necessity, namely
the relentless pursuit of a subsistence livelihood. Their ‘distance’ from the world of material need brought
an autonomous sphere of knowledge production, a culture of scholarship, that produced an entire mode of
apprehending its autonomous products (texts) autonomously and an intellectual mode to justify and
rationalize it. The (relative) autonomy of knowledge is recognised in its internal reference system of
themes, ideas, categories, and questions. These are not reducible to commodity production or commercial
transactions, hence the appearance of knowledge, or at least some of its organised forms, as self-sustaining
and ‘free floating.’50102
CONCLUSION
The work-study-scholastic tradition and Mole institutional practices are not described or discussed
or mentioned in textbook histories of science and technology. The evident response is that the ‘ulama’ did
not produce knowledge that can be described as ‘science’. Their knowledge forms can be characterised,
from the point of view of its conceptualisation, as an ‘aesthetic’ of symbols and qualities. In contrast to
modern ‘Western’ science, the Mole mode of conception (and their Islamic world-view) did not reduce
101 Ferguson, “Islamization in Dagbon,” p. 332.
102 Cf. the interesting and informative comparative global study of intellectual life (‘abstract reflective thought’) by
Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophy.
Reprinted from FASC 300 Reader 2003 pp. 38-51 compiled by H. Lauer
Abridged from History and Philosophy of Science for African Undergraduates ed. H. Lauer
Ibadan: Hope Publications, 2003
16
reality to quantitative analysis. For this reason their empirical and technical achievements would not count
as science (or technology), in any form, in many current academic circles. Mole scholarship knew the
world differently. It defined knowledge in a spiritual sense and not only in a material sense. Ultimate
knowledge was knowledge of the infinite, of God. The ‘Way’ to ultimate knowledge was achieved through
Sufism.
