A man of two worlds: Leo Africanus

SaudiAramco World (Tom Verde)

An article about Al Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fassi, better known to western scholars as Leo Africanus.

A traveler-historian in the tradition of Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Jubayr, Leo was a man of many talents, occupations and adventures. He was, at various times, a diplomat, jurist, hospital administrator, geographer, teacher, political prisoner and international celebrity. In the course of his travels from Timbuktu to Istanbul, he survived Atlas mountain blizzards and Nile crocodile attacks only to be kidnapped by pirates and presented to Pope Leo x in Rome, where he ostensibly converted to Christianity. Though it’s believed he eventually returned both to Islam and to North Africa, he gained fame while in Italy for his knowledge of the Maghrib, or North Africa, and the African interior, which he set down in a book whose English-language version was called The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained. . . .

From Timbuktu to Hausaland (now eastern Mali and southern Niger), across the neighboring kingdoms of Borno (now in northeastern Nigeria) and Kanem (now in Chad and Libya), on up through Egypt, along the Nile to Aswan, Chana (modern Qena, where “cruell and noisome” crocodiles “lurking about the bankes of the river, do craftily lay waite for men and beastes … and there devour them”) and Cairo, and then on his trip back home via Tunisia and the Barbary Coast, Leo kept a meticulous account of everything he saw, smelled, tasted and heard. With characteristic thoroughness and attention to detail, he offered the good with the bad, the magnificent alongside the mundane, in an even-handed narrative that was clearly meant to inform rather than impress or flatter.

Thus, we learn that the pomegranates of Mecnase (Meknes) are “most pleasant of taste” but its “lemons are waterish and unpleasant”; that Cairenes are “people of a merrie, jocund and cheerful disposition such as will promise much, but performe little”; that the king of Borno doesn’t pay his bills on time, yet has so much cash on hand that he can furnish his dogs with collars of “pure golde.”

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