Tradition to Text: Writing Local Somali History in the Travel Narrative of Charles Guillain (1846-48)

Abstract

The essay offers some observations on the interplay of orality and literacy in Somali society, using the mid-nineteenth century travel narrative of Charles Guillain. Because Guillain was among the earliest Europeans to record local Somali traditions, the sources of his information and the circumstances in which he gathered it warrant scrutiny. A close reading of Guillain suggests that he relied heavily on Arabic-speaking informants; that these informants provided him with written as well as oral sources on Somali history; and that Arabic literacy had already begun to spread from the urban centres of the coast to the Somali interior at the time of the French traveler's visit. We then speculate about the influence of written Arabic texts on the production and transmission of Somali ‘oral traditions’ in both Western and Islamic literary circles during the later nineteenth century.