Yarnam, Mandara and Descourtilz

 

Something we have thought about for some time now is the reference to a tyrannical and extreme Sayfawa maina in a 19th century Mandara chronicle. The kirgam, translated in French in Eldridge Mohammadou's Le Royaume du Wandala, ou Mandara, au XIXe siècle, was the subject of another post on the ill-fated 1781 Mandara campaign of Borno. But the chronicle, despite being written several years after the war and from a highly biased perspective, also tells us of a Sayfawa prince named Yarnam who robbed, raped, and killed en route to Mandara. At a place called Karangou, Yarnam was said to have stayed with a man named Ali Ayssami. The prince not only demanded money, he also raped his host's wife and daughter and executed her son. When the host sought justice from the mai of Borno, Ali b. al-Hajj Dunama, he received nothing. 

While this episode could be a literary invention to portray the Sayfawa ruler in as poorly a light as possible and make his attack on Mandara unjust, it is interesting to note Descourtilz also reported something similar about an African prince who was extremely cruel and monstruous. In the case of Descourtilz, however, it is left ambiguous as to the origin of this prince. But he included the anecdote of this prince in a chapter on Borno, based on interviews with Africans from there living in Saint Domingue (modern Haiti). In Descourtilz's version, this African prince mercilessly killed a child and then killed the daughter of a ruler in a neighboring state. Since the daughter had the same name as the animal meant for sacrifice in some sort of ritual or rite (labani, a forest beast), the despotic prince killed her and offered her as a sacrifice. Needless to say, this triggerered a larger conflict won by the father of the princess. His victory against the prince and his followers supposedly led to some of them ending up on the Rossignol-Desdunes plantation in colonial Haiti.

As previously mentioned, the story reported by Descourtilz does not specify that the young prince was from Borno. But it is inserted in a short chapter on Borno. Is it possible this young prince was the same Yarnam mentioned in the Mandara chronicle? The timing is consistent with a perhaps 1780s Sayfawa maina whose extremely abusive and violent actions led to his demise. Some of his followers may have ended up in Saint Domingue by the end of the 1780s and then were met by Descourtilz. Of course, Descourtilz never clearly identified the place of origin for the prince he was writiing about.