Talk:Guinea (region)

Lower Guinea

Some old books talk about the Angola and Congo kingdoms being in Lower Guinea. How does that fit in with the descriptions here? --moyogo 16:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Leo Africanus and Djenné

"A competing theory, first forwarded by Leo Africanus (1526), claims that 'Guinea' is derived from Djenné, the great interior commercial city on the Upper Niger River.[4]."

Hunwick (2003:277-278) contains a modern translation into English of Leo's text: "This next kingdom is called Gheneoa by African merchants, by its people Genni, and by the Portuguese and those who know these lands in Europe, Ghinea.[31]"

Footnote (n31): "Ghinea (Guinea) is the name applied by early European sources to the coasts south of the River Senegal and is derived from the Berber root G-N – 'black' (see Basset (1909), 147), but it was never applied specifically to Jenne. Malfante (1447) knew of Jenne as Geni, while De Barros (active in West Africa 1522-32) calls it Genná; see Crone (1937), 87, 140. The name 'Gheneoua' is the Moroccan term gnawa (from the same Berber root G-N), used for West Africa and its people in general (see also the same usage by the 12th century Andalusian geographer al-Zuhrī, Corpus, 94 ff.)

Here are the refs:

• Hunwick, John O. (2003), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Leiden: Brill, ISBN 0585-6914 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help). First published in 1999 as ISBN 9004112073.
• Levtzion, Nehemia; Hopkins, John F.P., eds. (2000), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West Africa, New York, NY: Marcus Weiner Press, ISBN 1-55876-241-8. First published in 1981 by Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521224225.
• Crone, G.R., ed. (1937), The Voyages of Cadamosto and other documents on Western Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century, London: Hakluyt Society.
• Basset, René (1909), Mission au Sénégal. Tome 1. Étude sur le dialecte Zanaga, Notes sur le Hassania, Researches historiques sur les Maures, Paris: Ernest Leroux. Page 147 is here see Nègre.

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"Djenné dominated the gold and salt trade across West Africa, from the 11th C. (fall of Ghana) until the 13th C." I don't believe there is a source for this. See my comments on the Djenné talk page Aa77zz (talk) 10:45, 28 April 2011 (UTC)