L’Histoire du Niger, transcrit du touareg de l’Ayr

A shortsighted reader might dismiss Niger as peripheral; at present, it is a strong contender for poorest country in the world, familiar to Westerners mainly from headlines about insurgency or famine. Yet this very rapidly growing country (approaching 26 million people as of 2022) supplies a third of the uranium that fuels the nuclear power plants of its former colonial ruler France, mined almost entirely in the predominantly Tuareg north. Their region is home to some of the oldest written records in West Africa, and has played a key role in the trans-Saharan trade perhaps as far back as Herodotus, making it central to relations between the Mediterranean and West Africa and to the emergence of premodern concepts of race in western Eurasia. Its history should be of interest, not just to students of West Africa, but to anyone seeking to understand how the modern world works and how it got that way.

The book reviewed here presents the history of Niger – more particularly, the history of the Tuareg people of Niger – from the perspective of a leading European student of their language and culture, Karl-G. Prasse, in collaboration with a Tuareg scholar and politician from Amataltal, Ghabdouane Mohamed. According to its preface, it draws especially upon the work of Yves Urvoy and André Salifou; apart from the works listed in its bibliography, specific sections also reflect collaboration with Ahmed Mika’il, Issouf Hadane, and Ismaghile Ilitnine. The work appears in two languages: Tayart Tamajeq (the language of the Tuareg of the Air Mountains), and French. It would be presumptuous for this reviewer to comment in any detail on the Tamajeq version; Prasse’s customarily careful transcription makes it a valuable resource for foreign students of Tamajeq as well as for Tuareg readers, despite the unavoidable use of neologisms some of which may not be widely known. A detailed summary of the contents based on the French version, however, is provided below for the benefit of interested Anglophones, with occasional critical remarks. The two volumes are followed by a short pamphlet containing obituaries of the two authors, both deceased in 2018, along with a bibliography of Karl-G. Prasse’s works, vital for any student of Berber linguistics.