Cheikh Moussa Kamara, historian of Fouta-Toro

1864 – 1945 · Ganguel Soulé

Cheikh Moussa Kamara, born around 1864 and called back to God in 1945, was a great Muslim scholar of Fouta-Toro. He taught the Islamic sciences at Ganguel Soulé, on the Senegal River, where he founded a daara. Between 1920 and 1925 he wrote in Arabic the Zuhūr al-basātīn (“The Flowers of the Gardens”), a vast history of the Black Muslim peoples of more than 1,800 pages. In it he gathered the traditions of Fouta-Toro, Mauritania and Fouta-Djallon, after questioning elders and families, and took a critical view of some nineteenth-century holy wars and of the caste system. In 1935, at the inauguration of the Cathedral of African Remembrance in Dakar, the Muslim religious leaders of French West Africa chose him to speak for them: he pleaded for understanding among the three religions of the Book. Part of his manuscripts was entrusted to IFAN in Dakar, to Théodore Monod, as early as 1944. Translated and published by the CNRS, his work is one of the great written sources for the history of West Africa.

Sources

• CNRS Éditions — Cheikh Moussa Kamara, « Florilège au jardin de l’histoire des Noirs (Zuhūr al-basātīn) », introduction
• Cambridge — « Reading with the colonial in the life of Shaykh Musa Kamara, a Muslim scholar-saint » (Africa)
• Seneweb — « Cheikh Moussa Camara, le saint, le savant et l’érudit de Ganguel (1864-1945) »

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