Bafour

 ( Ethnic Groups In Mauritania ) 

The Bafour or Bafur were a group of people inhabiting Mauritania and Western Sahara. Scholars such as H.T. Norris describe "Bafur (Bafour)" as a loose term encompassing the pre-Sanhaja inhabitants of the region, who were "part Berber people, part Negroid, and part Semitic people."

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History Some historians believe that Bafour hunter-gatherers were the dominant population group in Mauritania during the Neolithic Era. Others propose that they were agriculturalists living in and around the Adrar Plateau, at that time the edge of the Sahara desert. The earliest European sources refer to the region as 'Adrar al Bafur', or 'Bafur Mountains'. They are credited with introducing irrigation and the cultivation of the date palm there. As Sanhaja Berber populations increasingly came to dominate the region, the Bafur mixed and traded with them.McDougall EA. The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century. The Journal of African History. 1985;26(1):1-31. doi:10.1017/S0021853700023069

Historian James L.A. Webb writes,

"During the more humid period from c. 1450 or 1500 to c. 1600. the lands of the central and northern Gibla came to be settled once again, this time apparently by Bafur villagers. Bafur place-names and desert traditions about the Bafur survive, but little else. The ethnic identity of the Bafur apparently was transformed in the period before the late seventeenth century and absorbed into the ethnic categories of Wolof people, Berber people, and Fula people,In ; in . and thus remains somewhat mysterious."

According to Webb's study of oral traditions, from 1600 to 1850, in the pre-colonial period, there was a well-established commercial route between communities of the Senegambia reaching north to the Western Sahara and Mauritania. Over four centuries before that, Arabs mixed with Bafur and Massufa in Wadan, in present-day Western Sahara. A group known as Idaw al-Hajj ("sons of pilgrims" in Hassaniya Arabic) gradually settled in trading areas of northwestern Senegal, from where they dominated the gum arabic trade, as well as shipment of grain from the Wolof region to the Beidane (white North Africans), and trade between Wolofs and the Maghreb for horses for their military campaigns. As is common among trading peoples, over time intermarriage had taken place between the Idaw al-Hajj and Wolof peoples, and the northerners gradually became assimilated into the sub-Saharan African community, including the use of Wolof as their language. James L.A. Webb, "The Evolution of the Idaw al-Hajj Commercial Diaspora", Cahiers d'études africaines, 1995, Volume 35:Issue 138-139, pp. 455–475, accessed 4 November 2013

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Identification The relationship between the Bafour and any modern-day West African ethnic group is unclear. They are at times referred to as the descendants of local pre-Berber peoples.Olson, James Stuart & Shadle, Robert, Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism, Greenwood Publishing Group (1991), p 399, Others have argued that they were initially a non-Sanhaja Berber group that later mixed with Soninke and Fula.

French art historian Jean Laude wrote, "In the pre-Islamic period (before the ninth century), according to oral tradition, Mauritania was occupied by the Bafour, a population of possibly mixed origin from whom the eastern Songhai Empire, the central Gangara, and the western Serer people are derived."Laude, Jean, The Arts of Black Africa, University of California Press, 1973 (translated by : Jean Decock), p 50, [2] They may also be the ancestors of the coastal Imraguen community.

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Notes

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Sources

• Anthony G Pazzanita (2025). 9780810855960, Scarecrow Press. . ISBN 9780810855960
• James L.A. Webb (1994). 9780299143343, University of Wisconsin Press. . ISBN 9780299143343

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Further reading

• UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. III, Abridged Edition: Africa from ... edited by M. El Fasi UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. III, Abridged Edition: Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century
• Ethnic Groups of Africa and the Middle East: An Encyclopedia By John A. Shoup Ethnic Groups of Africa and the Middle East: An Encyclopedia

Categories: Ethnic Groups In Mauritania, Social History Of Mauritania, Ancient Peoples, Wolof People, Serer People, Fula

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