Sahara and Sudan. Vol. 4 Sahara and Sudan IV: Wadai and Darfur

Portrait of Gustav Nachtigal, wearing a Nife tobe, before his return to Europe Frontispiece Permit issued by the Government of Sultan Ibrahim of Darfur Facing page 394 Letter of Introduction from Shaykh Umar of Bornu to Sultan Muhammad Ali of Wadai Facing page 395 Map of Gustav Nachtigal's route through Wadai and Darfur End of book ix X ## Wadai and Darfur not impressed with their potential as working slaves, and declined to offer more for them than one good strong camel. 1 Returning safely to Murzuq, Nachtigal set out again, on April 18, 1870, this time for Kuka, joining a caravan under the leadership of Hajj Muhammad Bu Aisha. Hajj Muhammad, an envoy of the Governor-General of Tripolitania, had been entrusted with a mission to the Shaykh of Bornu on behalf of the Sultan in Constantinople. In Kuka, Nachtigal was well received by Shaykh Umar, and with his active co-operation he embarked upon further exploratory journeys, first to Kanem and Borku, and then to Bagirmi. He finally left Kuka on March 1, 1873, and his voyage eventually ended when, after traversing Wadai and Darfur, he arrived in Cairo in November 1874. On his return to Europe Nachtigal began the preparation of an extensive account of his travels, more than 2,000 pages in all, Sahara und Sudan: Ergebnisse sechsjährigen Reisen in Afrika. The first volume was published in 1879, an d the second in 1881, both in Berlin. In 1882 he became German Gonsul-General in Tunis, just after the French annexation of that territory. He had plans for further exploration in Wadai and Darfur, the territories covered in the present volume; but these plans had to be abandoned when, shortly afterwards, he was appointed Reichskommissar for the German government in Cameroon and Togoland. He died in April 1885, off the West African coast, on his way back to Europe. The third volume of Sahara und Sudan, of which the present work is a translation, did not appear until four years later, in 1889, in Leipzig. Until 1967, when a reproduction of the original work was published in Graz, Sahara und Sudan was a rare book, and it is difficult to find a library in Britain or America which possesses copies of all three of the original volumes. Translations of a few pages or paragraphs have been incorporated in various books, such as Thomas Hodgkin's Nigerian perspectives, but there has been no English translation of extended passages, much less a complete version. The contributions which Nachtigal made, and may still make, to knowledge of the regions through which he travelled have scarcely received in the Englishspeaking world the attention which they deserve. A French translation, now very difficult to come by, of part of the first two volumes was published in Paris in 1881 ; 2 and in 1903, when French interest in the area was becoming intense, there was a French translation, in a journal This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.