"YOU know me, I am one of you."
So said the bird when he arrived among the fish. Blessed with the ability to live in air or water, he had lived happily among the birds until their king came demanding his taxes, at which point the amphibious bird plunged into the sea. Claiming kinship with the fish, the bird found comfort among them. But when the fish-king came around for his taxes, the bird shot from the water and rejoined the flock. So it went for the rest of his days, the bird claiming membership in each of the societies he moved between, but never granting his full allegiance to either.
This is one of the stories told by 16th century scholar al Hasan al Wazzan in The Description of Africa, the first narrative geography of the continent to appear in Europe. The itinerant author explains that he will "be like the bird": He will tell the truth of his subject because he belongs to no nation. Wazzan is better known as "Leo Africanus".
Wazzan's travels are revisited in a new book: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds written by Natalie Zemon Davis who offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of Al Wazzan's life.
The book takes us from his birth in Islamic Granada in the 1480s; his family's flight as Christian armies expelled the Moors from Spain; his education in the madrassas of Fez, Morocco, and his years traveling as a diplomat in North Africa and the Levant, among the Berbers, Arabs, Jews and black Africans who populated those lands.
She writes of his kidnapping by Spanish pirates who offered him as tribute to Pope Leo X in Rome; his christening as "Giovanni Leone" (hence Leo Africanus) by the pope; his life of independent scholarship in Bologna and his departure from Italy after nearly a decade, during which he produced "The Description of Africa" and other works.
Read a review here: Tricksters Travels
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