Almost every day, and especially in the summer months, we have news, many of them with tragic endings, of African immigrants trying to access the Iberian Peninsula through the sea, with small boats that can barely withstand the waves and in which they travel crowded men, women and children, or trying to jump the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla, but there was a time when it was the African continent that received and welcomed the migratory currents that fled from the Iberian Peninsula. In the year 818, in the so-called slaughter or rebellion of the Arrabal (from Arabic, al-rabad , suburb), the Cordovans who lived in the suburb took to the streets to protest against the rise in taxes by Emir Al-Hakam I. His response was swift, for 3 days the emir's troops were fully employed :the suburb was set on fire and razed to the ground, more than 3,000 Cordovans were killed -300 of them crucified- and the rest of the inhabitants, more than 20,000, had to flee from Córdoba, mostly to the city of Fez (in what is now is Morocco) where they founded a neighborhood called «the city of the Andalusians «. Another example would be the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, who fled to Navarre, a kingdom in theory still independent, to the Balkans, to the Ottoman Empire and to North Africa; and the migration that concerns us... that of the Moriscos .
Although the definitive expulsion of the Moriscos did not take place until 1609, during the reign of Felipe III, with the Decree of Conversion of 1502, by which the Muslims residing in the peninsula had to convert to Christianity (moriscos ) or leave the peninsula, there was already a first migration, albeit small, to Africa. Many were suspicious of that forced and simply apparent conversion (it was believed that in private they continued to maintain their customs and religion); in addition, the monfíes appeared (Moorish bandits) looting and murdering. The Barbary pirates saw that, now, they had to support the Moors to wound, in their own house, their greatest enemy, Felipe II. The group became more and more numerous, the local authorities could not do anything, they desecrated churches, they stood at the gates of Granada... and in 1568 the war of the Alpujarras broke out . Philip II commands the Tercios , with Don Juan of Austria at the head, to put down the revolt. In 1570 they were defeated and exiled from the Alpujarras for the rest of the peninsula. From that moment, until the expulsion, the migration of the Moors to North Africa was constant.
Who welcomed these emigrants born in the peninsula, once Moorish, who had kept the almighty Felipe II in check was Muley Ahmed al-Mansur , sultan of Morocco. After organizing and pacifying his territory, he set his sights on the south of the Sahara, from where the gold caravans departed. To carry out his project, Muley Ahmed organized an army of some 4,000 soldiers made up basically of Andalusian mercenaries, descendants of those Moors who fled from Spain, and renegade Christians, equipped with firearms (arquebuses) and whose mother tongue was Spanish. Spanish. The expedition left Marrakesh on October 16, 1590, led by a trusted man of the sultan named Yuder .
And who was Yuder?
In one of the many raids that the Barbary pirates made on the Andalusian coast, they captured a young man -according to some sources called Diego de Guevara – born in Cuevas de Almanzora (Almería). The young man was sold as a slave in North Africa and his master decided to castrate him. The vicissitudes of life, his determination and his conversion to Islam, made him a man close to the sultan to the point of trusting him with that mission. The first obstacle of that risky adventure was to cross the desert through the Tanezrouft , one of the most desolate areas of the Sahara, between the current borders of Algeria, Mali and Niger, to reach the once most powerful kingdom in black Africa, the Songhai Empire . After several months of crossing the desert, Yuder and the Andalusians reached the Niger, and following their course they planted themselves at the gates of Gao , the capital. The overwhelming numerical superiority and the weakening of an army punished by the long and tortuous journey, presaged an easy victory for the Songhai… nothing could be further from the truth. These fire-breathing weapons, never before encountered by the Songhai, quickly decimated the ranks of the battle-hardened warriors; many others drowned while trying to cross the river fleeing from the bullets... in just two hours, Yunder had taken Gao . His next destination… Timbuktu (in present-day Mali), the mythical city from which Hasan bin Muhammed al-Wazzan al-Fasi, known as Lion the African , it said in « Description of Africa » (1526)…
In Timbuktu there is an extraordinary mosque and a majestic palace. […] The inhabitants, and especially the foreigners who live here, are extraordinarily wealthy, to the point that the current king has married two of his daughters to two of these merchants. There are many wells filled with very fresh water, and every time the Niger River overflows, they bring the water to the city through ditches. There is plenty of grain, milk and butter in the town, though salt is very scarce and has to be brought in from the Taghaza mines twenty days away. […] Here resides a large number of doctors, judges and other people of great wisdom, who live splendidly at the king's expense. […] And here come books and manuscripts from Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise. Timbuktu's currency is pure gold, unminted, without inscription of any kind.
Taking Timbuktu was even easier. So far the news of those practically invincible soldiers and those who the Songhai called the Weapon had reached. (It is assumed that by association with the cry, for them unintelligible, of «to arms » that those soldiers who came from the north uttered when they entered combat). Although that place no longer looked so much like the «African Dorado »Which León the African described, since it was a place of transit for gold but not its destination, Yuder decided to settle there and proclaim himself governor of that territory in 1591 as Yuder Pasha . Likewise, Weapons they became a kind of dominant caste or ethnic group that perpetuated this dominance by marrying the more socially established Songhai women. The distance from the sultan of Morocco, the entire Sahara desert, allowed him to rule with some freedom, but wary of that self-proclamation and possible independence, Muley Ahmed al-Mansur sent a new governor and ordered Yuder to return to Marrakesh in 1599 , where he would die in 1605 without issue -remember that he was castrated in his youth-.
For two centuries, the descendants of this miscegenation of races and cultures dominated, directly or indirectly, the government of the city and were always proud of their origins. Today, in addition to the Arma direct descendants of those Moriscos born in the Iberian Peninsula -about 10,000-, it is estimated that more than 500 words of the Songhai language come from the Spanish of the 16th century, and even some surnames such as García, Esteve or León are given in those parts. In recognition of this joint past, the Junta de Andalucía financed what is known as the Kati Fund , the manuscripts that Ali ben Ziyad al-Quti brought to Timbuktu after his exile from Al-Andalus in 1467, through a conservation and research center in Timbuktu that, after the war that Mali suffered in 2012, was practically dismantled. Ismael Diadié Haidara , patriarch of the Kati, managed to save most of that cultural legacy and distribute it between a village near Timbuktu, Bamako, the country's capital, and, since April 2012, at the headquarters of the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH) .
There was a kingdom in black Africa that spoke Spanish and was ruled by a Spanish eunuch.
Andalusian Library of Timbuktu