SOURCE: Dunn, Ross E. Foreword to Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, translated by Said Hamdun and Noël King, pp. ix-xxxii. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994.

In the following essay, Dunn comments on the cultural background of the places Ibn Battuta visited in Africa.

In 1325 ad the young legal scholar Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta set out from his native city of Tangier on the north coast of Morocco to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. “I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones,” he tells us in his celebrated Rihla, or Book of Travels. “I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer nor caravan whose party I might join.”¹ His departure may have been poignant, but his loneliness did not last long. Within a few days he was meeting all sorts of people on the road, and as he...