(L’islam au). L’islamisation au Togo s’est faite au début du XVIIIe siècle par des marchands itinérants et par l’installation de groupes de populations islamisées. Faible, la progression de l’Islam est cependant constante, et touche façon inégale les régions et les groupes ethniques. Le 27 septembre 1963, l’Islam togolais qu’aucune structure n’organisait auparavant, se dote d’une Union musulmane du Togo (UMT) qui lui insuffle une nouvelle dynamique en l’inscrivant dans le champ monopartidaire du Rassemblement du peuple togolais.
Kubafolo ou Bafilo (8° 40′ lat. N., 1° 30′ long. Est), chef-lieu de circonscription du Nord Togo, à 73 km. au Nord de Sokodé, qui doit son origine à une halte inopinée d’une colonne de guerriers gonja conduits par Mama, souverain de Pembi, au début du XIXe siècle et revenant d’une campagne militaire contre Djongou. Ils firent halte à Séméré (actuelle République populaire du Bénin) où un groupe s’installa.
The port city of Cotonou is the major urban centre and economic hub of the West African Republic of Benin (known as Dahomey until 1975), with 679,012 inhabitants in 2013 (14.2 percent were Muslim in 2002). Cotonou was a fishing settlement, tributary to the Danxome (the Fon etymon of Dahomey) kingdom (c. 1600–1894) before the gradual encroachment of the French; it was overshadowed by the older Porto-Novo, the colonial and now political capital, twenty-four kilometres to the east. From the 1850s throu…
Northern and southern Benin (formerly Dahomey), which lie in different economic and cultural areas, have been traversed since early times by merchants and by the alfas (a local term for Islamic scholar) who accompanied them and introduced Islam. Islam arrived in the north beginning in the tenth/sixteenth century, or at the end of the eighth/fourteenth, but was not established permanently along the coast until the nineteenth century. Muslim merchants from the north are first mentioned, in 1116/1704, by the Chevalier des …
Kubafolo or Bafilo, the centre of the administrative region of Northern Togo, situated in lat. 8° 40′ N. and long, 1′ 30’ E., 73 km. north of Sokodé. It owes its origin to the unforeseen halting of a column of Gonja warriors led by Mama, ruler of Pembi, and which was returning from a campaign against Djougou at the beginning of the 19th century. They stopped at Séméré (now in the People’s Republic of Benin), and a group settled there. The warriors were tired by a long march through the mountain regions, but did not dare to ask their chief to stop; however, the latter’s horse stopped to urinate, and the warriors seized the opportunity to halt. Finding the spot pleasant, they set up an encampment which they named Gobangafol (from banga “horse” and mbofol “urine”). These Gouang warriors settling there married Tern women and adopted the Tern language. The traditions vary concerning this expedition; according to Goody, it was probably commanded by Soumaïla Ndewura Jakpa, king of Pembi, and according to others, by Mama, with Séméré and Bafilo being founded by rebellious dissidents rather than by disciplined soldiers.
Togo, Islam in the West African Republic of Togo. The Islamisation of what is now the Republic of Togo dates from the beginning of the 18th century, through the activities of traders and the settlement of Islamised population groups. Islam has been weak there, but has constantly progressed, whilst affecting different regions and groups in a variable manner. On 27 September 1963, what had been previously completely unstructured saw the formation of the Muslim Union of Togo (UMT), breathing into its structure a new dynamic as part of the one-party state of the Rassemblement du peuple togolais.
Kabou, a locality in Togo (9° 25′N., 0° 50′E.), 24 km. to the north of Bassari, an important market whose prosperity, in pre-colonial times, was based partly on the barter of crude iron given to the Kabre iron-smiths of Lama-Kara in exchange for slaves, and partly on its function as a halting place on the kolacaravan routes. The presence in Kabou of Muslim outsiders (particularly Ḥawsa and D̲j̲erma) was therefore not unusual.
Le Dahomey, couloir de 670 kilomètres de long sur 200 de large, coïncé entre le Togo et l’immense Nigeria, est un des pays du golfe de Guinée les plus anciennement connus.
La côte est basse, bordée de lagunes, tandis que la zone centrale est formée de plateaux et de monts isolés; la partie septentrionale, enfin, est plus élevée, prise en écharpe par les monts de l’Atacora, culminant jusqu’aux environs de 800 mètres. Dans le Sud particulièrement, l’hygrométrie est forte et la température à peu près constante, bien qu’il y ait double saison des pluies et double saison sèche.
La population du D…
Si l’Université de Lomé, auparavant sous l’emprise du parti unique du Rassemblement du peuple togolais, est souvent perçue comme un haut lieu de la contestation parfois violente du pouvoir depuis le tournant des années 1990, elle est aussi caractérisée par une multiplication d’associations religieuses de différentes confessions. Cette communication propose de retracer l’histoire du militantisme islamique dans cet établissement d’enseignement supérieur laïc depuis la création de la Jeunesse estudiantine islamique de l’Université du Bénin dans les années 1980. L’engagement militant sur ce campus reflète, d’une part, les mutations plus larges qui ont caractérisé l’islam au Togo au cours des dernières décennies, dont le rôle joué par cette élite musulmane dans les débats politiques. D’autre part, il met en relief les défis auxquels font face les jeunes étudiant.e.s musulman.e.s en contexte minoritaire et autoritaire, qui sont exacerbés par la méfiance de l’État envers l’islam "politique" et les craintes plus récentes de l’extension du djihadisme aux pays côtiers du Golfe de Guinée.
Despite the growing popularity of digital humanities, a limited number of initiatives related to Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa have attempted to mobilize digital tools to analyze and disseminate research data. Launched in 2021, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection (https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf/) is an open-access digital database containing more than 2,700 archival materials, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, photographs and bibliographical references related to Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso. “Digital exhibits” with interactive timelines, which include a selection of documents from the database, contextual information for approaching this material and a selective bibliography, serve as entry points for the larger collection. This project is one of the first digital humanities initiatives to be published under a new University of Florida Libraries program, LibraryPress@UF. This program, an imprint of the Libraries and the University of Florida Press, seeks to develop public scholarship across formats that extend and complement the work of traditional academic publishing. Alongside its value as a scholarly and educational resource, Islam Burkina Faso Collection has benefited LibraryPress as a case study to explore and refine three major areas: (1) publishing workflows and human resources, including evaluation of digital publications and multi-expert collaboration; (2) technical infrastructure and expertise, including defining services for web hosting and design; and (3) sustainability, including feasible expectations for maintenance and archiving. Throughout all of these areas, the project has modeled an approach to digital scholarship and library publishing that balances experimentation and ambition with realistic goals and an eye toward replicability in future work.
Despite the growing popularity of digital humanities, a limited number of initiatives related to Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa have attempted to mobilize digital tools to analyze and disseminate research data. Launched in 2021, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection (https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf/) is an open-access digital database published by the LibraryPress@UF, which contains more than 3,100 archival materials, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, photographs and bibliographical references related to Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso. “Digital exhibits” with interactive timelines, which include a selection of documents from the database, contextual information for approaching this material and a selective bibliography, serve as entry points for the larger collection. In the medium to long term, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection will be part of a larger collaborative digital database on Islam in West Africa, which will include material that Frédérick Madore has already digitized as part of his research on Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Togo.
