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In the mid-18th century, at the royal court of Gondar, the scriptorium of King Iyo’ās (1755-1769) imported sheets of paper to make a lectionary (senkesar) in three volumes. Today, one volume remains in Addis Ababa at the Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency, Department of Manuscripts, under the serial number 197. It is the only known Ethiopian Christian manuscript on paper. In Ethiopia, Christians copied their manuscripts exclusively on parchment. This innovative and ambitious project met the most sophisticated Ethiopian standards while adapting the codicological norms to the requirements of this new medium. Craftsmen who knew how to work on paper, foreigners or Ethiopians trained by foreigners, made this volume. The status of this manuscript was high enough to be part of the imperial library at the turn of the twentieth century and then included in the national heritage collection.

In 1347, the western and Mediterranean parts of the Old World recorded the first outbreaks of a returning mortal disease that would make its presence felt over several centuries. Known today as the Second Plague Pandemic—a zoonosis due to the bacterium Yersinia pestis—it scythed between a third and half of the population without regard for wealth or status. It deeply transformed all facets of societies, ignited fears, violence, and pogroms, tested the flexibility of religions, hierarchies, and traditions, and excited ambitions. Although the plague is commonly described as a pandemic, historical knowledge about the initial Black Death and the many recurrent waves of the disease is largely restricted to Western Europe and the Mediterranean world, where the literate elite left an impressive documentary record that served as resource to the long-lasting and flourishing heuristic tradition of Plague Studies. If, as suggested by Monica Green, the concept of ‘pandemic’ is to be taken seriously, we must consider the many excluded parts of the Old World, and especially Africa, in our plague narratives. We must recognize that these societies that did not practise ‘the reduction of speech to graphic forms’—to use the expression coined by Jack Goody—also could have experienced the brutal mortality of the plague and its radical transformative power, while producing no organized and specific, long-lasting traces. By extension, we must also recognize that all literate societies that had in common the art of writing did not practise this art in the same way and may not have produced identical categories of documentary records. Cultural differences affect the nature of the documentary archive, as illustrated by literate practices in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia. The invisibility or limited visibility of the plague in the documentary record is, therefore, a challenge for historians and a disguised invitation to accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This paper is my attempt to resist this temptation, to challenge the quasi-absence of interest in the plague problem in the historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to lay out the foundation of a research strategy that will be multi-disciplinary and comparative. The plague problem is not a footnote to African history. If the plague impacted African societies as it did in documented parts of the Old World, we must have missed or misread fundamental processes of change it entailed. Would we understand and interpret the history of Western Europe or the Mediterranean as we do if we ignored that the plague had occurred? Here, I do not solve the plague conundrum in Sub-Saharan Africa; rather, I build on the persuasive arguments made by other contributors to this special issue about the presence of plague in different parts of Africa before the 19th century. My purpose is to propose multiple, critical, and cumulative—but far from exhaustive—pathways to reading and rereading the traditional and less traditional sources of African history in the light of the possibility of societal crises related to plague. Besides presenting fragments of evidence, this paper also serves as an introduction to three groundbreaking papers exploring the archaeological, documentary, and genomic sources of the disease in the African past.

The Mäṣḥafä Seddät (“Book of Persecution”) is the Christian version of the description of the wars initiated by Imām Aḥmad from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn sultanate against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia between the 1520’s and the year 1543. In the first half of the eighteenth century, this short text in ge‘ez was inserted into the text of the so-called “short chronicles”. But the Mäṣḥafä Seddät is independently known in three Christian manuscripts and was probably written at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century, by an ecclesiastic of a monastery of Enfrāz in Bagémder. This paper proposes the hypothesis that to compose his text, the author had access to and was largely inspired by a copy of the Arabic text of the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (“The Conquest of Abyssinia”), the Islamic account of the wars of imām Aḥmad written in Harar in the middle of the sixteenth century by a Muslim scholar. This possible case of contact between a Muslim text from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn and a Christian author from the highlands provides an opportunity to question the commonly accepted separation between the Islamic and the Christian manuscripts produced in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century.

Recent researches on plague invite scholars to enlarge the chronology and the geography of the Black Death. If, according to the commonly admitted chronology, the Black Death occurred in Western Europe from 1347 to 1350, it is now evident that outbreaks of the Black Death occurred in the Near and Middle East long after the mid-14th century. In Egypt, historical sources show outbreaks of the plague during the 15th century, with regular waves in 1403, 1407, 1430, 1460, and later. Many Ethiopian written sources refer to pandemics shaking the kingdom and causing thousands of deaths. Chronicles and lives of Saints abound in scattered notations on the need to bury the victims of these pandemics with a particular process. The Saints embody figures of miraculous healing, and the reading during Mass services of hagiographic texts dedicated to these Saints provided hope to the victims of the pandemics. On the basis of these testimonies, however, it is often impossible to identify what disease was the cause of the pandemic. The synchrony between pandemics observed in Egypt and those observed in Ethiopia, as well as the diplomatic, commercial, and religious links between Ethiopia and Egypt, permit us to interpret some of the pandemics described in the Ethiopian sources as plague pandemics. After a presentation of Ethiopian sources dealing with pandemics from the 13th to the 15th century, the questions of the vocabulary used to designate epidemics, and the identification of the diseases involved, the paper then provides an overview of plague outbreaks in regions neighbouring Ethiopia, particularly in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, combined with an examination of the Horn of Africa’s connections with these regions. The last section focuses on social responses to epidemics in Ethiopia in an attempt to identify and singularize them, according to the attitudes adopted. The introduction of the commemoration of Saint Roch in the Ethiopian synaxary and in the collections of Ethiopian magical prayers is finally resolving the doubt about the likelihood of a plague epidemic in Ethiopia.