Note 163 — TEKRÚR.

Leo, pt. I. c. 11. Marmol (tom. I. c. 23, fol. 44) includes Gelofe (the country of the Wolofs), also within the range of the Zungay or Sungai language; but the origin of this mistake is perhaps not undiscoverable. He says (tom. III. fol. 22) that the people of Gualata or Ganata are commonly called Benais, and that they speak the Zungay language. Whence did the people of Gualata (Walata) obtain that name? Were they colonists from the capital of Málí? In the ‘True Historical Discovery of Muley Hamet’s Rising,’ it is said that “the grasshoppers (locusts) come into Barbary every seven years from the parts of Benie, or Genie, as the country people imagine.” Although the names Beni (Benin) and Guinea were often coupled together by old writers, yet it seems more natural to suppose that, in the passage here cited, the parts of Negroland nearest to Barbary were intended, and that by Benie, or Genie, we are to understand the country of Marmol’s Benais, or Jenni. But Marmol (tom. I. fol. 2 & 15) also places a people named Benais on the coast near the Senegal. In this, perhaps, he was guided by the Jesuit missionaries, who visited, from Cape Verde, a king of Bena (Ragguagli d’alcuni Missioni, 1615, p. 75); probably the Benay of Mollien. But the king of Bena was a Mandingo or Suso, and boasted of being superior to all other Farims (Jarric, tom. III. p. 411). Marmol appears to have confounded the Bena near the coast, with the Benai people of the interior, and thus to have made one language extend from the mouth of the Senegal to Houssa. Hence Moore, in his Travels in Africa, (1737), calls the Wolofe language the Zanguay.