Arma people

Arma
Total population
	Approximately 20,000
Regions with significant populations
	Middle Mandé, Moroccan

The Arma people are an ethnic group of the middle

Arabic: الرماة) "fusiliers".^[1]

The Arma ethnicity is distinct from (but sometimes confused with) the 3.6 million Zarma people of western Niger, who predate the Moroccan invasion and speak the Zarma language, also a member of the Songhay languages.

As of 1986, there were some 20,000 self-identified Arma in Mali, mostly around Timbuktu, the middle Niger bend and the Inner Niger Delta.^{[citation needed]}

Songhai expedition and aftermath

The

Moroccan, Morisco refugees and European renegades . They were armed with European-style arquebuses. After the destruction of the Songhai Empire in 1591, the Moroccans settled into Djenné, Gao, Timbuktu and the larger towns of the Niger River bend . Never able to exert control outside their large fortifications, within a decade the expedition's leaders were abandoned by Morocco . In cities like Timbuktu, the men of the 1591 expedition intermarried with the Songhai, became small scale independent rulers, and some of their descendants came to be identified as minor dynasties of their own right . By the end of the 17th century, Bambara, Tuareg, Fula

and other forces came to control empires and city-states in the region, leaving the Arma as a mere ethnicity.

Notes

^ N. Levtzion, "North-West Africa: from the Maghrib to the fringes of the forest" in: The Cambridge history of Africa, Volume 4 : c.1600-c.1790, Ed. Cambridge University Press (1975), pp.154-155

References

Samuel Decalo. Historical Dictionary of Niger. Scarecrow Press, London and New Jersey (1979).
ISBN 0-8108-1229-0

James Stuart Olson. The Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary. "Arma", p. 37. Greenwood Press (1996)
ISBN 0-313-27918-7

Michel Aitbol. Tombouctou et les Arma de la conquête marocaine du Soudan nigérien en 1591 à l'hégémonie de l'empire peul du Macina en 1833. Paris, (1979).

Albrecht Hofheinz. Goths in the Lands of the Blacks. New Arabic manuscript finds from Timbuktu and their significance for the historiography of the Niger Bend . (2001)
ISBN 90-04-11207-3
.

External links

I Congreso Internacional sobre los Arma. Al-Andalus, Andalucía y España en Tombuctú y la frontera subsahariana (s. XVI-XXI). Universidad de Jaén (Spain), 19–20 February 2004.