ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Koran quotations are from the Penguin Classics translation by N. J. Dawood. The Melville lines at the head of Chapter IV come from "The House-top: A Night Piece," composed during the Draft Riots of July 1863 in New York City, when George F. Opdyke was mayor. The epigraph for Chapter VII is taken from an address given by Professor el-Calamawy at a conference on "Arab and American Cultures" that she and I attended in Washington in September of 1976.

    Professors George N. Atiyeh of The Library of Congress, G. Wesley Johnson of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Carl R. Proffer of the University of Michigan have generously responded to requests for information. My African history derived from books by Basil Davidson, Robert W. July, E. Jefferson Murphy, Olivia Vlahos, J. W. Nyakatura, Alfred Guillaume, Paul Fordham, Colin Turnbull, Alan Moorehead, Leda Farrant, Jacques Berque, Roland Oliver, and J. D. Fage. For geography, I used the National Geographic magazine, children's books, Beau Geste, and travellers' accounts from Mungo Park to Evelyn Waugh, from Rene Caillie to John Gunther. Two out-of-the-way volumes of especial value were The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought, edited by Michael H. Glantz, and Islam in West Africa, by J. Spencer Trimingham. Thurston Clarke's The Last Caravan, a factual account of the Nigerien Tuareg during the 1968-74 drought, was published while I was retyping my manuscript, too late for me to benefit from more than a few details of its informational wealth. My wife, Martha, helped with the typing and, for the year in which she was this novel's sole reader, beautifully smiled upon it. Not that she, or any of the above, are responsible for irregularities in my engineering of The Coup.

    J. U.