Debate over Gannibal's place of birth with a black page, by Gustav Von Mardefeld. Gannibal would have been in his mid-twenties at the time of this painting, so he is not the black page depicted here. Gannibal's actual place of birth continues to be uncertain, and is subject to speculation by modern historians. Until recent scholarly field work, it was generally assumed that he originated in
Ethiopia. Chiefly Russian scholars for many years believed that he was from the vicinity of
Mereb Melash, a province in present-day
Eritrea. In a letter he wrote to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter, Gannibal stated that he was from the town of "Logon" However, the notion that Gannibal may have been born in Ethiopia holds little currency with the general Ethiopian population. It also erected its own statue of Pushkin and named a street after him in 2009.
Vladimir Nabokov cast doubt on Gannibal's ancestry, based on research findings during his work translating Pushkin's novel
Eugene Onegin. Nabokov disagreed with Anuchin's theory, stating that it was just as likely that Gannibal was referring to "the Lagona region of
equatorial Africa, south of
Lake Chad." Support for Anuchin's theory of Ethiopian birth declined after it was exposed as racially based, implying that "
hamitic" Ethiopian origins better explained Gannibal's success than "
negroid" origins. The
Beninese historian
Dieudonné Gnammankou, an expert on Russia, studied Russian, French and African sources and argued that Gannibal was indeed from
Logone-Birni and was most likely the son of a chief in the ancient sultanate. In 1995, Gnammankou asserted that the "Logon" Gannibal wrote about was actually Logone, capital of the old
Kotoko kingdom of Logone-Birni, now located in northern
Cameroon. He believed that the pattern of
slave trade around
Lake Chad made that region a more plausible likelihood for Gannibal's birthplace than
Gondar,
Ethiopia. Gnammankou's biography of Gannibal was translated into Russian, and was voted the best book on Pushkin at the 1999 Moscow Book Fair. Gnammankou's findings were in turn buttressed by the field work of Hugh Barnes. After consulting with the Sultan of Logone-Birni, Barnes found that an inscription on Gannibal's crest, which was hitherto undecipherable, corresponded with the term for "homeland" in the local
Kotoko language of central Africa. However, Frances Somers-Cocks, author of
The Moor of St Petersburg: In the Footsteps of a Black Russian, met the same sultan and received a different translation for FVMMO. She also suggested that FVMMO stands for the
Latin expression
Fortuna Vitam Meam Mutavit Omnino, which means "Fortune has changed my life entirely".
Honor at La Fère In November 2010, representatives from
Russia and
Estonia, the ambassador of
Cameroon, and the sultan of Logone-Birni went to
La Fère, France to unveil a
commemorative plaque honoring Abram Petrovich Gannibal as a graduate of La Fère's royal artillery academy. The academy, which closed in the 1990s, had been started by King
Louis XV shortly before Gannibal's enrollment there in 1720. The plaque declares that he was a graduate of the royal artillery academy of La Fère, and later became chief military engineer and general-in-chief of the
Imperial Russian Army. It also notes that Gannibal is the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet. Dieudonné Gnammankou, whose research into Gannibal's background was largely responsible for the ceremony at La Fère taking place, also served as the main speaker at a
symposium following the event. ==In popular culture==