Tebu/Mandara short sword?

[Rumpel]

...or tourist dreck?

I picked this up in Fez a few months ago. It was literally free- the shopkeeper threw it in with some calligraphic zellij tiles I'd spent hours haggling over- so the harsh intrusion of reality won't upset me too much...

It doesn't have the sharply-pointed tip of 'other' Tebu daggers I've seen (the shopkeeper claimed it was Tuareg, btw, but that's probably northern Moroccan for everything vaguely Sahelian/sub-Saharan). In fact, it has a distinctly squared off blunt 'tip', and seems to correspond in size exactly with the 'welded' mid-point of this sword: http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...highlight=tebu

Coincidence, quite probably. But I thought it worth throwing into the mix.

Finally, I don't think the conical ferrule on the sheath belongs to it: the shopkeeper scrabbled around in a biscuit tin for it, and it took some violence on his part to bash it on.