Bruce S. Hall

The Question of 'Race' in the Pre-colonial Southern Sahara

One of the principle issues that divide people in the southern margins of the Sahara Desert is the issue of ‘race.’ Each of the countries that share this region, from Mauritania to Sudan, has experienced civil violence with racial overtones since achieving independence from colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. Todays crisis in Western Sudan is only the latest example. However, very little academic attention has been paid to the issue of ‘race’ in the region, in large part because southern Saharan racial discourses do not correspond directly to the idea of ‘race’ in the West. For the outsider, local racial distinctions are often difficult to discern because somatic difference is not the only, and certainly not the most important, basis for racial identities. In this article, I focus on the development of pre-colonial ideas about ‘race’ in the Hodh, Azawad, and Niger Bend, which today are in Northern Mali and Western Mauritania. The article examines the evolving relationship between North and West Africans along this Sahelian borderland using the writings of Arab travellers, local chroniclers, as well as several specific documents that address the issue of the legitimacy of enslavement of different West African groups. Using primarily the Arabic writings of the Kunta, a politically ascendant Arab group in the area, the paper explores the extent to which discourses of ‘race’ served growing nomadic power. My argument is that during the nineteenth century, honorable lineages and genealogies came to play an increasingly important role as ideological buttresses to struggles for power amongst nomadic groups and in legitimising domination over sedentary communities. ‘Race’ was a corollary of the heightened ideological importance of lineage.

How slaves used Islam: the letters of enslaved Muslim commercial agents in the nineteenth-century Niger bend and Central Sahara

Historians of slavery in Africa have long struggled to recover the voices of enslaved people. In this article, an unusual set of sources found in Timbuktu (Mali) reveals the existence of a stratum of literate, Muslim slaves who wrote and received letters written in Arabic. These letters make it possible to probe the Islamic rhetoric used by Muslim slaves and ask how enslaved people who adopted Islam understood their faith. Did Muslim slaves arrive at different interpretations of Islam than those Muslims who were free? Using the correspondence of two slaves who worked as agents in their masters commercial activities in the Niger Bend and Central Sahara during the second half of the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates the extent to which Muslim slaves used appeals to their own piety in attempting to carve out a certain amount of social autonomy. For these Muslim slaves, Islam could be made to serve both spiritual and practical ends. And yet, this did not require slaves to interpret Islam in ways that rejected the legitimacy of slavery.

On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (review)

Scott, who discovered that the emergence of coolie labor helped extend the plantation system and the institution of slavery beyond the period in which it should have ended earlier and with the termination of the African slave trade in the mid 1860s. Finally, her analysis balances the work of Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who demonstrated that although the coolies were treated like slaves, they were salaried workers. As a result, they assisted in the process that led to the use of free wage earners in the sugar industry by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, Yun failed to underline that Cuban officials and planters were initially dissatisfied with the quality of coolie laborers. This perception caused them to end the Asian trade while they sought to recruit other types of immigrant workers from Mexico, Spain, and the Canary Islands until 1853. Only when they failed to locate an alternate source of cheap labor did the Asian workers look attractive to the plantocracy. Yun also understated that the coolie trade and their subsequent treatment were engendered by the decline of the African slave trade. It was only after 1865 that a large number of coolies arrived. Their increased numbers and presence assisted sugar plantation owners in producing more sugar than any country in the world. Illuminating these workers’ daily work regime and relationship to the production of this commodity could have been insightful in explaining why the majority of Chinese coolies were treated like African slaves. Those planters who held their contracts were slave owners, and they employed 80 percent of all coolies in agricultural tasks alongside black slaves. Nonetheless, Yun’s book is essential for graduate students and scholars who study race, ethnicity, labor, and immigration in Latin America and the Caribbean. philip a. howard University of Houston