In the mid eighteenth century, the Saharan interior of West Africa was still unknown.
Where coastal maps were crowded with names celebrating European knowledge, the interior
continued to be a collage of pictures and vague kingdoms imaged in fancy calligraphy. As
Europeans increasingly encountered the peoples of this region, the knowledge they produced of
the unknown had to be articulated in the language of the ‘known’. What mattered was the
conceptual framework and the literary traditions which made this possible. The Sahara was a real
physical place; Saharans were real people. But what came to be actually mapped, cartographically
and textually, was no less an image than the pictures and drawings of earlier times.
What came to be ‘mapped’ in the minds of late 18th and 19th century readers drew from and built
upon what they thought they already understood.1 As explorers and shipwrecked-sailors added
the Sahara to the known world(s), literally ‘filling in the map’, they were drawn into existing
literary and conceptual paradigms. The Sahara was in Africa. One of the principal activities of its
people, trans-Saharan commerce, tied Saharans to sub-Saharan, “black” Africa. Yet everything
about Saharan space – the flora, fauna, heat, and sand, and everything about its peoples – their
Islamic religion, flowing dress, Arabic-based languages and Arab genealogies, was Middle
Eastern or ‘oriental’. The process of ‘knowing’ the Sahara made of it an imagined contact zone
(in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense of the concept) in which Africa and the Orient met in the context of
their respective literary traditions.2 Superimposed on these were concerns particular to the author
and the audience. Shipwrecked captives sought refuge in a long tradition of survival literature; 3
other travelers, generally in the employ of a government or geographical society, were conscious
of contemporary issues. In the late eighteenth- and the nineteenth-centuries, European powers
pushed by anti-slavery movements in England were growing more and more ‘abolitionist’ in their
rhetoric, if not their policies. Literature dealing with regions where slave trading and slavery
existed, had a moral obligation to add ‘knowledge’ to the public commentary and imagination.
Consequently, imaging needs to be understood both as a function of merging cultural literary
traditions and as a response to contemporary abolitionist rhetoric. It is in this conceptual arena
that we will locate the origins of the trans-Saharan slave trade.
Emergent Discourses
Abolitionism and the Orient
In his influential 1839 publication The African Slave Trade (the sequel, Its Remedy appeared in
1840), Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton introduced the trans-Saharan slave trade to the British public.4
By situating descriptions of slave acquisitions by Saharans in the context of the horrors of
Atlantic slaving practices, and by presenting the desert crossing with its high mortality rates as
comparable to the infamous Atlantic ‘middle passage’, Buxton inserted the Saharan slave-trade
experience firmly within the Atlantic, abolitionist discourse.5 The title African slave trade was
instrumental in establishing the language and imaging already firmly associated with the Atlantic
trade as the discourse within which all slave trades out of Africa would be understood.6 But in his
imaging the Saharan trade, Buxton also evoked “Mohamedan towns” like Timbuktu and Kano as
being nothing less than “large warehouses where the stores of human merchandise are kept”, the
traders variously as “barbarians”, “Arab carriers”, “cruel Moors” and “merciless”, and the slaves
as mostly women and children, invariably being ‘cruelly’ treated. Male slaves were destined for
Middle Eastern armies.7 In so doing, he drew on the older ‘orientalist’ discourse rooted in the
Islamic, ‘despotic’ empire of the Ottomans and the romanticized views of slavery and society
attached to this part of the world. In simultaneously superimposing the abolitionist and the
orientalist discourses on the Sahara, Buxton effectively created a new ‘reality’ that resonated with
his audiences, public and political, because it was rooted in language and images they understood
and accepted. Moreover, by conflating the African and the Oriental, he created an imaginary
space that somehow transcended the Sahara itself, without corresponding in any precise way to
the geography of either ‘Africa’ or the ‘Orient’ as generally understood. Hence, the trans-Saharan
2
slave trade was part of the western (Atlantic), the ‘African’, and the eastern (Oriental)
experiences at one and the same time.
As Edward Said has pointed out, Christian Europe’s long relationship with the mysterious ‘East’
was from the outset shaped by its conflict with Islam and its fear of the powerful ‘Ottoman
peril’.8 This continued to play into Europe’s vision of itself in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, even as the quest for ‘the other’ became more nuanced and pervasive, and Europe’s
interests became more imperial. A generalized hostility to Islam and Muslims was articulated in
stories portraying ‘the orient’ as lasciviously sensual, sexually depraved, ruthlessly despotic and
inherently violent and cruel. This ‘orient’ came to be defined as any place that was Islamic–
North Africa (and especially Egypt), the central Ottoman territories, Persia, even India. The
harem with its eunuch guards as painted, poeticized and narrated epitomized the exotic
personality of the east.9 Travelers’ accounts invariably gave attention to this aspect of the ‘other’,
sustaining Europe’s collective imagination about what one should expect to see. In theory, a
traveler traveled in order to learn; in fact a pre-determined discourse limited what the nineteenthcentury Western observer saw in the East: he (and increasingly she), had already made the
journey before setting foot outside of Europe.10 Roxann Wheeler argues that male travelers to this
‘orient’ were sources for the initial ideas and images about Africa. “Their observations were
avidly read” she goes on to say, “and appeared wholesale in compendious editions of travel
narratives throughout the [eighteenth] century as well as in magazines. Theologians, natural
philosophers and other men of letters also included and refined upon these observations to
illustrate their particular speculations.”11
This recognition of ‘the expected’ was widely reflected in contemporary literature. Said’s
concept of orientalism merged with romanticism and the possibility of adventure. India was such
as arena for the imaginations of nineteenth-century British poets. Sir Thomas Moore, writing of
3
Mughal princes, was said to have known and represented more about the “real” India from
reading travel accounts than if he had been “riding on the back of a camel” through the land. His
poems were praised for having the quality of historical “truth”, and for being the “finest
orientalism literature so far…”. Sir Walter Scott’s India was characterized by the anticipated
harems, Muslim holy men, human sacrifice and despotic Sultans, who “thought nothing of
decapitation to terrify a slavish nation”.12 In the African context, the best studied cross between
popular culture, travel literature and romantic adventurism is the 18th century account of
Scotsman, Mungo Park.13 Ashton Nichols has argued that Park’s attitudes towards Muslims were
a notable exception to his otherwise romanticized Africa, and that his “Moors” “parallel other
excessive Romantic accounts of the East”, like those of Moore and Scott.14 He cites the following
description as evidence of Park’s “Rabid anti-Moslem bias”:
“I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them [Moors], a disposition
toward cruelty, and low cunning; and I could never contemplate their physiognomy,
without feeling a sensible uneasiness. From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger
would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence
of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the Negro
villages”. 15
In fact, Park repeatedly made much of the “fanatic” Moors’ proclivity to murder, theft and
cruelty, as well as to their hatred of Christians and their belief in the superiority of Islam.
Invoking almost every ‘orientalist’ stereotype of the day, Park continued:
“It is impossible for me to describe the behaviour of a people who study mischief as a
science and exult in the miseries and misfortunes of their fellow creatures. It is sufficient
to observe that the rudeness, ferocity and fanaticism, which distinguish the Moors from
4
the rest of mankind, found here a proper subject whereon to exercise their propensities. I
was a stranger, I was unprotected, and I was a Christian; each of these circumstances is
sufficient to drive every spark of humanity from the heart of a Moor…. The Moors are
rigid Mahomedans, and possess, with the bigotry and superstition, all the intolerance of
their sect. …Cut off from all intercourse with civilized nations,… they are at once the
vainest and proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted, ferocious, and intolerant of all the
nations on the earth – combining in their character, the blind superstition of the Negro
with the savage cruelty and treachery of the Arab.[last emphasis mine]”.16
A few years later, Park’s French counterpart, Rene Caillié echoed many of the same sentiments.
‘His’ Moors were variously cruel, insensible, violent and barbarous; he chose to travel disguised
as a Muslim, a reiteration of his fear that he would be killed if known to be Christian. 17 The
important and respected Clapperton-Denham mission through the Sahara in the 1820s18 reiterated
more of the same. The issue of traveling in ‘Muslim disguise’ was much debated a prior to their
trip and in the end, they had been forced to be ‘openly European’.19 Adu Boahen, summarizing
contemporary response to their mission, attached considerable importance to the fact that it
“buried the myth that the Muslim had an instinctive hatred for the Christian and that a ‘cruel
death’ awaited any person who went beyond Fezzan [northern Sahara] undisguised”.20 However,
in acknowledging that these Muslim ‘African’ rulers (the Sultans of Bornu and Sokoto) were
reasonable, religious men, respecting all who prayed to one God, Clapperton and Denham
pointedly distanced them from the nameless oriental ‘Moors’ and ‘Arabs’ who crossed the desert
to buy slaves (a point I will return to below).21 Moreover, the respite from stereotyping was short
lived. When Clapperton succumbed to illness and died while under the protection of the Sultan of
Sokoto, it was readily believed that this behaviour was typical of a Muslim, cunning and
untrustworthy. Following the same reasoning and buttressed by the anti-Arab prejudice of the
local British Consul-General in Tripoli, Colonol Hamer Warrington, the story that the Pasha of
5
Triopoli had arranged for the murder of the British explorer Richard Laing and then stolen his
papers, went unquestioned in London.22 Laing’s personal correspondence also fed the discourse
governing discussion of the Sahara and North Africa. He wrote of an important tribe as “an
extensive Arab tribe where [sic] life is devoted to hunting, rapine and war and [who] from this
constant vigilance are the terror of travelers” (1825).23 Put succinctly, at this point the Sahara and
its peoples had been appropriated by not only by personal prejudices but by an established
orientalist discourse that allowed for little innovation.
The Making of “The African” Slave Trade
The founding of the African Association in 1788 was about ‘casting light upon darkness’ in the
British national interest: ‘casting light’ meant exploration and mapping, and national interest
meant wealth. The perception of Africa that drew Park and others into the interior was articulated
by the Association committee member who wrote of Timbuktu: “Gold is there so plentiful, as to
adorn even the slaves… If we could get our manufactures into that country we should soon have
gold enough”.24 Those who argue that this turn-of-the-century exploration was not yet an arm of
the abolitionist movement are probably correct.25 That said, however, contemporary abolitionists
were extremely active. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787, and
from that time, they lobbied effectively for a political ending to the slave trade. Little that was
written about Africa did not have an impact on this debate and in turn, the debate shaped closely
what was written.
“Tracts, reprints, abridgments by prominent abolitionists were printed in the thousands,
inevitably encouraging others to write supporting pieces in newspapers and magazines.
… Indeed slavery and the slave trade became something of a literary genre, attracting the
most talented (and talentless) of the late eighteenth century poets and novelists. …The
6
anti-slavery writers created a pseudo-African to dwell in a pseudo Africa. Counter to the
‘beastly savage’ of the slavers was the ‘noble savage’ of the anti-slavery romances”.26
If “abolitionist literature was being produced and consumed on an unprecedented scale”27, so
too was its iconography.28 In 1787, the new abolitionist Society approved a medallion designed
by Josiah Wedgwood that is still today used to evoke the cause, namely a black man on bended
knees, raising hands and eyes in prayer, with the caption “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” This
medallion, widely produced and distributed,29 underscored the Christian base of the abolitionist
movement. The argument emphasized that the Africans being enslaved could be ‘saved’ and that
as a Christian nation, Britain had to be true to its own national ‘soul’ and allow such people to
find their way to God. Slavery as it was being practiced in the British West Indies was said to
deny slaves the possibility of freedom and redemption, as well as the right to own property and
access the law. It was specifically this slavery, not slavery in general, that the abolitionists
targeted. Indeed, early debates involved actual defense of Hebrew slavery and African (domestic)
slavery as being intrinsically different, as not being permanent (one allowing for manumission,
the other for community/familial absorption).30 In the initial stages, the movement resolved first
to end the supply of slaves; hence came the second image publicized in July 1799, the drawings
of the slave ship Brookes. This diagram showing the placement of slaves ‘packed in’ for the
Middle Passage became an immediate and stunning piece of anti-slave trade propaganda,
reproduced on posters and distributed widely in both Britain and France. 31
The campaign was effective in Britain, bringing about the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
Immediately following, attention turned to promoting similar action on the part of foreign
powers. By the 1820s it was clear that the treaties and diplomacy had not succeeded in reducing
the Atlantic trade; on the contrary, it appeared to be growing. For many abolitionists, it seemed
the only way slavery could be brought to an end was by out-right abolition. Just as initial efforts
7
had succeeded by raising public awareness with stories of the horrors of the trade, the continuing
campaign also utilized all forms of printed publicity, bolstered by an active schedule of local
lectures. The public played its role in petitioning members of Parliament. Indeed, many members
(like Sir Buxton) were themselves leading advocates of abolition. Buxton’s publication, the
second part of which dealt with the ‘remedy to the slave trade’ argued that the most effective way
to end the ‘illegal’ trade in humans was to replace it with ‘legitimate’ commerce in produce.
Africa was to be come both producer (of raw materials) and consumer (of British-manufactured
goods); the thousands of former slaves were to be the wage-workers who would do both, produce
and consume. 32
What needs underscoring, for there is nothing here that is not well-known, is the extent to which
the whole 19th century discourse continued to be shaped by these forces – the Atlantic slave trade
and attempts to end it. Even Clapperton and Denham’s identification of a specifically “Saharan”
slave trade can only be understood in this context. The explorers’ concerns were not abolitionist
initially. They were interested in promoting trade with the ‘wealthy’ interior of Africa (consistent
with earlier goals) and became convinced that the region’s slave-producing raids were counterproductive. They became converts to abolition and active participants in supplying accounts of
the traffic, complete with horrors, in order to support recommendations for its suppression.
Clapperton tried to convince Ahmadu Bello of Sokoto that the British could replace the ‘slave
dealing Arabs’ if he would agree to trade in some other commodity. 33
Arabs and Mohammedan Slavery
Although Buxton would soon subsume the ‘Saharan’ to the “African” trade, Clapperton and
Denham’s description of a desert-based ‘Arab trade’ dovetailed with a ‘dialogue’ on slavery and
abolition with the Ottomans beginning in the mid-1830s34. Ehud Toledano has argued that initial
attempts to discuss slavery with the Porte proved pointless because two different value systems
8
were operating. He might better have said that the British were applying a very particular concept
derived from their own construction of Atlantic slavery. 35 The results of this impasse were
twofold. First, continuing to operate in the dichotomized ideological straightjacket fashioned by
the Christian abolitionists, Britain responded by creating ‘Mohammedan’ slavery in the image of
its conceptions of Hebrew and African slavery. Central to “the peculiar nature of the institution
in the ‘East’” as it was referred to in an 1840 report, were possibilities open to slaves for social
elevation (the reference being to the wide range of royal and administrative posts occupied by
‘slaves’)36 and most importantly, the role played by women – especially harems.37 To attempt to
abolish this slavery, so different from the one abolitionists were targeting in the West Indies,
would be to invite major social upheaval. As one British official explained in 1869: “As long as
the detestable social system which is part of the Mohemmedan religion continues, female slavery
must remain in connection with it. … The difficulty of dispensing with female slaves in the
Harems necessarily existing in Mohemmedan countries, appears… to make it impossible to
sweep the atrocious institution away. [my emphasis]”38 Western fascination with the harem was a
long-standing element of orientalist literature and art; that it came into play in constructing the
very nature of Islamic slavery is not surprising. What is significant here is that something called
‘Islamic slavery’ was created by the West, for the West, in contra-distinction to ‘real’ (understood
New World) slavery. From here associations were then abstracted between the ‘Mohammedian’
religion, the countries where this religion was practiced and the presence of this ‘peculiar’
institution.
The second outcome of the failure to establish dialogue on the subject of ‘slavery’ was the
decision to refocus on slave trafficking; attention returned to Africa and the trans-Saharan trade.
Britain’s obsession with slave treatment in the Atlantic commerce conditioned much of the
discussion,39 but the dominant discourse derived from the process of ‘othering’.40 Toledano
argues that what occurred in the nineteenth century was “a very specific response by Western
9
elites, in given historical circumstances, to the kind of slavery practiced in the Americas…” He
warns scholars of the danger of “[falling] into the fallacy of ‘imaging the ‘Other’.. as an
‘imperfect –self’….Abolitionism is not a universally ‘natural’ reaction to slavery”. 41 But many
contemporary writers, scholars and leaders accepted to engage with the discourse constructed for
them by the West. Even within the Ottoman heartland, reformist officials supported the
suppression of the trade “in much the same discourse as the British and French. … In almost all
cases, one can observe a fascinating cultural translation of Western-phrased opposition to slaves
into Ottoman, indeed Islamic terms”.42 In 1881 and 1891, books were written in Morocco and
Egypt (respectively) as responses to Western claims that Islam condoned the evils of slavery and
the slave trade. Each argued, in this context, that Islam’s attitude to slavery had to be understood
as an historical process, one that first mitigated against inhumane treatment of enslaved heathens
and ultimately, worked to end slaving and slavery altogether.43 The 1891 publication was by a
French-educated Egyptian; it was published first in French, then immediately translated into both
Arabic and Turkish for widespread distribution. It was hotly debated. The ‘West’ had effectively
defined and appropriated what was to be debated and how -- even within Ottoman and North
African intellectual and literary circles.44
The trade in slaves into Ottoman territories also drew abolitionists’ attention to north-African
trans-Saharan termini. Buxton’s descriptions of mercilessly cruel ‘Moors’ dragging women and
children across the desert sands, indifferent to their sufferings, spurred the Anti-Slavery Society
(formed in 1823)45 to new activity. The ‘anti-Arab’ Consul-General Warrington in Tripoli was
entrusted with inducing the “Moorish Chiefs to give up themselves and to prevent other persons
from continuing the practice of procuring slaves for exportation from Tripoli to the Levant”.46
James Richardson was sent to the Moroccan Sultan in 1843 with the express purpose of
encouraging ‘legitimate commerce’ and thereby “[destroying] the horrible and revolting trade in
slaves, …thus pav[ing] the way for the diffusion of Christianity among a benighted people.” 47
10
The introduction to his published narrative rooted the abolitionist cause firmly in the orientalist
discourse prevalent at the time:
“Why should we respect… any community of Mohametans? Have we effaced from our
memory their treachery and inhuman cruelty in India; their utter worthlessness in Turkey.
… Civilisation cries aloud for retribution on a race whose religion teaches them to regard
us as ‘dogs’. … We should hunt them out of the fair lands they occupy and force them
back on the deserts which [sic] vomited them forth on our ancestors ten centuries ago”. 48
Richardson returned to travel in the Sahara in 1845-1846, again at the behest of the abolitionists.
His copious, “highly coloured reports about the volume and mortality involved in the [slave]
traffic… were given wide publicity in England by the Anti-Slavery society”, producing effects
similar to Buxton’s earlier efforts.49
From the 1840s through the 1880s, the “attack” on the Saharan trade was fought from Tripoli
and Morocco, as well as Ottoman Turkey.50 Boahen’s seminal study of the British role in the
Sahara chronicles the history of reports solicited from various Consuls about the horrors of the
‘desert passage’ (including those provided by vice-consuls positioned in Murzouk and Ghadames
for this purpose)51; these reports were destined for the British Ambassador and the anti-slave
trade campaign in Constantinople.52 Abolitionism encompassed all who traveled to the Sahara.
Even one of the most respected sources of ‘scientific’(meaning objective) information, explorer
Heinrich Barth (1857-1858), became converted to the cause while in Africa. He advocated for
some form of colonization (not unlike Buxton) as part of the ‘remedy’ to the trade.53 The
Moroccan Sultan refused to engage in discussions of limiting the traffic54 and in the 1880s, the
Anti Slavery Society (with the assistance of its in-house publication, the Anti-Slavery Reporter)
brought Morocco into the European limelight and kept it there. “Sensational and often garbled
11
accounts of ill treatment of individual slaves appeared in local foreign presses and were reported
in European newspapers….”. Reports of hawking slaves in the streets, stealing young children
from their mothers and castrating boys soon generated Anti-Slavery Society commissions to seek
out even more information that could be used to force Parliament to take action. That the
president of the society was also a Member of Parliament in 1883-1884 was useful.55 Local
consuls were in no way agreed on the ‘true’ nature of the situation. While the Consul in Tangiers
thought slaves were better off than poor peasants in hard times, and concubines (in harems) were
comparable to poor girls in Europe forced to sell themselves, the one in Mazagan fed the
abolitionists rhetoric enthusiastically. Arguing that slaves in general were “invariably badly
treated”, he noted that concubines in particular suffered “the most degrading treatment that can be
conceived. Imagine unprotected young females some of whom are handsome, in the hands of
savage barbarians, who have virtually the power of life and death over their victims, for no
inquiries are ever made into the causes of death and the only restraint therefore is the slave
owner’s pecuniary interest in his slave” [my emphasis].56 For a public imbued with firmly
entrenched expectations about what constituted ‘Mohammedan’ slavery and the Saharan trade
that supported it, it was this rhetoric, not considered reflection that resonated.
Focusing on the slave trade into Ottoman territories also highlighted the traffic out of East
Africa (the so-called ‘Indian Ocean trade’). The catalyst in broadening public awareness and
intensifying public outrage was David Livingston, a young missionary who had himself been
enlightened and inspired by Sir Buxton’s speeches. Until his travels in East and Central Africa,
the trade across the Indian Ocean had been treated as an Indian affair;57 Livingstone’s colourful
and impassioned accounts of “such sights as could not be described and would not be believed”
brought this trade too, within the ambit of the Anti-Slavery Society.58 Following on his reports,
indignant Christian Europeans denounced the “vicious ‘Arab’ slavers” responsible for the
deplorable caravans of captives arriving on Africa’s east coast. Henry Morton Stanley’s much
12
publicized search for Livingstone reinforced this image: “evil Arab slave traders were part of the
obstacles (along with swamps, deadly diseases and fevers, crocodile attacks and so on) that made
his trip all the more a triumph”.59 And, one might add, attractive to the public. Livingstone’s
publications also contributed to the all-important iconography of the slave trade. His 1865
account included a lithograph of an slave caravan (“Gang of Captives met at Mbame’s on their
way to Tette”) that captured the pathos of the situation. Ten years later, an even more forceful
image showed the execution of a captive unable to keep up with the caravan, under a sky filled
with vultures. “This illustration of the cruelties and hardships of the slave trade within Africa”
Patrick Manning has argued, “now gave European abolitionists an image which drew them into
the African continent as none had before”.60 Little matter that the images were indeed imagined,
or that these ‘Arab’ traders were not ‘Arabs’ of the Saharan trade, North Africa or the Ottoman
Empire. Images attached ominous ‘Arabs’ to a romanticized ‘Africa’, to the cruel slave trade, and
to the suffering, pitiful female and child slaves. Images gave discourse the substance its
nineteenth-century audience sought.
Resurrections and Resonances
Two critical elements should be drawn from the first half of this essay: the actual ‘contents’ of
the nineteenth-century Abolitionist and Orientalist discourses – their contours, language and
imaging; and the process by which they were articulated in the construction of the trans-Saharan
slave trade. Below, I will argue that we can see both content and process reflected in changing
political and national contexts during the twentieth century. What is especially valuable about
examining the selected texts below in light of the analysis presented above is the degree to which
otherwise obscure (if not invisible) linguistic and conceptual templates thereby reveal themselves.
And these revelations, as I shall argue in closing, raise concerns that take us beyond the realm of
the academic.
13
Gold and Slaves: the Sahara of E.W. Bovill
Whenever and wherever the trans-Saharan trade is mentioned, E.W. Bovill’s The Golden Trade
of the Moors (1958) invariably strikes a chord of recognition.61 It is often forgotten that an earlier
version, Caravans of the Old Sahara, first appeared in 1933.62 Caravans drew liberally on earlier
images of “virile” desert people (Tuareg and ‘Arabs’), with “highly developed predatory instincts
[living] …permanently on a war footing”. A zone of trading towns occupied by people “who
made an outward display of Muslim culture but at heart had strong pagan sympathies [separated]
… the slave raiding Muhammadan and the hunted pagan” peoples. The raiding of these innocent
pagans was one of the “principal dry-weather occupations of the Mohammadan tribes”. Young
men and women were carried off to slave markets but grown men were “massacred in cold
blood”. The eastern desert route was “essentially a slave route [and] … every European who
traveled this bloodstained highway was profoundly impressed by the thousands of human
skeletons, mostly those of women and girls, with which it was strewn”. Although the horrors of
this traffic were not as bad as those of the Atlantic trade, attention was drawn to the “particularly
hideous branch” of the trade in eunuchs. “All this ruthless savagery” Bovill concluded, “was
perpetrated in the name of religion”. Quoting the British colonial administrator, Lord Lugard: “It
is the most serious charge against Islam in Africa that it has encouraged and given religious
sanction to slavery’”.63
All the emotion-invoking references to ‘Muhammadans (virile and warlike), engaged in a trade
to feed depravity (women, children, eunuchs) with horrors measured in human skeletons (women
and children) were present. Although Bovil argued that enslaving “the Negro races of central
Africa” was already important in the sixteenth century, 64 he did not emphasize their role in the
overall trade of the nineteenth century. Rather, his analysis suggested that abolition had had
14
impact because the desert peoples no longer received labour for their oases. The ‘lifeblood’ of the
Sahara was thereby drained, and the sterile and threatening desert menaced its inhabitants.65
Golden Trade is interesting because in spite of the title change and alterations to chapter
headings,66 Bovill did little to elevate the theme of the gold trade, which had been central to
Caravans in any event. What did receive more attention was the slave trade: from the earliest
moments of trans-Saharan exchange “gold and slaves, slaves and gold provided the lifeblood of
the trade of the Maghreb with the Sudan”.67 Stories from Caravans, like the one about Bornu
insisting on trading slaves to northern merchants who actually wanted gold, were repeated. 68 But
added was the story of Songhay who had “almost unlimited quantities of gold and slaves… Never
before had the gold and slaves so much needed in the north been in such abundant supply….The
trans-Saharan trade in gold and slaves being the life blood of a score or more of the Barbary ports
and the sources of wealth of thousands of prosperous merchants, the Western Sudan was regarded
in the Maghreb as an Eldorado…”69, gold serving here literally as wealth and as a metaphor for
‘black’ wealth in slaves. In Caravans, Bovill had argued that the horrors of the Atlantic slave
trade and the hatred that that trade engendered had effectively ‘veiled’ Africa from Europeans. 70
In Golden Trade, that argument was directly refuted by one which facilitated a continuation of the
gold-slave metaphor: Europeans had been prevented from moving inland because coastal chiefs
“were as determined to prevent the white man from discovering the source of their slaves as the
merchants of Barbary had been to conceal from him where their gold came from”.
71
There was a
new awareness of race working alongside the religious dichotomies. As with the reference to
Europeans as ‘white men’ (above), there was also now distinction between “brown-skinned
tawny Moors” of the Sahara and “Black Moors”of the Sudan.72 In this more racially conscious
west Africa, there were now “viril Muslims of the savanna’ (presumably the ‘Black Moors’) who
raided the ‘primitive (formally pagan) forest tribes’ and then sold them to the ‘Arabs’ and
‘Tuareg’ of the desert who now bought (rather than raided for) slaves. 73
15
The new prominence given to the slave trade carried through to the discussion of abolition and
colonization. Contrary to his earlier conclusion that the ending of the slave trade had its primary
impact in depriving desert oases of their labour, Bovill argued in Golden Trade that abolition
“robbed the caravan routes of their second most important commodity”. Ironically, the ‘first’
commodity in the nineteenth century was no longer gold but salt, and this was result of Europeandriven Atlantic trade. Its unfortunate beginnings in the slave trade had, thanks to abolition, been
superceded by the development of cheap, modern sea and rail traffic that now allowed for the
growth of legitimate commerce, like the importation of European salts.74 This ‘success’ was
furthered by colonial rule. On the other hand, “with the establishment of British and French
administration between the desert and the Guinea coast” Bovill wrote, “the raiding for slaves had
to stop. The Arabs and Tuareg could no longer buy slaves to cultivate their oases. Not deigning to
stoop to agriculture themselves, they allowed the cultivable areas to shrink and the desert to creep
in… . [Like the Fens of Europe] when civilization recedes, the waters take back their own… so
does the desert reclaim the oases lost to man”.75 In elevating the role of slaves alongside that of
medieval gold, Bovill Simultaneously deepened the historical roots of the trade (and its long-term
importance), and elevated to the unforgivable, the apparently irreparable harm done by the
‘Muhammadan Arabs and Tuareg’. Moreover, in a new next-to-last chapter on the jihad of
Usman dan Fodio, he renewed readers’ association of Islam, Islamic slavery, and ‘degeneracy’.
Fulani enriched by the jihad: “[were] surrounded by slaves, eunuchs and concubines”, raided their
pagan neighbours long after there was religious justification and, growing too “feeble” to do even
that, “descended to enslaving their own peasantry”76.
Bovill’s new preface suggested that the principal influences reshaping his work were attention to
‘Barbary’, collection of new material and recognition that gold inevitably led to the Sudan. 77 But
little in the book reflects these concerns. There was a deepening of the orientalist discourse,
16
already evident in Caravans, overlaid with the colonialist obsession with race and European
contributions to civilisation. If nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse, intimately connected
with growing imperial interests and justification, was only vaguely visible in Caravans,78 it was
easily discernible in Golden Trade, its ‘latter-day imperialist’ patina notwithstanding. Bovill’s
new edition, produced in the context of mid-twentieth century African decolonization, gave
reinvigorated legitimacy to nineteenth-century discourses structured in dichotomies of west-east,
Christian-Muslim, free-slave and us-‘other’. And in developing further the ‘caravel victory over
the caravan’ theme, he firmly re-located the trans-Saharan trade in the story of the Atlantic slave
traffic.
‘In the Eye of the Beholder’: 19th Century ‘Visitors’ Revisited
Robert Maugham’s The Slaves of Timbuktu (1958) made no claim to being an academic text.
But like many nineteenth-century accounts, this example of ‘investigative journalism’ had wide
popular distribution.79 The fact that its author ‘had been there’ gave it authenticity, and the subtitle “A horrifying investigation of the vicious slave-trade in present-day West Africa” assured it
an audience. Like his ‘predecessors’ (as Maugham envisaged them), on his return to England he
addressed the Anti-slavery Society, met with politicians and even spoke in the House of Lords
about the ‘problem’ of modern-day slavery.80 Five years later, the book was translated and
republished in French.81 It has influenced the process of discourse construction through public
consumption and contributed to its content thanks to academic recognition.82
If Bovill subtly drew his subject matter back into the Atlantic-slave trade/abolitionist
framework, Maugham applied the template ham-fistedly: more than half of the book ostensibly
dealing with the Timbuktu slave trade dealt solely with the former Atlantic traffic and its horrors,
from Goree through the Middle Passage to New World plantations. By the time the reader arrived
with the author in Timbuktu, images of Atlantic slavery and slave trading had been sufficiently
17
impressed upon the mind as to ensure the appropriate Pavlovian reaction at the mere mention of
‘slaves’ and ‘slavery’. ‘Authenticity’ was achieved by referencing accounts of slave merchants
and ships’ captains, Maugham literally used their observations as substitutes for his own.83 As he
moved inland, ‘in search of slavery’, he turned on several occasions to the famous ‘expert’ we
have already met, Mungo Park, to ‘introduce’ the Moors. “Even the brave Mongo Park” we are
told, “speaks of their ‘savage and overbearing deportment’… [they had] so completely frightened
his attendants that… [they] declared they would rather relinquish every claim to reward than
proceed one step farther to the eastward [my emphasis]” -- they were afraid of being enslaved.84
Not surprisingly, the stories recounted to Maugham in Timbuktu reinforced this received wisdom.
Most concerned the Tuareg “the most important slave owners and the most vicious” but he also
mentioned the ‘Arabs’ (defined by him as the Regueibat) and the ‘Berbers’ of Mauritania – they
were “all more or less the same”, liking to beat and rape female slaves to show their prowess, and
willing to go to great lengths to recover and punish their property.85
Maugham’s substitution of earlier travelers’ voices for his own continues throughout the
account. En route to Timbuktu, he used Shabeeny’s account, provided to him by the Anti-Slavery
Society, to describe the town (even before his arrival). In Jenne (just up river from his destiny), he
read and quoted extensively accounts of slave trading to the West Indies. Then, once ensconced
in Timbuktu, he repeated the version of Laing’s murder that targeted the treachery of the Arabs in
both Tripoli and the Sahara, as well as Bovill’s account of the predatory Tuareg. 86 Maugham’s
account exemplifies, albeit crudely, the phenomenon of ‘seeing’ through the eyes of a kind of
literary canon established by previous travelers.87 Yet his descriptions of cruel, vicious, lascivious
‘Turaegs and Arabs’ with cowering bella slaves forced to crouch in ‘dung-strewn sand’ continue
to be publicly consumed and referenced in scholarly works. 88 Maugham’s particular take on
orientalism updated it to the eve of Malian independence: whenever possible, he underscored the
fear of the blacks and the arrogance of the Tuaregs as expressed in the certainty that when the
18
French left, the desert peoples would come to take back their slaves.89 And he left us in his final
words with echoes of Bovill’s menacing desert:
“For the last 200 years, Timbuktu has been dying, drowning in a sea of sand.
Imperceptibly, grain by grain and layer by layer, the great dunes are creeping into the
town. And soon – perhaps in a few centuries – the dunes will have rolled a few miles
farther south, and the crumbling grey houses will have been submerged by their unending
waves as they drift towards eternity”.90
Over the next fifteen years, three essentially ‘scholarly’ books addressed the trans-Saharan trade
in the context of broader studies: Adu Boahen in a terms of British policy in the Sahara, Allen
and Humphry Fisher while looking as slavery in Muslim Africa, and Suzanne Miers as one of
several aspects of British Abolitionist policy. Boahen’s classic Britain, the Sahara and the
Western Sudan consciously and critically set discussion of the Sahara (and as a sub-set of this, the
slave trade) within the dictates of the abolitionist agenda, but his was a study of policy not
discourse. He recognized the role of personal anti-Arab prejudice, as in Consul-General
Warrington’s role in promoting the fictional account of Laing’s demise91, but did not see the
underlying orientalist framework that gave foundation to the information. The same can be said
for his reasoning that Livingstone’s East African horror stories resonated immediately because
earlier stories had rendered the public sympathetic;92 they resonated because this was what the
public expected to hear of ‘Arabs’ and their cruelty, of ‘Muhammadans’ and slave trading. The
information was new, the discourse was not.
And so it is not surprising to see elements of both the Atlantic and Oriental discourses creeping
surreptitiously into Boahen’s own analysis. While refuting Warrington’s and Maugham’s account
of the Laing affair, he thought nothing of referring to the Saharan purported to have been the
19
assassin as a “fanatical chief “93. He is critical of Buxton and Richardson and other abolitionists
as sources of ‘reliable’ numbers (he arbitrarily halves their estimates of quantities of slaves
imported and drastically reduces their suggested mortality rates), but does not extend his
skepticism to their actual descriptions of the trade, which are generously referenced. Moreover,
this discussion takes place within the comparative framework of the Atlantic trade. Having
argued, for example that the Saharan trade was much smaller than that directed to the Atlantic, he
went on to argue how much more “hideous” it was because it involved mostly women, children
and eunuchs. He pointed out that: “Writers such as Buxton and Richardson tended to assume too
readily that the mortality was caused only by the inhuman treatment of slaves by the caravan
drivers”,94 but then, citing Caillié and Richardson in particular, underscored the especially harsh
treatment slaves received and the likelihood that they would have been sacrificed first.95 Quoting
an 1850s explorer James Church, he concluded that “Nothing illustrates the dangers and ravages
of the trans-Saharan traffic more vividly than the hundreds of skeletons that littered the routes. …
Most of these were undoubtedly the remains of poor Negro slaves”.96 He also fell victim to an
uncritical acceptance of the qualitative opinion of ‘all the explorers and consular agents’ who
suddenly acquired weight because they were “agreed” that “slaves were the main Sudan export in
the nineteenth century, as they had been from time immemorial….” Indeed, all skepticism left
behind, he asserted that “Richardson was not exaggerating when he reported in 1846 that ‘slaves
were the grand staple commerce of the Sudan and Bornu caravans and without slaves their
commerce would hardly exist’ “.97 Why Richardson might not have exaggerated this statement
when most of his reports were ‘colourful’, his numbers unreliable and his audience (and
employer) the Anti-Slave Society is not addressed. Moreover, this particular conclusion followed
several pages of discussion of the many important commodities traveling the desert routes,
including cloth, kola nuts and salt.98 Boahen was like the Victorian traveler, looking and listening
but still trapped by the reality he expected to find.
20
The Fisher’s Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (1970) dealt with the trans-Saharan trade as a
sub-theme. Its focus was slavery as observed in the Sahara by German traveler Gustav Nachtigal.
Combined with scattered evidence from the now familiar cast of characters, it created a sort of
nineteenth-century snapshot. What is of significance to us is the introduction. Noting the attention
given to the Atlantic trade, the Fishers raised an important question:
“Now that African history …is seen to have had an existence of its own [a reference to
the flourishing discipline of African history in the heady days of 1960s independence], in
many cases entirely independent of European pressure or influence … It is difficult to
fathom why the Atlantic slave trade should maintain its popularity as a study among
Africans, Europeans and Americans alike, while the independent African counterpart, in
the interior of the continent, remains in the shadows.”99
Actually, it was not so much in the shadows as subsumed to the discourse. What is notable is
their characterization of the Saharan slave trade as an African trade, taking place in the interior of
the continent. They also credited Islam as giving unity to a Saharan-Sudanese ‘heartland’ while
being careful not to attach it as a descriptor to the subject, ‘slavery’. In these ways, the Fishers
moved clearly outside the established orientalist framework. But scholars have tended to use the
book essentially as a reference tool, thereby overlooking the significance of the question raised at
the beginning (a question that deserved an answer) and the potential challenge of the destabilizing
assumptions embedded in the conceptualization of the book.
In Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, Suzanne Miers addressed the trans-Saharan
element entirely in the comparative, Atlantic context. She too was conscious of the context in
which people traveled and wrote, and provided a superb study of the of the anti-slavery
movement in its broadest political context.100 But when it came to the trade itself, the Atlantic
21
‘example’ remained the model. Buxton’s arguments about similarities in the cruelty of capture
and the horrors of the middle passage/desert crossing were drawn out, as were Boahen’s
assertions that the slaves suffered most. Miers added references to their having no clothes, no
shoes, swollen feet and being left to die.101 Where Boahen had made passing reference to the fact
that once sold, slaves who had survived the horrible crossing would be considered as “members
of the family, rather than as chattels as in the Americas” and that they often rose to become
“courtiers, ministers and governors”,102 Miers characterized the observations collectively as
“Muslim Slavery”. Taking Atlantic (or ‘New World’) slavery as the norm, Muslim slavery was
‘different’ in its use of concubines and eunuchs, in its ‘selectivity’ of slaves, in its ongoing
relation between freed slaves and masters’ families, and in its social and political character.103 A
thoughtful discussion, it nonetheless returned us to Buxton and early nineteenth-century
orientalists – oriental slavery, the ‘peculiar institution’ had simply become religion-specific.
That said, Miers went further than either Bovill or Boahen in distinguishing a domestic from an
export Saharan trade and market.104 But there is an interesting ambiguity about where it ‘sits’
between the African and the ‘Asian’ (oriental) worlds.105 In some places, North Africa and the
Middle East constituted a conceptual unity. In Chapter 2, subtitled ‘British Treaties with African
Rulers’, the Sahara was one of many ‘African’ spaces which included North and East Africa. But
the same chapter also addresses the Ottoman empire. Whether this is casual slippage or a
response to sources that, as we have seen, constructed these worlds with deliberately vague
geographical footing, it contrasted strikingly with the dichotomies raised by the whole discussion.
Miers conscientiously pointed to opposing arguments made by contemporaries on the (by now)
familiar issues: quantity of slaves in any given place/commerce, harshness of treatment of slaves,
cruelty of ‘Moors’, depravity of concubinage and castration, comparative ‘horridness’ of Atlantic
and Saharan slavery/trade. And just as conscientiously, she tried to evaluate them in terms of
‘truth’. She finally concluded by underscoring the “[enormous] difficulty of assessing the value of
22
contemporary literature on slavery”.106 What was not evident in the mid-1970s is today much
clearer: in this ‘genre’ of literature, the dichotomies served to indicate the boundaries of the
discourses in play, they were not articulations of ‘fact’ or reflections of reality. “Value” does not
lie in “truth”.
The “Curtin of Arabia” … and Successors
A lot had been said about the trans-Saharan slave trade but none of the works to date had been
written primarily to address the subject. With the appearance of Ralph Austen’s “The TransSaharan Slave Trade: a tentative census” in 1979, that changed.107 He brought an economic
historian’s perspective to the topic and, unlike the scholars discussed above who were British or
African British-trained, Austen was American. “Census” appeared as a chapter in The Uncommon
Market. Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade. That essays on the ‘Atlantic
Slave Trade’ would in fact open with one devoted to the trans-Saharan trade did not seem to
strike anyone as an anomaly. The introduction assumes that applying the quantitative analysis
Philip Curtin developed in the context of the Atlantic trade to its Saharan counterpart was entirely
appropriate.108 Austen himself demurred that he could ‘make no claim to being the Curtin of
Arabia’ because the data would not support the kind of sophisticated analysis his predecessor had
applied.109 The editors referred to his hesitation to accept this mantle but pointed out that Austen
did successfully cast doubt on the (then) current understanding that the Saharan slave trade was
small. The concept itself -- ‘Curtin of Arabia’ – passed without comment.110 Yet, with this single
analogy, a late-twentieth century version of the nineteenth-century marriage of Atlantic and
Oriental discourses silently reasserted itself. But where the architects of the former were Britaincentered abolitionists, those responsible for the latter would be American-based academics.
Austen reworked and republished “Census” just over a decade later. As was the case with
Bovill, it will be instructive to look at the differences in, and the impact of, the 1992 version; we
23
will do so, below. In the interim, two important books about slavery in Africa appeared. The
trans-Saharan slave trade was a sub-text for each, but they nonetheless had a significant impact.
Paul Lovejoy’s influential Transformations in Slavery (1983),111 removed North Africa from
Africa, once and for all. The trans-Saharan trade became, with a few key-strokes, an external
trade belonging to the Middle East and the “Muslim world”.112 This conceptual statement
allowed for the development of some interesting ideas about the relation between the Saharan and
Atlantic trades, and between Africa and the world. “[T]he earlier history of slavery in Muslim
countries [continually referred to as ‘Islamic slavery’] had drawn some parts of Africa into the
Islamic orbit”. The use of slaves in West Africa was “similar to their use elsewhere in the Muslim
world, allowing that in sub-Saharan Africa slaves were more often used in production than they
were in North Africa and the Middle East”. West African rulers “found it convenient to justify
enslavement from an Islamic perspective” and their use of slaves in the military and government
“were parallel in function to the employment of slaves in the Muslim countries of the
Mediterranean and Middle East heartlands”. In East Africa “Muslim merchants… transferred the
Muslim conception of slavery into Black Africa”. In this context, the Atlantic trade initiated by
the Portuguese was really just a “modification of existing Islamic patterns of commerce”, and the
influence of the European commerce on the general expansion of slavery in Africa was
“secondary”.113 Lovejoy drew parallels between the trades that in turn justified a discussion of
their competitive connections. One of these derived from the nature of the Islamic trade: drawing
on Austen’s data in general (here citing Ibn Battuta), he concluded that “Perhaps the majority [of
slaves exported across the Sahara] were women and children”.114 As the ‘internal market’ also
valued these categories of slaves, a competition existed that had the impact of decreasing values
of male slaves – by extension, facilitating the Atlantic trade and (later) domestic slave
exploitation.115
24
As Lovejoy’s focus was slavery in Africa and not the trade out of it, little more attention was
given to the Saharan trade116. Most suggestive was his concluding section where he engages with
issues of ‘legacy’: among others “Reports of kidnapped children, young girls taken to Mecca as
‘pilgrims’ but who end up in harems…” and “[within Africa] differences between Muslims and
Christians can well relate to who was raiding whom for slaves…”. The central point he made is
that that “earlier history”, which had dissected Africa by drawing part of it into the ‘Islamic
orbit’, was superceded by recent history which saw “the emergence of an international system of
slavery [that] tied the Americas and Africa together.” He argued passionately: “those who focus
on slavery in the Americas without reference to slavery in Africa have neglected a major problem
in the history of Africans. … To concentrate on the struggle for freedom in the United States, the
West Indies, or other parts of the Americas without recognizing the plight of slaves in Africa
introduces a major distortion into our understanding of slave history.[my emphasis]”.117 It would
seem that the American (broadly defined) slave experience was now claiming ‘Africa’ and
‘Africans’ as its own, leaving unanswered the question of just where the ‘Islamic’ past (and
present) was to be situated in contemporary scholarship.118
Pat Manning’s Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African slave trades (1990)
went some way to addressing that issue.119 Manning too saw connections between different
trades, and between trade and domestic slavery. On the one hand, he explicitly argued against the
idea of an “Islamic trade” or “Islamic world” because the concepts treated Africa as if it were
outside of Islam or at best, marginal to it. And besides, “religion was not the point of the slave
trade”. His use of ‘Oriental’ was meant to engage with this concern.120 On the other, he was
compliant with Lovejoy’s use of the term ‘Islamic Slavery’121 and more importantly, reinforced it
with his own definition of “African” and “Oriental” trade. Without referencing Buxton’s African
Slave Trade, Manning clarified that “[he] will restrict the term ‘African slave trade’ or ‘African
trade’ to trade in slaves within Africa and [he] will use the terms ‘Occidental trade’ or ‘Oriental
25
trade’ when referring to trade in slaves destined for markets outside sub-Saharan Africa”[my
emphasis].122 His definitions not only returned us to some “old-fashioned terminology”,123 but to
an ‘old-fashioned’ discourse that would see both the Sahara and North Africa as ‘oriental’.
Manning’s demographic modeling is in itself fascinating. But by relying largely on Austen’s
1970s data base, continuing to work within well-established dichotomies (‘did Islam promote or
restrict Slavery?124 Why did the Atlantic trade leave a large and visible population of African
origin and the ‘oriental’ did not?’125), and accepting as ‘givens’ the centrality of women in the
‘oriental’ (females dominating the slave trade, only women slaves marrying in the ‘orient’126), the
impact with respect to research on the trans-Saharan trade was less significant than it could have
been.
In many ways, African Life was an unusually frank and reflective work. Manning looked
carefully at ways in which ‘old debates’ live on, and reminded us that “there is no reason to
expect contemporary scholarship to be so sophisticated so as to be free of the outlooks and biases
inherited from earlier times. Our age, while methodologically more sophisticated, is
psychologically no less partisan than earlier times”.127 The ‘motives and biases’ he spoke of were
addressed; but the subtle, often insidious influence exercised by discourse was not. Nowhere was
this more apparent than in his attempts to incorporate ‘the orient(al)’ into his introductory and
concluding remarks; they emerge as little more than extended footnotes to ‘Africa and the
Occident(al)’. Manning emphasized the importance of recognizing the extent to which damage in
Africa was inflicted by slavery and “…the essential role of New World demand for slaves in
inflicting that damage”.128 His examination of the ‘ending’ of slavery focused entirely on the
Atlantic trade129, with no mention of the trans-Saharan trade or the interplay with the
Mediterranean and Middle East.130 He looked at the ‘heritage of slavery’ in terms of racism,
arguing that just as United States’ racism cannot be understood without looking at the intertwined
histories of America and Africa, within Africa “the expansion of slavery and the development of
26
a multitude of specific institutions of servility cannot be explained… as the evolution of
institutions within each ethnic group…[they were] responses to economic and demographic
pressures felt throughout the Atlantic Basin”. “Can one imagine”, he continued, “what an
interpretation of the rise of the modern world would be like if it left out the formation of new
social classes, or if it left out the influence of Christianity? These examples may give an idea of
the distortion brought to history by leaving out the experience and the influence of slavery.” He
suggested that to ‘reintegrate’ Africa would be to reformulate the William’s thesis to include the
whole Atlantic basin, rather than just Britain and the West Indies. This analysis should be applied
“not just to the Occident but to the African and Oriental regions of slave exploitation”, as they
were all tied into “a single great and diverse system for the supply and exploitation of slave
labour”. 131
Manning’s Africa was clearly sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, no work makes it more evident how
the study of the slave trade has delineated and distorted the study of the African continent. But
just as worrisome was the ease with which the ‘orient(al)’ was completely subsumed to the
‘occident(al)’ in this conceptualization. Its passion and intelligence notwithstanding, African Life
more than any of its predecessors resurrected the process so central to the nineteenth-century – it
drawing on a contemporary domestic concern of both moral and political import, and projecting it
laterally and retrospectively. Manning was careful to delineate his concept of ‘African’. But his
invocation of a universalized ‘slave history’ and ‘slave system’, and his conviction that changes
in the economic, social and ideological aspects of ‘the orient’ were ‘similar’ to those of the
Atlantic world belie any major difference from the appropriative application of Buxton’s African
Slave Trade more than a century and a half ago.
The edited volume, The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade
(1992),132 tackled a range of subjects linked to the trade, including slavery as an institution in the
27
regions to the north and south of the Sahara, and a bibliography entitled “Muslim Slavery and
Slaving”.133 Unfortunately, the opportunity to engage with larger issues (such as the conceptual
validity of ‘muslim slavery and slaving’), or to make more of the collection than the sum of its
parts (the perfunctory three-page introduction is disappointing), was not embraced.134 The quality
of individual chapters notwithstanding, there was little that was new or challenging in these
pages.135 In spite of the fact at least a few chapters rooted the trade very much in African
economies (including the Sahara itself),136 the overall framework paralleled the Atlantic system,
bringing together those working on the societies which supplied slaves, “sub-Saharan Africa”,
and those working on the “societies which received them”, North Africa and the Middle East.137
The initial chapter establishing this paradigm was John Hunwick’s
“Black slaves in the
Mediterranean World: introduction to a neglected aspect of the African Diaspora”:
“The enormous interest which the African Diaspora in the New World has generated has
tended to obscure an equally significant forced migration of black Africans from their
homelands to alien societies – that vast exodus of enslaved human beings to the lands of
the Mediterranean, the Middle East and South Asia which took place after the
establishment of an Islamic world empire….the movement of slaves across the Sahara, up
the Nile valley and the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and India
probably accounted for the uprooting of as many black Africans from their societies as
did the trans-Atlantic trade. [my emphasis]”138
Vague references to ‘a generous Braudelian interpretation so as to include both the Saharan
lands and the Arabian Peninsula’ in his Mediterranean focus139 did not obscure the fact that
Hunwick effectively created an Africa at best marginalized, at worst excluded from the larger
world of Islam. The Sahara was but a ‘middle-passage’ conduit (like the Red Sea and Indian
28
Ocean), and North Africa belonged to the Mediterranean and Middle East -- ‘alien’ societies. And
the identification with the trans-Atlantic trade was explicit in the evocative references to
‘uprooting’ and ‘vast exodus of enslaved human beings’.140 However, in invoking the African
Diaspora, a subtle, new set of assumptions was deployed. Conceptualizing all blacks in societies
ranging throughout North Africa and the Middle East (and south Asia) as a “neglected aspect of
the African Diaspora” equated their status to that of blacks in the ‘Atlantic’ world. It assumed
that they were all part of ‘forced migrations’ equivalent to ‘enslavement’, and that they shared the
common experiential factors shaping identity and society among New World Diaspora members.
Hunwick’s chapter, as one would expect, was knowledgeable, thoughtful and provocative. But it
ultimately led to a conundrum that he suggested was the “most interesting question”, and I would
argue is a distortion imposed by the model itself.
“What became of the millions of black Africans over the centuries? Is it the case that, in Bernard
Lewis’s words, ‘[T]here is nothing in the Arab, Persian and Turkish lands that resembles the great
black and mulatto populations of North and South America?”
141
Hunwick noted that while there
“do not appear to be any massive concentrations of black Africans, no ghettoes, no visible
struggles for civil rights, etc”, that there is probably more of a “residuum” than we have assumed,
and therefore their lack of visibility (as a distinctive social class, as sources of social protest)
needs explaining. Alternately, if Lewis is correct then we have to explain why black communities
comparable to those in the Americas did not survive.142 Hunwick performed interesting
intellectual acrobatics to explore the question (leaning towards the argument that there was a
‘residuum’).In the final instance, he gave the last word to a French colonial observer of the 1950s
who wrote about ‘black brotherhoods’ in North Africa:
“The cruel situation, at least as regards its origin, of the blacks of North Africa has
favoured the life of their brotherhoods and the maintenance of a Sudanic ritual adapted to
29
Islam, … The religious phenomena characterized by the words zar and bori (spirit
possession) and by diwan (assembly) are widespread in Abyssinia, North Africa,
Hausaland and among the Bambara and Songhay…Under the symbolism of the spirits the
deeper goals, … are a catharsis, a purification of the [psychic] forces, the curing of
illnesses of nervous origin and the calming of the soul through ecstasy. This is the form
which can easily be taken by the mysticism of an uprooted, exiled and oppressed
minority which has accommodated itself to Islam in Africa, just as it did to Christianity in
America.[my emphasis]”143.
In addition to reinforcing the idea that all blacks shared the same ‘uprooted, exiled and
oppressed’ condition, this suggestion also drew a religious parallel with the Atlantic experience –
blacks ‘accommodating’ themselves to Islam in North Africa were like slaves accommodating
themselves to Christianity in the New World. This image of a ‘Black, non-Islamic’ Africa distinct
from an Arab Islamic ‘oriental’ world was very much Bovill’s 1950s perspective, not a surprising
one for the colonial ‘eyewitness’ to share. But in proposing that it serve as a basis for further
exploration in the context of Diaspora studies, Hunwick (perhaps inadvertently) ensured the
legitimacy of its resurrection and the likelihood of its informing future research.144
The last chapter in The Human Commodity is Ralph Austen’s revised “Census”. What was “The
Trans-Saharan Slave Trade” became “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa”. 145
No explanation was given for this change, but it does reflect Austen’s vision of Africa and the
trade as articulated in the new introduction and conclusion. He began by suggesting that “efforts
to tabulate the number of slaves taken from Africa by Muslims have always been a subject of
political polemics and academic controversy … because of their ideological implications (were
Arabs ‘worse’ for Africa than Europeans?)” and that “Muslim merchants and shippers in Egypt
and the Maghrib did not enter into as much direct conflict with European abolitionists as their
30
East African brethren and the issue of slave trading is less central to colonial penetration of
northern Africa.” “Thus” he concluded, unlike the East African situation, “ disputes among
students of this commerce have few ideological overtones”. He based his analysis on literary
accounts, containing distortions because of “ignorance and bias of observation” but providing
useable “capacity estimates”, and customs records from Consuls in Cairo and Tripoli, having the
advantage (in his view) of “relative disinterestedness”. Trade ‘out of Africa’ (in contra-distinction
to “forced internal migration”) was defined as a “net demographic transfer to societies which
functioned under the control of an alien Mediterranean world. The definition of Mediterranean
used here is mainly Islamic.”146
The language was different, the discourse unchanged: ‘Muslims’ take slaves from (an implied)
non-Muslim Africa; then with a stroke of the pen ‘Muslims’ become ‘Arabs’ from ‘alien’ lands
and are equated with Europeans as outsiders, damaging and detrimental to this creature called
‘Africa’. Arabs and Europeans are not African; Muslims are Arabs (and slavers), therefore…. .
Even in our brief discussion of the intersection between abolitionist, orientalist and Africanist
discourses in the nineteenth century, shows Austen’s characterization of the comparative impact
between northern and eastern Africa to have been mistaken.147 But to suggest that disputes about
the trade ‘have few ideological overtones’ was to miss the very strong ones shaping his own (and
others’) work. It also isolated his sources from their respective discourses.148 The dangers of
naively superimposing one on the other were apparent in his interpretation of ‘black’ and ‘negro’:
throughout Austen’s many tables, these descriptors and nouns used by all variety of sources were
assumed to mean ‘slave’ – as indeed the ‘Diaspora’ template would have us do. 149
Austen’s final statement, new to the 1992 analysis, was the most tellingly reflective of the
evolving discourse during the 1980s: while continuing to note the very tentative nature of the
work, presenting it as just a stage in bringing together comprehensive data on the ‘Islamic African
31
slave trade’, he concluded that it is intended “… to invite them [students] to join in the effort to
produce as definitive an account as possible of this major confrontation between Africa and the
outside world”.[my emphasis] 150.
James Webb Jr. stops short of seeing the trade as a marker of Africa’s confrontation with ‘the
outside world’, but he accepted the invitation to develop its history as one of a ‘major
confrontation’. His Desert Frontier (1995) is the most recent influential work to address the
trans-Saharan slave trade and it does so in direct response to the Atlantic trade models.151 The
sub-title is Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel 1600-1850 but its aim is to
establish links between increasing aridity, violence and consequent slaving along the desertsahelian frontier. Using economic modeling techniques,152 Webb concludes that for much of the
eighteenth century, more slaves moved across the Sahara than the Atlantic.153 This has
implications for weighing the comparative importance of the two trades in regional economic
development, but what is significant here is the final part of the argument:
“… the evolution of the regional economy along the western sahel took place in large
measure independently of the Atlantic sector. …[comparing] the relative importance of
the Atlantic sector (which opened onto the larger Atlantic world) and [the] African sector
(the sahelian, Saharan, and North African markets), … the African sector was the more
important of the two. (my emphasis)”154.
Webb Jr. effectively reclaims these regions for ‘Africa’ but only in contrast to the ‘Atlantic’.
This Sahara is populated with ‘Arab desert warriors’ who are frequently ‘in league’ with slaving
elites to the sahelian south or Moroccan north.155 That they are Muslim is not important; like
American slave traders and owners, they are ‘white’:
32
“… as the southern shore of the desert moved southward [because of increasing aridity]
and waves of political violence broke onto the savanna, Black Africans were caught in
the undertow. Many, probably most, were transferred north to the Maghreb. But many
others were dragged into the sahelian world, where over time they were transformed into
slaves, and then some were freed. Their cultural identities became deeply bound to the
White world. The massive slave and greed slave population of the Islamic Republic of
Mauritania are the legacy of this historical process”.156
For the first time since Bovill’s colonialist sensitivities discerned ‘tawny brown-skinned’ from
‘black’ Moors’, and both from ‘white Europeans’, race replaces religion and ethnicity in Webb
Jr.’s imaging throughout the book. Austen’s major confrontation between Africa and the Islamic
outside world is scripted here as one between Black and White Africa, black slaves and white
masters. In entering the world of the Atlantic slave trade to challenge Bovill’s ‘caravel versus
caravan’ thesis,157 Webb Jr. effectively transplanted the discourse itself, fully Americanized, back
into Africa.
Concluding observations: ‘Beyond the Academic’
What I have attempted to illuminate in a rather relentless critique of the field, is the very
intricate way in which the web of research questions and analytical language around the topic of
the trans-Saharan slave trade has been woven over the past two centuries. In this world of
discourse and distortion, ‘all is not as it seems’. The discussion has been very focused, concerned
only with Anglophone158 and with written texts. The iconography Patrick Manning drew attention
to is another form of equally deserving ‘text’. I would simply point out the fact that The Human
Commodity, for example, chose for the back cover a photograph of a 1938 replica of Josiah
Wedgewood’s 1789 medallion, showing a woman instead of a man, asking “Am not I a
33
sister?”.159 This derivation of one of the central images of the Atlantic abolitionist discourse must
have been intended to associate the Saharan with the Atlantic trade in the minds of readers. James
Webb Jr.’s book about ‘ecological and economic change’, presents a romanticized cover drawing
of a terrified, topless black African woman cradling a baby, while being chased by a saberwielding, remarkably European-looking ‘white’ Moor on horseback. Clutching onto him is a
young child and in the background, the ‘Negro village’ huts burn and people flee.160 A third
publication (not discussed here), Francois Renault and Serge Daget’s Les traites négrières en
Afrique,161 reproduces drawings like an 1839 Constantinople representation of a harem, showing
concubines, oriental ‘master’ and a sinister-looking black eunuch looking on, and an ‘orientalist’
rendering of black female slaves in Fez, appropriately framed by an Eastern arch.162 These and
other images163 have little directly to do with the trans-Saharan trade, but they were an integral
part of the nineteenth-century discourse that defined it. By using them to ‘illustrate’ our
contemporary analyses, we undermine our claims to be interrogating our written texts differently,
and we continue to replicate that very same discourse.
Lastly, since Hunwick’s invitation to regard this trade as part of the ‘neglected African
Diaspora’, Paul Lovejoy has launched the largest ‘African Diaspora’ project ever. Taking
Nigeria’s Bights of Benin and Biafra and their hinterlands as the ‘center’, he and other
participants working in the internationally funded Nigerian Hinterland Project assume that the
‘model’ can be applied to all places in the Americas, North Africa and the Middle East to which
slaves from these regions were sent. The Project: “… assumes that persons born in Africa carried
with them into slavery not only their culture but also their history, and that if we understand the
experiences of slaves and the histories of the societies from which they came, then we will be
able to trace these influences into the Diaspora.”164 It also implicitly assumes that the processes
by which they come to be members of those societies are comparable (‘enslavement’ and
‘slavery’) and that the ‘receiving societies’ recognized these processes in the same ways (hence
34
that ‘enslavement’ and ‘slavery’ were understood similarly in the Americas, North Africa and the
Middle East).165 These assumptions are surely questionable.
In a recent special issue of Slavery and Abolition, “Rethinking the African Diaspora”, Kristin
Mann addresses the debate generated by this approach within the ‘Atlantic’ scholarly community
itself. Challengers argue both theoretically and empirically for more autonomous creolization and
acculturation; Mann paraphrases the position:
“the Diaspora started in Africa with the movement of slaves north across the Sahara, west
across the Atlantic and in different directions across Africa itself. … The Atlantic
crossing should be seen as simply another extension of the moving African frontier. The
fact that in modern times persons of African descent throughout the Atlantic world have
sought, for their own purposes, to reconstitute Africa should not, in [Robert A.] Hill’s
view, be allowed to subvert this basic historical reality”.166
Mann then moves directly into the Atlantic world, seeking to merge the two positions. But this
process only further underscores the inherent difficulties of simply extending the Diaspora
analysis into other networks of population movement, be they within or ‘out of’ Africa. Or, as in
the case of the trans-Saharan trade, both.167
I suggested earlier that that this exploration of ‘discourse and distortion’ raises concerns that
take us ‘beyond the realm of the academic’. The socio-political contexts that gave rise to the
abolitionist and orientalist discourses were racist and imperialist. They promoted confrontation
and colonialism. And they have without question been central to defining ‘the West’ and ‘the
Orient’ as we understand them today. ‘Western’ power has shifted to America, ‘oriental’ power
remains with the Muslim ‘Arab’ world – whose geographical and ethnic definition remains as
35
evasive as it was over a century ago.168 ‘Africa’ comes into play as it has been ‘reconstituted’ by
the late-twentieth century take on both abolitionist and orientalist discourses. Afro-Americans are
creating the Africa they need to affirm their role in society, and in so doing, appropriating the
right of Africans to do the same. The hugely popular Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Wonders of the
African World” series directly challenged East African Swahili to ‘catch up’ to American Blacks
in recognizing their ‘African’ slave roots and in rejecting identities that would link them to the
‘oriental’ Muslim world.169 Certain strands of current Diaspora studies contribute to this trend in a
more academic format. The subtle subsuming of the trans-Saharan trade to the Atlantic model in
the ways we have discussed here reinforces the notion that to be Muslim is to be Arab is to be
alien to Africa -- worse, is to be a predator of Africans through centuries of slave trading. In
recent years, some less-than-subtle journalism has directly called upon Afro-Americans to reject
Islam in the name of their ancestors enslaved by Arab slave traders. We may scoff bad
journalism’s distortion of history, but we should not dismiss the popular (and potentially
political) impact of its rhetorical emotional appeal, any more than we can dismiss the impact of
nineteenth-century abolitionist tactics.170 Is it really so far from Gates Jr.’s message, recasting
African history in terms of the Afro-American slave experience, imaged with vivid, video footage
of Africa’s ‘wonders’, just as earlier books and brochures outraged caring Christians with their
drawings of the horrors of slavery? Perhaps most serious of all is the internalizing of these
discourses by Africans, in Africa. In Mauritania, Sudan, Nigeria, and Tanzania for example,
thousands of Africans have killed (and continue to kill) other Africans over the right to be African
and Muslim and of ‘Arab’ origin.171 The new ‘orientalism’ ascribes to North African countries an
identity as part of the Muslim, white Arab world; those on the ‘frontier’ like Mauritania and
Sudan are caught between that and ‘being African’ – essentially being pro-American and black.
As in the nineteenth century, the stroke of a ‘western’ pen (or the voice of a western politician)
arbitrarily allocates their place in the ‘known world’. Our study of the trans-Saharan trade is only
36
one small aspect of this process,172 but it is time we recognized to what extent we have become
‘enslaved’ to the some very dangerous discourses.
Notes
For general discussion of these issues see among others: Wheeler, Roxann. “Limited Visions of Africa:
1
Geographies of savagery and civility in early eighteenth-century narratives”. In James Duncan and Derek
Gregory (eds.), Writes of Passage. Reading Travel Writing (Routledge, London and New York: 1999), 1448; Pratt, Marry Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. (Routledge, London and New
York: 1992); Gregory, Derek. “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of travel”. In James Duncan
and Derek Gregory, (eds.). Writes of Passage. Reading Travel Writing. (Routledge, London and New York:
1999), 114-150.
2
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, “Introduction: criticism in the contact zone”, 1-11; also 81-90
3
Ibid., 86-88.
4
Buxton, T.F. The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy. Intro. G.E. Metcalfe. (London, Dawsons of Pall
Mall, 1968; originally published in two vols., The African Slave Trade 1839 and The Remedy 1840).
5
Ibid., 63-72; 90-113.
6
For a discussion of Buxton and the impact of his book (not, however, the issue of interest to us here) see
Boahen, A. Adu. Britain, The Sahara and The Western Sudan 1788-1861. (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1964),
98-101.
7
Ibid., 63,64; 90-113 passim.
8
Said, Edward W. Orientalism.(New York, Vintage Books Ed.: 1979), 58-60.
9
Ibid. passim.; Kabbani, Rana. Europe’s Myths of the Orient. (Bloomington, Indian University Press: ???),
1-13.
10
Kabbani references the travels of Francois-René de Chateaubriand to make this point effectively, 10,11;
also Gregory, Derek. “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of travel”. In James Duncan and Derek
Gregory, (eds.). Writes of Passage. Reading Travel Writing. (Routledge, London and New York: 1999),
114-150.
11
Wheeler, Roxann. “Limited Visions of Africa: Geographies of savagery and civility in early eighteenth-
century narratives”. In James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds.), Writes of Passage…, 14-48 (quotation
p.19).
12
Bearce, George D. British Attitudes Towards India, 1784-1858. (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1961),
102-20; quotations 107-108, 117-118.
13
Park, Mungo. Travels into the Interior Districts of Africa, with an Account of a Subsequent Mission in
1805, 2 vols. (London, 1816). The version used here is Miller, Ronald (Ed.). Mungo Park’s Travels in
Africa. (London, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., Everyman’s Library: 1969; originally published 1907; enlarged
and revised 1954).
37
14
Nichols, Ashton. “Mumbo Jumbo: Mungo Park and the Rhetoric of Romantic Africa”. In Alan
Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Eds.), Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture. ( ), 93-113.
15
Ibid., ??; Park, Travels, p.121.
16
Park, Travels, pp. 87, 94-95, 115, 122.
17
As quoted in Buxton, African Slave Trade, 106-107.
18
The French traveler Rene Caillié returned from his successful voyage to Timbuktu just as the inquiry was
underway as to the whereabouts of British traveler, Major Laing. In England it was generally believed that
“Caillié had never set foot in Timbuctu and that the journal that was published under his name was
compiled [by someone else]… based on Laing’s [missing] papers.” Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 85.
19
Ibid., 59-60. Their account makes much of how significant this was.
20
Ibid., 63. “Cruel death” is in quotes in Boahen’s text, citing G.F. Lyon, A narrative of the Travels in
Northern Africa, 1818-1820 (London, 1821), 200.
21
Cited in Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 71
22
Ibid., 80-83, 88-91.
23
Cited in Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 87. He was referring to the Awlad Delim, one of the grand
nomade groups who moved between southern Morocco and the Middle Niger.
24
Hibbert, Christopher. Africa Explored. Europeans in the Dart Continent, 1769-1889. (London, Allen
Lane, 1982), 18-19.
25
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, Chs.1-2, 1-44. Mungo Park’s texts, for example, indicate that he was not
specifically interested in the complexities of the slave-trade question. In the most often quoted passage of
his 1799 chapter on slavers and slavery, “he takes a position that is as ambivalent as it is carefully
worded… significantly includ[ing] no moral evaluation.” Nichols, “Mumbo Jumbo”, p. ?? Slaves,
slavers/traders and slavery are interwoven throughout his narratives for the most part with no comment.
26
Hammond, Dorothy, and Jablow, Alta. The Myth of Africa. (New York, The Library of Social Science:
1977; previously published The Africa that Never Was. Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa,
New York, Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1970), 25.
27
James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776-1838 , (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi:
1986), 108-109.
28
Patrick Manning refers to this as “the icononography of slavery”. Slavery and African Life. Occidental,
Oriental, and African Slave Trades. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1990), 151.
29
30
Ibid.; image reproduced as Plate 8.1, p.152.
Hurwitz, Edith F. Politics and the Public Conscience. Slave Emancipation and the Abolitionist
Movement in Britain. (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.; New York, Barnes & Noble Books: 1973),
“Introduction”, 15-100 passim.
31
Manning, African Life, 152; drawings reproduced as Plate 8.2, p.153. It is still widely reproduced today.
Also Hurwitz, Public Conscience, “Introduction”, especially 48-100.
38
32
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 98-102; Hurwitz, Public Conscience, 77-100. Also on this period, see
Manning, African Life, 149-60, and for extensive discussion, Suzanne Miers, Britain and the ending of the
slave trade. (London, Longman Group Ltd.,1975), 3-168.
33
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 71; the argument is developed 70-74. “According to Denham, the Sheikh
admitted the inhumanity of the trade and even pointed out that it was against the tenets of Islam. ‘But what
are we to do?’ the Sheikh is reported to have asked helplessly: ‘the Arabs who come here will have nothing
else but slaves. Why don’t you send us your merchants’?” (71).
34
This corresponded to the modernizing Tanzimat period in Ottoman policy-making.
35
Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, (Seattle and London, University
of Washington Press: 1998), 115-117. Turkish writers at the time were indeed correct in arguing that
Europeans thought Istanbul slaves were like Americans (122).
36
Y. Hakan Erdem,. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909. (London, Macmillan Press
Ltd. And New York, St. Martin’s Press, Inc.: 1996), 69.
37
Ibid., 87; Toledano, Slavery and Abolition, 122, reference to “the Harem fantasy”.
38
Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 87.
39
Palmerston made a direct comparison in 1857, when he suggested that thinking of slave traders in terms
of ‘pirates’ was more appropriate to the trans-Atlantic than to the Ottoman Mediterranean trade. (Ibid.,84)]
40
Said, Orientalism. The concept has been widely used since the appearance of the book (and probably
abused or at least used so loosely and superficially as to render its origins obscure at best); I am thinking
here especially of the discussion in Part III: ‘Orientalism now…Orientalism’s Worldliness’, 226-254.
41
Toledano, Slavery and Abolition, 128. I will return to his arguments in my conclusion.
42
Ibid., 119. For discussion of contemporary literature and slavery, 119-134. Elsewhere, as in Tunis for
example, efforts to restrict the Saharan trade in slaves by the local Pasha were accompanied in 1863 by
admonishing, abolitionist letters addressed to the United States!
43
The former noted that there were no longer heathens in Africa therefore enslaving Africans could no
longer be justified, the latter that the ‘slaves’ currently in Egypt were not ‘really’ slaves. Toledano argues
he was actually describing “African” slavery, another issue. (Slavery and Abolition, 124-125 ft.24.)
44
Toledano does not make this last point; I do. His argument, however, is relevant here because he is
attempting to explain why modern writers of the Arabic-speaking world are not engaging constructively
with scholarship on slavery. He is very attuned to Islamic discourse and politics but is too uncritical of
corresponding influences shaping western (especially American) scholarship.
45
It was this society, and not the African Association of 1788, whose activities were oriented to abolishing
the slave trade. (Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 1-7).
46
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 135.
47
Ibid., pp.135,6; James Richardson,???????p.xiv. Richardson was not, however successful in seeing the
Sultan who refused to receive him.
39
48
Richardson, ???ix. Preface by Trent Cave. My thanks to Mohamed Hasan Mohamed for drawing this
preface to my attention. Mohamed Mohamed, Assistant Professor, State University of New York at
Fredonia, is currently completing his PhD thesis at the University of Alberta. A chapter of his thesis looks
at the question of discourse and the trans-Saharan slave trade with respect to the famous Beyruk Family of
Gouilmine, southern Morocco. Hopefully, this chapter will soon be published as it will do much to give
depth my argument here, and at the same time, develop it in some very interesting new directions.
49
50
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 147.
The term is Suzanne Miers,’ Britain and the ending of the slave trade. (London, Longman Group
Ltd.,1975), chapter headings.
51
They were to encourage British legitimate commerce and stop the slave trade.
52
Ibid., 150-151. The larger discussion appears p. 147-159.
53
Ibid., 203; fuller discussion of Barth’s role appears p.197-212.
54
Ibid., 141; discussion of the Moroccan situation appears p.141-145.
55
Suzanne Miers, Britain and the ending of the slave trade. (London, Longman Group Ltd.,1975), 62-63.
56
Ibid., 66-67, quotation p. 67.
57
Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience, 72-73; Miers, Britain…and the slave trade, Appendix “The
India Act (V. 1843) Ablishing the Legal Status of Slavery”. The status was also tied into the ZanzibariOman connections (86-88) and later with diplomatic relations with the French (20-23).
58
Ibid., 88-89.
59
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A story of greed, terror and heroism in Colonial Africa,
(Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co.: 1998), 28-30.
60
Manning, African Life, 158; lithograph reproduced Plate 8.3.
61
E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, (London, Oxford University Press1958; reprinted -with
corrections- 1958; 1961 and 1963).
62
E. W. Bovill, Caravans of the Old Sahara. An Introduction to the History of the Western Sudan.
(London, International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Oxford University Press: 1933).
63
Bovill,. Caravans, quotations passim, 8-9; 255-258; Lugard 258.
64
Ibid., 105-106.
65
Ibid., 8-9.
66
The second book, Golden Trade, is not a mere reissue of Caravans. Bovill completely replaced the
Preface and eschewed the three foci of Caravans (as indicated in ‘section’ headings): Beled es Sudan, The
Golden Trade, The Sudan Unveiled.. Most of the chapter titles have been changed and their texts rewritten.
A close comparison of the two books will find many of the same sections, often ordered differently but
often, as well, with subtle changes – a sentence of two left out, a new phrase inserted.
67
Bovill, Golden Trade, 24.
68
Ibid., 130; in caravans, 111.
69
Ibid., 134-135, 157.
40
70
Bovill, Caravans, 204-209.
71
Bobill, Golden Trade, 207.
72
Ibid., 119.
73
Ibid., 13.
74
This was an oft-repeated claim around the turn of the century that had no basis in truth. Even the railways
that arrived late on the scene could not compensate for a range of problems Europeans faced in
transporting, storing and marketing salt. See E Ann McDougall , “Perfecting the ‘fertile seed’”: the
Compagnie du Sel Aggloméré and colonial capitalism, c.1890-1905”. African Economic History,
[Forthcoming, 2002].
75
Ibid., 14.
76
Ibid., 131.
77
Ibid., v-vi.
78
Bovill, Caravans, .8-9. For example, in the suggestion that Europe could better mange the ‘menacing’
Sahara than those ‘Moors’ with ‘predatory instincts’.
79
Robin Maugham, The Slaves of Timbuktu. A horrifying investigation of the vicious slave-trade in present-
day West Africa (London, Sphere Books Ltd. 1967).
80
See his ‘Forward’, 7-8; ‘Postscrpt’, 252-255.
81
As Les Esclaves existent encore, Trans. Franz Weyergans (Paris, Editions Universitaires: 1966).
82
It is included in Joseph Miller’s first (of an annual series) Bibliographies, “Muslim Slavery and Slaving:
A Bibliography”. In Elizabeth Savage (Ed.), The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan
Slave Trade. (London, Frank Cass: 1992; first published as “Special Issue”, same title Slavery and
Abolition 13, 1 (April, 1992) ), 249-271 (cited 264). It appears in Paul Lovejoy’s bibliography,
Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
African Studies Series: 1983), 326 and is still cited in the recently published second edition (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, African Studies Series: 2000), 341. Most noteworthy is its extensive use
(direct quotations, several references) by Martin Klein in his seminal Slavery and Colonial Rule in French
West Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, African Studies Series: 1998); see 237-238, 241,
247.
83
This annoying habit pervades each chapter (egg. 21-33 no fewer than fourteen different accounts of the
Middle Passage are excerpted, generously; similarly 337-338; 41-53 several of the same as well as new
sources are called upon to witness the horrors of the trade. And on it goes.)
84
Ibid., 58-60; quotation p.58.
85
Ibid., 223-226.
86
Ibid.; Shabeeny 82-89; West Indian slavery 121-30; Laing’s story 154-185; Bovill on the Tuareg 186-187.
Caillié and Barth were the readers’ guide to the town itself.
87
See notes 10-12, above.
41
In particular, Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 237-238, 241. Maughm repeated the image of ‘dung-
88
strewn sand’ several times.
89
Maugham, Slaves of Timbuktu, for example, 226-227.
90
Ibid., 255.
91
He actually critiqued Maugham’s recent publication of that version, 86-89.
92
Ibid., 100.
93
Ibid., 86.
94
Ibid., 121-122.
95
He also commented on how males were chained together and made to carry loads, which seems, at least
on the surface, to be somewhat at odds with the repeated emphasis that the slaves were predominately
women and children.
96
Ibid., 121-122, 128-129.
97
Ibid., 127.
98
Ibid., 122-127.
99
Allan G.B Fisher, and Humphrey J Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa. The Institution in
Saharan and Sudanic Africa and the Trans-Saharan Trade, (London, C. Hurst & Co.: 1970), 2.
100
Miers, Britain and… the Slave Trade, passim. But especially Chapters 1,2.
101
Ibid., 60-61.
102
Boahen, Britain, the Sahara…, 130.
103
Miers, Britain…. And the Slave Trade, 55-59. This ‘social and political character’ was contrasted with
New World slavery which was primarily, if not exclusively, economic.
104
Ibid., 73-75.In fact, in this argument she reinforced aspects of Fisher and Fisher’s perspective.
105
Miers prefers the use of ‘Asia’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Asiatic’ to ‘Orient’ and ‘Oriental’.
106
Ibid., 67.
107
Ralph A Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census”. In Henry A. Gemery and Jan
S. Hogendorn (Eds.), The Uncommon Market. Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(New York, Academic Press Inc.: 1979), 23-76.
108
Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn “Introduction” in The Uncommon Market…, 4-5.
109
Austen, “Tentative Census”, 23, 26.
110
Gemery and Hogendorn, “Introduction”, 4.
111
Full reference, note 76, above. In this case, the second edition (2000) has few changes relevant to our
concerns; what few there are considered in the concluding section.
112
Ibid., 23.
113
Ibid., 23, 28-29, 35. Manning, recently, has taken issue with aspects of this analysis in African Life, 36.
114
Ibid., 25.
115
42
116
He notes that between 1600 and 1800 Islamic states contributed to the insecurity of the West African
savanna, feeding enslavement, and in a chapter sub-section entitled “The Imperialist Justification of Islamic
Slavery” argues that the attention given by Europeans to the slave trade was little more than the title
suggests. Ibid., 261-268.
117
Ibid., 280-281.
118
If at all. Broadly interpreted, Lovejoy’s analysis could be said to have marginalized both: “the Muslim
connection” (35) and “the Islamic factor” (15) were critical elements in the early stages of the Atlantic
trade, now the dynamics of that trade have taken scholarship in very different directions. See also my
concluding comments.
119
Full Reference see note 28.
120
Manning, African Life, 10.
121
Ibid., 161.
122
Ibid., 10, 12.
123
Ibid., 10. The descriptor is his.
124
Ibid., 28.
125
Ibid., 39.
126
Ibid., 41, 45-46.
127
Ibid., 14-18; quotation p.14.
128
Ibid., 6-7.
129
It is in this context that he discussed the ‘iconography of slavery’ referred to above, and again in my
concluding comments.
130
Ibid., 149-167. the sole reference to anything related is to Lovejoy’s analysis of the imperial justification
of Islamic slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 161.
131
Ibid.,171-173.
132
Elizabeth Savage, (Ed.)., The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade,
(London, Frank Cass: 1992; first published as “Special Issue”, same title Slavery and Abolition 13, 1
(April, 1992) ). It was based on a workshop held in Bellagio, two years earlier.
133
See chapters by Martin A. Klein, Beverley Mack, Gerard Prunier, Douglas H. Johnson and Daniel J.
Shroeter and Miller, “Bibliography”.
134
This is not a comment on the volunteer efforts of Elizabeth Savage who took on the thankless task of
getting the papers edited and out; it is rather an expression of disappointment that the potential of the
Workshop organized by Humphrey Fisher and Michael Bret was not realized.
135
Various chapters engage with the numbers game with respect to ‘how many?’; others follow the
‘commodities’ along fairly well-trodden itineraries; studies of military slavery along with Joe Miller’s
bibliography, implicitly reinforce the now unquestioned concepts of ‘Muslim slavery and slaving’. More
on some of these issues follows, below.
136
For example chapters by E Ann McDougall and Abdullahi Mahadi.
43
137
See Savage, “Introduction”, 1-4.
138
John O. Hunwick, “Black Africans in the Mediterranean World: Introduction to a Neglected Aspect of
the African Diaspora”. In Elizabeth Savage (Ed.), The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the TransSaharan Slave Trade. (London, Frank Cass: 1992; first published as “Special Issue”, same title Slavery and
Abolition 13, 1 (April, 1992) ), 5.
139
Ibid., 6.
140
This in spite of Hunwick’s own expertise in studying Islamic intellectual and legal texts in Africa,
especially those that link North and West Africa through their Saharan networks.
141
Ibid., 25.
142
Ibid., 25-26.
143
Ibid., 29. See Hunwick’s ft.103 for the reference!
144
Ibid. In ft.103, Hunwick draws attention to a 1991, University of London thesis, which operates within
this same dichotomy but with worrying lack of sensitivity or subtlety. The author suggested that former
slaves used bori in “support of their endeavour to cross boundaries from ‘paganism’ to Islam, from nonArabness to Arabness and from ‘savagery’… to ‘civilized’ norms. My own preliminary work along these
lines attempts to probe some of these issues, and suggests some alternative approaches. E Ann McDougall,
“A Sense of Self: the Life of Fatma Barka (North/West Africa)” Canadian Journal of African Studies ,
32, 2 (1998), 398-412.
145
“The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade Out of Africa: A Tentative Census”. In Elizabeth Savage (Ed.),
The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. (London, Frank Cass: 1992; first
published as “Special Issue”, same title Slavery and Abolition 13, 1 (April, 1992) ), 214-48.
146
Ibid., 214-215.
147
See discussion pp. , above.
148
For example, to assume that Consular reports were ‘relatively disinterested’ given the history of
abolition (even the brief discussion, above pp. ), is dangerously naïve, to say the least.
149
There are five tables in total: t.1 216-9, t.2 223-227, t.3 232-234, t.4 238, t.5 239.
150
Ibid., 242.
151
James L.A.Webb Jr., Desert Frontier. Ecolonigal and Economic Change along the Western Sahel 1600-
1850, (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press: 1995). A review article discussion focused on this work
recently: E Ann McDougall, “Research in Saharan History”, Journal of African History 39/3 /98,467-480.
152
Economic modeling is only as good as its data. Austen’s sources and calculations provide many of
Webb Jr.’s figures, along with some of the travellers’ accounts we examined earlier. There are some other
issues regarding the modeling that are raised in McDougall, “Saharan History”.
153
Webb Jr., Desert Frontier, 65-67.
154
Ibid., 136.
155
Ibid., 27.
44
156
Ibid., 26. A similar argument appears on p. 25 “As a result of White raids into Black lands, a sizable
frontier trade in desert-bred and North African horses to the Black cavalry states of the savanna, a regional
exchange of salt and other commodities, a large column of Black Africans were swept into the desert
world. Large numbers of these victims of political violence were forced to march across the Sahara to meet
their fates in the Maghreb. But many of these individuals did not make the trans-Saharan journey. From
these northbound coffles composed principally of women and children many Black African captives were
put to labour in the White world of the desert edge and the desert itself”.
157
As concluded, p.135. He is correct in arguing that the thesis has had an enormous and largely
unchallenged weight in West African history.
158
As I began to look at the francophone materials from the nineteenth century, I realized that they need to
be similarly analysed but in their own political and literary climate. Had twentieth century researchers
drawn Anglophone and francophone work together more consistently, that strand would have had to have
been woven in. As it stands, the divide remains sufficiently wide as to justify this particular study. A more
extensive examination should look at what a comparison might reveal about national(ist) discourses and
shifting academic ‘imperialism’.
159
The usual back cover, even for special editions, is advertising. There is no reference attributed.
160
Webb Jr., Desert Frontier. Another illustration in the book itself shows white, rather featureless-guards,
garbed in a sort of generic ‘oriental’ dress, carrying very long spears and marching a half-dozen naked
slaves “from the interior” (where is not indicated). (p. 92, illustration 4.4.)
161
Renault, Francois and Daget Serge. Les traites négrières en Afrique. (Paris, Editions Karthala: 1985).
162
Ibid., 172, 51 ”Interieur d’un harem a Constantinople” (Constantinople, 1839); p.160, 48 “Esclaves
noires a Fez” (Paris, 1882). In the latter, one slave woman stands brazenly to the forefront, skirt slit open to
the top of the leg, the other very noticeably wearing the ‘Berber’ (Saharan) veil but not covering the face as
a ‘noble’ would do. Both illustrations are in the chapter on the Trans-Saharan and ‘oriental’ trade.
163
Images like a slave caravan being taken between the Senegal and the Niger in the Soudan or Barth’s
sketch of Timbuktu (Ibid., p.154, 45 “Convoi de captifs” (Paris, 1868); 157, 47 “Tombouctou en 1853”
(New York, 1857).
164
Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and
Culture”. In Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay (Eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora. The Making of a
Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. Special Issue Slavery and Abolition 22, 1 (April
2001), 5.
165
It is important to note that these assumptions are beginning to be questioned even from within the
Project. Ismael Musah Montana is currently preparing a PhD thesis at York University and recently
presented “Surviving Diaspora: West and Central African Communities in Early 19 th century Tunis” at the
Canadian Association of African Studies Annual Meeting, Toronto 2002. He is critical of the consequences
of assuming all ‘blacks’ were slaves or that all black slaves saw themselves as part of the same ‘Diaspora’
experience. The ‘one size fits all’ approach creates some difficulties for areas that cannot be logistically
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considered part of the ‘hinterland’ in spite of the very generous definition (egg. including Angola) that the
Project directors give to ‘hinterland’.
166
Ibid., 7.
167
“…what we know about the past now requires a model that begins in Africa, traces the movement of
specified cohorts of peoples into the Americas and examines how, in regionally and temporally specific
contexts, they drew on what they brought with them as well as borrowed from what they found in the
Americas to forge new worlds for themselves. In the process persons of African descent contributed to the
making of broader regional and eventually national histories and cultures, forging the wider Atlantic
civilization. New awareness of the Atlantic as a single, complex and integrated unit of analysis helps us
recognize that influences not only have slowed forwards and backwards from Africa to the Americas but
also have circulated around the Atlantic world. This knowledge too needs to geed back into and enrich our
conceptualization of the history and culture of the Atlantic basin…”. Mann’s suggested ‘compromise’
position seems to me to be questioning the usefulness of the ‘Diaspora model’ as it has been defined to date
on the one hand and clearly explaining in terms of process why the movement of blacks through the transSaharan trade into the Sahara, North Africa and elsewhere should not be studied as part of the same
experience that shaped the “Atlantic world” (p.16).
168
The medieval concept of crusade has even recently been resurrected; its current articulation takes the
form of a worldwide ‘war on terrorism’, a reference to the aftermath of the attack on the New York World
Trade Towers, September 11, 2001 as articulated by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, Jr.
Media coverage of all forms is sufficiently extensive to serve as reference here.
169
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Wonders of the African World”, PBS Television series, 1999. Defenders of the
Swahili countered with charges of cultural imperialism and orientalism. The controversy has been well
documented on discussion lists like H-Africa and in the electronic journal West Africa Review that has
published many articles in response to the program and to Ali Mazrui’s critique in which he described
“Wonders” as a case of “Black Orientalism.” H-Africa, http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/ and Ali A.
Mazrui, "A Preliminary Critique of the Tv. Series by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," West African Review 1, no. 2
(2000). ; Ali A. Mazrui, "Black Orientalism," West African Review 1, no. 2 (2000) and Ibid. My thanks to
Louise Rolingher, currently a PhD student at the University of Alberta working on Swahili identity, for
these references.
170
E. Ann McDougall, Mesky Brhane, and Urs Peter Ruf “Legacy of Slavery; Promise of Democracy:
Mauritania enters the 21st Century”, in Malinda Smith (ed) Globalizing Africa (Africa World Press,
Forthcoming 2003).
171
On this point see the heated debate between Ali Mazrui and Woyle Soyinks in West African Review.
[Check exact reference]
172
Even this rather lengthy overview only skims the surface of the problem of studying the trans-Saharan
slave trade, and by extension slavery in the many societies with which this trade intersected. It would take
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another more extensive study than this to tackle the issue of slavery itself, and yet a third to look at where
we should be trying to go and how to get there.
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