The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
James L. A. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
North African ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Black African ◽  
Western Sahara ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Le Gall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
North African ◽  
World War ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Colonial

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North Africantarīqa(pl.turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.

Mooring Aslima

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Zainab Cheema
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Sex Worker

Abstract In Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, the entanglement of Spain and Morocco emerges through the diasporic figure of Aslima, the Moroccan sex worker. This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pandiasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.

How Much Is Your African Slave Worth?

differences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 156-168
Author(s):  
Anthony Bogues
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Modern World ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Racial Slavery

Arguing that racial slavery was a foundation of the modern world and of capitalism, this essay details the historical ways in which the organization of debt and credit networks were integral to the Atlantic slave trade. The author contends that the enslaved body of the African was itself commodified and, as such, opened new technologies of rule. Contemporary forms of commodification, indebtedness, and saturation, the essay concludes, draw from some of the ways in which the enslaved black body was ruled.

Decolonization and Migration

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud S. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
North African ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Jewish Populations ◽  
The Way

This chapter builds on the link between French colonial policies and Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole by tracing how decolonization throughout North Africa changed the way a diverse set of social actors, including French colonial administrators, international Jewish spokesmen, and a wide range of indigenous nationalist groups conceptualized Jewish belonging throughout the region. It argues that the process led to the emergence of the “North African Jew,” a category to which no individual ascribed but that worked rhetorically to unite the diverse Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish populations into a collective often understood to be in conflict with “North Africans,” “Muslims,” or “Arabs.”

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

The London Committee and mobilization of public opinion against the slave trade

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractDuring the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

scholarly journals French and Spanish colonial policy in North Africa: revisiting the Kabyle and Berber myth

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (239) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohand Tilmatine
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Divide And Conquer ◽  
North African ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Resistance Movement

AbstractThe French colonial presence in North Africa gave rise to a view that was founded on attributing certain – supposedly distinctive – qualities to the Kabyle people (Algeria) and the Berber people in general (Algeria and Morocco). This became known as “the Kabyle (or Berber) myth” and was propagated both by North African nationalists and by the academic world in order to validate their accusations against the colonial powers of practicing a “divide and conquer” policy. What’s more, from the outset, the French and Spanish colonial governments, by empowering Arabic as an imperial and dominant language to the detriment of the peripheral and low prestige Berber languages, greatly contributed to the widespread acceptance of a further myth, i. e., North Africa was “Arab and Muslim”. These myths then became a key argument used by the post-colonial governments to deny the distinctiveness of the Kabyle people, and Berbers in general, hence justifying rejecting their demands for linguistic and cultural recognition. In recent years, however, the Berber people have reacted to these myths; we have witnessed the birth of a resistance movement, the uprising in Algeria (Kabylie) and the development of cultural pride and identity. Surprisingly, these events have caused us to reflect anew on the Berber myths of the colonial period.

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