“His name is ‘Usman”

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Einboden
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Interior Part

This chapter focuses on a slave named ‘Usman. Born in 18th-century Futa Jallon—“in the interior part of Guinea”—‘Usman was raised in a Muslim region famed for scholarship, but also soldiery, regularly waging war against neighboring states. Educated in Islamic traditions, ‘Usman was trained not merely to recite Qur’anic text orally, but to write in elegant lines. Such literary skills would comprise a rare continuity in a life of jarring interruption, linking ‘Usman’s studies in Africa with his slavery in America. Surviving the Middle Passage horrors crossing the Atlantic, ‘Usman was settled near Midway, a West African exile enslaved near an itinerant church, itself a refugee in Georgia. Transitioning between cultures, ‘Usman was surrounded by contending lines of succession, lines which seem to bleed into his own ink, receiving expression from ‘Usman’s pen.

scholarly journals Bilad al-Brazil: The Importance of West African Scholars in Brazilian Islamic Education and Practice in Historic and Contemporary Perspective

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Ayodeji Ogunnaike
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Sudan I ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Contemporary Perspective

While it is well established now that the middle passage did not entirely separate Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas from their home cultures and traditions, these connections are often studied and understood in the form of survivals or ancestral memory. This paper argues that in major urban centers in Brazil until around the time of World War I, West Africans not only managed to recreate Islamic communities and intellectual traditions, but maintained important contacts with their homelands. In much the same way that scholars have argued that the Sahara constituted an avenue of exchange and connection between North Africa and Bilad al-Sudan, I argue here that the Atlantic Ocean was not an insurmountable barrier but provided opportunities for African Muslims to extend the traditions of Bilad al-Sudan into Brazil—albeit to a much lesser extent.

The ‘Genius of language’

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 367-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schlaps
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Scientific Value ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Static Concept ◽  
Interior Part

Summary The so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.

Muslim Brotherhoods in West African History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Nobili
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African History ◽  
Lake Chad ◽  
History Of ◽  
Independent States ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Government

Muslim Sufi brotherhoods (ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa) are ubiquitous in contemporary Islamic West Africa. However, they are relative latecomers in the history of the region, making their appearance in the mid-18th century. Yet, Sufism has a longer presence in West Africa that predates the consolidation of ṭuruq. Early evidence of Sufi practices dates to the period between the 11th and the 17th centuries. By that time traces of the Shādhiliyya and the lesser-known Maḥmūdiyya are available between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Chad, but it was the activities of the Kunta of the Qādiriyya and of al-ḥājj ‘Umar of the Tijāniyya that led to the massive spread of Sufi brotherhoods in the region. The authority of leaders of ṭuruq did not disappear with the imposition of European colonialism. In fact, the power of those leaders who adjusted to the novel political situation further consolidated thanks to their role as mediators between their constituencies and the colonial government. Eventually, the end of the colonial period did not signal the decline of ṭuruq in West Africa. Conversely, during the postcolonial years, Sufi brotherhoods continued flourishing despite the secular nature of West African independent states and the increasing tension with a plethora of equally rising Salafi movements.

scholarly journals History of whaling in Annobón, Equatorial Guinea, and new evidence of its continued occurrence

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Russell Fielding ◽  
Christian Barrientos
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Humpback Whales ◽  
Equatorial Guinea ◽  
The West ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Evidence

A regular, though infrequent, artisanal whaling operation targeting humpback whales has been known to occur from the West African island of Annobón, Equatorial Guinea, since the late 18th century. Little has been known outside of Equatorial Guinea about this whaling operation since the mid-1970s. This paper presents a brief history of Annobonés whaling, describes recently surfaced evidence of its continuation as recently as 2017 and considers the future of the operation.  

U.S.–Nigerian Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian McNeil
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
African State ◽  
The United States ◽  
West African ◽  
International History ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Energy Politics ◽  
West African State ◽  
The Relationship

The United States and Nigeria have a long history, stretching back to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century and continuing today through economic and security partnerships. While the relationship has evolved over time and both countries have helped to shape each other’s histories in important ways, there remains a tension between hope and reality in which both sides struggle to live up to the expectations set for themselves and for each other. The United States looks to Nigeria to be the model of progress and stability in Africa that the West African state wants to become; Nigeria looks to American support for its development and security needs despite the United States continuously coming up short. There have been many strains in the relationship, and the United States and Nigeria have continued to ebb and flow between cooperation and conflict. Whatever friction there might be, the relationship between the United States and Nigeria is important to analyze because it offers a window to understanding trends and broad currents in international history such as decolonization, humanitarianism, energy politics, and terrorism.

Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West African ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
The World ◽  
African Coast

In 1771 Joseph Banks, John Fothergill and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. The name of this collector was Henry Smeathman, an ingenious and enterprising Yorkshireman keen on improving his position in the world. His expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married several times into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to landlords and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life and his attitudes to slavery, both African and European, as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection forged in this period between science, collecting, and slavery. The book also reproduces and discusses Smeathman’s essay describing his journey on a fully slaved ship from West Africa to Barbados, a unique account because it is written by a passenger unconnected to the slave trade. After four years in the West Indies observing plantation slavery Smeathman returned to England to write his ‘Voyages and Travels’.

Deaths of Slaves in the Middle Passage

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Over Time

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

Língua de Preto, the language of the African slave community in Portugal (16th–19th centuries)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-90
Author(s):  
Alain Kihm
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Portuguese Population ◽  
African Slave ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Folk Literature ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract Língua de Preto ‘language of the Blacks’ (LdP) is the conventional name for the basic variety of Portuguese spoken by the West African slaves deported to Portugal from the end of the 15th century onwards, who formed an important and visible minority within the Portuguese population until the end of the 19th century. The restructured Portuguese they used with the white Portuguese and among themselves is partially known to us through theatre and folk literature. Although its heyday was the 16th century, it apparently continued in use until the 18th century. The present article tries to account for its emergence and continuance and to assess its possible contribution to the formation of West African Portuguese Creoles. What LdP implies for the Portuguese attitude toward language issues is also examined.

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