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.

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 Early Medieval Slave Trade of the Central Sahel: Archaeological and Historical Considerations

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Haour
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
African Continent ◽  
African Slave ◽  
The Past ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
The Impact

The trans-Atlantic trade that brought slaves from the African continent to the New World has generated such interest and controversy that it has tended to obscure another significant African slave trade, that which saw individuals sent across the Sahara to be sold in North Africa and Western Asia. This trans-Saharan trade was both longer-lived and, in terms of numbers eventually enslaved, demographically similar to the better-known trans-Atlantic trade. This chapter summarizes current understandings of the trans-Saharan slave trade for the period ad 750–1500 approximately, and assesses the prospects for its archaeological recognition. A second topic will be to suggest the merits of a comparative approach considering the impact of slave trading on social and political frameworks: the argument here is that a consideration of wider themes can bring us closer to understanding roots and causes, invalidating the convenient assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was a historical curiosity which can be safely consigned to the annals of the past.

Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.

1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (59) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein ◽  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Sokoto Caliphate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Last
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Local Markets ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The 19Th Century

Established using a conventional Islamic model of government, the new Muslim state in Sokoto, known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), possessed eventually very large numbers of men, women, and children, taken captive (usually when children) in jihad from mainly non-Muslim communities, to serve as slaves. These slaves worked on farms or within households, they might be concubines and bear children for their owners; or they might be sold as children for export to North Africa in payment for the luxury imports the new elite wanted. Slaves were, under Islamic law, deemed “minors” or “half-persons,” and so had rights that differed from those of the free Muslim. By the end of the 19th century there were more slaves on the local markets than could be sold; exports of captives to North Africa had already dropped. For some captives enslaved as children, however, the career as a slave led eventually to high political positions, even to owning many slaves of their own. But slaves’ property, even their children, ultimately belonged to the slave’s owner. Revolts by male slaves were very rare, but escape was commonplace. Concubines, if they ever became pregnant by their owner, could not be sold again. The abolition of slavery c.1903 was slow to become a reality for many individual slaves, whether men or women.

Slavery and the Slave Trade in Dār Fūr

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. O'Fahey
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The State ◽  
The South ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
State Organization ◽  
Slave Raid

The institutions of slavery, slave raiding and the slave trade were fundamental in the rise and expansion of the Keira Sultanate of Dār Fūr. The development of a long-distance trade in slaves may be due to immigrants from the Nile, who probably provided the impetus to state formation. This process may be remembered in the ‘Wise Stranger’ traditions current in the area. The slave raid or ghazwa, penetrating into the Baḥr al-Ghazāl and what is now the Central African Republic, marked the triumph of Sudanic state organization over the acephalous societies to the south.The slaves, who were carefully classified, were not only exported to Egypt and North Africa, but also served the sultans and the title-holding elite as soldiers, labourers and bureaucrats. In the latter role, the slaves began to encroach on the power of traditional ruling groups within the state; the conflict between the slave bureaucrats and the traditional ruling elite lasted until the end of the first Keira Sultanate in 1874.

The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807

1984 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 841
Author(s):  
Richard S. Dunn ◽  
Jay Coughtry
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave
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