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

Author(s):  
Anne Haour

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.

Author(s):  
James McCann

This chapter examines the ecological and environmental history of modern Africa. It explores the range of environmental challenges faced by Africa’s peoples over the past two centuries of imperialism and globalization and considers the extent to which these challenges were particular to the African continent. After setting out the diversity of Africa’s environments and climatic patterns, it examines levels of biodiversity and endemism, the creation of the forest fallow agricultural system in West Africa, the impact of New World crops, the interaction between disease and landscape in East Africa, and finally the ecological impact of the ‘urban footprint’ in the postcolonial period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Zainab Cheema

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.


Groupwork ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Paul Johnson

In June 2018, I was fortunate enough to attend and present at the IASWG Symposium at Kruger National Park in South Africa. It was a truly amazing experience. However, in July of 2019  I was once again able to return to the  African continent. This time to visit Zimbabwe. For the past four years, my friend and School Principal Chris Labbe,  had been visiting and working with the  IMVELO organization to raise funds for the following three schools:  Ngamo Primary School, Mlevu Primary School and St Joseph’s Primary School.These three schools are located in the indigenous and rural rural villages of Hwanga  National Park.  During the course of the visits to these three Schools, my wife Peg McGovern and I were able to observe the incredible work that was being done between IMVELO and the local communities. The overarching theme of the IASWG 2018 symposium had been “Groupwork in Communities.” On my visit to Hwanga,  I witnessed the impact  of Groupwork in these indigenous and rural communities. On my return home, I reviewed the Groupwork literature, and it reinforced what I observed and encountered  in Zimbabwe.  The wonderful sense of community, sustainability, cooperation, integration of programs, social action and empowerment. It truly was an amazing experience and a trip of a lifetime.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 894-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Spierings

Abstract Our knowledge of social trust's drivers in the MENA region is limited and there are good reasons to expect that theories based on Western countries cannot be copied to the MENA one-to-one. Arguing for a broader and at the same time context-sensitive comparative approach, I translate the ‘societal winners’, social capital, and religious beliefs mechanisms explaining trust to the MENA context. Moreover, I acknowledge intraregional diversity and test how the impact of these factors also differs among MENA countries. Empirically, I synchronize 47 surveys from 15 MENA countries, which provides the broadest and most systematic assessment of trust in the MENA to date. The results show that the societal-winner mechanism does not hold: employed, higher education and wealthier citizens are not more trusting. However, higher-educated citizens distrust other citizens more, particularly in the strongest autocracies. Religiosity seems pivotal too. Among others, service-attending citizens are more trusting, mainly where regimes regulate religious affairs. Overall, this study provides insight into what shapes generalized social trust in the Middle East and North Africa and it underscores that at a comparative level we need to consider inter-regional and intra-regional forms of context-dependency were we to formulate a broadly applicable theoretical framework of trust's drivers.


Antiquity ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 35 (140) ◽  
pp. 286-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bushnell

It is a commonplace of current archaeology that the publication of radiocarbon dates is revolutionizing our ideas of the past. Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in the University of Cambridge, England, has already published in ANTIQUITY and elsewhere some of his views on the impact of radiocarbon dating on New World chronology. Here he studies the whole problem in detail. He adopts the useful convention of referring to a date already fully published in the Radiocarbon Supplement to the American Journal of Science simply by its laboratory designation and number {thus K-554 is reading no. 554 of the Copenhagen Laboratory), but in some cases, where the date is not fully published, he gives fuller information.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-270
Author(s):  
Caryn Abrahams ◽  
David Everatt

The city of Johannesburg offers insights into urban governance and the interesting interplay between managing the pressures in a rapidly urbanizing context, with the political imperatives that are enduring challenges. The metropolitan municipality of Johannesburg (hereafter Johannesburg), as it is known today, represents one of the most diverse cities in the African continent. That urbanization, however, came up hard against the power of the past. Areas zoned by race had been carved into the landscape, with natural and manufactured boundaries to keep formerly white areas ‘safe’ from those zoned for other races. Highways, light industrial plant, rivers and streams, all combined to ensure the Johannesburg landscape are spatially disfigured, and precisely because it is built into the landscape, the impact of apartheid has proved remarkably durable. Urban growth is concentrated in Johannesburg’s townships and much of it is class driven: the middle class (of all races) is increasingly being found in cluster and complexes in the north Johannesburg, while poor and working-class African and coloured communities in particular are densifying in the south. The racial and spatial divisions of the city continue to pose fundamental challenges in terms of governance, fiscal management and spatially driven service delivery.


2020 ◽  
Vol 130 (630) ◽  
pp. 1817-1841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Levine ◽  
Chen Lin ◽  
Wensi Xie

Abstract We evaluate the impact of the African slave trade between 1400 and 1900 on modern household finance. Exploiting cross-country and cross-ethnic group differences in the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa, we find that slave exports during the 1400–1900 period are negatively associated with current measures of household (a) access to financial services, (b) access to credit, (c) use of mobile finance and (d) trust in financial institutions, suggesting that the slave trade has had an enduring, deleterious effect on household finance.


1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
James L. A. Webb

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.


Itinerario ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-113
Author(s):  
J. Lechner

Recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the need to study the impact of the New World on the Old, instead of the other way about. Yet surprisingly little is known about the whereabouts of books on America, or of atlasses and maps of this new world, in the libraries of European intellectuals from, say, 1500 until 1700 (the same holds true, incidentally, for texts about Asia). A possible explanation for this state of affairs might be that it is easier, although difficult enough, to compile a reliable bibliography of printed sources on America, as the splendid European Americana amply proves, than to ascertain what books figured in private libraries which are no longer intact. Furthermore, research into the private libraries of the past is still a somewhat modest sector of the province of intellectual history, in spite of the fact that Mario Schiff's brilliant study of the Marqués de Santillana's library dates from 1905 and that Henri-Jean Martin's seminal works have been published since 1958.


1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Nader

We are now, in 1992, searching to find the meaning of an event 500 years distant in time. For us as Americans the importance of the Columbian voyages is obvious. In the past ten years the great wealth of research, publication, and debate on ancient American cultures has made the impact on the Americas abundantly clear.For Europe the impact is much less clear. We say that the old world ended almost immediately, that a new world came into being when Europe ended its isolation from America. By this we mean that European perceptions of world geography began to change as early as 1498 —not just dotting the map of the Ocean Sea with more islands, but perceiving that South America was a continent whose existence was never imagined by the ancients. We also mean that the natural world began changing from the old world of two separate ecologies into a new world-wide environment.


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