When Ali Mazrui coined "Afrabia" in 1992, he was writing at what felt like a pivotal moment in world history. The Berlin Wall had fallen, apartheid was crumbling, and Mazrui saw in this "New World Order" both a centrifugal danger—the fragmentation he traced in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Yugoslavia—and a centripetal opportunity: the possibility that walls separating peoples, like those falling between Eastern and Western Europe or the United States, Canada, and Mexico, might also fall between Africa and the Arab world. The Kenyan historian had advanced this proposition before: that the Red Sea, like the Sahara, was a geological and colonial accident elevated into a civilizational boundary, and that a candid reckoning with shared language, religion, migration, and yes, the trauma of slavery, could yield a new geography of solidarity—Afrabia—could be a shield against what he called “global apartheid.”
This second issue of Souffles on Afro-Arab trajectories returns to Mazrui's vision more than three decades later, testing it against the granular. Where our first issue, "Afro-Arab Trajectories," laid out the intellectual genealogy of the idea of Ifriqiya—from Mazrui's own itinerary through Nasser's three circles, Nkrumah's pan-Africanism, and the Souffles-Anfas collective's wrestling with Négritude and Arabism—this issue assembles case studies that probe how that idea has actually been lived and contested. If Mazrui asked whether Africans and Arabs could forge a common future, the essays gathered here ask a harder question: on whose terms, through which institutions, and at what cost?
Several essays extend Mazrui's framework directly into new realms. Aomar Boum's study of Sudanese children's comics magazines—al-Subyan, Sabah, and Maryud—shows an Afrabian sensibility built not through summit diplomacy but through the pedagogical imagination of a postcolonial state, as comic heroes like "Uncle Tango" naturalized Sudan's African and Arabic identities as a single, ordinary inheritance for children rather than a contested political frontier—until the state itself, threatened by the cosmopolitan curiosity its own comics had cultivated, shut the experiment down. Dahlia El Zein's essay on Léopold Sédar Senghor's Arabité demonstrates how Senghor theorized Africanité as a "symbiosis" of Négritude and Arabité even as his politics—excluding North Africans from FESMAN in 1966, defending Senegal's Lebanese merchant elite while ignoring the structural inequality beneath that friendship—reveal the gap between rhetorical inclusion and redistributive justice that haunts every Afrabian project. Ahmed Allam's dispatch on Sudanese cuisine's recent explosion across Cairo and Alexandria offers something closer to Mazrui's hoped-for organic reconciliation: an unplanned, grassroots Afro-Arab convergence built not by treaty but by breakfast, in which shared dishes like wīka and ta'miyyah are quietly dismantling stereotypes that decades of diplomacy could not touch—even as the essay underscores that it is economic crisis is the catalyst.
A second cluster of essays examines Afrabia's twentieth-century political infrastructure—the institutions, alliances, and interventions through which African and Arab states actually tried to build the solidarity that Mazrui envisaged. Osama Abdel-Tawab's account of Nasserist Egypt and Nkrumah's Ghana reconstructs the diplomatic, military, and cultural architecture of a genuine Arab-African alliance, forged against colonial containment and Israeli inroads, and undone in the "Year of Setbacks" that followed both leaders' fall. Farid Boussaid's history of Morocco's interventions in Zaire during the Shaba crises complicates any romantic reading of Afro-Arab cooperation, revealing how Hassan II's solidarity with Mobutu was inseparable from Cold War calculation, the Safari Club's covert intelligence-sharing, and Rabat's own desire for American arms. And Abdimalik Ali Warsame's essay on Israel, Ethiopia, and Somalia inverts the volume's usual axis entirely, showing how a non-Arab, non-African outside power exploited precisely the fault line Mazrui wanted erased—cultivating Ethiopia as a bulwark against a Somali nationalism viewed as an extension of Arab hostility. Together these essays insist that any history of Afrabia must reckon with the Cold War's cynical instrumentalization of African-Arab difference, not only its idealistic overcoming.
A third set of contributions turns Mazrui's framework back on itself, interrogating the very categories—race, slavery, Arab, African—that Afrabia takes as its building blocks. Hisham Aidi's essay traces how American racial categories, forged in a specifically U.S. history of slavery and civil rights, have been exported to the Middle East and North Africa by universities, foundations, and now the State Department itself, often imposing a ‘colorline discourse’ where local idioms of difference were operating differently. Nathaniel Mathews's essay dismantles the term "Arabo-Islamic slavery," arguing that it conflates religion and ethnicity, erases the historical arguments of Muslim jurists like Ahmad Baba who condemned slavery from within the tradition, and imports an anachronistic, often Islamophobic framework onto a far more heterogeneous history. Bouazza Benachir pursues a parallel argument in a different register, insisting that any honest reckoning with trans-Saharan slavery must resist the "discursive see-saw" by which the trade is blamed on Arabs when addressing sub-Saharan audiences and on the West when addressing Arab ones.
Finally, two essays engage with the edges of Afrabia. Kenza Talmat's meditation on Amazigh loss, ethnocide, and the "Noirabie" of the Parisian banlieues insists that Arabization itself has functioned as an internal domination, one that "Afro-Arab" reconciliation risks reproducing if it does not also reckon with the Imazighen's own dispossession—a reminder that the Sahara's peoples are not merely a bridge between two blocs but a third party with political subjectivities of their own. Finally, Judith Scheele's interview on her book Shifting Sands dissolves the Africa/Arabia binary at its geological and methodological root, arguing that the Sahara should be read not as a barrier awaiting Afrabian bridging but as a region and a model in its own right, whose internal diversity resists exactly the kind of totalizing categories—Arab, Berber, Black, African—that both colonial cartography and nationalist writers reached for.
Broadly speaking, these essays complicate Mazrui’s idea of Afrabia. They show a history of Afro-Arab encounter that is at once more intimate than diplomacy (a shared breakfast table, a comic strip) and more compromised by power than solidarity rhetoric admits (Cold War patronage, racial categories imported wholesale, internal domination submerged beneath the Arab-African binary itself). Thirty years after Mazrui asked whether the wounds between Arabs and Africans might heal as slowly as those between Britain and America, or as quickly and shallowly as those between Japan and the United States, this issue suggests a third possibility he did not quite name: that the healing has been partial, uneven, and contested from the start—not a single reconciliation awaiting completion, but an ongoing argument about who gets to belong to Afrabia, and on what terms.
- THE EDITORS