"Beyond specific cases, the heavy legacy of Middle Eastern slave trading continues to weigh on relations between the Arab world and Black Africans, and constitutes one of the main obstacles to African integration… Among [these] burdens, one could discern the ambiguous relations between sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, which is essentially Arab and white (Ngoupandé, 2007)."[1]
"(…) the racial, ontological question that haunts these societies (in the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean) - this question concerns the construction of a genuine pluralism nourished by full awareness and understanding of the fact that slavery carries racism as the storm cloud carries the thunderstorm. The storm (racism) remained after the cloud (the slave system; Diène, 2002)."
"I belong to an Africa that has always looked at itself through its own eyes (Hawad, 2017)."
The thesis according to which Western slave trading and slavery have their generative impulse in the Arab slave trades is defended by the Africanist and American specialist of “Black Islam,” John Hunwick[2] (Hunwick, 1962), and amplified by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, but was nevertheless promptly rejected by the authors of the Proceedings of the Lisbon Seminar (Castro Henriques & Sala-Molins, 2002), in particular by Louis Sala-Molins (Sala-Molins, 2002, [1987] 2002). For their part, forgetting even the very existence of the Western Codes Noirs (Sala-Molins, 1987, 1992), the same Pétré-Grenouilleau or John Hunwick focused, following among others Bernard Lewis (Lewis, 1993), solely on the social, intellectual, or juridical field of “Arab Africa.”
Yet thus, and at the same time, with regard to all slave trades, there are institutional Africanist authors as well as Sub-Saharan African thinkers and writers who, depending on the contexts of enunciation and the audiences addressed, “tip” or oscillate to one side (the trade is “Arab” and not transatlantic) or to the other (the trade is not “Arab” when the audience is “Arab,” but Euro-Atlantic). This discursive see-saw betrays a harmful political indecision with respect to epistemological ethics and undermines the proper use of thought and of the plurality of ways of thinking the universal and the horizon of humanity–beyond, if not against, identity withdrawal.
With regard to Morocco, what this Africanist, pro-Africanist, or even Orientalist constellation feigns to overlook is this country’s military resistance to the African extension not only of the Reconquista from January 2, 1492 onward, but also of the American “experimentation” (the descendants of the Guanches of the Canary Islands know all too well the bitter fruits and unripe deeds of the murderous “exploits” of a Spanish conquistador named Cabeza de Vaca) of the Pizarros, the Cortéses, and others. The Mexican Dream or Thought (Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio) recounts and narrates the “Destruction of the Indies”; the sobs of Las Casas cannot wipe away the tears of Moctezuma and of his Mexican or Aztec descendants. A specter haunts the Conquistadors: the anxiety felt in the face of the critique of imperiality (Meziane, 2021), but also hatred of the Moor and of his brother in destiny: the African.
Towards the Transmutation of Knowledge into Recognition
The conative yet nevertheless phatic posture (Honneth, 2005) of J.-P. Ngoupandé mentioned above is not without recalling the metonymic articulation of the tree around the forest. There is nothing to hide, and in particular this: that the erection of slavery (al-Rik in Arabic; Aïdi, 2023; Benlemlih, 2004; Chebel, 2007; El Hamel, 2013; Ennaji, 1994; N’Diaye, 2008) as a pseudo-unthought (Boukaboute, 2012), poisoning relations between the peoples of the Two Shores of the Sahara (including Saharan peoples), in fact induces the rejection of the Machiavellian occultation of the African anchoring of northern Ifriqiya and of the “Tuaregs,” who are an integral part of the Amazigh world[3]. The articulations, one around the other, of so-called “white” Africa and so-called “black” Africa are bound to the decisive necessity of breaking the taboo subject of the trans-Saharan slave trades, several ramifications of which lead massively to the Ottoman seraglio, or to Persia, or to the Indian littoral of the Arab world, or to the Mediterranean shore of Africa. And this, while accompanying the concluding assertion of the Burkinabè historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, for whom neither Islam nor North African culture is at issue in this matter (Ki-Zerbo, 1988).
The construction of a de-racialized pan-African living-together, productive of shared possibilities, entails de-complexifying inter-African relations in order to gain access to the meaning of a common legacy that would allow the active intellectuality of African “decolonial” horizon-bound convicts to rethink the outrages—namely, not only intra-African and trans-Saharan slave trades and slavery, but also the transatlantic slave trades. Indeed, relations among the aforementioned peoples must be revisited in light of the ordeal of aporia: the slave trade and its various vectors or channels (including racism) through which pass what it carries–Black persons raided, captured, sold, bought, resold, ontologically denied… This machine of dehumanization bears an “Africanist” name: the trans-Saharan noria. Yet there are peoples (Maghrebi, Tuareg, Songhay, Fulani, Bambara, Hausa, Sarakolé…) among whom the various effects of this machine’s functioning continue to be sustained and thus endure. This is what Malek Chebel (2007) designates by the expression “residual slavery.” An expression whose meaning must be broadened to encompass the present-day social, ecological, and mental dimensions of the consequences of all slave trades. Indeed, the slave-trade/slavery dyad generates the anthropological dilapidation of the descendants of slaves (‘Abid). They bear not only the burden of their ancestors, as well as that of the inhumanity of their condition, but also the trauma intrinsic to the intra-African and Middle Eastern genesis and to their pseudo-terminus, namely: the transatlantic slave trade (or the Black Atlantic; Gilroy, 1993; McNeil, 2010).
Being “only” the input of the capture of this flow of deported and enslaved Africans, the Middle Eastern trade, insofar as it is said to constitute the zero degree of the slave phenomenon, finds itself multiplied through both “ideological” yet real outputs and “receptions” (of these very flows), whose locations vary, shift, or multiply according to the intensity and criminality of the global geopolitical space-time which, in the era of “triangular” trade—yet nonetheless disseminated and globally “territorialized”—determined the arrangement of these economic and anthropological catastrophes, of which Africa, and later the American Africas or those of the Indian Ocean, with the various and infinite eloquent silences that veiled them in a garb woven by the feathers and inks of the most illustrious currents of thinking or theologizing Europe. Reviled by a handful of institutional Africanists, Louis Sala-Molins (1987, 1992) decisively deciphered the manuals and the Black Codices of the genesis and effects of the alliance between reason and the crozier.
Trans-Saharan or the Transfigured Desert (El Guabli, 2024)
Since the dromological revolution (i.e., the introduction of the dromedary and the crossing of the Sahara) and the introduction of Islam into North Africa from the seventh century onward, trans-Saharan slavery and the slave trade have hardly been—beginning with and following the scriptural productions of the first ethnologist “geographers” writing in Arabic—the object of an eloquent “silence” in the writings of numerous Arabophone Maghrebi jurisconsults and “philosophers” (of law), whose argumentative authority and conclusions derive from their recourse to reliability through chains of witnesses or transmitters referring to the “Arabo-Muslim library.”
How, then, should trans-Saharan slave trading and slavery be approached? In North Africa, who has addressed them—or gone beyond them—through a reflection capable of attaining a conceptual productivity able to confront the truths that haunt the North African body and imagination, and make them dance with their “Black” double? What are the lineaments of a non-mythical—indeed, universal and pluriversal—orientation of ethnological reflection at work within Maghrebi historiography and within the cosmography (and its interpretation) that it carried? Among other questions, these call for a renewed confrontation with the thought or thoughts forged by “Africanists,” but also, paradoxically, by diverse sources such as Ibn Battuta, Leo Africanus, Ibn Khaldun—the proto-Deleuzian defender of “the supremacy over other peoples conferred by nomadic life—in fact a limited semi-nomadism” (Servier, 1986, p. 35)—theorist of the paradigm of the “Berber” tribe, paradoxically, or rather “naively,” productive of sociopolitical “chaosmosis” (Félix Guattari) and, at the same time, of state imperialisms or, failing that, confraternal ones.
The task of the “specific intellectual” is to cultivate a mania for doubt, to integrate into theoretical reflection geo-cultural phenomena that appear to belong exclusively to the superficial exercise known as the alliance of theology, Kanoun (law), reason, and ideology. To gain access to the unspoken (slave trade and slavery) of “our” sciences and of those of Africa(s) is to free them from the amnesia that once intoxicated them. While it goes without saying that one cannot dispense with passing through the dismantling of this exercise, the same does not hold for the necessity of revisiting the pro-Eurocentric and sub-Saharan Afrocentric reading of the question of the Arabo-Muslim logosphere in its relations to the trade in Africans south of the Sahara and the Sahel. Connecting, one upon the other, discourses expressed in Arabic with Euro-American and Afro-African discourses on the slave trades would make it possible to better grasp both the lineaments and the ravages and outrages caused by the combined effects of intra-African, sub-Saharan, Middle Eastern, and Western slave trades.
Let us restate it: the thesis according to which Western slave trading and slavery have their generative impulse in the Middle Eastern trades is defended by the Africanist and American specialist of “Black Islam,” John Hunwick (1962), and amplified by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, but was nonetheless promptly rejected by the authors of the Proceedings of the Lisbon Seminar (Castro Henriques & Sala-Molins, 2002), in particular by Louis Sala-Molins (2002). Clearly, whatever their genesis, sources, or deployments may be, slavery and the slave trade “are crimes against humanity” (Diène, 2002; Balibar et al., 2005).
For their part, forgetting even the existence of the Western Codes Noirs (Sala-Molins, 1987, 1992), Bernard Lewis (1993), John Hunwick, or Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (to cite only these authors) focused on the almost exclusive juridical field of “Arab Africa” and overlooked how sub-Saharan jurisconsults condemned “only” the moral “deviations” of a few sub-Saharan enslaved persons in the Maghreb under Turkish domination—particularly the handful of Black men who were conscripted into the Tunisian Turkish navy. These authors ignore the historiography and, above all, the sub-Saharan “Other Archives” (Chokri, 2010; El Guabli, 2023; Memel-Fotê, 1996) written in Arabic, such as the writings of Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu and those of Ahmad Ibn al-Qadi of Timbuktu (1808–1809), for example. Moreover, these Africanist and Orientalist luminaries feign to overlook that ‘abd (slave), rayia (subject), and ‘amma (plebs) are inseparably companions in misfortune of subjection and corvée labor at will: when labor power is cheap, if not “free,” it ceases to have a color, or even a “soul” (as Ginés de Sepúlveda liked to say of the Amerindians).
But what of the Middle Eastern slave trade? What of the trans-Saharan slave trade? This has already been noted: according to Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, in his version of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the latter would be the eldest daughter of the other trades—the Middle Eastern ones and, therefore, the trans-Saharan trades and, without saying so, the intra-African ones. This genealogy, which generates a series of questions falling within the domain of historians’ expertise, raises the issue of how to explain the positioning of medieval North African historiography and sources concerning the trans-Saharan slave trade.
Beyond the fact that this positioning continues to poison, according to the late Central African philosopher Jean-Paul Ngoupandé and his Africanist or para-Africanist analogues, inter- and intra-African relations, let us recall that, whatever their forms, medieval Maghrebi Arabophone sources did not focus on the phenomenon of slavery and, consequently, on its abolition. With the exception of insidious allusions made by certain North African jurisconsults specializing in fiqh (Maliki canon law)—in particular the An-Nawāzil al-Fiqhiyya or writings of the Moroccan jurisconsult al-Wancharissi (Mezzine, 1989), the chronological elder of an Ibn Khaldun (statesman and theorist of ‘aṣabiyya; Khaldun, 1856[4]) with regard to sources of knowledge about Africa south of the Sahara—the pre-Wancharissian and post-Wancharissian corpora examined the status and lived experience of slaves and delimited their “rights” and “duties,” and did so in light of the Arab- and African-Muslim juridical field (Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu must be invoked here in view of his critical involvement in this field).
What is required of Maghrebi scholars is not only to grasp the mechanisms behind the silence of medieval North African Arabophone sources in their treatment of slavery and the status of slaves. More importantly, what is demanded of them is to universalize approaches to, and interpretations of, the globalized phenomenon of slavery by delocalizing it. This requirement refers these scholars back to their intellectual and academic responsibilities in the face of the present moment: to detach from themselves and to embrace the standpoint of Africa(s) and of the margins that, unbeknownst to them, work through the discourses scholars construct—at once—about them (the Africas), about themselves, and about the world community as a whole.
One example among others illustrating the path forward to confront the entanglement of North African history and the history of slavery: today—or in the past—in South Africa, a literary and theoretical corpus has emerged that explains and renders visible the genesis of Apartheid and its (dis)solution through the concept of Ubuntu, forged by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and taken up by Souleymane Bachir Diagne. In short, positive law speaks of this vitrifying panopticon; it theorizes it just as the Nawazil did in relation to the trans-Saharan slave trade and slavery.
Another example showing the way forward to confront the entanglement of Maghreb history (for instance) and that of Sub-Saharan Africa: today, in the Maghreb, a literary and theoretical corpus has emerged that explains and renders visible the genesis of the statist marginalization of society or the “subalternization” (Spivak, 1988)[5] of the “majority.” And all the better if positive law, society, and public institutions integrate these insights into the public sphere of discussion. Here, the relationship to truth is a social fact, in contrast to the ambiguous relationship of the Nawazil to slavery.
Yet the apparent silence of the two epistemes (al-Nawazil and law) is not an ordinary “biopolitical” phenomenon that merely controlled the forms of life (libenswelt) of slaves. It was also foundational to societies with an “artificial mode of production” or a “tributary mode of production” (Amin, 1979, p. 54). The material civilization of the peoples north of the Sahara is one of the combined effects of these modes of production without stock or clock (Claudot-Hawad, 2006; El Guabli, 2023).
The practice of slavery is so evident, so visible—like space (Ibn Battuta vs. Ibn Khaldoun; Battuta, [1858] 1994), secularizing thought (Averroès; Averroès, 1987), the Black Codes (Louis Sala-Molins), “Negrafricanism” (Claudot-Hawad, 1995), “Arab Africa,” ethnocides, Apartheid, and civil wars in Africa—that the dominant discourse, and even the meanders of destructive ambiguation stemming from the critical contributions of the “Jargon of the Aufklärung,” ended up claiming to render it invisible.
Beyond, and at the same time alongside, the Timbuktu Studies or Maghrebian studies in a non-Pan-Africanist Black Studies version (El Hamel, 2013), we note that, in terms of the visibility of this practice, Sub-Saharan scholars such as Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu (2012) and Ahmad Ibn Al-Qadi teach us to approach slavery and the writing of history without specular mediation. Even more, they initiate us into the necessity of having history—and its unthought—speak what it suppresses, whereby the critique of the potentials of their stances constitutes a form of de-denial or confirmation of a diverse relation to truth.
This heuristic gesture allows one to phrase knowledge after trans-Saharan slavery. Beyond the silences of Ibn Khaldoun (insensitive to Ibn Battuta’s revolutionary spatial paradigm) and those of Al-Wancharissi, anti-slavery voices reach us from Sub-Saharan Arabic-language knowledge intended for Maghrebian and Ottoman governments.
Regarding the visibility of the slave system, Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu and Ahmed Ibn Al-Qadi left little clear testimony of their condemnation of this practice. At best, they condemned anti-Islamic behaviors—nights of trance, orgies, mediumship, Maghrebian-Black Blues (Aidi, 2014), Afro-Maghrebian music therapy—within African-Maghrebian communities. Hence the necessity of analyzing the unthought of Sudan-Maghrebian historiography; of reconsidering the Eurocentric, Afrocentric, or Machiavellian Black Studies’ distortion of the relation to this unthought as a form of unmediated stigmatization of so-called “white” Africa, and, consequently, the establishment of the Sahara as a multi-dimensional[6] frontier.
Analyzing this unthought allows one to phrase knowledge after slavery in its global generality, and not exclusively as “Oriental.” Beyond this distortion and the silences of Maghrebian intellectuality and the intellectual legacy of the previously cited Sub-Saharan authors, what academic research demands is respect for scientific debate and dialogue, in the Platonic sense, in order to dismantle the various consequences of the anthropological and geopolitical bordering of the Sahara, as well as its perverse effects, such as the maintenance of the isolation of Saharo-Sahelian peoples (referring here only to this part of Africa that one would like to render “ghostly”).
Beyond these considerations of the “inactuality” (in the Nietzschean sense) of the frontierization of the Sahara, and whatever this may or may not signify, Ahmed Baba and Ahmad Ibn Al-Qadi teach us to approach the writing of history without specular mediation. In other words: to compel the “globalizers” (J. Ki-Zerbo) and their unthought to speak what they suppress, in which their constrained “positionalities” exist outside the depths of the Other’s speech and outside “my” relation to the “Other-Archives.”
Address to my colleagues in Africa and beyond, who will engage with Valentin-Yves Mudimbe
For the Africas, or the Afriches[7], to construct a meta-coexistence productive of shared possibilities and liberating meta-narratives, it was necessary for them to ontologically unblock their specular relations and access the depths of their common legacy, which is by no means free from outrage: namely, slavery and the intra-African, Sub-Saharan, and trans-Saharan slave trades. Indeed, the relations existing between peoples south and north of the Sahara, including Saharan peoples, must be reconsidered in light of the aporetic test—that is, slavery and the Cerberi of denial. Yet certain African “governmentalities” continue to practice trailing slavery in other forms and versions. This drives the anthropological degradation of the descendants of slaves, who bear the burdens of their ancestors, the disasters induced by slavery, and the polymorphic contours of all slave trades, whose accounting and compatibility mark the elastic, shifting, globalized territory spanned by the Middle Eastern / Western slave trade dyad. The combination of causes and impacts, or effects, of this dyad has resulted both in the Black Sahara or Black Atlantic (Gilroy [1993] 2010) and the Black Mediterranean, as well as in the planetary marginalization of humanity—and, contrapuntally, in the urgent anthropo-political imperative to produce alternative ecologies and pluralistic ontological policies.
Codicil, or the Grey of Hegel
Three considerations to open new research avenues:
1. The problem of breaking the juridico-philosophical and ideological silence regarding intra-African, Sub-Saharan, trans-Saharan, Middle Eastern, Indian Ocean, and transatlantic slave trades also concerns the descendants of slaves and the so-called African machinery of enslavement[8].
2. The alliance of ideological and legal arsenals has contaminated science, consciousness, politics, and morality. Slave trades prior to the 15th century, as well as those that followed, operate on a century-scale metric. They build upon Eastern and intra-African trades, which explains the relative silence on the co-responsibility of Middle Eastern, African, and Western slavers for the protean consequences of these trades on Afro-diasporic life and culture.
3. The writings of certain Maghrebian and Sub-Saharan jurists and intellectuals not only condemned slavery but, more importantly, advocated for its abolition. They carried the delegitimization of subjection and the misdirection of reason, or more precisely, the right of the subjugated to be free.
With these considerations, my contribution to Souffles’ work pauses. But is it truly pausing if one does not cite René Descartes: “Reason is entirely in each of us (…) there is more or less only among the accidents and not among the forms or natures of individuals of the same species” (Descartes cited by Césaire, 1954, p. 3)?
Cogito, ergo sum, said Descartes. But for me to exist, I must still my unthought: for a world without the Other and without others can only program my juridical and ontological nonexistence. This “co-being” with the Other is the inchoate Ubuntu to be continually affirmed: a necessary condition to break the Sphinx dialogue that seems to govern the anthropo-political relations of the “rainbow” peoples of Africa, particularly those of the two shores of the Saharo-Sahelian zone.
These peoples will no longer need to be autistic toward the musical partition of the world and the rumors spread by “global” ideology about the part of the world to which they belong, in part or entirely: the Muslim world. Indeed, these peoples are directly concerned by the cartography of contemporary geopolitics and by the geostrategic thought that this produces according to tendentious principles. This area, I would argue, is the object of a geostrategic alliance directed against it, precisely in the name of the Middle Eastern slave trade and, by ricochet, the trans-Saharan slave trade. If one of the objectives of this alliance is the brainwashing of women and men of the “Global South” and the “Global North,” we are entitled to ask: what is the status, in terms of power and ideology, of Orientalism and Africanism in its identity-globalization version, and of their uncritical adoption by Southern scholars, particularly African and Afro-Euro-American researchers?
Certainly, from the standpoint of reification, Africa’s tragedy mirrors the Amerindian tragedy and vice versa. But that is a wholly different matter—a diversifiable affair, destructive of the universal to be made.
If there is one affair that, for decades, even centuries of Boethian thought, has weakened global intercultural relations—paradoxically and despite the ethical efforts and performance of the UN, UNESCO, and ICESCO—it is the necessity of diagnosing the expectations and perspectives of the “crucial, ontological question” at the heart of the “racial contract” (Mills, [1997] 2023).
The transition from the triangular trade to today’s globalized trans-triangulation cannot be reduced to an Occidental / Muslim world clash in the name of the “Middle Eastern” slave trade. To preserve the connection of peoples on both shores of the Sahara, all Africans must assume their responsibilities by questioning whether the moment has not come to reconsider their relations—that is, to recognize the misdirection of reason carried by our scholarly, plebeian, and governing ancestors toward the subjugated. What organon mandates this duty? How can hegemonic, even racialized impulses be expelled from African memory and unthought?
Meeting these challenges simultaneously emphasizes the shared responsibility of ancestors and denounces the ideological and pseudo-legal foundations of the dual temptation of the International of the rights of globalizers (Ki-Zerbo, 2007, p. 19): a) denying the alter-practices of peoples seeking to overcome postcolonial subalternation, which continues, like a virus, to consume forms of life thought eradicated; b) making “Black” Africas the Golgotha of metachromatic Africas and the anthropological granary of the pluriverse to be continuously universalized.
Whether in the name of humanism or other paradigms, the historical catastrophe called the slave trade must not burden the inter- and transgenerational communication constitutive of the community of the possible world; it predates the formation of the three monotheisms and traditional African religions, having developed within them. Moreover, one can observe how the current implications of the slave system are inextricably linked to racism, conditioning numerous psychosocial and political postures of individuals, groups, institutions, and organizations. Those adopting this perspective will doubtless contribute to formulating a renewed approach to trans- and inter-Saharan relations, surpassing the desire to embed a Trojan Horse designed to poison the pluriversal perception of the world and of emerging globality.
These themes and issues can be critically examined around two central pivots: cosmo-citizenship and reciprocal acculturation. The construction of an alternative African unity, articulated around the affirmation of a de-alienated history and, simultaneously, the joyous celebration of the multi-world, freedoms, and transversal imaginaries (Mbembe, 2000), comes at this price. In other words: what “anthropological resonances” (Glowczewski & Soucaille, 2007) should be introduced in the act of rethinking the history of African and Afro-Overseas peoples? This act must inevitably consider, for application to African worlds, what, following Clifford, two anthropologists call the “notion of ‘articulations,’ principle of connections which (…) translates the Oceanian metaphor of the peoples of the Pacific” (Glowczewski & Soucaille, 2007, p. 25), but also the trans-Saharan peoples and deserts, as well as their cartography determined by the inter-multiple rather than exclusively the inter-two. This allows for recycling the Elsewhere and “multiplying the horizon” (Claudot-Hawad, n.d., p. 71) and enacts methodological prudence, resonating here as a call to make the “connections” for the empowerment of Africa and its past and present histories, non-fixist. All this while instilling joy into “solastalgia” (a term by Glenn Albrecht). “Thus, it is appropriate, without further delay, to return to work and open new horizons” (Boukari-Yabara, 2017, p. 337), all the more so since, ab initio, there was the rhizomatic diasporization of the living (human and non-human) and of the processes producing cosmo-citizenship. Is this dystopia?
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