Gorée Island is known as the location of the House of Slaves, and was used for the slave trade. John Karwoski/flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Growing attention to the racial and colour-based discrimination that sub-Saharan Africans and African slave descendants face in the Maghreb and in the Middle East has opened up new spaces to debate the relationship between ‘racism’ and legacies of slavery in the two regions. While these debates are far from new in a context like Mauritania, where former slaves and slave descendants have struggled for decades against descent-based discrimination, in many other North African and Middle Eastern countries they have emerged only relatively recently. This is perhaps because, as the Moroccan historian Chouki El Hamel notes, a “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery and colour.

With this week’s special series, we seek to unpack the ‘racial issue’ in different post-slavery contexts in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East by interrogating its connections with local histories of slavery and their contemporary legacies. Drawing on fresh case studies from Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Emirates and Yemen, the contributors reflect on the complex intersections of historical and contemporary dynamics that shape present imaginations of ‘blackness’, black identities, and belonging. They also look at new forms of racial discrimination and activism based on specific constructions of race.

A “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery and colour.

Very few authors have looked at the racial legacies of slavery in these contexts to date, in contrast to the relatively large amounts of scholarly attention shown to the memory of the transatlantic slave trade and race in the post-slavery Americas. That is thankfully starting to change. A growing body of historical works (think Paul Lovejoy, Martin Klein, Alice Bellagamba, Ann McDougal, Ehud Toledano, John Hunwick, Eve Troutt Powell, Terence Walz, Kenneth Cuno, Bruce Hall, Chouki El Hamel, Ismael Montana and Behnaz Mirzai) have significantly enriched our knowledge of the history of slavery and race in West Africa and the Mediterranean Muslim world. A number of anthropological studies have furthermore explored the shadows of slavery in the lives of slave descendants and haratin (a term generally translated as ‘freed blacks’ or ‘free blacks’), especially in Mauritania and in the Maghreb area.

However, we need to explore if and how current developments are reshaping racialised dynamics in social, political and intimate lives. Tracing the local meanings of race, with its complex relations to ideas of colour, origin, blood and descent, the contributors seek to interrogate how current expressions of racism connect with historical experiences of slavery.
 

Breaking the silence

Since the early 2000s, the francophone magazine Jeune Afrique has published personal testimonies of both Black Maghrebians and sub-Saharan Africans. The questions posed regarding identity and discrimination in these narratives became more urgent following the protests and revolutions that took place in many North African and Middle Eastern countries in 2011. In post-revolution Tunisia, for example, we’ve seen unprecedented forms of black rights activism that question the very idea that black emancipation can exist without a continued struggle against racism.

In 2014, in Morocco, the national campaign “my name is not a negro” (ma smitish ‘azzi) gave public visibility to the issue of racism in Moroccan society. In March 2016, a network of associations launched the international anti-racist campaign “neither serfs nor negro: stop that’s enough” (ma oussif, ma ‘azzi: baraka wa yezzi) in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Mauritania. From Mauritania to Yemen, local anti-racist movements and societal debates have enabled novel political practices, languages and subjectivities to emerge. To what extent, we ask, are current anti-racist movements and debates on race able to capture the complexity and multiplicity of the experience of ‘blackness’? What histories and vocabularies are mobilised to raise public awareness and attain political goals?

Engaging with these questions, some pieces reflect on the emergence of race in their interlocutors’ political imaginations and public actions. In Mauritania, where slavery was abolished in 1981, the anti-slavery organisation El Hor (established in 1978) has denounced the persistence of slavery and its consequences on the lives of the haratin in terms of the socio-political stigmatisation and chromatic demonisation. However, as Giuseppe Maimone shows, with IRA Mauritanie, a local organisation founded by Biram Dah Abeid in 2008, ideas of colour and racial discrimination have started to replace the classic focus on slavery and descent-based forms of discrimination of previous antislavery movements.

In Yemen, a political discourse based on colour has been mobilised by the akhdam, a dark-skinned marginalised group, to gain a public voice and denounce their socioeconomic and political discrimination. As Luca Nevola shows, in a society in which individuals and groups are ranked according to their genealogical origin, an emphasis on colour entails a crucial shift in the common sense representations of this group. Crucially, Nu’man al-Hudheyfi, the political leader of the akhdam, reference prominent figures like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to give international visibility to his political struggle.

In Morocco, it has been the growing public attention to violence and discrimination against sub-Saharan Africans that has recently opened a debate on the issue of anti-black racism and its connections to the history of slavery. Against the backdrop of these debates, Laura Menin shows how Senegalese students and young professionals experience, interpret, and reckon with racism in their everyday lives. Their stories suggest that while the legacies of slavery affect local constructions of ‘blackness’, current racism against black Africans also speaks to contemporary dynamics in Morocco, in which media stigmatisation, unemployment, widespread poverty and social insecurity work together to nourish social tensions and resentment vis-à-vis the “new” comers.

From different perspectives, these pieces show the complex ways in which ‘blackness’ is embodied, experienced, represented and contested by different social actors – be they slave descendants of African origins, haratin, or Sub-Saharan African students and professionals.
 

Lived legacies and present pasts

The processes of abolition and emancipation followed different paths and took place at different times in North Africa and the Middle East. The consequences have also varied greatly depending on the context. Yet while not all black-skinned people are descendants of slavery, nor are all slave descendants black, one important legacy that this history has left behind across the board is the close connection between blackness and slavery in the popular imagination. This had led socially ‘white’ people to position socially ‘black’ people in lower or subordinate positions.

An important legacy that the region’s slave history has left behind across the board is the close connection between blackness and slavery in the popular imagination.

In many contexts, colour attribution reveals more about local dynamics of power, status and origin than colour itself. This emerges clearly in Marta Scaglioni’s piece on the meanings and practices associated to ‘blackness’ among the ‘Abid Ghbonton, a community of slave descendants in southern Tunisia. She shows how visions of ‘blackness’ rooted in the history of slavery in Tunisia re-emerge, in different guises, in her interlocutors’ everyday lives and aesthetics. This makes both ‘blackness’ and colour central concerns, for women especially, in relation to marriage, beauty, and social prestige.

Not all countries have, like post-revolution Tunisia, begun to centre questions of race and colour in public debates. In other contexts, like the Emirates, these remain taboo topics. Former slaves became Emirati citizens in 1971, several years after abolition in 1963, and since then the process of modern state-building has since sought to include them within a single ‘Arab’ national identity. As a consequence, the roots of many Emiratis in the Indian Ocean and East Africa have become lost. They have not been forgotten, however, and even though the slave past is officially silenced, Idil Akinci shows how the daily dynamics of colour, origin, and race expose the limits of Emirati citizenship in absorbing difference.

It is often when marriage is at stake that questions of colour and origin matter, making a slavery past vividly present in people’s lives. Alice Bellagamba’s contribution focuses precisely on marriage, a crucial question in the Kolda region of Senegal, as one important site where the shadows of slavery become palpable. In this context, a marriage between a slave descendant and a person of free or noble ancestry isnot only met with social opprobrium on the side of the latter, but also considered unideal by the person ‘marrying up’. Even though an increasing number of young people aspire to a marriage based on love rather than on local norms, questions of origin and race continue to have an impact in a context where marriage remains a key factor of social reproduction.

Taken together, the pieces found in this special feature draw attention to the multiple and complex ways the shadows of slaveryare experienced, reckoned with, and even politically mobilised by different social actors in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. These present pasts, as Alice Bellagamba reminds us, overlap with and influence current socio-political dynamics.

Laura Menin is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Milano Bicocca. She has conducted research in Morocco since 2008, working on migration, love and intimacy, political violence during ‘the years of lead’, and ‘race’ and racism.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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South Sudan refugee camp, 2011. Maximilian Norz/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Judging by the millions protesting against president Trump’s policies on behalf of the vulnerable and voiceless, empathy is alive and well. Or is it? Trump’s recent immigration ban exempts Christians from Muslim-majority countries, recognizing their status as the world’s most persecuted faith. But how much empathy do Christians feel for their brothers and sisters in Africa? And why do Muslims who care about the plight of the Palestinians lose so little sleep over the systematic elimination of their black African co-religionists in Darfur? Is skin colour still a significant stumbling block to empathy?
 

Who exactly is my neighbour?

For years, African Christians have been persecuted for their faith. For the purposes of this article, persecution is not litigation against bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay weddings, or pharmacists declining to sell contraceptives. Rather, persecution is the deliberate and deadly targeting of Christians because of their religious identity, whether it is the terrorist group Boko Haram bombing churches in northern Nigeria, or the Sudanese armed forces killing their non-Muslim citizens, or Islamic State brutally erasing 2000 years of Middle East sectarian diversity. 

Occasionally, the western media reports on Egyptian mobs destroying Coptic Churches, or ISIS beheading Syrian and Iraqi Christians. But coverage of Africans being subjected to massive ethnic cleansing is relatively rare. African Christians are left wondering if their co-religionists in the comparatively wealthy white world take the commandment about loving their neighbour so literally that they empathise only with people like themselves, as Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene.

The Africans interviewed for this article do not come from the ranks of intellectuals who blame colonialism for the continent’s problems. Yet, they believe that even though most westerners deny it, at a subconscious level a black African Christian life isn’t quite as valuable as a white one.

“Christians in Europe and America are not talking much about the killings of fellow Christians in Africa because to some, Africans do not matter, just like during the genocide, when our people were killed,” a survivor of the Rwandan genocide explained to me. “The west did not care much, but when they are attacked by terrorists they make measures to stop terrorists and it is in the world news”. In the words of another Rwandan, who provides training for genocide survivors: “My take on this? It is pure racism, and there has never been any brotherly love”.

A retired British bishop recalled attending a conference at Lambeth Palace (home of the Anglican Church worldwide) where an American bishop said the African Anglicans were, “only just out of the jungle.” “He failed to realize that more of the African Bishops had earned doctorates than he or most of those American Bishops who complained!” The retired bishop continued: “I was a bit shocked when Archbishop Justin Welby said he lost sleep over homophobia, at the same time as fellow Christians were being massacred in Northern Nigeria, which he didn’t mention”.

According to Bill Andress, an American who has been campaigning against the persecution of Sudanese Christians for decades, “whether consciously or subconsciously, we do not value the lives and welfare of black people as we value those of white people, and we assume that tragedy in Africa is just part of the picture and cannot be stopped”.

Another American campaigner, Marv Steinberg, of Genocide No More, believes Christians in the US are split in their interpretation of the commandment to love thy neighbour, “meaning your immediate neighbour, if he agrees with you. I really think race enters into it”.  

And Rod Brayfindley, a pastor in northern California, blames “the difficulty of overcoming both deep and latent racism in the western press.” He adds, “news rooms argue African conflicts are too expensive and risky to cover, but if a similar group of white folk were being attacked, they would absolutely have the funds to cover them”.

Many European and American Christians insist people of faith should be concerned about all humankind, and not just their co-religionists. Yet, this does not account for the widespread ignorance among western Christians about black African Christians who are being killed precisely because they practise their faith, rather than converting to Islam or agreeing to live by Islamic rules.

According to Ann Buwalda of the Jubilee Campaign, a UK charity which advocates for persecuted Christians worldwide, “when I speak or share in American churches, I find there is interest in the suffering in Africa. But when people are not given anything to do in response to hearing the horrors, they will shut down and tune out because of the emotional side of learning and then not knowing what to do with the information”.

The awareness gap persists, despite the best efforts of several western NGOs like the Jubilee Campaign. It is unlikely many Jewish people have not heard of the Holocaust, or that most literate Muslims would not know about the Palestinians. Both ‘sides’ in the Palestine-Israel conflict have efficiently politicised their co-religionists across the globe. Arguably, some Muslims and Jews living beyond the Holy Land may pay lip service to the cause represented by their imperiled brothers, but, in contrast to Christians, they are at least aware of the issues.

Perhaps, as Barbara, an Anglican stalwart in California, put it, people feel so overwhelmed by the misery of Africa that they do not distinguish between the victims of famine, AIDS, natural disasters, civil wars and jihad. If this is the case, then, in the view of one British aid worker I spoke to, development charities and NGOs may be partly to blame for painting such a negative picture of the continent in order to raise money.
Andy Warren-Rothlin, an academic living in Nigeria, echoes this, when he argues that “western media has tended to present suffering Africans in ways which do not engender engagement (‘she’s just like me!’), but rather paternalism (‘I must help the poor thing’). The result is that western audiences don’t see a village in northeast Nigeria as somewhere they might live, or a Nigerian church as somewhere they might have been when Boko Haram rolled into town”.

It was not always like this, points out Sam Totten, an American academic with decades of human rights and humanitarian experience in Africa. Less than 20 years ago, the evangelical supporters of George W Bush pushed him to press the Sudanese regime to allow ten million southern Sudanese Christians to secede in 2011, forming South Sudan. That widely-shared concern seems to have shrunk to a few NGOs and activists.
One of president Obama’s final acts was to ease Sudanese sanctions. Yet, the Khartoum regime continues to bomb the Christian areas in what remains of Sudan. Villages, schools and hospitals have been targeted as recently as January 2017, while, according to Amnesty, Sudan used chemical weapons against its Muslim civilians in Darfur in September 2016. But instead of outrage at Obama’s appeasement of Sudanese leader Field Marshall Bashir, the only sitting head of state indicted for the crime of genocide, there has been near silence from American politicians who otherwise flaunt their Christian values.
 

The wrong kind of Muslim?

The Islamic world is similarly unmoved by the fate of Muslims in Darfur, prompting some Middle Eastern commentators to observe that black African Muslims suffer from the same indifference as black African Christians. “Are the people of Darfur not Muslim as well?” demands Tareq Al-Hamed of the Asharq Alaswat paper. And the former fundamentalist, now Washington think-tank expert Ed Husain asks, “Are Darfuris the ‘wrong’ kind of Muslim because they self-identify as black Africans rather than Arabs?”.

I spoke to a canon in northern Nigeria who believes that most Arabs still view Africans as slaves, even when they share the same Muslim faith. His view is supported by anecdotes from Sudanese who describe being routinely and publicly addressed as abid (slave) when working in North Africa and the Middle East. In Libya, Human Rights Watch has documented the alarming extent to which black African Muslims have been bullied, tormented, attacked and killed by Arabs. The Canadian academic Salim Mansur believes, “Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long and turbulent history”.

Andy Warren-Rothlin sees the situation differently. “This is clearly not a race issue, since it’s even harder to get interest from London-based southern Nigerians in the suffering of their northern Nigerian compatriots. Or if it is race (if you use such terms!), you must recognise that each of the 500 or so ethnic groups in Nigeria is one ‘race’.” His views are shared by American Christian activists who are disappointed by the lack of concern shown by southern Nigerian Christians towards their fellow Christians in the northeast of the country. “Nigeria is so delicately balanced between Muslim and Christian, that the Christians living in relative peace don’t want to stir up trouble,” admitted one campaigner.

Richard Cockett, a regional editor at The Economist, argues that the Rohingya people of Myanmar have, until very recently, suffered the same invisibility as African Muslims. Because the Rohingya are “mildly Sufi”, he tells me, they have not attracted support from Muslims further afield. Now, thanks to a recent UN report, their persecution has been noticed, but for decades they suffered ethnic cleansing in obscurity. They might not have been African, but it seems they were the wrong kind of Muslim.

Meanwhile, Muslim countries that consider themselves as defenders of the faith have been silent following the Trump Administration’s ban on Muslim immigrants. And it has been widely noted that three million Syrian refugees could be given shelter in the 100,000 air-conditioned tents standing empty in Saudi Arabia.

What can be done? Each time a Christian or Muslim leader or politician piously invokes their faith, they should be challenged by the faithful and the non-faithful alike in their community to make good on the pledges of equality and shared identity explicit in the roots of both religions. If a church or mosque does not have a partner or link with a church or mosque in Africa, then members of their community should ask why not. In addition, our governments should recognise the vital role played by African churches and mosques as arbiters of local reconciliation, because they often represent the only genuine civil society in repressive countries; and our aid programmes should therefore support those grassroots peace-building efforts.

Is it worth contacting our elected officials and faith leaders about these matters? The late American Senator Paul Simon said that if only he had heard from 100 constituents demanding action during the Rwanda genocide, he would have felt empowered to contact the Secretary of State. Politicians know that for every one person who makes a phone call or writes a letter or an email, there are hundreds of thousands who share their views but haven’t quite got around to taking action. It is never a waste of energy.

Rebecca Tinsley is the founder of Network for Africa, a charity that trains local people to become lay counsellors for the survivors of conflict and genocide. She also founded Waging Peace, an NGO campaigning for human rights in Sudan.

This article was first published on Open Democracy

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