“In the early-twentieth century Northern Sudan, use of the term “Black” described more an idea than a color. In short, both “Black” and “Sudanese” were a comment on low social status made by those who claimed a higher status. These terms usually referred to slaves, or to those of slave descent, whose relatives had belonged to a non-Muslim group from the South or from the Nuba mountains (possibly from even farther afield, e.g., from Abyssinia). Islam figured in this story of slavery through legal custom; since Islamic law proscribes the enslavement of Muslims, non Muslims had been historically the targets for enslavement. In the Sudan today, a memory of this connection between Southerness and the stigma of slavery recurs in the term abid, meaning “slaves,” which Northern Sudanese in the post colonial period have sometimes used in derogatory, belittling manner to refer to Southerners.”
“The history of slavery and the slave trade in Sudan stretches back to ancient Egyptian times. The early nineteenth century, however, witnessed a burgeoning domestic, as opposed to export, trade in Muslim northern regions. The stimulus came from the region’s new Turco-Egyptian rulers, who sponsored raiding in non-Muslim regions as a way, first of securing male slaves for their armies, and second, of profiting through the sale of women and children in both internal (Northern Sudanese) and external (Egyptian, Arabian and Ottoman) markets. Slaves became so plentiful and cheap as a result of this intensified raiding that even the humblest families of the central river in North were able to purchase a slave or two.”
“This influx of slaves transformed patterns of labor and attitudes toward labor. For example, whereas free cultivators from the region north of the Nile confluence had performed most agricultural work before 1820, by the end of the nineteenth century slaves had come to do virtually all of that labor. According to one historian, slaves accounted for approximately one-third of the Northern population by the tim of the 1898 conquest. In the Sudan, as in northern Nigeria, Zanzibar, and others British African territories, post conquest policies aimed to abolish slave raiding and to trans form ex-slaves into wage laborers, who would in turn generate tax revnues and stimulate cash based markets. As slave men and women asserted their freedom (by obtaining manumission papers or simply by fleeing), many migrated from rural areas to the growing urban centers, where they provided important labor (e.g., as construction and sanitation workers) for both the public and private sectors.”
“Although British officials welcomed the transformation of slaves into workers, they nevertheless tolerated or encouraged the continuation of some slavery. They particularly encouraged slave women to remain under or return to the control of their masters, fearing that the women would otherwise slip into prostitution and thence become vectors of vice and venereal disease. By taking such a gradualist policy toward slavery, especially vis-a-vis slave women, officials also hoped to appease and accommodate the slave owning classes, who were potential allies of the new regime. Patterns of assimilation were complex for slaves who gained freedom in the Anglo-Egyptian period or in previous generations. Although slaves taken North had routinely converted to Islam and had learned Arabic, it was far easier for them to become Muslims than to become Arabs in the eyes of the slave owning classes. Moreover, such cultural assimilation on the basis of religion and language rarely entailed a dramatic improvement in status, since low social status stuck to those of servile descent even after manumission.”
“One anthropologist who did fieldwork in the 1960s in a village along the Nile near Merowe, for example, noted that the village’s continued to have social obligations toward families who had owned them or their forebears. Since those of higher status frowned upon intermarriage with them, the group had remained largely endogamous. Slave descent, therefore, “blackened” an individual in social terms. Skin color was no index, since in the years before the nationalist transformation that would make Sudanese-ness acceptable, a person of high status could have had dark skin without being regarded as “Black,” or “Sudanese,’ by his community. Such an individual would most likely have identified himself instead as “Arab,’ which conveyed not simply his use of the Arabic language, but, more importantly, his claim of distinguished parentage. Good parentage derived from membership in a patrilineally reckoned tribal group (e.g., the Sha’iqiyya or Baqqara) that claimed a distant Arabian progenitor. The father’s line was paramount, though high status on the mother’s side enhanced social position.”
“Ultimately, “Arab” and “Black” were both more important to the Northern Sudanese as labels of status and class rather than of ethnicity or color. The British appear to have absorbed some of these attitudes, in the form of an “Arab”/”Black” classification system that easily dovetailed with their own prejudices and notions of race. The system was also reinforced by their partnership with the Egyptians in the Condominium, since Egyptians tended to carry their own racialized stereotypes about Sudanese slavery and servitude. The result, by and large, was the promotion of policies that favored Arabs over Blacks–high status over low—for the finest academic educations and the most lucrative office jobs. A British soldier, D.C.E. Comyn, provided an insight into this rough classification system in his memoirs, publishd as follows: “Of the 150 men, 50 were pure, straight-haired Arabs; 70 were Kordofan Arabs, who, by intermarriage with the Nubas, tc., have the curly hair of the latter. The remainder were Sudanese.”
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[…] FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “Under Arab cultural influence such people though black to westerners are those that came to describe themselves as “whites” in Africa, because of the many much darker slaves brought from further south. However, had they meant white or fair in the European sense, the word “red” or “ahmar” would have been used as it was the term among Arabs for the complexion of people of Syrian, Persian, Byzantine, Frankish and Turkish descent. The Arabic term (biyad or abyad, etc.) which has been translated as “white” was in that day usually reserved for very dark-skinned Arabs and Africans like the Tuareg (Sanhaja) or Fulani (Woodabe), who in the late medieval period were essentially dark brown as most remain today, though lighter than other Africans.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “Africanist Bruce Hall has been one of the few to explore the modern definition of “black” and “white” in African Sahelian societies and note that the meaning of each is dissimilar to the way such terms are used in Europe and the West. As he also has pointed out, in the Sahel the term “white” is frequently used by and for Fulani, Tuareg and the rather dark-brown Arabs (the Trarza for example). Sometimes, the Soninke Wangara and other merchants are designated “whites” in old texts as well.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain Hall at least prudently qualifies his usage of the words “race”, “black” and “white”in a footnote in the introduction of his own book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 saying – . “Throughout the book I will use the term “black” ,“white” and “race” . It will be understood, I hope, that even when not indicated by quotation marks or parentheses these terms are not meant as objective descriptors of physical or racial difference, but as social and cultural constructions” (Hall, 2011, p. 6, fn.) See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain But, another American historian Timothy Cleaveland published in the Journal of North African Studies writes in his abstract “Ahmad Baba included only one Black scholar in his biographical dictionary and instead featured nine scholars from his own ‘Berber’ patriline, including himself. The ironic characteristics of the Mi‘raj al-Su‘ud and Nayl al-Ibtihaj may best be explained by Ahmad Baba’s own ambiguous status in Timbuktu and the broader society of Islamic West Africa – as a ‘White’ Berber living in the ‘land of the Blacks’” (Cleaveland, 2015, Abstract). See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “The last statement, of course, implies Berbers were not “black Africans”. But, according to early observers, Sanhaja and other Berbers were a people black and near black in color if not culture. What’s more according to some accounts Ahmad Baba was far from being purely Sanhaja Berber and part of his ancestry was from the Sudan. In any case, if he was “white” in the African sense that should not be confused with the modern Western one, and to say that only one scholar was black in reality has little resonance with contemporary Western considerations of what a“black” complexion is.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain ” It probably would have been better to say few sub-Saharans were named by Ahmad Baba, but even that sounds inappropriate since Berbers were at some periods were recognized as much sub-Saharan as they were northern peoples. Baba was black in the western or European sense because he was Berber and secondly because his foremothers were also of sub-Saharan origin. If he considered himself “white” it could only have been in the Arab cultural sense that is now used among the Fulani, Ibo and other groups that Western observers have customarily considered “black Africans”. A prime example of this usage is in the text of Ibn Battuta supposedly a Berber himself when he describes a group of Bardama or Tuareg women of Mali as “pure white” or of a “whiteness without admixture” (Poppenoe, Rebecca, 2004, pp. 33 and 34). Bardama is the name of the Tuareg even today. The Fulani still call the Tuareg “Burdaame”, and the Soninke name for the Tuareg is Burdama (Hill, Allen G., 2012, p. 9; Jablow, Alta, 1990, p. 42). Some authors have also suggested that the Sanhaja refused to mix with the inhabitants of Tekrur based on the fact the latter were “blacks”. See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain ” According to al-Maqqari, the people of the Tekrur had in fact under their king invaded the Sanhaja city of Walata or Aywalatin. But the partners of the King of Tekrur he stated were in Tlemcen, a town in Algeria. It would only be natural that the Massufa clan of the Sanhaja of Walata, today’s Tuareg clan of Inusufen or Imesufa, would develop some dislike of the inhabitants of Tekrur. Thus, the whole generally agreed upon premise of why the Sanhaja Berbers despised and would not intermarry with the Africans of Tekrur is once again a case of projecting modern Maghrebi and Western anti-black views onto a historically and contextually-unrelated matter.’” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “Such antipathy in Africa when it has existed between peoples was mainly historically and economically-based as everywhere else in the world. Such tensions also existed and in some places still between the lighter nomad or “red” Fulani (called Woodabe or Bororo) and other African groups. See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “The fifteenth century Genoese observer Antonius Malfante wrote about the Tuareg (veiled Sanhaja) as Philistines, saying they were “fair” in comparison to the black Africans they lived amongst. In translation they were “bianchi Africani” and “tawnie”. However, in the same century Portuguese voyager Alvise Cadamosto (d. 1483) describes the Sanhaja of Oudane in that area as “brown rather than lightish” and the Arabs themselves were also described as of “brown complexion” (Blanchard, Ian 2005, p. 1139, fn. 114), which would characterize the majority of both of these so-called “white” peoples even today. See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “A recent article states, “The Tuareg had a racist contempt for the dark-skinned agriculturalists and did not see themselves as part of the same cultural universe. They saw themselves as white, though many were quite dark. Their supposed ‘whiteness’ made them favored by colonial administrators, but left them targeted by African nationalists.” http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v29n2p10.htm See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “But as we can see whiteness of the Tuareg and Fulani as with African Americans has little to do with “whiteness” of Europe or even modern coastal North Africa, but is a way to describe “black Africans”. Nevertheless, many mistaken views of the Tuareg have arisen due to the presumption that modern coastal people called Berbers represent “truer” Berbers than the people that called themselves Berbers not living near the Mediterranean coast today. Such ideas have led to interesting, but baseless genetic studies founded on unwarranted suppositions. Some of these studies for example are based on the idea that the Tuareg were descendants as the plough-using Garamantes and autocthones of North Africa or Sahara. See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “The variety of shades among black Africans was recognized by Arabic and African observers. Similarly, European writers addressed the difference between the shades of fairness among Europeans. The noted American inventor and founding father (for the U.S.) Benjamin Franklin distinguished a variety of tones among the incoming early European immigrants to the American colonies. It has often been noted that Europeans even used such terms as black for individuals among them that were darker than the norm. A similar thing was done among black Africans and affiliated peoples in Arabia. The term “white” has traditionally been used for certain black Arab or African people and African Americans of the same complexion. It has also been the case for a long time that “red” or “white” was in different areas used for black Africans for West African and East African black populations that are not absolutely black as well, but that is not to be mistaken for the Arabic use of the term “red” for European or other fair-skinned people. As mentioned previously in this blog certain Arab-speaking societies, when “referring to skin, an Arabic speaker may use [abyad] (“white”) as a euphemism for [aswad] (“black”)” (Allam, J., 2000, p. 78). As well “the word meaning white can be used to describe the color of coal…” (Boullata, Kamal, 2000, p. 302) . See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “This usage was customary for complexion where a black complexion with exceptionally clear or shining caste could be described as “abyad” and that of black buckwheat as found among many Sahelian Africans, Fulani, Tuareg, Trarza etc. could be expressed as abyad or bidan. It finally came to take on a cultural significance as well since many of the latter had obtained higher status in the Sahel and Sudan.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “Unfortunately, a number of academics having failed to discern or discriminate between the Arabic influenced uses of such words in Africa and as a result many of the people, i.e. Fulani, Tuareg, Wangara, or medieval Berbers often called “whites” in medieval Arabic writings have been wrongly interpreted as being swarthy Mediterranean people. Meanwhile, the references to the Berbers and Moors being black or even black as night and ink or pitch black have been considered either anomalies or exaggerations.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “According to Lewicki, in fact, Bavares is also thought to be the name of the people that came to be called the Bafour. “According to some traditions Bafour were whites … belonging to the Berber group of the Zenata. According to non-Muslim tradition the autochthonous inhabitants of Adrar Tmar were agriculturalists…The Bafour, might we think, be identified with the Libyan (Moorish) tribe of the Bavares, active in western part of North Africa in the third to fourth centuries of the Christian era” (Lewicki, Tadeusz, p. 313) See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “Clearly it seems that the “Barbares” or Soninke of the Sahel and Sudan were the “Mauri Bavares” or Babars of Mauritania in what is now Morocco and Algeria possibly pushed down by the Tuareg “the second race of Berbers” and/or Arab Sulaym/Hilal peoples like the Trarza or Hassaniya. They were direct ancestors of the black merchants known as Soninke, Sughai (Isuwaghen or Zawagha) or Wangara who are called “whites” in early African manuscripts. Of course it is easier to put two and two together when it is realized that the Songhai or Soninke version of “white” is not the modern North African or European one.” See FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain “One anthropologist who did fieldwork in the 1960s in a village along the Nile near Merowe, for example, noted that the village’s continued to have social obligations toward families who had owned them or their forebears. Since those of higher status frowned upon intermarriage with them, the group had remained largely endogamous. Slave descent, therefore, “blackened” an individual in social terms. Skin color was no index since, in the years before the nationalist transformation that would make Sudanese-ness acceptable, a person of high status could have had dark skin without being regarded as “Black,” or “Sudanese,’ by his community. Such an individual would most likely have identified himself instead as “Arab,’ which conveyed not simply his use of the Arabic language, but, more importantly, his claim of distinguished parentage. Good parentage derived from membership in a patrilineally reckoned tribal group (e.g., the Sha’iqiyya or Baqqara) that claimed a distant Arabian progenitor. The father’s line was paramount, though high status on the mother’s side enhanced social position. Ultimately, “Arab” and “Black” were both more important to the Northern Sudanese as labels of status and class rather than of ethnicity or color. The British appear to have absorbed some of these attitudes, in the form of an “Arab”/”Black” classification system that easily dovetailed with their own prejudices and notions of race. The system was also reinforced by their partnership with the Egyptians in the Condominium since Egyptians tended to carry their own racialized stereotypes about Sudanese slavery and servitude. The result, by and large, was the promotion of policies that favored Arabs over Blacks–high status over low—for the finest academic educations and the most lucrative office jobs. A British soldier, D.C.E. Comyn, provided an insight into this rough classification system in his memoirs, published as follows: “Of the 150 men, 50 were pure, straight-haired Arabs; 70 were Kordofan Arabs, who, by intermarriage with the Nubas, tc., have the curly hair of the latter. The remainder were Sudanese.” Source: Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan […]
[…] Source: Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan […]
[…] Source: Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan […]
[…] Source: Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan […]
[…] Source: Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan […]