In this pioneering book, Bruce Hall takes a bold look at the historical dynamics of racial discourse in the long-term history of the western Sahel from the vantage point of the Malian town of Timbuktu. This area witnessed the flourishing of traditions of Islamic learning generating rich local archives. Unlike most scholarly visits to the Timbuktu libraries, Hall's research spanned two years during which time he learned to decipher handwritten documents and acquired proficiency in the Songhay language in order to conduct interviews.
In a masterfully written introduction, Hall explains how the language of race and slavery came to dominate the political rhetoric of the 1990s separatist Tuareg and Arab rebellions of northern Mali and Niger. The articulated binaries of black and white, slavers and enslaved, that fueled political conflict, Hall argues, had more in common with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century local discourse about race than colonial ethnographies. Confronting the literature, Hall takes issue with scholars such as Terrence Ranger, Jean-Loup Amselle, and Mahmood Mamdani whose deliberations on race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial Africa underplay the role of African agency in racial constructions over time.
The book's eight chapters are organized in four thematic and chronological parts, each preceded by a short introduction. Due to the format of the African Studies series, this book regrettably does not include a bibliography. The first chapter is a historical survey that, following the literature, treats the seventeenth century as a turning point when Islamic traditions of language and culture prompted foundational and genealogical realignments among Sahelian and Saharan peoples. Warriors came to overpower clerical lineage groups, while Berber and increasingly Arabic-speaking pastoralists developed ideologies of race to assert their dominance over sedentary and so-called black agricultural communities. Hall examines ancient debates about racial difference, ranging from climes theory to the story of Ham, highlighting the contributions of Ibn Khaldun and al-Suyuti, two important references in West African thought.
In Chapter Two, Hall engages in inter-textual readings of Arabic legal manuscripts dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. How African intellectuals conceived of free versus enslaved groups, Hall suggests, changed over time to the point that ‘blackness gained legal meaning’ in the Sahel (p. 69). In a well-known treatise on slavery, Timbuktu's famed scholar Ahmed Baba recommended that blacks not be indiscriminately equated with slaves, and provided examples of West African Muslims who could not be turned into slavery. Subsequent scholars discussed the collective status of certain non-Muslim groups, namely the ‘Bambara’, an ethnonym that became synonymous with the enslavable status of unbelievers. Hall discusses the concept of mustaghraq al-dhimma applied to one whose legal personality has been ‘consumed’ (or ‘submerged’) by unlawful activity, and the debates among Saharan scholars on its application to collective groups. Drawing on legal opinions of the eighteenth-century scholar al-Sharif Hama Allah, Hall shows how scholars grappled with the complicated question of illegal seizures, as in the case of raids, and the property rights of blacks, both free and enslaved. Evolving racial politics would prompt the nineteenth-century Caliph of Hamdullahi to have the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicle, Ta'rikh al-fattash, forged for inclusion of racial categories of blackness aimed at relegating permanent servile status to certain groups for the sake of population control.
The next section deals with the French occupation and administration of the Niger River Bend region, with a focus on their dealings with Tuareg nomads. Here Hall draws from the colonial archive to trace the evolution of French perceptions of the Tuareg from Algeria to the conquest of what would become the ‘Soudan Français’. The very choice of name for this colony (from sudan meaning ‘black’ in Arabic) is indicative of the mixed genealogies of race that are Hall's concern. An informative review of French ethnographies highlights the strange affinity the French held toward the Tuareg whom they identified alongside Berbers and Arabs as ‘white’. One of the most interesting parts of Chapter Four deals not with the Tuareg, but with a warrior group known as the Berabish from the Azawad region to the north of Timbuktu. Based on an anonymous chronicle, crosschecked with colonial archives, Hall is able to examine from multiple angles their struggle to acquiesce to French demands.
In part three, Hall presents case studies illustrating subtle and obvious ways French rule transformed local power dynamics. Chapter Five discusses how Tuareg and Arab leaders used the French to shift allegiances among warrior groups, their vassals, and slave communities. The most captivating example is drawn from the writings of an Igillad scholar who chastised the French for turning social hierarchy topsy-turvy (‘you have reversed our [social] statuses and made the freeman into a slave and the slave into a freeman, the noble into a commoner, and the commoner into a noble, the princes into subjects and the subjects into princes, for no reason’ (p. 205)).
In Chapter Six, Hall returns to the subject of slavery and its persistence in the colonial period. Here as elsewhere, Hall deals not with the characteristics, timeline, or extent of the trade in slaves. He is mainly concerned with representations of slavery and racial dynamics in the local archives. Based on the legal opinions of the Kunta scholar Shaykh Bay, he examines the rights of masters and slaves in a colonial context, including questions about treatment, taxation, and paternity. The last case study (Chapter Seven) focuses on the Songhay people and their struggles to defend rights to land in the fertile Niger floodplains. After the colonial occupation, these Songhay switched from paying the Tuareg tribute to being directly taxed by the French, thereby aggravating power relations among pastoralists and sedentary populations.
The last section of the book examines racial discourse in the period of decolonization and beyond. It describes the 1950s failed French attempt to establish the ‘Organisation commune des régions sahariennes’ (OCRS) that had gained popular support among Tuareg and Arab groups eager for territorial autonomy on the eve of Malian independence. Hall also discusses well-publicized cases of the slave trade to Saudi Arabia at the hands of Malians close to the colonial state.
This is a remarkable work of scholarship that will cause scholars of Africa to reconsider the history of racial politics among Muslims from the earliest sources to contemporary times. It is also an exemplary contribution from a methodological standpoint, not only because of Hall's deep reading of local archives, but also because of his cross interrogations of the colonial record. Hall demonstrates throughout how records penned by the Muslim elite, especially legal opinions, document social and behavioral norms, including those of the victims of institutional racism. What remains to be understood is how oral traditions and literature represent experiences of negotiating race in a multi-ethnic society.
