A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960

Traces the development of African arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in Mali.

Bruce S. Hall (Author)

9781107678842, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 March 2014

360 pages, 7 b/w illus. 5 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'What makes this work so outstanding is that it is for the larger part based on local Arabic source material, which ensures that the local visions of race and society are indeed local and not inferred through an interpretation of French source material … For many of us, reading this book will mean reconsidering much of what we thought we knew about Islam, history, and society in the Sahel.' Baz Lecocq, Islamic Africa

The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since.

Introduction
Part I. Race Along the Desert-Edge, c.1600–1900: 1. Making race in the Sahel, c.1600–1900
2. Reading the blackness of the Sudan, c.1600–1900
Part II. Race and the Colonial Encounter, c.1830–1936: 3. Meeting the Tuareg
4. Colonial conquest and statecraft in the Niger Bend, c.1893–1936
Part III. The Morality of Descent, 1893–1940: 5. Defending hierarchy: Tuareg arguments about authority and descent, c.1893–1940
6. Defending slavery: the moral order of inequality, c.1893–1940
7. Defending the river: Songhay arguments about land, c.1893–1940
Part IV. Race and Decolonization, 1940–60: 8. The racial politics of decolonization, 1940–60
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Islamic studies [JFSR2], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], African history [HBJH]