Of the neologisms coined by the late Kenyan-Omani historian Ali Mazrui, “Afrabia” is the most memorable. This was his attempt, inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois, to delineate an emancipatory geography of Africa that would include the Arabian Peninsula. Mazrui would observe that Madagascar - which is separated from the African continent by the 500-mile wide Mozambique Channel - is considered part of Africa, while Yemen, which is only “a stone’s throw” from and boasts age-old migratory, commercial, and cultural ties to the Horn of Africa, is not (Mazrui, 1986, p. 28-9; Mazrui, 1992). Mazrui, who spent much of his career, reflecting upon the shared histories and futures of Africa and the Arab world, would also popularize the term "Afro-Arab." He deployed this concept to describe not only "Black Arabs" or what he’d call, “Afrabians,” but also to refer to geographic overlay, ethnolinguistic mixing, and the solidarity projects of 1970s and 1980s that tried to promote inter-regional cooperation and combine pan-African and pan-Arab nationalism (Amin, 1986; Akinsanya, 1976).
This issue of Souffles uses Mazrui's concept of Afro-Arab as a point of departure to examine a range of encounters and phenomena from the legacies of slavery to colonial attempts to institutionalize "African" and "Arab" as separate political identities and attempts to create an Afro-Arab nationalism that joins Arabism with pan-African political thought. The term "Afro-Arab" is admittedly contested, often drawing criticism for positing Afro/African as separate and distinct from Arab. It is also a designation that is highly contingent and shifting (Villa-Vicencio, Doxtader, & Moosa, 2015; Mayyas, 2023). Julius Nyabenda demonstrates below how the meaning of “Afro-Arab” in Kenya has changed since the colonial era, such that the term today refers to a specific elite group, the upper-class Waungwana group in coastal Kenya, but not to the lower-class raia. Afro-Arab thus conjures an array of convergences and identities on the continent and in the diaspora. In this issue, historian Amal Ghazal suggests we speak of an "Afro-Arab continuum" to capture this multitude of encounters and political projects.
“Hegel’s Ghost”
If the boundary between Africa and the Arab world is a political artifact, the essays in this issue probe how “Afro-Arab” is also a construct, and invariably a political response to colonial social engineering. It was European colonialists who first decided that the Red Sea and the Sahara were to be boundaries or divides. Decades ago Ali Mazrui traced the incongruous trajectory of the term Africa (Mazrui, 1986, p. 25), “Ifriqiya,” once the Berber/Amazigh word for the northern coast of Africa, which would morph into "Africa" and be adopted by Afrikaners at the southern tip of the continent, and then be embraced by African American thinkers who conceived of Africa from Cairo to the Cape; and yet, nowadays the term has come to connote Africa below the Sahara. The migration of the name reflects historic struggles within the continent and in the African diaspora over how to define and demarcate the African land mass. How Africa’s internal and external borders are drawn has political, social, and cultural repercussions, defining not only boundaries of citizenship and inclusion but also patterns of racial exclusion and domination.[1]
The European view of the Sahara as a line dividing Africa is often traced to Hegel, who famously declared that “Africa…is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” The German philosopher divided Africa into three regions: North Africa, which he called “European Africa”; northeast Africa, which he termed “the land of the Nile”; and then, “Africa proper,” the land to the south and the west. He considered North Africa and the Nile Valley to be extensions of Europe and Asia, respectively. Of “Africa Proper,” the land to the south and west, which provided slaves for the transatlantic trade, Hegel opined: “Africa proper, as far as history goes back, has remained for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world – shut up…” (Hegel, 1975, 173-5). Hegel’s division of the world into “people with history” and those without, his segmenting of Africa, and separating the northern tier from the rest the continent would shape colonial policies, academic disciplines, and generations of scholarship in Europe, America, and beyond.[2]
Even African scholars reproduced Hegel’s designations. In The Invention of Africa (1988), the seminal intellectual history of African philosophy, the Congolese thinker Valentin Mudimbe argued that knowledge production in Africa was dependent on Western languages and on the “colonial library,” which provided conceptual frames for post-colonial African thought. Yet, as the Senegalese scholar Ousmane Kane observes, Mudimbe could only reach this conclusion by ignoring northern Africa and the “Islamic library” – the multitude of texts written in Arabic and ‘ajami across the Sahel and the Sahara, from the 16th century onward (Kane, 2016, p. 18).
As the progenitor of racial science, Immanuel Kant took these divisions even further in the 18th century (Mills, 2017). The German philosopher developed a formalized racial hierarchy underscoring the importance of skin color as evidence of superiority and inferiority. He divided humanity into four categories: “1/ the white race; 2/ the Negro race; 3/ the Hun race (Mongol or Kalmuck); and 4/ the Hindu or Hindustani race.” Arabs, Moors, Persian, and Turkish-Tatars are included as sub-categories of the white race. Kant’s elaborate hierarchy of race reflected ambivalence about Arabs and Muslims. While denigrating the Oriental races, white and non-white, he wrote positively about Islam and the Arabs, whom he considered white (Battersby, 2007, p. 75-77). This ambivalence about North Africa would resonate across the centuries. Kant and Hegel were equivocal about the racial status of North Africans (alternatively called Moors, Arabs, Berbers), but they did see them as different from the people below the Sahara. European racial scholars could never agree on the specific criteria for defining the concept of “race” let alone the correct order of the hierarchy. Whether emphasizing “skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry” (Lopez, 2006, p. 2) or public sentiment and political opinions, the exact racial position of North Africans was always contested. But it was generally agreed that they sat below the European and above the Black African.
These racial distinctions would then inform colonial patterns of rule. Segregating races according to their presumed racial-civilizational capacity became the logic of 19th century colonial governance. In North Africa, deep into the 1930s, French colonial administrators wrote tomes claiming that Arabs and Berbers were distinct races, with the latter deemed white, indigenous, and secular, thus more amenable to the French mission civilisatrice than the Oriental Arab settlers (Ageron, 1960; Gross & McMurray, 1993). Sudan would become a flash point for colonial administrators, as a territory straddling both North and Central Africa, with a long history of ethnic mixing. The British began to separate populations into categories of “Oriental Arabs” and “native Africans” and developed a policy of native administration in which North and South were governed according to different logics ostensibly reflecting the natural abilities of the two regions. This culminated in 1930, when the British adopted the “Southern Policy” that sought to regulate movement and interaction between the country’s “African” south and “Arab” north to protect the South from the nefarious economic and political intentions of their northern countrymen (Collins, 1983). As essays in this issue show, similar policies would be adopted in Kenya, Zanzibar, and Mauritania.
Less well-known is that the colonial conceptual separation of the North African (Moorish, Berber, or Arab) from the sub-Saharan (Negro) would make its way across the Atlantic. On the American plantation for instance, whether a Muslim slave was of North African or Sahelian origin and Arabic-speaking, or from “Black Africa” and not Muslim, determined their place in the plantation’s pecking order. As historian Michael Gomez has argued, the role of Muslim slaves and Islam in colonial and antebellum America “in the process of social stratification within the larger African American society… contributed significantly to the development of African American identity” (Gomez, 1998, p. 60). An estimated ten percent of the slaves brought to America were Muslim, many of whom were of Fulbe, Mande, and Senegambian background, whose features, according to the colonial Hamitic thesis, were thought to be closer to those of Europeans than of Africans. American slave owners saw Muslim slaves, “as more intelligent, more reasonable, more physically attractive, more dignified people” (Puckett, 1926, p. 528-9). Because of this thinking, Muslims slaves in the United States were often placed in positions of power over other non-Muslim slaves, earning the distrust of other Africans and reinforcing the social construction of their difference.[3]
“Afro-Arab Time”
Colonial policies and trans-Atlantic slavery reinforced the Sahara as a racial marker and geographic divider. As decolonization began, one objective of anti-colonial movements was the challenging if not overturning of imperial cartographies. Prominent “Middle Eastern” actors on the African continent, such as Nasser’s Egypt, Muammar al Qaddafi’s Libya, and the Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) Algeria viewed themselves within an African context, as did many Third Worldist intellectuals and publics. As Mazrui has observed, both Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Nasser of Egypt sought to “re-Africanize” their countries. Upon coming to power, for instance, Gamal Abdel Nasser would famously declare that Egypt falls within “three circles” – Arab, African, and Islamic. The Egyptian president aligned Cairo with the Soviet Union through his two decades of rule, and supported liberation movements from Algeria to Rhodesia to the Zanzibari revolution, where Africans rose up against an Afro-Arab ruling elite. Most newly independent African states, led by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had a vision of pan-Africanism that included North Africa.
The meaning of pan-Africanism and unity would inspire much debate. The Egyptian leader, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekou Touré of Guinea belonged to the more radical Casablanca school which called for African unity, a pan-African army, and supported the FLN against France. Opposed to them were the more conservative Monrovia school – which included Nigeria, Senegal, and Cameroon – that stressed African statehood over pan-nationalism, and backed France in Algeria. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi was wary of Nasser’s interventionism and wanted a “sub-Saharan pan-Africanism.” Israel also competed with Egypt for the favors of African leaders. Nkrumah, an ally and competitor – was advised by the Trinidadian ex-Communist intellectual, George Padmore, who was sympathetic to Zionism and favored forging ties with Israel, to check Egyptian ambitions. He invited Golda Meir to address the All African People Conference in Accra in 1958.
In the early 1960s, the Pan-African academic project would find a home in African universities, specifically at Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (and to a lesser degree, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Committee in Zamalek, Cairo). With Egypt’s shift into America’s orbit and the rise of Sadat, Egyptian Pan-Africanist Marxists like Samir Amin looked to Dakar where working with the Malawian scholar, Thandika Mkandawire, and others, he helped establish the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973. Amin worked closely with the eminent historian Hilmi Sharaway, author of Afro-Arab Times, to translate classic works into Arabic and to bring Arab scholars into conversations about pan-Africanism (Sharawy, 2005).
The divide between North Africa and Africa was institutionalized even more as international institutions adopted and made policy based upon the category of “sub-Saharan Africa” (in lieu of the earlier “Tropical Africa” and “Black Africa”). Despite critiques from African scholars (Camara, 2005), it would form the basis of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund’s approach to the continent. The United Nations still considers 46 of Africa’s 54 countries as sub-Saharan – excluding Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia (“About Africa”). For some reason, Eritrea is considered sub-Saharan but neighboring Djibouti is not. Language, race and ethnicity, geographic features, as well as level of economic development have all been put forth as reasons for how a country is classified, yet these rarely match the actual sorting of countries. For the World Bank, Mauritania, which is located largely in the Sahara, is classified as “sub-Saharan.” Somalia and Djibouti located in the Horn of Africa are categorized as Middle East. It’s worth recalling that the World Bank once placed apartheid South Africa in the MENA category, but once the country transitioned to Black majority rule, it was put in the “sub-Saharan” box (“What is sub-Saharan Africa?”). African organizations—such as the OAU and the African Development Bank—have since the 1960s tried to push back against such externally-imposed designations, preferring to speak instead of regional organizations like the East African Community and the Economic Community of West African States as its “building blocks.”
African and Arab intellectuals have also attempted to remap Africa’s geography. In a seminal article published at the start of this century, Achille Mbembe argued for a cosmopolitan (“Afropolitan”) approach to the African experience that includes North Africa, starting with a reconfiguring of the geographies that continue to define the study of the continent (Mbembe, 2000). Mbembe calls attention to the long history of exchange that ran through multiple ancient corridors connecting North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa despite, or more accurately, because of the Sahara desert. In the last decade, a number of initiatives have emerged on the African continent – in Dakar, Johannesburg, Rabat, and Kampala – that are trying to connect African Studies with Middle East Studies so as to bridge the Saharan divide. Scholars in North Africa and the Middle East are increasingly noting the myriad ways that their (sub)regions are linked to Africa, not least through language and identity. North Africa’s main ethnicities extend deep into “sub-Saharan Africa.” Arabism stretches beyond the confines of the MENA region into northern Nigeria, Chad, Somalia, the Swahili coast, and Zanzibar. Likewise, Amazigh identity and nationalism continue into the Sahel – into Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Nor can the Gulf and the littoral areas of Eastern Africa be split from the Indian Ocean, given their long interconnections (Green, 2014).
Afro-Arab Studies?
Since its inaugural issue in 1966, Souffles has pondered how to simultaneously locate the Maghreb in Africa and the Arab world. Until its shutdown in 1972, Souffles was a vibrant forum discussing the ideas of Senghor, Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and the poetry of Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish. The essays in this issue revisit some of the questions addressed by Souffles – on Arabic language and identity, Negritude versus Fanonism, the meaning of the Sahara to nationalists – and show how the “Afro-Arab” idea is contingent and constructed in competing ways by different political actors and scholars. The contributions below address four broad themes: (1) the legacies of slavery; (2) anti-colonial solidarity and colonial legacies; (3) ideological and literary encounters between Afro- and Arab- nationalism; and (4) the project of Afro-Arab Studies.
On racism and slavery, Afifa Ltifi looks at the semantic legacies of slavery in Tunisia, and how the names inherited by Black Tunisians reinforce “invisibility and inferiority.” Noting the absence of Black Tunisians from school textbooks and public education, Houda Mzioudet recounts the story of Zohra Hamdiyya, a Black woman from the southwestern oasis city of Gibili, who became Tunisia’s first nurse. Zineb Faidi provides an ethnographic account of Gnawa practices in the city of Essaouira, Morocco, asking how market imperatives are shaping Gnawa narratives, and whether Gnawa exist at the crossroads of “Afro-Arab influences.” Examining anti-colonial agitation in 1920s Paris, Oumar Ba draws attention to Lamine Senghor, the Senegalese tirailleur and Communist, who launched the League Against Imperialism, mobilizing people from far-flung colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to protest the Rif War. Baba Adou looks at how the post-colonial Mauritanian state chose to align with the Arab world and adopted an Islamic ideological framework and Arabization policies to overcome the divide between Arab- and Afro-Mauritanians. Similarly, Julius Nyabenda looks at shifting perceptions of Afro-Arab identity in Lamu and Mombasa.
On ideological cross-pollination, Nathaniel Matthews analyzes the socialist Ummah party of Zanzibar, founded by Abdulrahman Babu and other disaffected Afro-Arab leftists on the eve of the Zanzibari revolution of 1964, aiming to wed Marxism with pan-Africanism and Arabism. Hisham Aidi examines the influence of Leopold Senghor on Moroccan intellectual and political discourse, especially the Senegalese poet’s central role in the Afro-Arab Forum launched in the town of Asilah in 1980. Ben Jones looks at Libyan scholar and poet Muhammad Qashat’s particular brand of Saharan Arab nationalism that valorizes the ecology of the desert, language, lineage, and racial ties. Kribsou Diallou looks at the political activism and literary output of the Nubian novelist and Communist Mohamed Khalil Qassem, who served fifteen years in prison, and published the novel Al-Shamandura [The Buoy] in 1968. Zeyad El Nabolsy looks at parallels between the thought of Amilcar Cabral and Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani (two theorists central to the Souffles-Anfas project) and the significance they attributed to class analysis in the struggle against colonialism. Both thinkers held that the leaders of the first wave of independence movements failed to understand that liberation from colonialism was not in the interests of all members of the colonized societies.
Finally, the aim of this issue of Souffles is also to ruminate on the emerging field of Afro-Arab Studies, to contemplate how to write the “Afro into Arab,” without repeating or feeding (neo)colonial categories and Western narratives. To that end, Zakia Salime’s essay surveys recent American writing on the “race question” in North Africa, proposing ways to decolonize the race debate, in part by drawing attention to Moroccan scholarship that preceded the recent Western discovery of the topic. Amal Ghazal’s reflection on Afro-Arab Studies in the Gulf, similarly looks at recent initiatives in Qatar and UAE that try to think trans-regionally across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. In our author interview, Touria Khannous discusses her most recent book, Black–Arab Encounters in Literature and Film (2021), a sweeping examination of “the Arab world’s racial complexities” through the representation of Black Africans in Arabic literature and film.
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