Throughout the slave trade era, wars and raids in the hinterlands of West Africa brought captives into different ports of the Atlantic coast, many of whom were Muslims. Various political and social factors in Africa influenced the nature of the transatlantic slave trade, including the identities of those involved in exporting enslaved Muslims, the number of people transported, their ethnic origins, and the colonies and countries to which they were shipped. These dynamics shaped the trade’s complexity across different regions. Following the literary developments in Europe, the collection of individual histories of slavery began in North America in the first decades of the 18th century. Abolitionist biographical accounts were written about the enslaved (overwhelmingly about male individuals) as well as autobiographies in Arabic and English produced by freed Muslim Africans in Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as Québec and Canada West (present-day Ontario). In the Caribbean, Arabic and Hausa-Ajami manuscripts were produced both on the islands and on the shores of Central America. Freed and enslaved Muslim Africans in Brazil, particularly those from Central Sudan, created long-standing and rebellious communities. The Malê Uprising of 1835 was a cornerstone event for slave resistance and marked the strengthening of the bonds of a transnational community of Muslim Africans in different parts of Brazil that had an enduring impact until the early 20th century. Community practices as well as religious and cultural pluralisms marked the histories of these diverse diasporas.
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Enslaved African Muslims in the Americas
Bruno R. Véras and Mariam Elzeiny
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The Saro of West Africa
Femi J. Kolapo
During the hundred-odd-year period from 1837 to 1944, liberated Africans with their children, mostly from the Nigerian area who were resettled in Sierra Leone, returned to Nigeria. They and their descendants in Nigeria were known as Saro. While most of them were of Yoruba origin, their population included Igbo, Nupe, Basa, Hausa, and Efik. They returned to Lagos, Abbeokuta, Ibadan, Calabar, Onitsha, Lokoja, and Port Harcourt, locations of political-economic or missionary significance during the period. Isolated individuals went as far as Ilorin, Bida, Kano, Sokoto, and Zaira. In many respects, they constituted the earliest social group who, by their distinctive black Atlantic experience of cultural and intellectual hybridity, mediated Nigeria’s engagement with and introduction to the modern and colonial capitalist demands of the era. As purveyors of new sociopolitical and cultural ideas that would come to underpin Nigeria, they were the forerunners of the nation. By their vision of a homeland that was inclusive of multiple ethnicities and that conceived of a single economy emanating from a network of production centers in the interior, they laid its earliest modern foundation. Their significant economic, social, cultural, religious, and political roles in the actions, interactions, and structures that eventually led to the creation of Nigeria justify the consideration of them as founders of the nation.
