The continent of Africa has had a lengthy involvement in global maritime affairs and archaeological research with Middle Stone Age people using marine resources on the coasts of southern Africa, the Classical Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, and Medieval Indian Ocean trade on the Swahili coast to the Atlantic triangular slave trade. Maritime archaeology is the identification and interpretation of physical traces left by people who use the seas and oceans. Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa such as Klasies River Mouth and Pinnacle Point have the earliest evidence for human use of marine resources including birds, marine mammals, and shellfish. This exploitation of marine resources was also coincident with the use of pigment, probably for symbolic behavior, as well as the production of bladelet stone tool technology. The extensive timespan of human activity on the coast around Africa occurred during changing relative sea levels due to Ice Ages and tectonic movement affecting the location of the coastline relative to maritime archaeological sites. Geomorphological changes may also take place over shorter periods such as the 1909 ce shipwreck of the Eduard Bohlen in Namibia lying c. one and half thousand feet landward of the shoreline.
Ancestors of sea-going vessels have been recorded on rivers from dugout canoes excavated at Dufuna in northern Nigeria and the first plank-built boats, such as the Old Kingdom Royal Ship of Cheops of Khufu, found at the Giza pyramids, which imitated the shape of earlier papyrus rafts. Classical documents such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei and Ptolemy’s Geographia record Arabian and Indian trade with eastern Africa including ivory and rhinoceros horn and describe fishing practices using baskets and sewn-hull boats of the inhabitants. The increase in oceanic trade links here during the medieval period encouraged the formation of Swahili port cities such as Kilwa and Mombasa. The former was in a strategic position to manage much of the gold trade between Sofala in Mozambique and the northern Swahili Coast. Portuguese forts, constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries on their trade routes around Africa, such as Elmina Castle in Ghana, Fort Jesus in Mombasa, Kenya, and Fort São Sebastião on Mozambique Island, dominate the ports and harbors. The first sub-Saharan underwater scientific investigations took place in 1976 of the Portuguese frigate Santo Antonio de Tanna that sunk during an Omani siege from 1696 to 1698. At Elmina in West Africa, studies were made of wreck-site formation processes around the 17th-century Dutch West India Company vessel Groeningen, which had caught fire when firing its guns in salute to Elmina Castle after arrival. More broad-based studies that interpret the functioning of the African maritime society in its wider environmental setting, both physically in the context of its religious buildings, harbors, fishing grounds, sailing routes, and shipwrecks, and by taking account of non-material aspects of the beliefs that influence behavior of coastal societies, have led to interpretations of their maritime outlook.
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African Maritime Archaeology
Edward Pollard
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African Music in the Global African Diaspora
Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje
When researching music in the African diaspora, most scholars concentrate on the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade, which has been a trend since inquiries began during the mid twentieth century. Only since the late twentieth century have researchers started to consider musical repercussions from the involuntary and voluntary migration of Africans in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. Using historical and musical secondary sources, the essay, African Music in the Global African Diaspora, devotes special attention to musicking during the enslavement of Black people in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In addition to a concise history of slavery and the enslaved, a description of instruments, musical traditions, performance practices, and meaning is presented for each diaspora. The degree that musical elements identified with Africa were retained and/or transformed, resulting in a fusion or blending of performance practices, is also explored. Because no single publication, heretofore, has focused on African music in the global African diaspora, the study fills a significant void in the literature and presents a more comprehensive view of the dispersion of African music inworld culture. The outcome provides a broader analysis and understanding of the power and impact of African music globally.
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African Religions in the Maghreb and the Middle East
Ismael Musa Montana
In the last few decades, discussions concerning the presence of spirit possession and healing practices associated with Sudanic Africans in North Africa and parts of the Middle East, coined as “slave religion,” have highlighted the relationship of these practices to indigenous religions and belief systems of Sudanic Africa. Unlike in the Americas, where the Atlantic slave trade was primarily responsible for the diffusion of similar indigenous African religious practices such as candomblé, Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and their variants, the history behind Sudanic African spirit possession and healing practices in North Africa and the Middle East is much more complex. While increased enslaving activities during the late 18th century through the 19th century may have exacerbated the diffusion of the various Sudanic religious practices such as the Hausa Bori, the Zarma Holey, and the Zar cults to North Africa and the Middle East, their presence and practice outside their original milieu cannot be attributed solely to the slave trade. Interregional commerce, pilgrimage, voluntary migration, and elements of cultural unity underlying the Sudanic African religious and cosmological systems have all contributed at different historical time periods at varying scale to their spread and diffusion in North Africa and the Middle East.
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Algerian Civil War
Anissa Daoudi
While the literature on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) is extensive, studies on the armed conflict between the Algerian military and the armed Islamic groups, which cost the lives of more than 200,000 remain insignificant. The complex intersections between the political, social, and economic factors leading to the war in the 1990s show that the critical junctures began after independence in 1962. These junctures continued through the 1970s (Arabization movement) and 1980s (1988 Berber Spring), which together can help in contextualizing the Algerian Civil War. These different periods reveal the history of the National Liberation Front (FLN) as a one-party rule and contextualize its historical strong relationship with the Algerian National Army, revealing the power dynamics between the two and the roots of the struggle over the country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, the 1980s were marked by the youth riots in 1988 (Berber Spring) and their crucial role in what president Chadli Benjedid presented as a political reform program, including a new constitution, which ended the political monopoly of the FLN and saw the emergence of more than thirty new political parties. In January 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) overwhelmingly won the municipal elections, with a much larger number of votes than the ruling FLN in the first round. However, instead of accepting the Islamists’ victory, the military promptly stepped in and cancelled parliamentary elections, banned the FIS, and arrested its leaders. After President Mohamed Boudiaf’s assassination, the government imposed a national state of emergency and used a combination of strategies including economic reforms as well tough laws to repress the Islamic armed groups and control the situation. The idea that the armed Islamic groups started after the official ban of the FIS has been contested. Two parallel strategies were adopted by the successive governments of the 1990s: one was based on the repression of the FIS, who in turn retaliated with car bombs and assassinations of women, intellectuals, police, and military forces; and the other was based on the introduction of social and economic reforms. The country went into cycles of extreme violence for more than a decade, in which the negotiations between the Islamists and the military were not interrupted. President Liamine Zaroual’s amnesty initiative, Rahma, was unsuccessful, yet it was the basis upon which his successor, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, proposed his project of amnesty, known as the Civil Concord, in 1999, later replaced by the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in 2005. Bouteflika resigned on April 2, 2019, after months of mass protest called the Revolution of Smiles, which started on February 22, 2019, against his candidacy to the presidency for a fifth mandate.
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‘Ali, Muhammad
George Michael La Rue
Muhammad ‘Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848. Long perceived as a reforming modernizer and founder of modern Egypt, historians have more recently reconsidered the impact of his economic and social policies on Egypt’s ordinary people. To determine his place in African history (and in the history of slavery and abolition) requires a broad reexamination of his policies and Egypt’s actions, and their consequences in Egypt, Sudan, within the Ottoman Empire, and in the 19th-century balance of power.
After arriving in Egypt in 1801, Muhammad ‘Ali emerged from a complex political field as the Ottoman Pasha of Egypt by 1805. He overpowered the remnants of the old Mamluk regime, pushed them to Egypt’s southern boundaries, allied with key Egyptian elites, helped to suppress the Wahhabi revolt in the Hijaz for his Ottoman overlord, and strove to reduce the power of his Albanian troops. He reestablished trade (including the slave trade) with Sudan, and planned a new army of enslaved Sudanese.
Between 1820 and 1835, Muhammad ‘Ali made a series of bold moves. The invasion of Sudan (1820–1821) and its occupation caused great political, social, and economic devastation there. Egypt toppled or threatened many Sudanese rulers, redirected Sudanese-Egyptian trade, and reshaped Sudan’s urban centers. The invaders attacked Sudanese and other African populations, conducted ongoing slave raids, enslaved thousands, and destroyed their homes. Egyptians and Sudanese found challenges and opportunities within these broader patterns. Enslaved Sudanese became soldiers in the nizam al-jadid, laborers in Muhammad ‘Ali’s new industries, diplomatic gifts, and taxable trade commodities. Newly formed elites bought African slaves for domestic tasks in Sudan and Egypt. Egypt’s new medical establishment treated Sudanese slave soldiers for guinea-worm, vaccinated incoming slaves for smallpox, and purchased Sudanese and Ethiopian women to train as hakimas—fully trained nurse-midwives.
Initially, Muhammad ‘Ali sent his new army to fight in Greece on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. Later, his challenges to Ottoman supremacy drew the attention of European powers, who feared any disruption to the delicate balance of power. The demographic impact of the bubonic plague epidemic of 1834–1835 on Egypt’s black slave population was notable, and led to increased demand for replacement slaves. This drew attention from European observers and added an abolitionist dimension to diplomatic pressure on Muhammad ‘Ali. By 1841, he gained Ottoman recognition as hereditary ruler of Egypt and parts of Sudan, his army’s size was capped, and he made trade concessions to Europe. With his imperial ambitions now limited to Africa, Muhammad ‘Ali renewed his interest in controlling more of Sudan and adjacent regions, and deflected abolitionist criticism by blaming supplying regions for continuing to raid and trade in slaves.
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The Almohad Empire, c. 1120–1269
Amira Bennison
The Almohad empire was founded during the mid-12th century by a militant religio-political movement that originated among the Maṣmūda tribes of the High Atlas Mountains in what is now Morocco. At its height, the empire extended across North Africa to modern Tunisia and also incorporated the southern parts of modern Spain and Portugal. The original religious leader of the movement was Muḥammad b. Tūmart, but the empire was ruled by a dynasty known as the Muʾminids after ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, Ibn Tūmart’s successor as leader of the Almohads. The empire was one of the largest Islamic political formations of its time and played an important role in the western Mediterranean and beyond prior to its demise in the mid-13th century.
The empire was distinctive in several ways. The Almohads saw their interpretation of Islam as a revival of Muḥammad’s message to which all Abrahamic monotheists should convert, a radical position leading to a black myth that they were persecutors of religious minorities, although the limited reach of medieval government meant that they could not always implement their objectives. As a Maṣmūda-backed empire, the Almohads also promoted public use of the Maṣmūda language, one of the Berber or Amazigh family of languages, alongside Arabic, and created an imperial elite from across their empire. They are also famous for their promotion of new styles of urban architecture, especially their huge square-tower minarets, and for patronage of the arts and sciences at court, making the Almohad century one of intellectual ferment as well as religious and political change.
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Arab Spring
Ahmed Abushouk
The phrase “Arab Spring,” “Arab Awakening,” or “Arab Uprisings” refers to the series of prodemocracy protests and demonstrations that erupted in the Arab world. It began in Tunisia in 2010 and spread to other countries, most notably Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, in 2011. The demonstrators expressed their political and economic grievances and called for regime change: “The people want to bring down the regime.” Under the increasing pressure of the mass protests, Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (r. 1978–2011) fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011; Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981–2011) resigned on February 11, 2011; Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (r. 1969–2011) was deposed on August 23, 2011, and killed on October 20, 2011, in his hometown of Sirte after the National Transitional Council took control of the city; and Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh (r. 1990–2012) resigned in favor of his vice president, Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Hadi became president for a two-year transitional period on February 25, 2012, but Yemen remained deeply divided between government supporters and the Houthi rebels who killed Saleh on December 4, 2017, in Sanaa. This change of leadership did not improve the political and economic situation in the Arab Spring countries but rather led to a contentious struggle between remnants of the old regimes and prodemocracy supporters, which finally turned into devastating civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The second wave of the Arab Spring took place in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, and Lebanon, confirming the persistent conditions that led to the outbreak of the first wave against tyranny and exploitation in the early 2010s. The two waves of the Arab Spring have drawn global attention. Tawakkol Karman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her role in organizing peaceful protests in Yemen. Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda won the 2011 World Press Photo Award for his photograph of a Yemeni woman carrying an injured family member, taken during the civil uprising in Yemen.
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Archaeology of the Canary Islands
Verónica Alberto-Barroso, Teresa Delgado-Darias, and Javier Velasco-Vásquez
The Canaries were the only Macaronesian archipelago to have had a stable population before the European expansion in the Atlantic in the late Middle Ages. North African indigenous populations occupied the Canary Islands in the first centuries of the 1st millennium ce and formed island communities whose historical definition amalgamates traditions from their continental origin, local adaptations, and the social dynamics generated by periods of isolation, yet also includes occasional migratory events that affected some of the islands. This shaped populations with a particular development in each part of the archipelago that is manifested in different archaeological expressions. Thus, while some traits can be regarded as held in common, such as the agropastoral resources on which subsistence depended and certain domestic models and funerary practices, other materialities reflect autonomous sociocultural processes. The European conquest and colonization of the Canary Islands in the 15th century led to the sudden disappearance of those Insulo-Amazigh cultures, even though a few aspects have survived, such as some traditions, linguistic elements, foodstuffs, and a genetic footprint that can still be identified in the modern Canary population.
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Ben M’rad, Bchira
Lilia Labidi
The Tunisian Bchira Ben M’rad (1913–1993), a feminist for some, a reformist for others, was a significant figure in Tunisia in the first half of the 20th century in the struggles for women’s education, for a more balanced relationship within the married couple, and against colonialism. Her participation in these struggles was shaped both by her own personal experience as well as by the then social, cultural and political context of Tunisia and its region.
Bchira Ben M’rad was the first Tunisian woman to request official recognition for a women’s organization, the Union of Muslim Women of Tunisia (l’Union des femmes musulmanes de Tunisie, or UFMT), which she founded in 1936 and headed until 1956, during the period when Tunisia was a French colony. The refusal by the authorities to award official recognition and the excuses they offered in defense of their refusal provide an insight into the complex relations between the French colonial power and the Tunisian authorities, headed by the Bey, as the debate over women’s rights, including the right to form women’s organizations, became an increasingly profound societal issue. It was only in the early 1950s, in the years just before Tunisian independence was achieved in 1956, that the UFMT obtained official recognition.
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Berbers and the Nation-State in North Africa
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
Throughout history, North Africa’s native Berber-speaking populations have been central to the mix of political, social, cultural, and linguistic attributes that rendered the region distinct. At the dawn of the 20th century, Berbers still constituted a substantial majority of sharifian Morocco’s population, and a significant minority of French Algeria’s Muslim populace; their numbers were smaller in Ottoman Libya and smaller still in France’s Tunisian protectorate.
Nationalism began to spread in North Africa during the first decades of the 20th century. Each nationalist movement was shaped by a particular combination of factors; all of them, however, foregrounded the Arab and Islamic components of their collective identities, downplaying or ignoring the Berber ones.
Berbers actively participated in the struggles for independence in both Algeria and Morocco, often in leadership roles. This pattern would continue during the decades after independence, even as both the Algerian and Moroccan states placed supreme value on the Arabization of the educational system, and of public life in general. The state’s overall view of Berber identity was that it should be consigned to the realm of folklore.
However, even as the number of Berber speakers continued to decline, there arose a modern Berber (Amazigh) identity movement that demanded a reexamination of the underlying premises of their countries’ collective identities, one that would bring the Berber language and culture to center stage. It also demanded genuine amelioration of the dire conditions of poverty that characterized much of the rural Berber world. As ruling regimes struggled to maintain their legitimacy after a half century of independence, the Berber “question” now took on a new salience in North Africa’s increasingly contested political space.
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Environmental History of the Maghreb, 1800–Present
Brock Cutler
North Africa is a diverse region with a rich history and society, part of a set of varied landscapes that make up a compounded and multiplex socio-ecosystem. Its position as a meeting point—of the desert and the sea, of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, of North and South, of East and West—makes it a complex and rewarding area of study. This multiplicity of environments and societies means there is no one history of North Africa, it is rather a structure of imbricating stories, no one of which records the whole. The environmental history of the region is no different, as the many different ecosystems—and human relations within them—give rise to different stories and different ways to tell them. Indeed, the strength of the environmental approach to the history of the region is that it allows scholars to introduce important factors into the narrative that are otherwise left out. If history is to capture the richness of past lives, tell a compelling story of people in the world, then it needs to embrace those elements of the world that were important to people. These can be the everyday concerns with watering a garden, the spectacular catastrophes of multiyear drought, or the contemplation of what factors make a place one place and not another.
While there is this bottomless well of potential stories to tell within the environmental history of North Africa, there are some centripetal forces that hold it together. One is the geographical setting, defined by the desert, seas, and Atlas Mountains. Within this setting the relative aridity of the region is its central concern; each history has a place for water within it. The other generalizing trend over the modern period is the increasing centralization of decision-making about the management of that aridity: since 1800, small-scale and localized knowledge, practice, and control over hydrology has been eroded. More and more the local ecosystem has become the regional ecosystem, managed according to a logic shared on a global scale. The tension between these generalized trends and the multiplicity of local ecologies and stories is what gives the environmental history of North Africa its power and appeal.
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Eunuchs
Jane Hathaway
Eunuchs, castrated male slaves, were employed at the courts of kingdoms and empires throughout Africa north of the equator. While the practice may have started as early as the 6th century bce, it became widespread during the medieval and early modern eras. Eunuchs were part of palace culture in both East and West Africa and in both Muslim and animist polities. Ethiopia was a notable exception to this rule; there, uncastrated male servants held posts that in other polities were filled by eunuchs.
The transportation and castration of African eunuchs formed part of a much larger trade in African slaves along overland caravan routes and through the Red Sea. A shifting collection of castration centers existed across supraequatorial Africa. In East Africa, Upper Egypt was a key center; in Central and West Africa, Bagirmi became a center in the 18th century.
Court eunuchs performed an array of roles, notably those of gatekeepers and companions to the ruler, harem guardians, and supervisors of the palace treasury. Particularly in West Africa, they also took on military duties. African eunuchs were also widely employed at imperial courts outside Africa, particularly in the Near East and South Asia. Beginning in the 12th century ce, a corps of mostly African eunuchs also guarded the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina and the Kaʿba in Mecca.
Sporadic attempts to abolish the trade in eunuchs and their employment were unsuccessful before the British-led abolition movement of the 19th century. Even so, African eunuchs continued to serve in several West African kingdoms and in the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century.
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Frantz Fanon
Christopher J. Lee
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital outside Washington, DC. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a philosopher of anti-colonial revolution. He published two seminal books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), respectively. He also wrote a third book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), as well as numerous medical journal articles and political essays, a selection of which appear in the posthumous collections Toward the African Revolution (1964) and Alienation and Freedom (2015).
Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and decolonization has remained vital, influencing a range of academic fields such that the term Fanonism has become shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. Fanon is a political martyr who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.
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Free French Africa
Eric Jennings
Free French Africa was the part of the French empire that came under the control of General Charles de Gaulle’s movement. From 1940 to 1943, it encompassed French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon; Brazzaville served as its capital. These African lands provided Free France with legitimacy, manpower, revenue, natural resources, and a starting point for military operations in the Desert War. These territories fell into Free French hands for a number of reasons, including the actions of African noncommissioned officers who spearheaded the arrest of Vichy’s governor in late August 1940. Thereafter, they were thrown headlong into the war effort. Some 17,000 soldiers were recruited in these regions and a run on natural resources ensued. It was at considerable cost to local populations that de Gaulle built a military machine in Central Africa, one capable of bringing France back into the global fray. For Africans, the advent of Free France signaled economic hardship, multiple imperatives including military enlistment and rubber collection, and a hardening of colonial practices.
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Historiography in the Maghrib in the 19th and Early 20th Century
Sahar Bazzaz
The Maghrebi tradition of historical literary production extends back to the early centuries of Islamic expansion and conquest in North Africa and comprises a rich corpus including dynastic chronicles (tarikh), biographies (tarajim), and hagiographies (manaqib/rijjal), and, since the 20th century, positivist national histories as well. While this tradition had evolved since its inception, 19th- and 20th-century Maghrebi historical production both influenced and was influenced by the extension of European military, economic, and political power into the Maghreb. Grappling with the legacies of colonialism, nationalism, and pan-Arabism, among others, Maghrebi historians continue to sow the rich terrain of historical literary production in the postcolonial period by absorbing, reacting to, and building upon new trends in the historical profession.
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A History of Western Sahara
Francesco Correale
Writing the history of Western Sahara can be difficult insofar as it means breaking the silence surrounding the territory and its population, the Sahrawi, whose existence as political subjects is often denied. In 1975, without consulting its inhabitants, Madrid ceded the territory of Western Sahara, a Spanish colonial possession since 1884, to the Kingdom of Morocco and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. A first Sahrawi nationalist movement was born in the late 1960s, but the Spanish authorities harshly repressed it. In May 1973, the Polisario Front was born, and the United Nations recognized it as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people in May 1975. Until 1991, Libya and Algeria supported it in an asymmetrical war in which it defeated Mauritania (1979) and contained the Moroccan army. On September 6, 1991, Morocco and the Polisario Front signed an armistice under the auspices of the United Nations that provided for the establishment of a UN mission (MINURSO) and a referendum on self-determination. Thirty years on, however, the Sahrawi people remain divided: many have lived in refugee camps near Tindouf (Algeria) since 1975, some inhabit Moroccan-controlled areas (80 percent of the territory), and others live in the diaspora. On November 13, 2020, after a breach of military agreements by Morocco, the Polisario Front declared the ceasefire null and void. The war resumed and remains ongoing.
Western Sahara has thus been at the center of a decolonization conflict since 1975. In this conflict, history has been brought into play to justify the legitimacy of one position or the other, often highlighting positions that do not take into account the complexity of political and social processes. The two sides have systematically interpreted the various events in light of the conflict, generating multiple, contradictory narratives. According to Sahrawi nationalists, for example, the Sahrawi people have existed since the dawn of history. In the refugee camps of Tindouf, one often encounters narratives according to which the rock art of the Western Sahara territory is a direct and uninterrupted testimony of a Sahrawi people who have existed since prehistoric times. From Morocco’s perspective, by contrast, the Saharan territory has always been part of the Kingdom of Morocco, as if Morocco always existed in this form and was not itself the result of a long historical process. Indeed, it is often forgotten that the parameters of territorial sovereignty in this area did not exist prior to European colonization—a reality obscured by Morocco’s claims.
It is evident that writing the history of Western Sahara and its population is an impossible undertaking; it is therefore much more honest to propose a probable historical reconstruction, based on the rigorous interpretation of archival documents and testimonies collected within the framework of scientific research projects. Even so, such an undertaking can only ever be a subjective interpretation, mediated by knowledge but without any pretense of objectivity.
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Interactions between North Africa and Spain: Medieval and Early Modern
Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Arabic-speaking Muslim polities existed in medieval Spain and Portugal where they were superseded by Christian empires that gradually disavowed cultural connections to this past. Hebrew and Arabic were largely expurgated from homes and libraries. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were expelled. And while an incipient study of that past existed, echoed even in popular literary forms, the need to disavow kinship prevailed, at least publicly and officially. The Maghrib, for its part, separated by a mere fourteen kilometers of sea from the southern tip of Spain, experienced Portuguese and Spanish imperial expansion firsthand, receiving the bulk of the displaced and interacting with fortified settlements and encroachments along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Later European colonization of North Africa completed the galvanization of a Maghribi culture of resistance to and disavowal of European, Latin, and Christian cultural forms and connections. Spain and North Africa came to be conceived as separate worlds; domains of inimical faiths; divided by culture, language, religion, and a history of mutual hostility. This sense of separateness is deceptive, however, as the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are bound by deep and extensive commercial, material, and cultural contacts. They share inextricable histories in which alternating movements of commerce, conflict, and migration have played fundamental roles in shaping recognizably Western Mediterranean societies. They should be thought of as areas of a unified region with a common culture, or at the very least, as areas sharing a common region, in which they interact regularly, creating extensive ties and parallel forms of cultural and social organization.
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Ismaili and Fatimid North Africa
Christine D. Baker
The Fatimid dynasty ruled North Africa from 909 to 1171 CE. The Fatimids identified as Isma’ili Shi’is and they declared a Shi’i countercaliphate in Qayrawan to rival the Sunni ‘Abbasids in Baghdad. Their dynasty rose to power from an underground missionary movement, but eventually conquered most of North Africa, the Levant, the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and Yemen. Their first capital was in Qayrawan, but they are best known for founding the city of Cairo as their imperial capital in 969. The Fatimids linked North African and Mediterranean trade with the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea, creating an era of unprecedented economic growth. Further, Fatimid sponsorship of Isma’ili Shi’i ritual and scholarship allowed for the development of several Isma’ili movements that have persisted into the modern era. The Fatimid era ended in the 12th century during the rise of Turkic dynasties and the influx of Crusader forces into the eastern Mediterranean region.
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Italian Colonial Architecture and City Planning in North and East Africa
Mia Fuller
Italian colonial architecture began with styles directly transplanted from Italy to Eritrea—Italy’s first African colonial territory—in the 1890s. By the late 1920s, when Italy also held Libya and Italian Somalia, it had already created a substantial set of buildings (cathedrals and banks, for instance) in any number of unmodified Italian styles ranging from the classical to the neo-medieval and neo-Renaissance. Moorish (or “Oriental”) effects were also abundant, in another transplant from Europe, where they were extremely popular.
Following the rise of design innovations after World War I, though, at the end of the 1920s, Italian Modernist architects—particularly the theoretically inclined Rationalists—began to protest. In conjunction with the fascist regime’s heavy investment in farming settlements, prestigious city centers, and new housing, architecture proliferated further, increasingly incorporating Rationalist design, which was the most thoughtfully syncretistic, aiming as it did to reflect particular sites while remaining Modernist. After Ethiopia was occupied in 1936, designers’ emphasis gravitated from the particulars of design theory to the wider canvas of city planning, which was driven by new ideas of racial segregation for colonial prestige and control.
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Italy and the Ḥafṣids in the Medieval Period
Joel Pattison
The Ḥafṣids were an Amazigh (Berber) Muslim dynasty who ruled in the territory of Ifrīqiya (including all of Tunisia and parts of Algeria and Libya) for over 300 years, from 1229 to 1574. They transformed the city of Tunis from a small port into a major Mediterranean metropolis and an important node in trade networks connecting the trans-Saharan trade with the central Mediterranean. However, as noted by historians, the family’s authority waxed and waned significantly over that period. Strong rulers were able to assert Tunis’s supremacy over the other cities of Ifrīqiya, appointing and dismissing local officials, and exacting obedience or at least passive acceptance from powerful Arab and Berber tribes in the hinterland. Weak or contested rule from Tunis led to the rise of semi-autonomous dynasties by rival family members in major cities, like Bijāya, Constantine, and Mahdia, and tribal rebellions. Despite the political vicissitudes facing the dynasty, its rulers benefited from and strongly encouraged trade across the Mediterranean, including tight links between Ifrīqiyan ports and Italy, especially with the “maritime republics” of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice but also with the nearby kingdom of Sicily. Such links, particularly with the northern Italian communes, were mostly free of attempts at political coercion or the imposition of tributary status on the local rulers, in contrast to attempts by the Crown of Aragon. By the end of the Ḥafṣid period, Italian merchants and sailors were a common presence across the coast of Ifrīqiya, despite the endemic threat of piracy and violence motivated by religious difference.