As a system of identity, African masculinity is much more than a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others. It also refers to more than how African male bodies, subjectivities, and experiences are constituted in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. African masculinities, as historical subjects embodying distinctive socially constructed gender and sexual identities, have been both male and female. By occupying a masculine sociopolitical position, embodying masculine social traits, and performing cultural deeds socially construed and symbolized as masculine, African men and women have constituted masculinity. Across various African societies and times, there have been multiple and conflicting notions of masculinities, promoted by local and foreign institutions, and there have been ceaseless contestations and synergies among the various forms of hegemonic, subordinate, and subversive African masculinities. Men and women have frequently brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular notions of masculinity. Through such performances of masculinity, Africans have constantly negotiated the institutional power dynamics of gender relations. So, the question is not whether Africans worked with gender binaries, because they did. As anthropologist John Wood puts it, African indigenous logic of gender becomes evident in the juxtaposition, symbolic reversals, and interrelation of opposites. Rather, one should ask, why and how did African societies generate a fluid gender system in which biological sex did not always correspond to gender, such that anatomically male and female persons could normatively occupy socially constructed masculine and feminine roles and vice versa? And how did African mutually constitutive gender and sexuality constructions shape African societies?
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African Masculinities
Ndubueze L. Mbah
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Central Africa and the Atlantic World
Roquinaldo Ferreira
Central Africa became deeply intertwined in the Atlantic world with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1482, which opened up a new world of connections between African societies and European and American partners. As a region, central Africa stretches from Gabon to Mossamedes, near the border of the present nation of Namibia. Two distinct patterns of interaction marked the region’s integration into the wider Atlantic world. On the Loango coast, Atlantic trade by Dutch, British, and French merchants favored African kings in the short term but eventually paved the way for the rise of coastal rulers who seized upon wealth amassed through the slave trade to challenge kingship. After first playing out in the kingdom of Kongo, this dynamic unfolded in several other polities, such as the kingdom of Ngoyo and Ndongo.
South of the Congo River, Portugal’s ability to carve out coastal enclaves in Luanda and Benguela powerfully shaped the relationship with the Atlantic world. Both cities developed sprawling trading networks with their immediate hinterlands as well as several cities across the Atlantic, particularly in Brazil but later also in Cuba. Although the slave trade formed the cornerstone of trading networks, a continuum of social, cultural, and political ties bridged the ocean. Portuguese institutional and economic presence was deeply dependent on Angola’s ties with Brazil. The two Portuguese colonies interacted bilaterally, and Brazil was not only the source of commodities for the trade in human beings but also in crops, food supplies, and military hardware.
Distinct patterns of Afro-European interaction in Loango and Portuguese Angola should not hide the intense trade between these two regions. Since the 17th century, Luanda had depended on the Loango coast for palm-cloth currencies (libongos) that circulated widely in the capital city of Portuguese Angola. Cabinda men sailed to Luanda to purchase tobacco and sell slaves and other goods. As the French and then the British abandoned the slave trade, the direct slave trade with Brazil intensified and altered the structure of shipments of captives. In addition to the tightening Brazilian grip over central Africa’s slave trade, this development further integrated coastal trade between Loango and Portuguese Angola and set the stage for the continuation of shipments of captives until the 1860s.
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Gender and the Study of Slavery and the Slave Trades in Africa
Vanessa S. Oliveira
Indigenous societies in Africa made use of slave labor and traded in captives. Slavery was one of many forms of dependency and an effective means of controlling people alongside serfdom, clientage, wage labor, and pawnship. In African societies, enslaved individuals could be sacrificed at funerals and in public ceremonies, as well as used in the military and in the production of goods and foodstuffs. Because of their kinlessness and dependent status, some enslaved men and women could hold positions of authority. Women were more wanted in the domestic market, as they played a major role in the production of foodstuffs in agricultural societies and contributed to increasing kinship groups. Indigenous forms of slavery coexisted with demand for enslaved laborers in the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, and transatlantic markets from ancient times until the 20th century. The Muslim markets absorbed more women, incorporated as concubines and domestic servants, as well as castrated boys. The transatlantic market, in turn, required more men to work on plantations and in urban occupations. The growing need for slave labor in the Americas and in the Muslim world had profound implications for slavery in Africa. By the late 18th and 19th centuries, the productive use of enslaved labor had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy, resulting in the development of slave societies in various regions of the continent. The demand for captives in the internal and foreign markets resulted in the enrichment of few individuals and firms and in the growth of insecurity and slavery in Africa.
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The History of Mali: Connectivity and State Formation since the 18th Century
Madina Thiam and Gregory Mann
The Republic of Mali comprises a very diverse population spread over a vast territory composed of a large part of the southern Sahara, the Sahel, and the savannah. One of the world’s great rivers, the Niger, runs through much of the national territory, reaching its northern apex near Timbuktu. For over a millennium, this territory has allowed empires and kingdoms to flourish alongside decentralized societies. These include the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, as well as any number of smaller states, trading diasporas, and nomadic and semi-nomadic communities. The territory of Mali has long been a hub in African commercial and intellectual circuits, notably those linking the societies of the Maghreb (or North Africa) to those bordering the Atlantic. In the 19th century, as elsewhere in Muslim Africa, new and explicitly Islamic states emerged in western and central Mali. They did not endure more than a few decades, as the territory was colonized by France in the late 19th century. The Republic of Mali claimed its independence in 1960 and rapidly developed greater autonomy from French neo-colonialism than did most of its neighbors. Mali has maintained an out-sized diplomatic and cultural role on the African continent and beyond under a socialist government from 1960 to 1968, military government through 1991, and a vibrant democracy in the decades since. However, since 2011, the country has been increasingly beset by violent conflicts between nonstate actors, the national government, and foreign forces including the French. Thus, in historical perspective, Mali’s geographic position and its environment have proven conducive to the production of expansive, diverse, and mutually dependent communities that have produced radically distinct and often fragile states.
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Mechanisms of Enslavement
Daniel B. Domingues da Silva
The transatlantic slave trade involved the capture and transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for a period of approximately four hundred years. European and New World merchants, traders, and ship captains were behind much of the organization of this huge forced migration. They also captured and loaded Africans onto slave ships themselves via raids, warfare, or trade. However, the traffic would not have evolved as it did had they failed to rely on a series of mechanisms of enslavement indigenous to Africa. Some of these mechanisms included judicial proceedings, debts, pawning, trickery, kidnapping, and, of course, warfare. Each of them had an impact on Africa and her children, both those who stayed behind and those scattered across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, these mechanisms helped sustain the traffic as a long-lasting and complex historical event.
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Migration History and Historiography
Benedetta Rossi
Migration has been a central factor in African history. It is likely that the human species started spreading on the planet within and outside of Africa between 2 and 2.5 million years ago. Although the earliest stages of human migrations are the subject of intense debate, most hypotheses concentrate on movements that occurred in the African continent. In historical times, African migrations can be divided into two broad sub-fields looking at, respectively: people moving because they were forced to and people choosing to move on their own free will. Africa has been the source of the largest forced migrations in history. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance forced migration of people, even though it happened over a shorter period than the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Within Africa, trade across complementary ecological zones and the seasonality of production propelled free migrations of traders and workers involved in long distance trade. Following the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, free labor migrations rose in importance. European colonialism introduced the need for cash that was often only accessible in cities and areas of cash crop production. It was also responsible for the introduction of new forms of forced labor required for the building and maintenance of colonial infrastructure. The rise of development as a rationale for the government of African societies influenced migrations in multiple ways through national and international policies aimed at channeling people’s mobility. In the last two centuries, African migrants have been unfolding projects of self-development by traveling to places where they hoped to find better opportunities. Yet contemporary trafficking and displacements caused by wars, intolerance, and natural catastrophes attest to the continuing relevance of violence as a key aspect of the experience of African migrants.
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Routes to Emancipation in West Africa
Alice Bellagamba
West African slave emancipation has been a process patterned and experienced in multiple ways depending on the histories, geographies, and uncertainties of individual, family, and communal lives and trajectories. Regionally and culturally diversified conceptions of slavery and the condition of slaves, the interrelation of slavery with other kinds of personal dependence, the local arrangements between masters and slaves, and gender and age, together with the socio-political and economic dynamics of entire areas and regions factored into this plurality of outcomes. To some extent, this process is unfinished, as the late 20th century closed with reports of child and female exploitation akin to slavery, the political mobilization of slave descendants in Mauritania and other West African contexts, and the interlacement of the legacies of slavery with civil strife and insurgency in still others. Three aspects characterize West African routes to emancipation: the centuries-old connections with the Sahara and the Mediterranean and—since the 15th century—with the Atlantic world, early exposure to Atlantic abolitionism and West Africans’ participation in the struggle against slavery and the slave trade, the political relevance of histories of enslavement, life in slavery, and emancipation. Through case studies and historical examples, the abolition of the West African slave trade and internal slavery in the aftermath of the colonial conquest, the gendered experience of emancipation, the controversial relationships between spatial and social mobility, and post-slavery politics can be considered.
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Runaway Communities in Central and South Africa
Crislayne Alfagali
The formation of fugitive communities in Central and Southern Africa is a recent historiographical topic. The lives and trajectories of fugitives have undoubtedly received much more attention in studies of the African presence in the Americas. Focusing on Africa is to return to the perspective that resistance to slavery, forced labor, and colonialism began on the continent. It is getting to know the local dynamics and the history of a continent in constant transformation. In particular, as it pertains to the regions of Central and Southern Africa, it resumes debates over the so-called precolonial period given that covered highlights of colonial occupation and exploration long before the Berlin Conference. Stories about escapes that led to the formation of runaway communities are referred to in a variety of ways—cipaka, mocambos, muttolo, quilombos, ocilombo, drosters, musitu—were privileged, with special attention to the political, economic, and cultural relationships that shaped the experience of those who chose or were forced to leave their home communities. Highlighting a diversity of experiences, gender differences, legal statuses (free, freed, enslaved), ethnic and identity formations, religious and political values, and situations of forced labor and exile (servants, soldiers, exiles, and convicts in general) are investigated.
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The Sahel in West African History
Barbara Cooper
The Sahel or Sahil is in a sense the “coast” of the Sahara and its cities major “ports” in trade circuits linking long-standing regional exchange in the products of different ecozones to the markets of the Mediterranean through the trans-Saharan trade. Despite botanical diversity and the capacity to support high concentrations of humans and livestock, the productivity of this region depends upon a single unpredictable annual rainy season. Long- and short-term fluctuations in aridity have required populations specializing in hunting, farming, fishing, pastoralism, gold mining, and trade to be mobile and to depend upon one another for their survival. While that interdependence has often been peaceful and increasingly facilitated through the shared idiom of Islam, it has also taken more coercive forms, particularly with the introduction of horses, guns, and a dynamic market in slaves.
Although as an ecozone the region stretches all the way to the Red Sea, the political Sahel today comprises Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad—all former French colonies. France’s empire was superimposed upon the existing dynamics in the agropastoral meeting ground of the desert edge. Colonial requirements and transportation routes weakened the links between the ecozones so crucial to the success of states and markets in the region. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1905, France tacitly condoned the persistence of servile relations to secure requisitions of labor, food, and livestock. Abolition set off a very gradual shift from slavery to other kinds of labor patterns which nonetheless drew upon preexisting social hierarchies based upon religion, caste, race, and ethnicity. At the same time, gender and age gained in significance in struggles to secure labor and status. “Black Islam” (Islam noir), both invented and cultivated under French rule, was further reinforced by the bureaucratic logic of the French empire segregating “white” North Africa and “black” sub-Saharan Africa from one another.
Periodic drought and famine in the region has prompted a perception of the Sahel as a vulnerable ecological zone undergoing desertification and requiring intervention from outside experts. Developmentalist discourse from the late colonial period on has facilitated the devolution of responsibilities and prerogatives that typically belong to the state to nongovernmental bodies. At the same time, competition over political authority in the fragmented postcolonial states of the Sahel has often reinscribed and amplified status and ethnic differences, pitting Saharan populations against the governments of desert edge states. External and internal radical Islamic movements entangled with black market opportunists muddy the clarity of the ideological and political stakes in ways that even currently (2018) further destabilize the region.
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Women in West African History
Barbara Cooper
Across West Africa up to the 19th century, titled positions for women ensured that women’s interests could be voiced and their disputes regulated. Women often had major roles as brokers and intermediaries in trade centers along the Saharan and Atlantic littorals, contributing to the emergence of powerful Euro-African families. Nevertheless, women were particularly vulnerable to the depredations of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades. Because female labor was so highly valued, female slaves were more expensive than male slaves. The history of women in West Africa has been characterized by marked differences by ecological zone. Those differences have been deepened by Islamic influences in the North and by different experiences under French, British, and Portuguese rule. With the decline in the Atlantic trade and the growing emphasis upon commodity production, the demand for female labor in agriculture and in processing rose. Under colonial rule, the loss of slave labor was partially offset by increasing demands upon the labor of wives. Women mediated demands upon their labor through colonial courts, with some success in the early decades of the 20th century. Later courts and administrators supported patriarchal controls upon women in the interests of order and a smoothly running economy. Women’s control over their traditional means of accumulating wealth through farming, cloth production, and specialized crafts was typically undermined as economies shifted to emphasize cash crop production and tree crops in particular. Women nevertheless could flourish in market trade and could sometimes gain control over new niches in the economy. The growth of colonial infrastructure had contradictory implications. Women’s traditionally important roles as queens, priestesses, and ritual specialists declined in importance. At the same time, schooling gave some women access to new means of gaining income and prestige as teachers and medical practitioners.
