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 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.
