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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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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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.
