The term “Zanzibar Revolution” refers to (1) the overthrow in January 1964 of the islands’ first postcolonial regime, barely a month after gaining independence from British rule; (2) a period of several weeks following the overthrow when Africans targeted islanders of mostly Arab heritage and identity for violence, plunder, and vengeance seeking; and (3) the years from 1964 through the 1970s, when Zanzibar’s revolutionary regime sought to level island society at the expense of Arabs and South Asians, whose numbers continued to dwindle, mostly through emigration, some of it coerced. While aided and advised by socialist experts from overseas, and inspired by socialist models such as China and the Soviet Union, the regime charted its own unique course, a course influenced by the revolutionaries’ own understanding of the role of race in island society.
The Zanzibar Revolution was exceptional in several ways. Arguably, it was the most lethal outbreak of anti-Arab violence in Africa’s postcolonial history. It was also remarkable in the extent to which it attempted to bring an end to long-standing social and economic inequalities. Since the early-19th century, all the wealthiest and most privileged islanders were Arab or South Asian. Yet after a decade of revolutionary policies, they and their less well-off kinsmen were killed, forced into exile, or reduced to relative poverty. Thus, despite its modest size and population, Zanzibar produced one of sub-Saharan Africa’s only postcolonial revolutions. While scholars may disagree as to what constitutes a “revolution,” if that term refers to a situation in which one regime overthrows another, and then afterwards seeks to “turn society upside down,” then it is an accurate characterization of Zanzibar in the 1960s and 1970s.
Article
Alexander Thurston
Mauritania is an almost universally Muslim society in northwest Africa, with a deep history of Islamic scholarship but also painful legacies of slavery and, more recently, shifting permutations of political authoritarianism. Three main forces have affected the intersection of Islam and politics in Mauritania since independence in 1960: the growing diversity of Islamic identities and affiliations available to Muslims, the role of Islamic discourses within tense negotiations over socio-racial identity in Mauritania, and the state’s efforts to manage Islam and shape the religious field. Some of the diverse Islamic affiliations, postures, and movements in postcolonial Mauritania include loyalism, Islamism, Salafism, the missionary movement Jamāʿat al-Tablīgh, jihadism, and quietism. In terms of socio-racial tensions, there has been growing self-assertion on the part of the ḥarāṭīn (singular ḥarṭānī), an Arabic-speaking population of slave descendants who are classified as “black” within Mauritanian society, in distinction to Arabic-speaking “whites”—bīḍān (singular bīḍānī). Meanwhile, there have been variable and at-times tense relationships between the state and Islamists, as well as key moments when authorities sought to elaborate or modify structures relating to “official Islam” in the country. Amid these changes, there has been an ongoing construction and reconstruction of Islamic scholarly culture in Mauritania. The country has also had consequential exchanges with the wider Islamic world, with influence from Saudi Arabia and other states affecting dynamics of Islamic identity in Mauritania, but with Mauritania also making profound contributions to the trajectory of Islamic authority in the Gulf region through the transnational careers and media prominence of key scholars.
Article
Meghan Healy-Clancy
Apartheid, the system of racial and ethnic separation introduced in South Africa in 1948, was a gendered project. The immediate goal of the white Afrikaner men who led the apartheid state was to control black men: to turn black men from perceived political and criminal threats into compliant workers. Under apartheid, African men would travel to work for whites in towns and on mines, but their homes would be in rural ethnic “reserves,” known as “homelands” or “Bantustans.” This vision depended on the labors of African women: while their men migrated to work, women were to maintain their families in the increasingly overcrowded and desolate countryside, reproducing the workforce cheaply while instilling a sense of ethnic difference in their children. “Coloured” (mixed-race) and Indian women were similarly charged with social reproduction on a shoestring, in segregated rural and urban areas. White women uniquely had the franchise and freedom of movement, but they were also constrained by sexually repressive laws.
Apartheid’s gendered vision of production and social reproduction faced continual resistance, and it ultimately failed. First, it failed because African women increasingly moved from rural areas to urban centers, despite laws limiting their mobility. Second, it failed because some women organized across ethnic and racial lines. They often organized as mothers, demanding a better world for a new generation. Both their nationally and internationally resonant campaigns—against pass laws, educational and health care inequities, police brutality, and military conscription—and the fact of their collective organization gradually undermined apartheid. Officials generally underestimated the power of women, and their contributions have continued to be under-appreciated since apartheid ended in 1994, because women’s political style emphasized personal and familial concerns. But because apartheid was premised on transforming how families lived, actions of women in fact undermined the system from its core.
Article
Muriam Haleh Davis
The precolonial history of slavery is fundamental for understanding the roots of antiblack racism in the region known as the Maghreb. At the same time, the question of skin color does not capture the diverse forms of discrimination that have been experienced by populations in the region over the last two hundred years. French colonial officials, for example, upheld the Berber population as a separate race that was inherently more civilized and less Muslim than the Arab population. Jews in Algeria were offered French citizenship in 1870, further complicating the racial formation of the colonial Maghreb. Despite colonial attempts to posit a racial difference between so-called white and black Africa, the porous geographical boundaries in the southern regions of the Sahara made it difficult to assert a clear distinction between Arab and African peoples. After independence, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia sought to foster a coherent national identity and achieve political legitimacy, and their experiences of state building in turn influenced how religious and ethnic minorities were treated after independence.
Article
Justin Willis
Mombasa is the product of ongoing contests. Those contests have been about labor (both waged and unwaged): who should do what kind of work, and on what terms? They have been about land: who controls the right to build or cultivate, and what terms can they demand of potential users? They have also been about commerce: who has the right to control and tax the goods that have been traded in and through Mombasa, and who sets the terms of that trade? Those contests have often been pursued through force: Mombasa’s past can be told as a story of violent struggles over political power. Yet the contestants have also mobilized competing ideas of rights that constantly recur to ideas about identity and belonging. Where people belong has been a source of constant and sometimes violent dispute: who is an immigrant, and who is at home? Where “Mombasa” itself belongs has also been disputed: Is it part of Kenya, part of the coast, or part of an Indian Ocean world that stretches far across the sea? Life in the urban phenomenon that is Mombasa in the 21st century is shaped by these continuing contests: It is a divided city in which people live very different lives in an uneasily shared space.
Article
Celeste Fortes and Elizabeth Challinor
Cape Verde is a transnational nation, situated off the coast of Senegal, formed out of the slave trade, and has such a long history of migration that it is widely believed that double the size of its local population resides abroad. Men were traditionally the first to emigrate, influencing family and gender relations, with high rates of informal male polygamy producing diverse family forms in predominantly female-headed households that challenge the dominant Cape Verdean model of a patriarchal society that places the man as the breadwinner at the head of the family.
Historical records have largely failed to address the significant roles played by women during the colonial period and struggle for independence, which have become the focus of current research. Following Cape Verde’s independence from Portugal in 1975, women did not occupy any governmental positions until after the country’s first multi-party elections in 1991, when issues related to women’s emancipation, gender equality, and equity began to gain political leverage. In 1994 the government created the Institute for the Condition of Women (ICF) to implement its policies to combat discrimination against women in all public and private spheres, which was renamed the Institute for Gender Equality and Equity in 2006. Civil society and non-governmental organizations that specialize in gender and promote women’s empowerment through projects and campaigns have also become increasingly active. Informal commerce has constituted an important resource for many women to provide for their families, some of which takes place through transnational business networks that allow them to buy goods abroad and sell them in Cape Verde. Women have also migrated to support their families—thus initiating transnational maternity practices—and to pursue academic capital in higher education. They have also contributed toward the dissemination of Cape Verdean culture through female voices such as Cesária Évora and Lura.
Article
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.
Article
Definitions of and explanations for mental illness differ between societies and have changed over time. Current use of the term arises from secular and materialist epistemologies of the body and mind, influential from the 18th century, which rejected the spiritual or supernatural as causes of illness. Since the 19th century, a specialist body of study, of law, practices, professionals, and institutions developed to investigate, define, diagnose, and treat disorders and illnesses of the mind. This was the emergence of psychiatry and of a professional psychiatric sector. With origins in the West, at a time of capitalism and imperialism, psychiatry was brought to South Africa through colonialism, and its development has been strongly influenced by the country’s economic, political, ideological, and medico-scientific histories. There have been significant continuities: the sector has always been small, underfunded, and prioritized white men. Black patients were largely neglected. Discrimination and segregation were constant features, but it is helpful to identify three broad phases of the history of the psychiatric sector in South Africa. First, its most formative period was during colonial rule, notably from the mid-1800s to c. 1918, with an institutional base in asylums. The second broad phase lasted from the 1920s to the 1990s. A national network of mental hospitals was created and changes in the ways in which mental illnesses were classified occurred at the beginning of this period. Some new treatments were introduced in the 1930s and 1950s. Law and the profession’s theoretical orientations also changed somewhat in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s. Institutional practice remained largely unchanged, however. A third phase began in the 1980s when there were gradual shifts toward democratic governance and the progressive Mental Health Act of 2002, yet continued human rights violations in the case of the state duty of care toward the mentally ill and vulnerable.
Article
Oluwatoyin Oduntan
The case for narrating the history of slavery and emancipation through the biography of enslaved Africans is strongly supported by the life and experiences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Kidnapped into slavery in 1821, recaptured and settled in Sierra Leone in 1822, he became a missionary in 1845, founder of the Niger mission in 1857, and Bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. His life and career covered the span of the 19th century during which revolutionary forces like jihadist revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of a new Westernized elite, and European colonization created the roots of the modern state system in West Africa. He was intricately tied to the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Britain’s antislavery evangelical movement, resulting in Ajayi becoming the poster face of slavery, its acclaimed product of abolitionism, the preeminent advocate of evangelical emancipation, and the organizer of practical emancipation in West Africa. The leader of a very small group of Africans who worked diligently against the slave trade and domestic slavery, Ajayi also became a victim of the use of that agenda by imperialists. Thus, the contrasts of his life (i.e., slavery/freedom, nationalist/hybrid, preacher/investor, leader/weakling, linguist/literalist, etc.) were celebrated by himself, his patrons, and his evangelical followers on one hand, and denounced by his critics on the other. They underline the disagreements over his legacy, and indeed over the understanding of the institution of slavery, abolition, and emancipation in West Africa.
Article
Ned Bertz
The Indian diaspora in Tanzania emerged in waves from the subcontinent. While its internal religious and cultural diversity has been a hallmark, the diaspora accreted into a political category and community identity through the crucibles of colonialism and nationalism. Its origins were more disparate. East Africa and western India—especially peninsular Gujarat and Kutch—were fused by the monsoon winds that drove premodern Indian Ocean trade, when small numbers of Indian merchants sojourned and settled across the sea. The diaspora received a fillip after the Sultan of Oman shifted his capital to Zanzibar in 1840, granting positions to Indians and attracting trade and migration, largely of Indian Muslims.
Britain used the suppression of the slave trade—in which its Indian subjects had participated vigorously—as a wedge to declare a protectorate over Zanzibar and established Tanganyika on the mainland after German East Africa was ceded following World War I. This was a boom time for settlement from India, and while the migrants were mostly poor, they thrived in the transformation into an imperial diaspora, working within segregated colonial structures and attaining advantages denied to Africans. Indians—a majority of them Shia Muslims of several sects—numbered around 110,000 when African nationalism won independence in Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the early 1960s, and in the postcolonial period their privilege made them targets of public animosity and state action. While protected by the inclusivist first president of united Tanzania, the diaspora integrated into the new nation in limited ways. When socialist reforms nationalized housing and made business challenging in the 1960s and 1970s, almost half of the Indians left, largely to Canada and the United Kingdom. Those who remained suffered occasional moments of political pressure even after socialism collapsed, but in the early decades of the 21st century they continue to reside in urban centers as a secure but marked minority with lives revolving around commerce and diverse community institutions.
Article
Musiwaro Ndakaripa
Economic indigenization and black economic empowerment (BEE) policies in most sub-Saharan African countries were designed to create more economic opportunities for “indigenous,” “black,” or “African” people, mainly through affirmative action. They were attempts to address historical injustices caused by economic marginalization and deprivation of “indigenous” or “black” people during European colonial domination. In addition, they were attempts to address the negative impact of the incorporation of Africa in the world capitalist system, precisely the impact of foreign capital. While the adoption of indigenization and BEE policies was sine qua non in sub-Saharan Africa, there were a number of constraints. Socialist ideologies adopted by some postcolonial governments in Africa discouraged entrepreneurship and private accumulation of wealth. African governments’ alliance with and accommodation of local white and foreign capital, and their reluctance to create a middle class with potential to challenge their dominance retarded indigenization and BEE policies. At different times, and responding to domestic or foreign developments, the attitude of African governments changed and they opened some political and economic space to indigenous entrepreneurs. Indigenous interest groups advocated for legislation to support indigenization and BEE. While indigenization and BEE policies created economic opportunities for indigenous people, they ignited debates on issues such as racial discrimination, citizenship, and increasing inequalities among the targeted beneficiaries. They have also been pilloried for providing a gateway for fraud, corruption, patronage, and cronyism.
Article
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.
Article
Hamadou Adama
Ahmed Bâba (1556–1627) was among the most prolific and the most celebrated of Timbuktu scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries. During his childhood he was educated and trained in Arabic law and Islamic sciences by his father, Ahmad, and other relatives. His principal teacher, the man he named the regenerator (al-mujaddid), was the Juula scholar Mohammed Baghayogho al-Wangarî, whose teaching he followed for more than ten years.
Following the Moroccan occupation of Timbuktu in 1591, he was exiled to Marrakesh in 1594, jailed for two years, then obliged to remain in the city for many years. He was widely known both for his teaching and for the fatwas (legal opinions) he issued. He was offered administrative positions but declined them all in favor of teaching.
In 1608, he was permitted to return to his hometown, Timbuktu, where he continued to write and teach until his death in 1627, but he held no public office there.
His special field of competence was jurisprudence. He was also recognized for his abilities in hadith and wrote several works on Arabic grammar. He is probably best known for his biographical compendium of Mâlikî (founded by Malik ibn Anas died A.D. 795 is orthodox school of Muslim jurisprudence predominating in Sudanic Africa and the Maghreb) scholars, Nayl al-Ibtihâj bi tadrîs ad-dibâdj, a valuable supplement for the Western Islamic world to Ibn Farhûn’s ad-Dibâj al-Mudhahhab.
His work specifically addresses issues relating to the significance of racial and ethnic categories as factors in the justification of enslavement. In the Bilâd as-Sûdân, Ahmed Bâba influenced the debate over slavery by relying on interpretations of Islamic precedent, which was invoked to protect freeborn individuals from enslavement. By extension, he impacted the transatlantic slave trade on the basis of religious identification with Islam and the desire to avoid the sale of slaves to non-Muslims, especially Christian Europeans on the coast of West Africa.
Article
Bayo Holsey
West Africa and the African diaspora share an intertwined history. From the earliest moments of the development of the diaspora, West Africans and members of the African diaspora have sought ways to connect to each other. They have done so through the exploration of cultural links, travel back and forth between West Africa and the diaspora, and the development of shared philosophical and political movements. They have celebrated the idea of a collective “African” identity shaped by people on both sides of the Atlantic including the Pan-African Movement, the New Negro Movement, and Negritude. The late 20th century has seen the travel of diasporic subjects to West African countries including Ghana, the Gambia, and Senegal, which have fashioned themselves as African homelands. Artists, activists, and migrants continue to travel back and forth between West Africa and various points in the African diaspora and, in doing so, shape the contours of the Black Atlantic World. The continuous communication and contact between West Africa and the diaspora constitute an ongoing dialogue that has led to cultural innovations on both sides of the Atlantic.
