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HOW SLAVES USED ISLAM: THE LETTERS OF ENSLAVED MUSLIM COMMERCIAL AGENTS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NIGER BEND AND CENTRAL SAHARA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

BRUCE S. HALL
BRUCE S. HALL*
Affiliation:
Duke University
*
Author's email: bruce.hall@duke.edu.
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Abstract

Historians of slavery in Africa have long struggled to recover the voices of enslaved people. In this article, an unusual set of sources found in Timbuktu (Mali) reveals the existence of a stratum of literate, Muslim slaves who wrote and received letters written in Arabic. These letters make it possible to probe the Islamic rhetoric used by Muslim slaves and ask how enslaved people who adopted Islam understood their faith. Did Muslim slaves arrive at different interpretations of Islam than those Muslims who were free? Using the correspondence of two slaves who worked as agents in their master's commercial activities in the Niger Bend and Central Sahara during the second half of the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates the extent to which Muslim slaves used appeals to their own piety in attempting to carve out a certain amount of social autonomy. For these Muslim slaves, Islam could be made to serve both spiritual and practical ends. And yet, this did not require slaves to interpret Islam in ways that rejected the legitimacy of slavery.

Keywords

MaliSaharaIslamslaverytradeliteracy
Type
Islam and the Slave Condition
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 279 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

This article is a product of a larger collaboration with Yacine Daddi Addoun on the trans-Saharan commercial networks connecting Ghadames to West Africa. For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Fahad Bishara, Timothy Cleaveland, Laurent Dubois, Chouki El Hamel, Engseng Ho, Janet Ewald, John French, Martin Klein, Pier Larson, Paul Lovejoy, Ghislaine Lydon, E. Ann McDougall, Thomas McDow, Seraphima Rombe-Shulman, Benedetta Rossi, Zekeria ould Ahmed Salem, and Terence Walz.

References

1 F. Cooper, ‘Islam and cultural hegemony: the ideology of slaveowners on the East African coast’, in Paul Lovejoy (ed.), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverly Hills, 1981), 277, 294.

2 Glassman, J., ‘The bondsman's new clothes: the contradictory consciousness of slave resistance on the Swahili coast’, Journal of African History, 32:2 (1991), 283–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Cooper, ‘Islam’, 271; Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977), 239.

5 Cooper, ‘Islam’, 291.

6 His nisba ‘al-Shaʿwānī’ suggests that he, or his ancestors, were not from the town of Ghadames itself, but from a smaller town called Shaʿwāʾ (in present-day Libya), approximately 150 km to the north-east of Ghadames.

7 On the dynamics between trans-Saharan and local trading circuits, see E. A. McDougall, ‘Salt, Saharans, and the trans-Saharan slave trade: nineteenth-century developments’, in E. Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London, 1992), 61, 67–8. See also Lydon, G., On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (New York, 2009), 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lydon, , ‘Contracting caravans: partnership and profit in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trans-Saharan trade’, Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The earliest dated letter that mentions ʿĪsā in Timbuktu is from 1854. Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherche Islamique Ahmad Baba, Timbuktu, Mali (IHERIAB) ms. 8244.

9 I am unable to be more precise. The estimated date is based on the end of his contribution to the correspondence.

10 Ṣanbu appears to be the Fulfulde name ‘Samba’, which means ‘second son’. The name Anjay is actually written in different ways by different letter-writers. I have chosen to use the form ‘Anjay’ based on the common spelling ‘A-n-j-y’, but there are other examples where a different spelling is used. It also appears as ‘Unghī’, ‘n-j-y’, ‘u-n-k-y’, and ‘jī’. These different spellings suggest possible cognates with local languages. The most likely is ‘Njaay’ which is a relatively common West African name. It exists in Fulfulde and Wolof. It could also be a cognate of the Hassaniya Arabic words ‘ŋgi’ which means ‘pure’ (of heart), sinless, or the word ‘Nājī’ which is a term used in Timbuktu to indicate an Arab.

11 G. Lydon discusses similar sources from Mauritania and several letters from the Ghadames-Timbuktu network in ‘Slavery, exchange and Islamic law: a glimpse from the archives of Mali and Mauritania’, African Economic History, 33 (2005), 129–32.

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18 Cooper, ‘Islam’, 290; Cooper, Plantation, 36.

19 Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī, ‘al-Ajwiba al-muhimma’, IHERIAB ms. 1476, 38.

20 Shaykh Bāy al-Kuntī, ‘Nawāzil Shaykh Bāy’, IHERIAB ms. 118, #173, 218. Hall, B. S., A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (New York, 2011), 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Qurʾān, 66:6.

23 Shaykh Bāy al-Kuntī, ‘Nawāzil Shaykh Bāy’, IHERIAB ms.122, #687, 52–3.

24 Ennaji, M., Le sujet et le mamelouk: esclavage, pouvoir et religion dans le monde arabe (Paris, 2007), 33–75Google Scholar.

25 Shaykh Bāy al-Kuntī, Nawāzil Shaykh Bāy’, IHERIAB ms.124, #879, 55–6.

26 A version of this argument has been suggested by J. Schmitz, ‘Islamic patronage and republican emancipation: the slaves of the Almaamy in the Senegal River valley’, in B. Rossi (ed.), Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool, 2009), 105.

27 IHERIAB ms. 10741.

28 Brockelmann, C., Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur (Leiden, 1937–42)Google Scholar, 2:84, Suppl. 2:98.

29 Ibid. 1:631, Suppl. 2:396.

30 Ibid. Suppl. 1:275.

31 Ibid. Suppl. 2:476.

32 Ibid. 1:178, Suppl. 1:302.

33 It is often said that slaves who could recite the Qur'an would be automatically freed. R. Roberts, ‘Ideology, slavery, and social formation: the evolution of Maraka slavery in the middle Niger valley’, in Lovejoy, The Ideology of Slavery, 184.

34 Stilwell, S., Paradoxes of Power: The Kano ‘Mamluks’ and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804–1903 (Portsmouth, 2004), 84Google Scholar.

35 Ennaji, M., Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco, trans. S. Graebner (New York, 1999), 14–15Google Scholar.

36 El Hamel, C., ‘“Race”, slavery and Islam in Maghribi Mediterranean thought: the question of the Haratin in Morocco’, Journal of North African Studies, 7:3 (2002), 29–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ayalon, D., ‘Studies in al-Jabartī I: notes on the transformation of Mamluk society under the Ottomans’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3:2 (1960), 165–8Google Scholar.

37 There is nothing unique about Islam in this regard. Jewish merchants in medieval Cairo employed Jewish slaves as commercial agents. See Goitein, S. D., A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1967), 130–47Google Scholar; Ghosh, A., ‘The slave of Ms. H.6’, Subaltern Studies, 7 (Delhi, 1993), 159–220Google Scholar. Enslaved people sometimes filled similar roles even in the Atlantic world. For example, Olaudah Equiano famously acted as a commercial agent on behalf of his Quaker master Robert King in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. See Equiano, O., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (New York, 2004), 93Google Scholar.

38 Glassman, ‘Bondsman's’, 291–2; also Glassman, Feasts, 74–5; Rockel, S., Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, 2006), 17, 21–2Google Scholar.

39 Hanna, N., Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismaʿil Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, 1998), 47Google Scholar; T. Walz, ‘Family archives in Egypt: new light on nineteenth-century provincial trade’, in L’Égype au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1982), 24–5; Lydon, ‘Slavery’, 127–8; Roberts, Warriors, 64; R. Harms, ‘Sustaining the System: Trading Towns along the Middle Zaire’, in M. Klein and C. Robertson (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983), 95.

40 Monteil, C., Une cité soudanaise: djenné, métropole du delta central du Niger (Paris, 1932), 262Google Scholar.

41 Richardson, J., Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 (London, 1851), 260Google Scholar.

42 al-Ḥashāʾishī, M. U., al-Riḥla al-Ṣaḥrāwiyya ʿabr arāḍi Ṭarābulus wa-bilād al-Tawarāq, ed. M. al-Murzūqī (Tunis, 1988), 170Google Scholar. The French translation is Mohammed Ben Otsmane el-Hachaichi, Voyage au pays des Senoussia à travers la Tripolitaine et les pays Touareg, 2nd edn, trans. V. Serres, Lasram (Paris, 1912), 221.

43 R. Austen and D. Cordell, ‘Trade, transportation, and expanding economic networks: Saharan caravan commerce in the era of European expansion, 1500–1900’, in A. Jalloh and T. Falola (eds.), Black Business and Economic Power (Rochester, 2002), 99–101.

44 Much of the literature has focused on culturally-defined trade diasporas, or family networks. Among the best-known are: Curtin, P., Economic Change in Precolonial Africa. Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), 59–91Google Scholar; A. Cohen, ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’, in C. Meillassoux (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), 266–81; Lovejoy, P., Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria, 1980)Google Scholar.

45 Studnicki-Gizbert, D., A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford, 2007), 104–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trivellato, F., The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), 132–52Google Scholar.

46 G. Lydon has shown that another form of commercial partnership called mufāwaḍa was widely used by Saharan trades. In this system, partners pool their investments, and one partner is commissioned with the authority to conduct trade on behalf of the others. See Lydon, Trans-Saharan, 292; Udovitch, A. L., Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton, 1970), 144, 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Equiano, Interesting, 110–13.

48 Baier, Economic, 63.

49 IHERIAB ms. 8246. The complaint about the lack of news from Timbuktu may reflect a wider crisis in the Saharan trade as a result of the suppression of the slave trade and lower prices for important trade items such as ostrich feathers. Haarmann, ‘Dead’, 39.

50 IHERIAB ms. 10456.

51 T. Walz reports that slaves based in nineteenth-century Asyūṭ in Egypt filled a similar function of carrying money in trade with Cairo. See Walz, ‘Family’, 24–5.

52 IHERIAB ms. 5499.

53 IHERIAB ms. 5453.

54 Unfortunately, I do not know the exact date of ʿĪsā b. Aḥmayd's death, nor do I know how his assets – including his slaves – were divided amongst his heirs.

55 IHERIAB ms. 11690.

56 IHERIAB ms. 10333.

57 IHERIAB ms. 10471.

58 On Islamic epistolary models, see Sood, G., ‘“Correspondence is equal to half a meeting”: the composition and comprehension of letters in eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50:2–3 (2007), 172–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Trivellato, Familiarity, 177–93; Goitein, S. D., Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973), 8–9Google Scholar; Lydon, ‘Contracting’, 111–12; Lydon, , ‘A paper economy of faith without faith in paper: a reflection on Islamic institutional history’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 71 (2009), 647–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aslanian, S., ‘The salt in a merchant's letter: the culture of Julfan correspondence in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean’, Journal of World History, 19:2 (2008), 127–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Klein, ‘Concept’, 840–2.

60 That Ṣanbu and Anjay were brothers is confirmed by IHERIAB ms. 10040. Judging from her name, Ṣanbu's wife Kani was from Timbuktu. The name is Songhay, and it means sweetness. ʿUthmān is a common Muslim name, but Baniya (Bañña) is a Songhay name meaning male slave.

61 IHERIAB ms. 9311–30. He also had a son named Baba. The letter from which this information is drawn was written by one of ʿĪsā b. Aḥmayd's sons, al-Khalīfa b. ʿĪsā. The deferential tone of this letter on the part of al-Khalīfa suggests beyond much doubt that Baba was not a slave. IHERIAB ms. 8324.

62 Anjay had a recognizable style of hand-writing and prose style. Ṣanbu was a less sophisticated letter writer who sometimes employed the services of scribes, although he also wrote himself. Other slaves relied entirely on scribes for their correspondence. One of the most important scribes in this correspondence was a man named Muḥammad Sinṭāwu, and who is frequently saluted at the end of letters. For example, IHERIAB ms. 8593. Haarmann found a similar role for scribes in other Ghadames commercial correspondence. ‘Dead’, 15.

63 IHERIAB ms. 10577.

64 The slave trade remained the most important part of the trans-Saharan trade financially through the nineteenth century. Lydon, Trans-Saharan, 123; Wright, J., The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

65 G. Lydon points out that the term ghulām refers to slave boys between the age of ten and fourteen. She also notes that it was a common epithet for ‘male slaves or freed slaves working as commercial agents and couriers for merchants of Ghadāmis and Ghāt’. ‘Slavery’, 122–3. The same term was used in medieval North Africa. According to S. D. Goitein, there is some ambiguity in understanding its precise meaning because it could refer to a slave, or to a manumitted slave. It was a polite form of address that made it possible to avoid the use of the legal term for slave (ʿabd). Goitein, Mediterranean, 1:131.

66 P. Lovejoy points out that this injunction against selling second generation slaves was often overcome in practice. ‘Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate’, in Lovejoy, The Ideology of Slavery, 222; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000), 115–16.

67 ʿUthmān was another slave owned by ʿĪsā who was involved in this network.

68 The mithqāl was the weight unit of gold in West Africa. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Niger Bend, one mithqāl was equivalent to approximately 4 grams of gold. Johnson, M., ‘The nineteenth-century gold “mithqal” in West and North Africa’, Journal of African History, 9:4 (1968), 557CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. O. Hunwick, ‘Islamic financial institutions: theoretical structures and aspects of their application in sub-Saharan Africa’, in E. Stiansen and J. I. Guyer (eds.), Credit, Currencies and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective (Uppsala, 1999), 85.

69 IHERIAB ms. 5451.

70 In early modern Europe, letters could be used in legal disputes. This encouraged very detailed enumerations of all transactions. See Trivellato, Familiarity, 168. Detailed discussions of instructions and accounts did not carry the same legal weight, but they were also very common. See Lydon, ‘Contracting’, 111–12; Lydon, ‘Paper’, 654–5.

71 IHERIAB ms. 8308.

72 Lydon, ‘Paper’, 649.

73 S. D. Goitein argued that the medieval Jewish traders he studied constantly invoked God in their letters because keeping God ‘constantly in mind and mouth was the most practical thing a good business man could do’. Goitein, Letters, 7.

74 J. Glassman frames slave rebellion in nineteenth-century East Africa in terms of efforts at defending practices and ideas of patron-client relations that were being challenged by masters. Glassman, Feasts, 107.

75 IHERIAB ms. 8261.

76 It is of course possible that Anjay and Ahmad al-Bakkāy were half brothers, each a son of ʿĪsā.

77 IHERIAB ms. 5510.

78 IHERIAB ms. 8339.

79 His manumission is discussed at length by one of ʿĪsā's sons named al-Khalīfa. IHERIAB ms. 5510.

80 IHERIAB ms. 8326.

81 Cooper, ‘Islam’, 291–2.

82 Glassman, Feasts, 23.

83 According to the Saharan scholar Shaykh Bāy al-Kuntī, only slaves who had achieved the status of umm walad after bearing their master a child, could cover themselves. Hall, A History, 239. According to L. Fair, a similar set of expectations applied to female slaves who had achieved such a status in East Africa. Fair, L., ‘Dressing up: clothing, class and gender in post-abolition Zanzibar’, Journal of African History, 39:1 (1998), 63–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also J. R. Berndt, ‘“Closer than your juglar vein”: Muslim intellectuals in a Malian village, 1900 to the 1960s’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 2007), 329–32; K. Bromber, ‘Mjakazi, Mpambe, Mjoli, Suria: female slaves in Swahili sources’, in G. Campbell, S. Miers, and J. C. Miller (eds.), Women and Slavery, Volume 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens, 2007), 122; Cooper, B., ‘Reflections of slavery, seclusion and female labor in the Maradi region of Niger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Journal of African History, 35:1 (1994), 61–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.