A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (African Studies)

A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960

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A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960

The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating – and intensifying – civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since.

Meeting the Tuareg

Theoretically speaking, racism is a philosophy of history or, more accurately, a historiography which makes history the consequence of a hidden secret revealed to men about their own nature and their own birth. It is a philosophy which makes visible the invisible cause of the fate of societies and peoples; not to know that cause is seen as evidence of degeneracy or of the historical power of the evil. Etienne Balibar

prefiguring racial encounters

In the account of a reconnaissance trip made from the Atlantic coast of West Africa at Dahomey to the Niger River in 1896, Georges Toutée narrates his first encounter with the Tuareg:

For the last three days, my trip has taken on a new interest; we are surrounded by white faces, fine figures, worried looks, numerous demonstrations of friendship, and rare but certain signs of hatred and treachery…. Are these Tuareg, who have given us such a good welcome, enemies or friends? I don’t know anything any- more, but they are whites.2

This passage captures remarkably well the expressed sentiments of so many French military officers upon meeting the pastoralist, seminomadic Tuareg people of the West African Sahel at the end of the nineteenth century. Again and again in published narratives, and in official and private correspondence, the Tuareg make an ambiguous entrance on the stage of colonial encounter as, on the one hand, wild and dangerous “tribes” of nomadic warriors who threaten the nascent colonial enterprise, and on the other hand, as racially white, lightly touched by Islam, suggesting a capacity for civilization certainly not shared by their black neighbors. The consistency of French writing about the Tuareg suggests that the colonial encounter was in an important sense already imagined before it occurred, already structured into the outlines of a colonial vulgate that reduced the social and political complexities of the Sahel into a series of dichotomous and mutually exclusive groupings, namely nomad and sed- entary, master and slave, black and white.

The echoes of other imperial adventures (and misadventures) are obvious, although in the history of European colonial expansion, I can- not think of a people other than the Tuareg from whom so much was expected on the basis of so little actual exposure and experience. There were important consequences of French hopes for the Tuareg in terms of shaping the structure of the colonial regime that was constructed in the Niger Bend, and in opening up the space for many Tuareg themselves to play the French-assigned role of the “nomad” in order to maximize the relatively privileged position they were allotted in the ethno-racial hier- archy of colonized people. My purpose in this chapter is to explore the genealogy of the French racial ideas that informed the colonial encounter. Race fed into a larger myth about the Tuareg, even before French forces set foot in the lands where the Tuareg people lived.

Much of the historical literature concerning the emergence of European racial ideas has focused on early-modern encounters with non-Europeans, and especially on encounters with Africans. There is a whole literature on the racial construction of blacks that dates back to the earliest European travelers’ accounts of Africa.3 It is blacks who were made to represent the furthest extent of difference, the most prim- itive end of most racial hierarchies. Kim Hall has made much of the early-modern literary uses of black imagery as precursors to European

colonial expansion.

The use of Africa and blackness as signs of disorder is the first step in preparing for Europe’s ordering and later exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources. In the ordering of such strange variety, there lies power as well as wealth. At first only a culminating sign of physical oddity and natural disorderliness, blackness begins to represent the destructive potential of strangeness, disorder, and variety, particularly when intertwined with the familiar, and familiarly threatening, unruliness of gender.4

These ideas about blacks and blackness were vitally important to the development of Euro-American racial projects, but we need to be careful to avoid teleology. Critics have argued that Kim Hall’s focus on the imagery of color misrepresents a more complex history of racial ideas in early-modern Europe. Roxann Wheeler, for example, suggests that in eighteenth-century England, racial ideology “forms mainly around English responses to certain customs, dress, religion, and especially trading – in short, around a concept of civility.”5 The focus on the negative imagery of blackness may act to conceal the multiple ways in which racial difference can be constructed.

In this chapter, I trace some of the important steps that contributed to French imaginings of the Tuareg as a proximate race closer to Europeans than either Arabs or blacks. I will have little to say about the development of French ideas about people defined as black. This subject has been treated by others and does not need to be rehearsed here. As important as ideas about blackness were in structuring French colonial power, it was often the issue of how to understand and manage groups thought to occupy medial positions in the larger racial hierarchy that posed the bigger problem. It was with these “higher order” colonized groups that the French administration sought “natural” alliances. The problem of race faced by French officers and administrators in the Niger Bend and across the Sahel more broadly was not about blacks, but about how to deal with Arabic- and Berber-speaking peoples whom Europeans identified as white. Encounters with Arabs and Tuareg did not lead to a colonial discourse of alterity, but instead to efforts at intellectual excavation and recovery of the natural (racial) ties of affection that would/should bind them to France.

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