JAH Forum SAHARAN OCEANS and BRIDGES, BARRIERS AND
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Journal of African History, (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX JAH Forum SAHARAN OCEANS AND BRIDGES, BARRIERS AND DIVIDES IN AFRICA’S HISTORIOGRAPHICAL LANDSCAPE* Ghislaine Lydon University of California, Los Angeles Abstract Based on a broad assessment of the scholarship on North-Western Africa, this article examines Saharan historiography with a particular view towards understanding how and why historians have long represented the continent as being composed of two ‘Africas’. Starting with the earliest Arabic writings, and, much later, French colonial renderings, it traces the epistemological creation of a racial and geographic divide. Then, the article considers the field of African studies in North African universities and ends with a review of recent multidisciplinary research that embraces a trans-Saharan approach. Key Words Sahara, North Africa, West Africa, historiography, colonialism, racism. Each geographic space, insofar as it is a space for a possible history, is ... a function of many variables. More than six decades ago, Fernand Braudel pointed the way towards a ‘total history’ of Africa. His method, anchored in the concept of ‘liquid planes’ that treated seas and oceans as heuristic devices, was to collapse geographical barriers in order to recast the parameters of history. Braudel wrote of a ‘greater Sahara’ extending from the Atlantic to China. For him, Africa’s Sahara Desert, representing the entire northern half of the continent including the North African littoral, was ‘one of the faces of the Mediterranean’. In his conception, this vast physical space was connected through the movement of caravans and * This article is dedicated to historian and diplomat Mohamed Saïd Ould Hamody with whom I spend many enjoyable afternoons discussing Saharan myths and sagas in the propitious setting of his library. I am grateful to Richard Von Glahn and Ross Dunn for editing and guidance, and to four anonymous reviewers of this journal for critical readings. O. y Gasset, An Interpretation of Universal History (New York, ), . F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris, [orig. pub. ]), . Ibid. This particular insight inspired other historians to investigate Saharan-Mediterranean links, starting with V. M. Godinho, O ‘Mediterrâneo’ saariano e as caravanas do ouro: geografia econômica e social do Sáara Ocidental e Central do XI ao XVI século (São Paulo, ), whose work was included in Braudel’s second edition. Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Lund University Libraries, on 08 Sep 2016 at 06:07:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002185371400070X vol. , no. SAHARAN OCEANS AND BRIDGES ‘grand nomads’ circulating across its various shores and oases from the Tunisian Sahel to the Senegal River. Given how entrenched the idea of a divided continent was then, and still remains in Africa’s historiographical landscape, Braudel’s vision was remarkable even if his overall interest in African history would remain peripheral. Covering close to one-third of Africa’s continental landmass, the Sahara has long been romanticized as an arid, rugged, and impenetrable desert. In much of Western historio- graphy, the Sahara was misconstrued as a buffer zone separating two culturally and racially contrasted ‘Africas’. Muslim writers similarly imagined a ‘land of the blacks’ (Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n), south of the Sahara Desert that separated it from the Maghrib. Yet, notable scholars across the ages have questioned, as did Braudel, this particular paradigm. Théodore Monod, a founder of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, an avid camel rider and an authority on western Saharan studies, delivered a lecture in at the Rotary Club of Dakar entitled ‘The Sahara: Barrier or Hyphen?’ He concluded by stating ‘the historian can only answer in one way: indubitably “hyphen (trait d’union)”’. Echoing Monod, the political scientist of North Africa, William Zartman published an essay in entitled ‘Sahara: Bridge or Barrier?’ that began with the following statement: There is a well-entrenched idea, a hangover from the Middle Ages and from French colonial notions, that Africa stops at the Sahara. As long as the Continent could be divided into convenient zones of colonial influence and Africans could be spoken of as anthropological specimens rather than political beings, the world could get by with this sort of concept. As long as it lasted, archi- tectural similarities between Warzazat in the Moroccan Valley of the Dra and Bamako on the Malian Niger went unnoticed, the presence of both Nilotic and Negroid types on the Tassili fres- coes went unexplained, and the column of General Leclerc marching up from Lake Chad across the desert in was a brave anomaly. Today this attitude is rapidly becoming outmoded. Contrary to Zartman’s assessment, however, it would be another fifty years before debunking the myth of a Saharan divide would begin in earnest. Today an increasing number of scholars engage in Saharan and trans-Saharan research. Still, due to the schism between North and so-called sub-Saharan Africa the Sahara remains a glaring blind spot in the historiography. Varying efforts to set geographic limits to both Africas and to disregard the Sahara proper have tended to insulate and isolate information exchange. The history of the discursive fracture, reimagined from antiquity to postmodernity, is deeply layered. Depending on scholarly tradition and regional location, the parameters of African history, ‘a function of many variables’, in José Ortega y Gasset’s meaning, have shifted in orientation and scope. Orientalism and the politics of race, religion, and conquest are among the reasons behind this bipolarized episteme. Given their historic hold on north-western Africa, the French played no small part in the construction of the Saharan divide, all the while P. Braudel, La Méditerranée, , esp. –. An excerpt of this unpublished lecture entitled ‘Le Sahara: barrière où trait d’union’ is featured in R. Capot-Rey, L’Afrique blanche française tome second: le sahara français (Paris, ), and a copy is preserved at the Archives Nationales du Sénégal. See L. Marfaing and S. Wippel (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes à l’époque contemporaine: un espace en constante mutation (Paris, ), . W. Zartman, Sahara: Bridge or Barrier? (New York, ), . Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Lund University Libraries, on 08 Sep 2016 at 06:07:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002185371400070X GHISLAINE LYDON vol. , no. generating a voluminous literature on Saharan zones. This colonial discourse has proven enduring, and in many ways, it continues to constrict intellectual exchange in and out of Africa, and yet today many prominent Saharanists are francophone. Still, African and Saharan studies, as well as trans-Saharan research, remain underdeveloped in North Africa, especially in Algeria. In West Africa, Mauritanian scholars have done much to pro- mote western Saharan studies. As for North America, where university research tends to be compartmentalized in area studies, the field attracts few students. This article is a modest attempt to reflect upon the state of Saharan studies with particular reference to the schol- arship on north-western Africa, or the region from West Africa to the Maghrib. I trace the Saharan divide’s formation and underlying causes, examining recent scholars’ efforts to confront and transcend it. Throughout this article I make a distinction between studies on Saharan history and society, and studies that explicitly embrace a trans-Saharan approach. AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SAHARAN DIVIDE In The Invention of Africa, Valentin Mudimbe recognized the extent to which African gno- sis was shaped by ‘a silent dependence on a Western episteme’. Yet, for him ‘Africa’ was implicitly ‘the black continent’, a conception that paradoxically replicates Hegel’s nineteenth-century ‘framing’, which equated what he termed ‘Africa proper’ with ‘that which lies to the south of the Sahara desert’. This synthetic construct that makes an ab- straction of ‘North Africa’ and relegates Africa to a sub-Saharan part of the continent, is, to borrow from Théophile Obienga, a ‘Eurocentric Africanism’. The idea of a divided continent has deep roots. Herodotus’s description of the northern desert-edge of Africa (then known as ‘Libya’) as a region of ‘wild beasts’ beyond which was a ‘ridge of sand’, must have made a lasting impression. How the northern part of the con- tinent was erased of its ‘blackness’ to become what Hegel thought of as ‘European Africa’, is much less understood. Starting as early as the eighth century, Muslim writers, geogra- phers, and travelers invariably infused their mappings of Africa with racialist attitudes. Like Jews and Christians before them, their interpretative framework for ‘black Africa’ was the story of Ham. The Hamitic template influenced subsequent interpretations of Africa and its inhabitants and gave shape to the formulation of Africa’s racial divide. V. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, ), x. Ibid. Hegel divided the continent in three parts, the two others being ‘the land to the north of the desert, a coastal region which might be described as European Africa [sic]. And the third is the region of the Nile, the only valley land of Africa, which is closely connected to Asia.’ G. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge, ), . T. Obenga, ‘Africanismes eurocentristes’, in M. Gassama (ed.), L’Afrique répond à Sarkozy: contre le discours de Dakar (Paris, ). Herodotus, Histories I; IV (London, ), –. A. Muhammad, ‘The image of Africans in Arabic literature’, in J. R. Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London, ), –; J. Hunwick and E. Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, ); J. Schmitz, ‘Islam et “esclavage” ou l’impossible “négritude” des Africains musulmans’, Africultures, (), –.