JAH Forum SAHARAN OCEANS and BRIDGES, BARRIERS AND

Journal of African History,  (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press   doi:./SX

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 historiography, 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, ), .

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 promote 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 scholarship 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 continent 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, geographers, 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,  (), –.

The rhetoric of ‘black equals slave’ would prove enduring as Baz Lecocq explains in his contribution to this Forum. Arabic-writing scholars invariably borrowed stereotypes from the Greek and Latin works (some based on Ancient Egyptian scholarship) they translated and reproduced, starting with Ptolemy’s Geographia. The expression Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n, country of the blacks, was first recorded in the writings of Muslims of the eighth century. At roughly the same time the word ‘Sahara,’ Arabic for  desert, desolate environment, was applied to regions of Africa. Racism against black- skinned people was already so pronounced among certain Muslims by the next century that several scholars of black descent were prompted to react in writing. One of the earliest was the Iraqi ‘Uthman ‘Amr Ibn Bahṛ al-Ja¯hiẓ̣(d. ), author of ‘The Book of the Glory of  the Blacks over the Whites’ (Kita¯b Fakhr al-Su¯ da¯n ‘ala¯ l-Bida¯̣n). In this essay, al-Ja¯hiẓ̣ highlighted the contributions of black people, including Prophet Muhammad’s supposed black ancestors. He criticized the association of blacks with ignorance and enslavement – an idea that would remain entrenched among Muslims, including some Saharans. What most exasperated al-Ja¯hiẓ̣was the classification of blacks as non-Muslim and unbelievers. For many Muslims, the color line often was conflated with a religious one, and so the land of the blacks was thought to lie beyond the abode of Islam (Da¯r al-Isla¯m). Such prejudice was clearly expressed by the tenth-century Tunisian Ibn Ab¯ı Zayd al-Qayrawa¯n¯ı (d. ). In his Risa¯la, one of the most popular compendia of Ma¯lik¯ı law in Africa, he declared: ‘it is  detestable to trade in the land of enmity (ardị al-‘adu¯ w) and the country of the Blacks’. Prejudice among North Africans was to the point that some deemed Western African trade goods and even profits derived from trans-Saharan trade to be tainted. Still, neither racism nor legal edicts would deter intra-African exchange. The geographical limits of the Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n, the Sahara and the Maghrib were a matter of perspective, but they also shifted in relationship to the movement of people and of the desert. Based on oral sources, the eleventh-century Al-Bakr¯ı reckoned the Sahara Desert  began at Sijilma¯sa, and Ancient Ghana was its southern limit. In a fatwa composed some eight centuries later about the payment of commercial agents written by a legal scholar from Tichitt, a town that sprang to the north of Awdaghust after Ghana’s decline, the  limits of the Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n were set at several days by camel to the south of that town. The so-called Arabo-Berber communities of south-western Sahara, in today’s Islamic Republic of Mauritania, would have adjusted the borders of the ‘land of the Blacks’

 First used to designate Libya’s region of Tripolitania, the word Sahara overtime became more broadly applied to the entire zone known today. See Capot-Rey, Sahara Français, –.  Al-Ja¯hiẓ̣is one of the ninth century’s most proliﬁc Muslim scholars. Vincent Cornell translated this particular book under the title The Book of the Glory of the Black Race (Waddington, NY, ). A later Iraqi scholar, Ibn al-Jawz¯ı (d. ), similarly would write on the ‘virtues of the Su¯ da¯n’, cited by the seventeenth-century Timbuktu jurist Ahmaḍ Ba¯ba¯. See J. Hunwick and F. Harrak, Mi‘ra¯j al-Sụ‘u¯ d: Ahmaḍ Ba¯ba¯’s Replies on Ethnicity and Slavery (Rabat, ).  Ibn Ḥama¯ma al-Maghra¯w¯ı (ed.), Al-Risa¯la al-ﬁqhiya lil-Shaykh Ab¯ı Muhammaḍ ‘Abd Alla¯h ibn Ab¯ı Zayd al-Qayrawa¯n¯ı, : (Beirut, ). It is interesting to note that this particular rule is absent from the Ma¯lik¯ı compendium by Khal¯ıl Ibn Ishạ¯q(Al-Mukhtasaṛ) most popular in Western Africa.  N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History [hereafter Corpus] (Princeton, NJ, ), .  Fatwa¯ of Shaykh S¯ıdi, ‘Abayda b. Muhammad al-Sagh¯ır b. Anbu¯ ja (c. s) on Caravan Wages (SBA ), Family Archives of Shar¯ıf Shaykhna Bu¯ yahmaḍ (Tichitt, Mauritania).

over time. Because of the ideologies of race and Islam, these particular Saharans would struggle with the question of belonging. Ahmaḍ al-Shinq¯ıt¯ı̣reported a late nineteenth- century case of a pilgrim who, like himself, was originally from south-western Sahara, and strove to convince people in Mecca that his homeland was part of the Maghrib not  the Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n. Early Muslim geographers from the Middle East dubbed the northern half of north-west Africa ‘the island of the West’ or ‘place of the sun’s setting’ (jaz¯ırat al-maghrib). Their knowledge was so limited that they either assumed this region was surrounded by water, or that it was an island between the Mediterranean Sea and the sea of sand to  the south. Concomitantly, several writers depicted the Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n as separate from the rest of the world. The Persian geographer Abu¯ Ishạ¯q Ibra¯h¯ım al-Istakha¯r¯ı was an early proponent of this concept, which would be plagiarized by the tenth-century scholar Ibn Ḥawqal. For the latter, the Su¯ da¯nwas‘an encircled land, which has no contact with other kingdoms. But one of its frontiers extends to the Ocean; another to the desert  (al-saḥrạ¯’) which separates it from the land of the Maghrib’. Ibn Ḥawqal would then proceed to contradict himself when describing Sijilma¯sa, a city he visited, as having  ‘uninterrupted trade with the land of the Su¯ da¯n’. Many of these early writers composed for a readership interested in the trade routes and realms of the land of gold dust (bila¯d  al-tibr), a region that the tenth-century geographer Muqaddas¯ı placed above the Su¯ da¯n. The celebrated Maghribi fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldu¯ n described three parts constituting black Africa. The first was the land of Abyssinia, or north-east Africa, then the land of the Zanj (another term for black, nowadays considered pejorative) for Africa’s eastern coast, and finally the land of the blacks, by which he meant Western Africa. For him ‘the boundary of the Maghrib south-east (qibla) and south is marked by heaped sands  standing as a barrier between the land of the Su¯ da¯n and the lands of the Berbers’. Although he never traveled to the heart of the Sahara, he provided one of the earliest  descriptions of its diverse zones and environments. He depicted the Sanhaja Berbers as quintessential Saharans who refused to be dominated, presenting a romantic view of this desert land that, in the mind of many Africans, especially nomads, would become synonymous with freedom. Bila¯d al-Su¯ da¯n and the Sahara were external labels, and it would be several centuries before they would become appropriated locally. Muslim Africans of the Sahara and Sahel also would create their own geographical constructs. One of the earliest was the ‘country of Takru¯ r’ (bila¯d al-takru¯ r), from the kingdom by the same name, which flourished in what is today Senegal in the eleventh century and was one of the earliest Islamic polities in the

 Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, –.  S.M.Ḍ ¯ıya¯bḤusayn, Bila¯d al-Maghrib f¯ı al-qarn al-awwal al-Hijr¯ı (Cairo, ); Isma¯‘¯ıl al-‘Arab¯ı, Hạ¯diṛ al-duwal al-Isla¯m¯ıya f¯ı al-qa¯rra al-Afr¯ıq¯ıya (Algiers, ). See also Isma¯’¯ıl ‘Arab¯ı, Al-Saḥrạ¯’ al-kubra¯ wa-shawa¯tị’uha¯ (Algiers, ).  Corpus,  and .  Ibid. .  Muqaddas¯ı, Kita¯bAhsaṇ al-taqa¯s¯ımf¯ı ma‘rifat al-aqa¯l¯ım (Beirut, ), .  Corpus, .  Ibid. –.

area. For centuries, Western Africans used Takru¯ r and the adjective Takru¯ r¯ı as an identity marker, to the point that the name became synonymous with West Africans of the Muslim world, and entire neighborhoods, from Cairo and Khartoum, to Jedda and Mecca, took  on the name. This marker would take on racial inference assigned to black Muslims, particularly West Africans. At some point in time, however, some south-western Sahara scholars from the oasis town of Chinguetti started writing about a bila¯d shinq¯ıt ̣perhaps to demarcate themselves from a bila¯d takru¯ r. Over time, these communities came to label themselves as ‘whites’ (bida¯̣n), and began writing about theirs as ‘a territory of the whites’‘(tra¯b al-bida¯̣n)’, though how this came about is not well known. The writings of Ibn Khaldu¯ n circulated across the northern half of the continent with increased velocity in the age of printing. It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that Europeans would begin reading and translating them. Jewish scholars in Spain and North Africa, including the fourteenth-century cartographer of the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, also provided detailed information about the regions and kingdoms of the Sahara and Sahel. One of the earliest works to profoundly influence European ideas about Africa was the sixteenth-century Latin description of Africa by the Maghribi  Hasa¯n ibn Muhammaḍ al-Wazza¯n¯ı. Although it is likely that he never traveled to Western Africa, as Pekka Masonen suggests, Leo Africanus was versed in Maghribi scholarship. Yet he relied heavily on European epistemes when compartmentalizing the  continent into four parts: Barbary, Numidia, Libya, and ‘the land of the Negroes’. It is worth mentioning that he wrote in Latin for a readership that included ‘Italian’ communities with a centuries-old commercial and residential presence in North Africa’s port cities. The Saharan divide was more firmly drawn in the modern era. As in Roman times, North Africa witnessed the most intensive colonization at the hands of Europeans. Decades after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt of , France (Algeria in ) carved out a North African colony ahead of the Berlin Conference. In myriad ways these experi- ences shaped their subsequent colonial experiments. This is particularly true of the French, many of whose colonial personnel in Western Africa were trained in Algeria, France’s first  ‘Muslim power’, as David Robinson has shown. The trans-Saharan dimensions of  colonial rule in Africa, however, remain unexplored. The invention of ‘white Africa’ (Afrique blanche) in French epistemology is not well understood. The self-identification of North Africans and Middle Easterners as ‘white’ clearly has a long history, as evidenced by Al-Ja¯hiẓ’̣s writings. A further consideration is the belief among French colonists that some ‘Berber’ (Amazigh) groups were descendants of former Roman colonizers. Eugène Daumas and Paul-Dieudonné Fabar made this argu- ment quite explicitly in their influential book La Grande Kabylie. Published in , it not only lent currency to the notion that North Africa was an extension of Europe, but it also

 See ‘Umar al-Naqar, ‘Takru¯ r: the history of a name’, The Journal of African History, : (), –.  P. Masonen, The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages (Helsinki, ), –.  A. Épaulard (ed. and trans.), Description de l’Afrique [par] Jean-Léon L’Africain (Paris, ), .  D. Robinson, ‘France as a Muslim power in West Africa’, African Studies Review, :/ (), –.  Samuel Anderson, a doctoral student at UCLA, is writing a dissertation on the migrations in Western African history of Algerian institutions and genealogies of colonial knowledge.

cemented colonial constructs about Arabs and Berbers, all the while reinforcing the practice of turning a blind eye to the blacks of the Maghrib. In the process, the French translation of Ibn Khaldu¯ n’s so-called history of the Berbers apparently was manipulated in order to legitimize France’s manifest destiny in Algeria, in what anthropologist  Abdelmajid Hannoum terms a ‘heretical colonial discourse’. By the late nineteenth cen-  tury, the expression l’Afrique blanche had become common. It was popularized in the next century when it was used synonymously with l’Afrique française, a region where, paradoxically, Algerian-born Frenchmen would be nicknamed ‘black feet’ (pieds noirs). At least by the s a further racial inversion was the French borrowing from Senegal the Wolof phrase bougnoul (bu ñuul) meaning ‘that is black’ as a derogatory term first for all blacks, and then, over time, exclusively for North Africans living in France. The race across the Sahara led by explorers Hugh Clapperton (and company) and Réné Caillié (s), and followed by German adventurer-scholars Heinrich Barth (s), Friedrich Gerhard Rolhfs (s), Gustav Nachtigal (s), and Oscar Lenz (s), fueled European interest in the region. General Eugène Daumas (d. ), the co-author of La Grande Kabylie, became one of France’s first prolific Saharanists. Other notable Frenchmen include Henri Duveyrier – who spent time among Algeria’s Tuareg, and was fascinated by caravan trade – and Paul Soleillet who also traveled extensively in the Sahara. Soleillet was a keen advocate of the French pipedream to build a trans-Saharan railway from Algiers to Timbuktu. Also significant is the work of colonial officer Alfred Le Chatelier (–), who visited West Africa and later taught the sociology of Islam at the College de France. It could be said that he and Soleillet were early Western practitioners of trans-Saharan research. In the wake of France’s conquest of the Western African interior, it became imperative  to stake out the Saharan trait d’union in order to build a ‘homogenous French empire’. The French were especially keen on connecting the early African territories, or, as the nineteenth-century Governor Faidherbe expressed, ‘Senegal and Algeria must extend a  hand across the Sahara.’ Le Chatelier had participated in the first mission led by Colonel Paul Flatters (who perished in  at the hands of a Tuareg party in an ill-fated second expedition). In his Questions sahariennes (), he reported on his expedition to the oases of south-western Algeria, and proposed Zinder would be a more viable desti-  nation for the projected trans-Saharan railway than Timbuktu. By this time, France’s ‘Saharan penetration’ of the Suda¯n was all the more imperative given British and German claims over parts of Niger. That the European colonization of West Africa was

 A. Hannoum, Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (Cambridge, Mass., ), –. Hannoum does not broach the concept of ‘white Africa’, although his focal point is France’s obsession with Berbers and Arabs.  An early expression of the paradigm appears in a public lecture on linguistics. V. Henri, ‘La distribution géographique des langues’, Bulletin de la société de géographie de Lille,  (),  (‘l’Afrique noire, séparée de l’Afrique blanche par le Sahara, qui constitue encore aujourd’hui une ligne de démarcation ethnique et linguistique parfaitement tranchée’).  A. Le Chatelier, Questions sahariennes: Touat, Châamba, Touareg: mission dans le sud Algérien en juin-août  (Paris, ).  L. Faidherbe, ‘L’Avenir’,  (‘Le Sénégal et L’Algérie doivent se donner la main par dessus le Sahara’).  Ibid. . Le Chatelier was of the opinion that the ‘Transsaharien ne deviendrait viable, commercialement, qu’à la suite d’une transformation complète des populations nègres, auxquelles il apporterait la civilisation.’

led in part by military expeditions to and from North Africa tends to be forgotten. After the British-French agreement of August , Colonel Parfait-Louis Monteil would lead a mission to stake out the ofﬁcial borders between Nigeria, and Niger and Chad, and between  Algeria and Libya. The early twentieth century marked a high moment in the consolidation of the Saharan divide. Incongruously, the French scholar who had a heavy hand in fashioning the paradigm was another specialist of Saharan affairs. Émile-Félix Gautier (d. ), who  began his career in Madagascar, explored the Algerian Sahara and published extensively. His ﬁnal works were entitled L’Afrique noire occidentale (), followed by L’Afrique blanche (). In this last book he equated the Sahara to an ‘ethnic partition’ (cloison ethnique) separating the black African from the white African, and he assimilated the latter  to the ‘White Mediterranean’. For him it functioned as a cordon sanitaire that prevented the movement of, among other things, malaria-infected mosquitoes to ‘white Africa’. Ten years later, Jean Despois and Robert Capot-Rey published L’Afrique blanche française, consisting of two volumes, one on North Africa and the other on the ‘French  Sahara’. For the former doyen of North African history, Charles-André Julien (whose family migrated to Algeria when he was a teenager), l’Afrique du nord was not really part of  Africa – a region he, like Hegel, considered removed from history. Taking Gautier’s thinking to the next level, he describes Africa as a ‘thankless land’ (pays ingrat), isolated,  and hostile. Julien described the boundary between the two Africas as ‘an imprecise fron- tier that goes south of the Senegal River to the Indian Ocean, separates two distinct blocs  of humanity: White Africa and Black Africa’. Like Gautier, he excluded Ethiopia,  considered ‘civilized’ due to its literate tradition, from his mapping of ‘Africa proper’. In spite of nineteenth-century efforts to ‘unite’ France’s African Empire, twentieth-century epistemology clearly was bent on erecting the Sahara as a racial cordon. A religious divide was grafted to the racial divide, with the development of French ideas about different types of Muslims. In the early twentieth century, the French came to realize

 P.-L. Monteil, De Saint-Louis à Tripoli par le Lac Tchad, voyage au travers du Soudan et du Sahara accompli pendant les années –– (Paris, ).  His best known works are Missions au Sahara: Tome I, Sahara Algérien (Paris, ); La conquête du Sahara: essai de psychologie politique (Paris, ); and Le Sahara (Paris, ).  E. F. Gautier, L’Afrique blanche (Paris, ), –. It is tempting to link this ‘hardening of racial boundaries’ to the psychological impact of the French ﬁeld of eugenics and the social-hygiene movement. R. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago, ), .  J. Despois and R. Capot-Rey, L’Afrique blanche française (Paris,  [orig. pub. ]).  C. A. Julien, L’histoire de l’Afrique des origines à  (Paris, ),  (‘l’Afrique Noire, la véritable Afrique, se dérobe à l’histoire’.) This pocket history of Africa, in the ‘Que sais-je ?’ series, was originally published in  and went through no less than six editions. Naturally, Julien also wrote a pocket history of ‘white Africa’. See C. A. Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique blanche (Paris, ).  Ibid. .  Ibid. . It is interesting to note how far south he drew the boundary between white and black Africa.  As P. Curtin aptly remarked, Eurocentric chauvinism caused scholars ‘to draw the line between literacy and non-literacy at the edge of the desert, contributing further to the unfortunate tendency to separate North African history from that of the rest of the continent’. See P. Curtin, ‘Recent trends in African historiography and their contribution to history in general’, in J. Ki-Zerbo (ed.), General History of Africa I: Methodology and African Prehistory (Berkeley, CA, ), .

to what extent the frontiers of Islam and its ‘civilizing’ potential, epitomized by Arabic literacy, extended well below the Sahara. In order to fix this epistemological anomaly it became necessary to put a racial and hierarchical spin on ‘Islam’. Following an Orientalist perspective fixated on the ‘Arab’, the study of ‘Africa’ had to remain marginalized from that of the Muslim North. Arguably, the first action, made by a decree in ,wasto ban the use of Arabic in the colonial administration of ‘black’ Africa, starting with the  justice system. Then colonial scholars invented the new taxonomies of ‘black Islam’ (islam noire) and Moorish Islam (islam maure), to set African Muslims apart from others  practicing a ‘pure’ (arabe) Islam in North Africa and the Middle East. It is difficult to disassociate such labels from the iterations of later scholars writing about a so-called African Islam.

ERASURES IN AND OUT OF NORTH AFRICAN HISTORY

In the early postcolonial days of our historical profession, many conceived of the continent in its pan-African dimensions. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, editor of UNESCO’s General History of Africa, asserted: this history can only be the history of the peoples of the African continent as a whole, seen as a whole, including the mainland and neighbouring islands such as Madagascar, according to the deﬁnition in the OAU charter. The history of Africa obviously includes the Mediterranean sec- tor in a unity consecrated by age-long and sometimes bloody links, which make the two parts of  Africa on either side of the Sahara the two leaves of one door, the two sides of one coin. The Cambridge History of Africa editors similarly embraced a continental approach, as did Philip Curtin et al., in a textbook that – more than most – provides reasonable coverage  of North Africa across the ages. Still, the erasure of the Sahara is such that most frequently by ‘Africa’ is meant the so-called sub-Saharan part of the continent. This is despite the fact that technically this designated region includes a large portion of the Sahara (from Mauritania to  the Sudan). Guides to African historical methods and sources are silent on this issue. The artiﬁcial constructs of ‘black Africa’ and, to a lesser extent that of ‘white Africa’,

 See G. Lydon ‘Obtaining freedom at the Muslims’ court: women, divorce, and Islamic law in colonial Senegal’, in S. Jeppie, R. Roberts, and E. Moosa (eds.), Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa (Amsterdam, ), .  C. Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, – (Cambridge, ); D. Robinson, Paths of Accommodation (Athens, OH, ); J.-L. Triaud, ‘L’islam au sud du Sahara: une saison orientaliste en Afrique occidentale’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, – (), –. See M. Monjib, who examines how the encounter with West African Islam caused the French to invent an ‘Arab Islam’: ‘L’Islam arabe en Afrique de l’Ouest: une construction altruisante au temps de la colonisation’, in F. Harrak and K. Chegraoui (eds.), Les constructions de l’autre dans les relations interafricaines (Rabat, ).  J. Ki-Zerbo, ‘General introduction’, in Ki-Zerbo (ed.), General History, –.  P. Curtin, S. Feirman, L. Thompson, and J. Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times to Independence (London, ). The editors discussed the challenges posed by an inclusion of North Africa ‘a special case and a long-standing problem for the organization of historical knowledge’.  B. Jewsiewicki and D. Newbury (eds.), African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa (Beverly Hills, CA, ); S. Awenengo, P. Barthélemy, and C. Tshimanga (eds.), Écrire l’histoire de l’Afrique autrement? (Paris, ); J. E. Philips (ed.), Writing African History (Rochester, NY, ).

 remain usual in francophone literature when they have become outmoded elsewhere. Arabophone scholars progressively have abandoned the use of ‘land of the blacks’,or black Africa (Ifr¯ıqiya al-sawda), in favor of ‘Africa behind the Sahara’ (f¯ı ma¯ warã’a al-Saḥrạ¯’), an expression derived from geographically inaccurate English and French nomenclatures. Although not as voluminous as that of the Middle East, scholarship on North Africa is substantial, surpassing that of any other region of the continent. A big portion deals with pre-Late Antiquity and is largely concerned with ‘the projection of the history of  Europe on the African continent’. Another portion covers the period from the Muslim conquest through the ‘Umayyad rulers of Ifriqiya to the Hafsids, and beyond. Most of the historiography deals with societies of littoral North Africa, and research on the Sahara – an area constituting most of the landmass of northern countries such as Algeria and Libya – has been uneven, despite the existence of a sizeable French colonial literature. Scholars of North Africa across the ages have been conditioned to look up beyond the Mediterranean and not down across the Sahara. Aside from forgetting their ‘Africanity’,a trend slowly in the process of being reversed, three major groups, blacks, Berbers, and Jews, traditionally have been excluded from the general histories. While there is a substantial literature on Maghribi Jews, it has until recently been insular and marginalized. The scholarship on Moroccan Jews by Michel Abitbol, one of the ﬁrst Moroccans to engage in trans-Saharan research (with his study of the conquest of Songhay), is exceptional in  this regard. Both he and Daniel Schroeter have researched the case of Jewish merchants  working on behalf of Moroccan Sultans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, I have studied the commercial partnerships between Maghribi Jews and Muslims  engaged in trans-Saharan commerce. More than is now the case for Africa, North African history textbooks remain generally locked in the area-studies paradigm. Most make cursory mention of Ghana and Songhay in relationship to the eleventh-century Almoravids and the Moroccan invasion of  respectively, but rarely do they acknowledge the trans-Saharan trade system supplying markets from Tangier to Tripoli, a major source of economic wealth in the region,  let alone Africa’s historical connectivity. In his recent Approaching African History,

 Sarkozy’s  Dakar speech is a bleak reminder that racism and prejudicial ignorance about African history is still very much alive in France. See M. Gassama (ed.), L’Afrique; Adame Ba Konaré (ed.), Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l’histoire africaine à l’usage du président Sarkozy (Paris, ); and J.-P. Chrétien (ed.), Le Discours de Sarkozy: un déni d’histoire (Paris, ).  R. Cornevin, L’Histoire de l’Afrique tome I des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris, ), .  M. Abitbol, Tombouctou et les Arma, de la conquête marocaine du Soudan nigérien en  àl’hégémonie de l’empire peul du Macina en  (Paris, ).  M. Abitbol, Les commerçants du roi: Tujja¯r al-Sulta¯n (Paris: ); D. Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardic World (Stanford, CA, ); see also E. Gottreich and D. Schroeter (eds.), Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, IN, ). See Jessica Marglin’s  review in this journal.  Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails.  A. Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthèse (Casablanca, ). A more recent textbook in English, claims that it ‘tangentially includes the Sahara and the Sahel ... [and that] this book North Africa also embraces Egypt and the Sahara’, but in the end it follows well-known historiographical patterns. P. C. Naylor, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Austin, TX, ), .

Michael Brett makes an attempt to provide a ‘unified account’ that highlights Saharan  history but falls short of decrying the African divide. Over time, North African representations of ‘black Africa’ became coded in racialism and Arabocentrism. The classic texts by early North African, Middle Eastern, and Andalusian writers starting in the eighth century all contain elements of racial prejudice towards black Africans that go largely unproblematized in the scholarship. Even the ven-  erated Ibn Khaldu¯ n thought ‘blacks’ lacked in humanity (naqs ̣al-insa¯niya). Cultural chauvinism and ideas not unlike the pseudo-scientific theories of race in nineteenth- century Western thought still prevail among North Africans today. A cult of superiority of the kind exhibited by former colonists lingers among ‘Arabs’, many of whom do not consider themselves to be ‘African’. Using the example of the travels to West Africa of Jacques Berque, the prolific French islamologue of North Africa, Mustapha El Qadéry sheds light on the attitude problem of a ‘Maghribist going to “Africa” who considers him-  self an Arabicist (arabisant).’ Particularly emblematic was Berque’s confession that he was a specialist of ‘civilized’ and not ‘primitive’ societies. When confronting the scholarly barriers towards a holistic treatment of African history, the realities of race and prejudice throughout the northern half of the continent remain stark, as recent events in northern Mali have brought to the fore. Some scholars write frankly about the ‘negrophobia’ in countries such as Algeria, while others decry racist practices towards Western African  migrants, referred to as subsahariens in Morocco and recently as ‘the black peril’. As Lecocq suggests, it is the discomfort with race and confronting the legacies of the slave trades that accounts for the serious lack of historical research on trans-Saharan connectivities. The tendency to write the history of Arabs and Berbers separately is a result of the legacies of both Arab and French colonial discourses. Despite the voluminous scholarship on various groups in the colonial period, Berbers have been slighted in the postcolonial historiography of North Africa in line with their political invisibility, linked to questions of religious ideology, language hegemony, and national identity. An exception is the history of the Tuareg that has garnered constant scholarly attention since the nineteenth  century. On the question of Arabocentrism in Moroccan historiography, El Qadéry points to various anomalies in the dominant discourse, including overlooking the Berber  identity of the fêted Almoravids. Gabriel Camps, founder of the Encyclopédie berbère,

 M. Brett, Approaching African History (Woodbridge, ).  Ibn Khaldu¯ n, Kita¯b al-ibar wa-d¯ıwa¯n al-mubtada’ wa-al-khabar f¯ı̣ayya¯m al-‘Arab wa-al-‘ajam wa-al-barbaṛ , Vol.  (Cairo, ). See also Ka¯zim,̣ Tamth¯ıla¯t al-a¯khar.  El Qadéry, ‘L’Afrique a-t-elle perdu le nord? Le Maghreb et ses dichotomies coloniales’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, – (), –. El Qadéry’s article is mainly concerned with the colonial construction of the Arab-Berber divide.  S. Pouessel (ed.), Noirs au Maghreb: enjeux identitaires (Paris, ).  For a review of this voluminous literature, see B. Hama, Recherches sur l’histoire des Touareg sahariens et soudanais (Paris, ); P. Boilley, Les touaregs Kel Adagh, dépendances et révoltes: du Soudan français au Mali contemporain (Paris, ); B. Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms, and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden, ).  El Qadéry, ‘L’Afrique’, .

and specialist of the pre-Roman and Roman periods, exposed the erasure of Berbers  in North African history. Among Camps’ noteworthy contributions is an article where he discussed the ‘ancient black domination’ in the Sahara. He also exposed how colonial use of ‘haratin’ (erroneously deﬁned as ‘freed slave’) as a blanket term for all blacks of the Sahara and  North Africa masks the history of indigenous black populations. Research on black North Africa is relatively new. Several social scientists examine the cultures, religions, art, and aesthetics of black Maghribis (sometimes referred to as Afro-maghrébins or Sudani Africans). Noteworthy is the surge in the study of the Gnawa, the Moroccan religious group with Western African roots, by a variety of scholars, starting with ethno-  musicologists. Anthropologist Salim Khiat of the Centre National de Recherches Préhistoriques, Anthropologiques et Historiques (CNRPAH) in Algiers has studied re-  ligious practices among black Algerians. A  special issue of Critical Interventions: A Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, entitled ‘Africanity and North Africa’ explores visual cultures, literary traditions, and performance arts across the Saharan divide. With the exception of Tunisia, the history of slavery and the slave trades remains a relatively unpopular subject among North Africanists. On the other hand, and not surpris- ingly, the slave trade across the Mediterranean has garnered considerable attention. In , Lucette Valensi made a rare attempt to trace the origin of enslaved Africans  sold in Tunis to Sahelian markets. Tawﬁq Bin ‘A¯ mir’s dissertation considers the begin-  nings of the Muslim slave trade, one of the rare works on the subject in Arabic. More recently, Ahmed Rahal and Ismael Montana have researched the religious practices  of the enslaved in Tunisia. Using court records, Schroeter studied the slave market of  Marrakech from a transregional perspective. Almost twenty years ago, Mohamed  Ennaji produced a landmark history of slavery in Morocco that inspired further research.

 G. Camps, Berbères: aux marges de l’histoire (Paris, ).  Various works, several are alluded to in Camps’ article, used partial cranial analysis to argue that ‘negroids’ were recent newcomers to the Sahara. Camps, ‘Recherches sur l’origine des cultivateurs noirs’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée,  (), –. See also Capot-Rey, Sahara français, –.  A.Chlyeh (ed.), L’Univers des Gnaoua (Grenoble, ); D. Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Transe and Musique in the Global Marketplace (Middletown, CT, ); El Hamel, ‘Constructing a diasporic identity: tracing the origins of the Gnawa spiritual group in Morocco’, The Journal of African History, : (), –.  Among his publications, see S. Khiat, ‘La confrérie noire de Baba Merzoug: la sainteté présumée et la fête de l’équilibre’, Insa¯niya¯t,  (), –.  L. Valensi, ‘Esclaves chrétiens et esclaves noirs à Tunis au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, : (), –. For a more recent study, see Inès Mrad Dali, ‘De l’esclavage à la servitude: le cas des noirs de la Tunisie’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, – (), –.  T. Bin, A¯ mir, Haḍ a¯̣ra al-Isla¯m¯ıya wa-tija¯rat al-raq¯ıq khila¯l al-qarnayn al-tha¯lith wa-l-ra¯bi` lil-Hijra (Tunis, ).  A. Rahal, La communauté noire de Tunis: thérapie initiatique et rite de possession (Paris, ); I. M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainsville, FL, ).  D. Schroeter, ‘Slave markets and slavery in Moroccan urban society’, in E. Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London, ), –.  M. Ennaji, Soldats, domestiques et concubines: l’esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Casablanca, ). See also R. Aouad, ‘Esclavage et situation des “noirs” au Maroc dans la première moitié du XXe siècle’,

In , a Libyan historian published her master’s thesis on nineteenth-century families  in Tripoli in which close attention is paid to domestic slavery. As for Algerian research, Raed Bader completed a dissertation in France on slavery in colonial Algeria, and Benjamin Claude Brower documents French efforts to import enslaved Africans in the ﬁrst half  of the nineteenth century as a settlement strategy. Brower’s book on the conquest of Algeria’s Sahara, while not particularly concerned with the Sahelian zones, does engage with West Africanist scholarship to inform his chapter on the French policies towards the trans-Saharan slave trade, and he uncovers the voices of at least one enslaved  woman originally from the Middle Niger region.

RECENT SAHARAN HISTORY AND TRANS-SAHARAN RESEARCH

Ann McDougall assessed the burgeoning state of Saharan history some  years ago, not-  ing its ‘intellectual vitality’. Her contributions to African historiography are well known.  Together with John Hunwick, she founded the Saharan Studies Association in . Despite its long-standing tradition, the field of Saharan studies gained visibility only relatively recently in North America. Scholars such as E. W. Bovill, Albert Adu Boahen, Harry Norris, Nehemia Levztion, Paul Lovejoy, and Jean-Louis Triaud, major contributors to the field, are not always branded as ‘Saharanists’. Today, this vitality is primarily being felt in disciplines other than history, and particularly among francophone scholars. At the same time, North African research centers, especially in Morocco and Libya, have been actively promoting and publishing trans-Saharan research, as have scholars working on the region from Mauritania to Chad. Given France’s fascination with the Sahara, and because this settler colony was its crown possession, it stands to reason that Algeria would house the world’s first Saharan studies center. The Institut de Recherches Sahariennes (IRS) of the University of Algiers was  founded by none other than Gautier in . It published an annual volume containing

in Marfaing and Wippel (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes, –; C. El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge, ).  A¯ ma¯l Muhammaḍ al-Tạ¯lib, Al-Hayaṭ al-Usriya f¯ı wila¯ya Trạ¯blus al-gharbi f¯ı al-‘uthma¯n¯ı al-tha¯n¯ı (–) (Tripoli, ), esp. ch. . Currently she is completing at University of Manchester a dissertation entitled ‘Slavery: an economic reality and social concept in Tripoli, Libya (–)’.Of relevance is F. Renault, ‘La traite des esclaves noirs en Libye au XVIII esiècle’, The Journal of African History, : (), –.  R. Bader, ‘Une Algérie noire? Traite et esclaves noirs en Algérie coloniale’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université Aix-Marseille III, ); B. C. Brower, ‘Rethinking abolition in Algeria: slavery and the “indigenous” question’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, : (), –.  B. C. Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara (New York, ).  E. A. McDougall, ‘Research in Saharan history’, The Journal of African History, : (), –.  The Saharan Studies Association (http://ssa.asu.edu/) regularly sponsors conference panels and maintains an informative website, currently edited by Jacob Mundy (Colgate College), a specialist of the politics of the Western Sahara.  J. Depois, ‘L’institut de recherches sahariennes et les sciences de l’homme’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés et Civilisations, : (), –. See also M. Larneaud, ‘La géographie du Sahara et l’institut de recherches sahariennes’, Annales de géographie,  (), –, who discusses how researchers of the institute assisted the French military during the Second World War.

research in the natural and social sciences, including articles by Monod, as well as over a  dozen monographs. Postcolonial research in Saharan studies, however, has been irregu- lar. Curiously, the IRS did not survive after independence unlike the CNRPAH, which remains the premier center for historical and social science research in Algeria, publishing journals and monographs and hosting a yearly international conference. In the recent past the center’s scholars have contributed greatly to reversing the disregard for Berber studies. Although it does not include an African studies focus, the CNRPAH has organized of late two conferences catering to the interests of all specialists of Africa, namely one on the  pan-African Art Festival held in Algiers and another on Sufi networks in Africa. The center does not seem to have a particular research agenda for Saharan studies, although it did publish in  the proceedings of a singular conference on caravan  routes. The Libyan Center of Manuscripts and Historical Studies (Markaz al-L¯ıb¯ıy¯ı lil-Makhtu¯̣ta¯̣t wal-Dira¯sa¯t al-Ta’r¯ıkh¯ıya), also known as the Libyan Studies Center, promotes the country’s own Saharan and trans-Saharan history. African studies are not an explicit part of its agenda, but it is significant that the Center’s long-standing director,  Dr. Mohamed Jerary, is Jan Vansina’s former student. The Center, which survived the Libyan revolution, publishes extensively, convenes international conferences, and carries out archival and oral history training and preservation. Its publications range from  primary sources to monographs, including on Western African history. It releases a journal of historical research that regularly features articles on Sahelian history, especially  about Chad, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. The proceedings of the Center’s first international conference, entitled ‘trans-Saharan caravan trade’, were published in an issue containing translated articles by West Africanist historians Paulo de Moraes Farias,  Ahmad M. Kani, and Marion Johnson. In a preface to the special issue, Jerary lamented that the Sahara was perceived as ‘a dividing barricade (saddan fa¯silaṇ ) between two  worlds’, when in fact it is and always has been a connecting space.

 M. T. Monod, ‘La structure du Sahara atlantique’, Travaux de l’institut de recherches sahariennes,  (), –.  Colloque international sur les routes des caravanes, Taṛ¯ıq al-qawa¯fil (Algiers, ), –.  In the s, Vansina spent several months in Tripoli as a guest of the Center where he set up its oral history laboratory.  Particularly noteworthy are the transcribed commercial records and correspondence from Ghadames by B. Qa¯sim Yu¯ sha`, Ghada¯mis: Watha¯’iq Tija¯riya wa Ta’rı¯khiya wa Ijtima¯‘iya (–) (Tripoli, ) and a second volume Watha¯’iq Ghada¯mis: Watha¯’iq Tija¯riya wa Ta’r¯ıkhiya wa Ijtima¯‘iya (–),  (Tripoli, ). Also relevant are two histories of the caravanning towns of Ghat and Murzuk, bearing very similar titles. N. Rajab Dayyạ ¯f, Mad¯ınat Gha¯t wa-tija¯rat al-qawa¯fil al-Saḥrạ¯w¯ıya khila¯l al-qarn al-ta¯si‘ ‘ashar al-mila¯d¯ı (Tripoli: ); R. Nas¯ı̣r al-Abayd,̣Mad¯ınat Murzuq wa-tija¯rat al-qawa¯fil al-Saḥrạ¯w¯ıya khila¯l al-qarn al-ta¯si‘‘ashar (Tripoli, ); J. Muhammaḍ al-Tak¯ıtaka, Mamlaka Sungha¯yi al-Isla¯miya f¯ı ‘ahad al-Askiya Muhammaḍ al-Kab¯ır – (Tripoli, ).  Since , Majallat al-Buhụ¯ th al-Ta’r¯ıkhiya (journal of historical research) publishes multiple yearly volumes each of which includes a section listing recent works of relevance in Romance languages, English and German.  Majallat al-Buhụ¯ th al-Ta’r¯ıkhiya, ‘Tija¯rat al-qawa¯fil ‘abr al-Saḥrạ¯’, : (). The proceedings of a more recent conference on caravan trade were published in Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (ed.), Bridges Across the Sahara: Social, Economic, and Cultural Impact of the Trans-Saharan Trade During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, ).  Ibid. .

 One of Libya’s historians of Africa is Al-Ha¯d¯ı al-Mabru¯ k al-Da¯l¯ı. Like many North  African scholars, Al-Da¯l¯ı sees Muslims as the source of Western African ‘civilization’. Aside from its limitations, his research is noteworthy and he remains one of the few to have undertaken trans-Saharan research in Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. His publications  include studies of the Hausa, the Tuareg, and the Berabish. One of his focuses has been Libyan-West African relations as documented in scholarly and commercial letters. Moreover, he has edited several original Malian manuscripts, starting with the bio- bibliography of Ahmaḍ Bu¯ la‘ra¯f (d. ) entitled ‘The removal of suspicion, doubt and  neglect in the memory of the authors from the people of Takru¯ r, the Sahara and Shinqı¯t’̣. Morocco’s historical dealings in Western Africa have prompted notable historians to engage in trans-Saharan research, especially since the s. The sixteenth-century conquest of Songhay encouraged scholars to pay attention to the linkages and exchanges between West Africa and the Maghrib. The above-mentioned Abitbol published on trans-Saharan  caravan trade and Jewish participation in it, as well as on the history of Timbuktu.  The economic historian Louis Miège attempted to quantify trans-Saharan trade. Largely due to the legacy of Ahmaḍ Ba¯ba¯ (d. ) of Timbuktu, who trained notable Moroccan scholars in Islamic legal studies during his nine years in exile, several scholars took an interest in West African manuscripts held in Moroccan archives. These efforts began with Muhammaḍ Ibra¯h¯ım al-Katta¯n¯ı and Muhammaḍ Ḥa¯jjı¯, who together edited an eighteenth-century manuscript, the now well-known bio-bibliography of the scholars  of Takru¯ r, on which the above-mentioned Bu¯ la‘ra¯fdrew. In the same period, two important dissertations ﬁled in France focused on Morocco’s trade with Western African  polities.

 Al-Da¯l¯ı wrote his Master’s thesis on the Mali Empire and its relationship with Northern states (University of Tripoli) and his doctoral dissertation on the history of West Africa from the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth century (University Hassan II, Morocco). See his Mamlakat Ma¯l¯ı al-Isla¯m¯ıyah wa-‘ala¯qa¯tma‘a al-Maghrib wa-L¯ıb¯ıya¯ min al-qarn – m: safaḥ a¯̣t min ta’r¯ıkh al-‘ala¯qa¯t al-‘Arab¯ıyah al-Afr¯ıq¯ıyah (Beirut, ); Al-Ta¯r¯ıkh al-haḍa¯̣r¯ı li-Afr¯ıqiya¯ f¯ı ma¯ wara¯’a al-saḥrạ¯’: min niha¯yat al-qarn al-kha¯mis ‘ashar ilá bida¯yat al-qarn al-tha¯min ‘ashar (Tripoli, ).  Al-Da¯l¯ı, Al-Ta¯r¯ıkh al-haḍa¯̣r¯ı, –.  Al-Da¯l¯ı, Qaba¯’il al-Hawsa¯: dira¯sah watha¯’iq¯ıyah (Tripoli, ).  Al-Da¯l¯ı (ed.), Iza¯la al-rayyib wa al-shak wa al-tafr¯ıt ̣f¯ı al-mu’alif¯ın min ahl al-Takru¯ r wa al-Saḥrạ¯’ wa ahl Shinq¯ıt ̣li-Ahmaḍ Bu¯ la‘a¯f al-Tikn¯ı (Tripoli, ). It must be noted that Al-Da¯l¯ı’s introduction and the brief biographical note on Bu¯ la‘ra¯f contain a number of errors. See G. Lydon, ‘A thirst for knowledge: Arabic literacy, writing paper and bibliophiles in southwestern Sahara’, in G. Krätli and G. Lydon (eds.), The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Arabic Literacy, Manuscript Culture, and Intellectual History in Islamic Africa (Leiden: Brill, ), –.  M. Abitbol, ‘Le Maroc et le commerce transsaharien du XVIIe au début du XIXe siècle’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, : (), –; ‘Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien du VIIIe au XVe siècle’,inLe sol, la parole et l’écrit: mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny (Paris, ), –.  J.-L. Miège, ‘La Libye et le commerce transsaharien au XIXe siècle’, Revue de l’occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée,  (), –; ‘Le commerce transsaharien au XIXe siècle, essai de quantiﬁcation’, Revue du monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée,  (–), –.  M. I. Al-Katta¯n¯ı and M. Ḥa¯jj¯ı (eds.), Fatḥal-Shaku¯ rf¯ı ma‘rifati a‘ya¯n ‘ulama¯’ al-Takru¯ r lil-Tạ¯lib Muhammaḍ b. Ab¯ı Bakr al-Saḍ¯ıq Al-Bartayl¯ı al-Wala¯t¯ı. (Beirut: Da¯r al-Gharb al-Isla¯m¯ı, ).  These often-cited works remain unpublished: Z. Tamouh, ‘Le Maroc et le Soudan au XIXe siècle (–): contribution à l’histoire inter-régionale de l’Afrique (Thèse de Doctorat ème cycle, Centre de Recherches Africaines, Université de Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I, ); A. El Alaoui, ‘Le

With the creation in  of the Institut des Études Africaines, affiliated with the University Muhammad V in Rabat, research on Western Africa and transregional exchanges accelerated. Founded to further knowledge about Morocco’s relations with its neighbors to the south, it later changed its agenda to promote African studies  broadly. Aside from research monographs, the institute publishes Western African primary sources, including manuscripts, such as Ahmaḍ Ba¯ba¯’s fatwa on slavery or Ahmaḍ Tiyụ¯ r al-Jinna’s pilgrimage account. Since , it also issues a yearly journal (Al-Maghrib al-Ifr¯ıq¯ı). Naturally, the first subject of interest to scholars associated with the institute was the history of the Moroccan Sultan Ahmaḍ al-Mansu¯̣r’s  conquest of the Songhay Empire. The institute’s first international conference, held in Marrakech to commemorate four-hundred years since the sojourn in that city of the celebrated Timbuktu scholar Ahmaḍ Ba¯ba¯, brought together scholars from West and North Africa, as well as foreigners such as McDougall and Hunwick. The proceedings in Arabic, English, and French include papers on the Ottoman response to the conquest, legal disputes about property rights in colonial Songhay and Morocco-Timbuktu relations  since . More recently, the institute has tackled Mudimbe’s concept of ‘othering’ (alterité) that has become a useful way to begin confronting North Africa’s Africanity  beyond the divide. Another popular subject promoted by the institute is the history of Moroccan merchants  in West Africa, starting with the merchants of Fez. Rita Aouad’s scholarship on this subject is especially noteworthy, beginning with her dissertation based on the case study of the  Benbarka family that settled in several southern Saharan towns, including Timbuktu.  More recently, she has examined Moroccan-Jewish relations in trans-Saharan trade. It must be noted that West Africanists also have studied the history North African merchants

Maghreb et le commerce transsaharien (milieu XI au milieu du XIVè s.)’ (Thèse de ème cycle, Université de Bordeaux, ).  For a historiographical review of research on Morocco and Western Africa, that includes a review of relevant theses in Arabic and in French see Zahra Tamouh, ‘L’histoire interrégionale comme socle de l’intégration panafricaine: l’émergence d’une école des historiens spécialisés dans les relations du Maroc avec le Soudan’, in A. B. A. Adandé (ed.), Intégration régionale, démocratie et panafricanisme: paradigmes anciens et nouveaux déﬁs (Dakar, ), –.  Publications de l’Institut des Études Africaines, Le Maroc et l’Afrique Subsaharienne aux débuts des temps modernes (Rabat, ).  See, for example, F. Harrak and K. Chegraoui (ed.), Les constructions de l’autre dans les relations interafricaines (Rabat, ). Incidentally, the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain in Tunis recently held a conference entitled ‘Le Maghreb et ses Africanités: l’identité nationale au regard de ses “altérités”’ (Mar. ).  Y. Abou El Farah, A. Akmir, and A. Beni Azza (eds.), La présence Marocaine en Afrique de L’Ouest: cas du Sénégal, du Mali et de la Côte d’Ivoire (Rabat, ).  R. Aouad, ‘Réseaux marocains en Afrique sub-saharienne: le Tekna de l’oued noun: l’exemple de la famille Benbarka, –’, Revue Maroc-Europe,  (), –; ‘Aspects des relations entre Fès et l’Afrique noire au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle’, in J. Páez López and H. Triki (eds.), Fès: Mille deux cents ans d’histoire (Casablanca, ), –.  R. Aouad, ‘De Tombouctou à Conakry: musulmans et juifs du Maroc dans l’espace de la relation Maroc-Afrique noire (ﬁn XIXe siècle – début XXe siècle)’, in F. Abécassis, K. Simani-Dirèche, and R. Aouad (eds.), La bienvenue et l’adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb, XVe-XXe siècle,  (Paris, ), –.

 without necessarily engaging in trans-Saharan research. The institute houses historians such as Ahmaḍ al-Shukr¯ı who publishes on the history of ancient Ghana and Khalid  Chegraoui who studies Islamic discourse in nineteenth-century Western Africa. Without a doubt, this African studies institute is the most active in the Maghrib in promoting North–South African scholarly exchanges. In , a handful of Moroccan scholars created the ‘Research and Study Group on the Saharan Littoral’ (Majmu¯ àt al-Bahtḥ wal-Dira¯sa¯tHawlạ Sa¯hiḷ al-Saḥrạ¯). They self- published an edited volume containing chapters covering a range of research topics from water scarcity management and a cultural history of the camel, to a history of western  Saharan saints. The most accomplished specialist of Saharan history in Morocco is Rahal Boubrik, a sociologist by training who has written extensively on the political and religious history of the region from Mauritania to Morocco. His first book examines the Fa¯diḷ¯ıya Sufi Order, and his most recent, Saharan Studies: Society, Power and Religion,  is a broad historical synthesis of the western Saharan region. In , he founded a Saharan Studies Center at the University Mohammed V in Rabat. Given the pending liberation of the Western Sahara, however, Saharan history remains compromised in Morocco. As for the historiography in Spanish, it is relatively slim, lacking a transnational perspective and primarily concerned with the colonial experience of the Spanish Sahara. Notable exceptions include Alberto López Bardagos’ work focused on the Awlad Dlim, whose nomadic history reaches south of the Senegal River. He, more than any other  Spaniard, has built on Julio Caro Baroja’s legacy. Scholars of Mauritania, a quintessential Saharan country, have been at the forefront of Saharan history. Because it is a country betwixt and between West Africa and the Maghrib, I include a brief note on some relevant scholarship, much of which is written in Arabic and deserves wider distribution. The Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches Historiques of the University of Nouakchott publishes regularly a historical research journal (Masa¯̣dir). Lately, however, independent initiatives such as the Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur l’Ouest Saharien, and the association ‘Reseau d’Études Sahariennes’ have become dynamic intellectual hubs. As McDougall noted in her  review, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh is  a central figure in the field and he continues to publish widely. The recent work of four historians is of particular interest. The first three obtained their doctorates in North African

 L. Brenner, ‘The North African trading community in the nineteenth century central Sudan’, in D. F. McCall and N. R. Bennett (eds.), Aspects of West African Islam (Boston, ), –; É. Grégoire, ‘Territoires marchands en Afrique subsaharienne’, Historiens et Géographes,  (), –.  Their publications include: Al-Shukr¯ı, Mamlakat Gha¯na wa ‘ala¯qa¯tiha bil-harakaṭ al-Mura¯bit¯ı̣n (Rabat, ) and Chergraoui, ‘Etat et islam en Afrique de l’ouest à propos du discours politique soudanais au XIXème siècle’, Al-Maghrib al-Ifr¯ıq¯ı ().  M. Shra¯yim¯ı (ed.), Abha¯̣th wa-dira¯sa¯thawlạ al-Saḥrạ¯ (Rabat, ).  R. Boubrik, Saints et société en Islam: la confrérie ouest-saharienne Fâdiliyya (Paris, ); Dirasa¯t Saḥrạ¯w¯ıya: al-Mujta¯ma‘a wa al-Sultạ wa al-D¯ın (Rabat, ).  A. López Bardagos, Arenas Coloniales: Los Awlad Dalim Ante la Colonización Franco-Española del Sáhara (Barcelona, ); J. C. Baroja, Estudios Saharianos (Madrid, ).  His three-volume dissertation ,‘Nomadisme, Islam et pouvoir politique dans la société maure précoloniale: essai sur quelques aspects du tribalisme’ (Thèse de Doctorat ème cycle, Université de Paris V, René Descartes, ) is a foundational work in western Saharan history. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as Eléments d’histoire de la Mauritanie (Nouakchott, ) and edited

universities, whereas Yahyạ Wuld al-Bara studied with the late Pierre Bonte in Paris. Muhammadụ Wuld Mhammadaṇ sheds light on the French mis/interpretations of the Sahara in the of age exploration, Na¯ni Ḥusayn shifts the orientation of our knowledge on the Almoravids, and Ahmaḍ Mawlu¯ d Wuld Aidda published a comparative history  of Saharan architecture. Finally, Wuld al-Bara recently compiled a monumental collec- tion in ten volumes of fatwas and shorter legal responses, dating from the fifteenth to the  twentieth century and straddling north-western Africa from Guinea to Morocco. In the past decade or so, a new historiographical trend has been the study of trans-Saharan migration of West Africans seeking economic refuge in North Africa or passage to the European Union. Economic flight stories and maritime death tolls have encouraged historical reevaluations of Africa’s migration history. In line with the political and economic agen- das of the Global North, this has become a popular dissertation subject among African and foreign students. To a large extent, however, North Africanists are more consumed with studying the history of the migrations of their nationals to Europe than they are about migrants from the South. This is in line with the predominant Mediterranean orientation  of this scholarly tradition. It must be noted that the study of the clandestine migration of Western Africans to Europe, risked by embarking on treacherous voyages by sea and across the desert, on the one hand, and the terrorist activities of Islamic fundamentalists in the Sahara, on the other, have generated colloquia and publications, especially in Europe. In the past decade or so, some historians but especially geographers and anthropologists have made significant contributions to the study of trans-Saharan flows. Lawrence Marfaing, a specialist of Senegal’s commercial history, turned her attention to trans- Saharan migrations and the Senegalese in Morocco, and she has co-edited several  landmark studies. Scholars at the Centre des Mondes Africains (CEMAf), France’s  most dynamic center for African studies, have made substantial contributions. Jean Schmitz organized a special issue of Politique Africaine on the plight of West Africans, prompted by the cases of migrants in Ceuta and Melilla in  and , and the  fated travelers to the Canary Islands. He and Emmanuel Grégoire published a special journal issue entitled ‘Afrique noire et monde arabe’. In the preface they observe that despite the perception of the Sahara as an obstacle, ‘it has been throughout the ages a hyphen

Sahara: l’Adrar de Mauritanie sur les traces de Théodore Monod (Paris, ). Also see McDougall, ‘Research’.  Wuld al-Ḥusayn, Saḥrạ¯’ al-mulatham¯ın: dira¯sah li-ta’r¯ıkh Mu¯ r¯ıta¯niya¯ wa-tafa¯’uluha¯ ma‘a muh¯ı̣t¯ı̣ha¯ al-iql¯ım¯ı khila¯l al-‘asṛ al-was¯ıt ̣min muntasaf̣ al-qarn  H/ M. ila¯ niha¯yat al-qarn  H./ M (Beirut, ). Wuld Aiddah, Al-Saḥrạ¯’ al-kubra¯: Mudun wa Qusu¯̣r,Vol. (Algiers, ).  Wuld al-Bara, Al-Majmu¯ ‘a¯t al-Kubra¯ f¯ı Fata¯w¯ı wa Nawa¯zil Ahl ‘Arb wa Janu¯ b ‘Arb Saḥrạ¯’,Vol. (Nouakchott, –). He also publishes in French as Ould El Bara.  A case in point is Julia Clancy-Smith latest book, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. – ( Berkeley, CA, ).  Marfaing and Wippel (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes; E. Boesen and L. Marfaing (eds.), Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: un cosmopolitisme par le bas (Paris, ).  Since , the center publishes annually the journal L’ouest saharien/The Western Sahara with an editorial board headed by Pierre Boilley (University Paris-Sorbonne and Centre d’Études des Mondes Africains).  J. Schmitz, ‘Migrants ouest-africains: miséreux, aventuriers ou notables?’, Politique Africaine,  (). Also relevant is J. Streiff-Fenart and A. Segatti (eds.), The Challenge of the Threshold: Border Closures and Migration Movements in Africa (Lanham, ).

 between these two universes ... black Africa and white Africa [sic]’. This same journal later issued a number entitled ‘Migrations entre les deux rives du Sahara’, edited by Sylvie  Bredeloup and Olivier Pliez. Grégoire and André Bourgeot edited a  issue of Hérodote on the geopolitics of the Sahara, prefaced with the remark that the frontiers of the ‘saharo-sahelian space’ are increasing challenging to traverse. This issue features articles on the legal and illegal circulation of northbound migrants seeking economic refuge and merchandise such as powered-milk, cigarettes, drugs, and firearms. Three geographers – Karine Bennafla, Julien Brachet, and Olivier Pliez – have charted new pathways into the study of the central Saharan regions of Chad, Niger, and  Libya. Anthropologist Judith Scheele’s study of Algerian-Malian connections incorpo-  rates a historical perspective. Recently, linguists have been shedding light on the northern distribution of Chadic, Nilo-Saharan, and Mande languages that stands to significantly transform Africa’s historiographical landscape. Mohamed Tilmatine and Lameen Souag have studied Algerian Songhay, reflecting on the history of Songhay, Gao and Timbuktu’s northern migrations, and Souag documents the infusion of Hausa, Songhay,  Manding, and Kanuri in Algerian Arabic. Finally, the archaeological research by Kevin MacDonald, Sam Nixon, and Andrew Wilson is also producing new knowledge  about West Africa’s ancient Saharan and trans-Saharan networks.

CONCLUSION

Although it took centuries for scholars and colonists to erect the Saharan divide and fab- ricate the gnosis of two ‘Africas’, it can now be said that Zartman’s statement made half a century ago rings true at last, namely that this paradigm is ‘rapidly becoming outmoded’. The tides have turned over the past twenty years with historians and other social scientists

 J. Schmitz and E. Grégoire (eds.), Autrepart,  (Nov. ). ‘Ce numéro d’Autrepart entend donner une vision large et diversifiée des relations entre l’Afrique blanche et noire.’  S. Bredeloup and O. Pliez (eds.), Autrepart, : ().  Bennafla, ‘La réactivation des échanges transsahariens: l’exemple tchado-libyen’, in Marfaing et Wippel (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes, –; O. Pliez and K. Bennafla, in Pliez (ed.), Les Cités du désert: des villes sahariennes aux saharatowns (Toulouse, ); J. Brachet, Migrations transsahariennes: vers un désert cosmopolite et morcelé (Niger) (Paris, ); O. Pliez, ‘De la guerre à la coopération: les dangereuses liaisons tchado-libyennes’, in O. Pliez (éd.), La nouvelle Libye, sociétés, espaces et géopolitique au lendemain de l’embargo (Paris, ).  J. Scheele, Smugglers and Saints: Saharan Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ); and with J. McDougall, Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwestern Africa (Bloomington, IN, ).  M. Tilmatine, ‘Un parler berbèro-songhay du sud-ouest algérien (Tabelbala): eléments d’histoire et de linguistique’, Etudes et Documents Berbères,  (), –; L. Souag, ‘Sub-Saharan lexical influences on North African Arabic and Berber’, in M. Lafkioui, African Arabic: Approaches to Dialectology (Berlin, ), –; L. Souag, ‘The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications’, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics ().  K. MacDonald, ‘A view from the south: sub-Saharan evidence for contacts between North Africa, Mauritania and the Niger,  BC–AD ’, in A. Dowler and E. R. Galvin (eds.), Money, Trade, and Trade Routes in pre-Islamic North Africa (London, ). See also E. Fentress, ‘Slavers on chariots’,in A. Dowler and E. R. Galvin (eds.), Money, –; A. Wilson, ‘Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium-, and long-distance trade networks’, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa¸ : (), –; S. Nixon, ‘Excavating Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali): new archaeological investigations of early Islamic trans-Saharan trade’, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, : (), –.

organizing conferences and producing publications that bring previously separated specialists and literatures of Africa in conversation with each other. Inspired by Braudel, it has been useful to perceive the Sahara as a sea of connectivity afforded by its veritable hero, the camel or ‘ship of the desert’ (safı¯nat al-Saḥrạ¯’), now largely superseded by four-wheeled vehicles and mobile phones. Still, his inclusive geographical rendering has motivated too few scholars to envision the reach of the African continent. It is important to underscore the extent to which the language of flows with its oceanic metaphors may sometimes conceal the fact that oceans historically have acted as barriers to human migration, communication, and exchange. Besides, it is important to be reminded that before the last African Humid Period, vast sectors of this space were covered in vegetation, rivers, and lakes, and inhabited by both humans and animals circulating along green corridors in this central continental space. As desertification progressively claimed the terrain, it would require specialized knowledge and skills to inhabit and navigate within the Sahara. Yet, it still endured as a porous landmass. In other words, the Sahara as an ocean of sand connecting Africa’s internal shores is a metaphor that has its limits. The notion that the Sahara has ‘two shores’ likewise masks the complexity of the interconnectedness of its various oases and frontiers, and ignores local geographical lexi- cons. Indeed, just as the focus on trans-Saharan trade obfuscates the history of commercial exchange within the Sahara, so too can the notion of a ‘trans-Saharan Africa’ potentially deviate scholarship away from the path towards a pan-African history by promoting the idea of the Sahara as Africa’s transcontinental thoroughfare. Saharan Africa should be considered along the same lines as the history of the other regions of the continent, North, East, West, and South. It might be useful to use the adjective ‘trans-Saharan’, implying multidirectional movement among the region’s many deserts, mountains, plateaus, and shores, to describe not a field of study but a research method transcending previously contained epistemes. The field of Saharan Africa poses new meth- odological challenges to historians. These encompass training in languages not commonly taught (such as Hasaniya, Songhay, Tamazigh, and Tifinagh), on top of mastering classical Arabic, its dialects and scriptural traditions. It entails acquiring cross-cultural dexterity to maneuver among Saharan societies and spaces. Working across previously divided historiographical traditions presents additional problems, such as agreements on common ter- minology and lexicographic nomenclatures. Still, the historical profession suffers from linguistic divides, with francophone scholars engaging with the anglophone literature, but rarely the other way around, and arabophones and their scholarship remaining far too isolated. Besides, the cost of engaging in Saharan and trans-Saharan research is prohibitive, for Africans and foreigners alike. As transregional and global research causes the collapse of both geographical and epistemological barriers, the Saharan rift will dissolve leading the way towards a new African history. Filling the scholarly chasms about Saharan history through the ages stands to significantly transform the contours of world history as a whole. If neither the crisis in Darfur nor the struggle for independence of the people of South Sudan brought it to the fore, the activities of Al-Qaìda and the crisis in northern Mali certainly have laid bare the danger- ous gap in knowledge the Saharan divide represents. Sadly, much as the Algerian civil war of the s stalled research on the Sahara, so too does the current political situation threa- ten to close the doors of Saharan studies to all but the most intrepid researcher.