How many times have you exclaimed, “What a small world!”? The speed at which we travel, send goods, and communicate with people in other parts of the world seems to erase the tremendous distances that separate us. Historically, distance and lack of comfort in travel did not compel Africans to remain bound to one location or dissuade others from visiting the continent. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century scholar considered the inventor of the social sciences by some, was born in Tunis to a prominent family that ventured from Yemen to Spain before settling in Tunis. Oludamini Ogunnaike’s biographical profile of Khaldun reveals the breadth of the intellectual universe in which Khaldun operated as he received visitors from Andalusia (Islamic Spain) and northern Africa and as he lived and worked in important centers such as Fez and Cairo.
Luxury goods also traveled along the pathways traversed by Khaldun. François-Xavier Fauvelle introduces us to works by Arabic geographers and travelers that document the extensive international trade in which West African kingdoms such as ancient Ghana participated. Gold lubricated this trade between the eighth and fifteenth centuries that linked elites as well as Christians and Muslims and crossed the Sahara, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. Thus, Africa has long belonged to shifting multiregional networks through which products, ideas, and people flowed. In the process, different African societies have been entangled in the development and histories of other parts of the world and vice versa.
“Entangled Histories” offers rich examples of these networks at different historical periods and illuminates how people lived and experienced them. The Sahara is a desert, but it is not a lifeless place, as some dictionaries inform us. To help us understand the experiences of those whose lives crosscut the Sahara, E. Ann McDougall introduces us to three women whose trans-Saharan crossings were profoundly shaped by the big “isms” of our time—colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. The linkages that connected the lives of these women to global processes were pioneered in an earlier period when glory seekers ventured across the Atlantic. The transatlantic trade opened a new geopolitical era sustained by the wealth of the slave trade and slave labor. People of African descent were on multiple sides of this process. Some were among the colonizers from the Iberian Peninsula who laid claim to the “new” world. Leo J. Garofalo explores the life of one such itinerant, Diego Suárez, an actor who journeyed to Mexico and Peru as a member of the conquering forces. Others were among the millions of bonded laborers whose toil inscribed the landscape with their presence. Only traces are left of the places where enslaved Africans worked and lived in seventeenth-century Mexico City. Nonetheless, by mining wedding records, Frank Trey Proctor III reveals how enslaved Africans simultaneously held on to aspects of home while they created new families and new lives in this cosmopolitan city. The experiences of Pedro Sánchez and Mariana, who appeared at the Metropolitan Cathedral in 1640 to apply for a marriage license, also remind us that the institution of slavery varied considerably.
The formal end of slavery did not create equal citizens in former slave societies. The promises of reconstruction after the American Civil War were largely overturned by the end of the nineteenth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and legalized racial segregation generated many parallels in the histories of the United States and South Africa. Their shared histories supported transnational politics as African Americans and Black South Africans traveled across the Atlantic engaging in spiritual and political fellowship. Benedict Carton and Robert Trent Vinson introduce us to the transatlantic Pan-African crusade of Charles Morris, a black Baptist missionary and protégé of Frederick Douglass. The alliances Morris helped to forge during the nineteenth century would become even more urgent in the twentieth century as African communities both continental and diasporic struggled to purge democracy of white supremacy.
Africa did not only populate slave societies across the Atlantic. Enslaved Africans were taken to the Arabian Peninsula and to the Indian subcontinent. Renu Modi reminds us of the long-standing relations between India and the African continent. Slavery was one small facet of a relationship that is being reinvigorated as the Siddis, the descendants of enslaved Africans in India, establish ties to African countries and to African diasporic communities in other regions, and as the Indian government expands political, social, and economic ties with African governments. Collectively the chapters in part 1 reveal the dynamic and enduring entanglements that put Africa at the center of world history.