When the first Africans were deported to the New World, beginning in 1501, Islam was already well established in West Africa. The religion revealed to the Arabian trader Muhammad between 609 and 632 C.E. had been introduced to North Africa as early as 660. South of the Sahara it had been known since the eighth century through contacts with merchants from the north. Islam in its orthodox Sunni form started to spread, however, after the conversion of the two rulers War Diaby, from Takrur in northern Senegal—which, by applying the sharia, or Islamic law, became the first West African Muslim state—and Kosoy, from Gao in present-day Mali. Both conversions occurred at the beginning of the eleventh century. Within fifty years, Islam had expanded from the banks of the Senegal River in the west to the shores of Lake Chad in the east. Malian traders and clerics introduced it to Northern Nigeria—where the Muslims became known as Malé, or people coming from Mali—in the fourteenth century.1
In contrast to its arrival in North Africa, where it had been brought by the invading Arabs, the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa followed a mostly peaceful and unobtrusive path. Religious wars or jihad, came late—in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century—and Islam was diffused not by outsiders (except in the early years) but by indigenous traders, clerics, and rulers. These carriers of the faith were natives and therefore identified culturally and socially as well as ethnically with the potential converts. Some fundamental features of traditional religions and customs, such as the ritual immolation of animals, circumcision, polygamy, communal prayers, divination, and amulet making, also were present in Islam. Such affinities facilitated conversion as well as accommodation and tolerance of others’ rituals and beliefs. Africans themselves considered Islam an African religion.
Islam and Islamic populations quickly became an integral part of the West African landscape; but Islam was not the religion of the majority, and its followers coexisted with non-Muslims. Some Muslim rulers governed largely non-Muslim populations, while polytheist kings often had Muslim subjects. Muslim minorities could be found in practically every town, Muslim majorities in many. Islam was initially the religion of traders and rulers, but depending on the time and place, it also became the religion of the masses in opposition to their “pagan” leaders. As with any religion, Islam in Africa had a variety of followers—the devout, the sincere, the casual believers, the fundamentalists, the lightly touched, and the mystics.
Starting in the fifteenth century, Islam in West Africa gradually became associated with the Sufi orders. The Sufis stress the personal dimension of the relationship between Allah and man, as embodied in surah 2:115: “Wherever you turn, there is Allah’s Face.” They emphasize rituals and devotional practices such as the recitation of the Qur’an, incantations (dhikr), music to attain spiritual ecstasy (sama), meditation, acts of devotion, asceticism, retreats (khalwa), and fasting as techniques to get closer to God. Their leaders offer a mystic path (tariqah) to the believer that is more personal, more immediate, and more “human” than the intellectual and legalistic way of the ulama (learned men). The Sufi brotherhood also serves as a social organization that links its members over geography, ethnicity, and social class. They recite the Qur’an together and have their particular holy days and pilgrimages. There is usually much cohesion and support among the members of the brotherhood. The most extensive Sufi order in West Africa until the mid nineteenth century was the Qadiriyya, founded by Abdul-Qader Gilani, who lived in Baghdad from 1078 to 1166. With the deportation of Africans across the Atlantic, Sufism, which was dominant in West Africa, took hold in the New World; the traces it left can still be detected today, as is assessed in later chapters.
Just as they were part of a local milieu, the West African Muslims belonged to a much larger sphere—an Islamic world with pockets of followers from Spain to China. The West African Muslim world had direct economic, religious, and cultural ties to the Maghreb, Egypt, and the Middle East and was evolving in what today would be called a global market of ideas and goods. Kingdoms and empires such as Kanem and Mali had established diplomatic relations with Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria. Pilgrims on their way to Mecca spent time in Egypt. The sultan of Kanem, Mai Dunama Dibbalemi (c. 1221–1259), built a school in Cairo for his subjects who were studying there. Mansa Musa of Mali—who, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, spent so much gold that he single-handedly drove the gold market down—brought back to his country lawyers and descendants of the prophet Muhammad, as well as a Spanish-born Muslim architect, and sent numerous students to North Africa. There was a constant exchange of religious commentators, scholars, lawyers, and theologians between sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. “Natives of Cairo, of the great desert, of Medina and Mecca … even the imperial Sherfa tribe [descendants of the prophet Muhammad]” visited the region, stopping over in “heathen” lands such as Asante, as reported by Joseph Dupuis, a British consul who met some of these travelers at the court of the asantehene.2 Because they introduced new ideas, perspectives, and goods, the Muslims were the catalysts of change and modernization in West Africa.
One invaluable innovation these Muslims brought, which would later be important to the Muslims of the New World, was literacy. Islam emphasizes literacy, though Muhammad himself could not read or write, and the Qur’an is very explicit about the need to study. The second surah, “The Heifer,” states: “Those to whom We have given the Book study it as it should be studied” (v. 121). In West Africa, literacy and the spread of Islam went hand in hand, as John Hunwick stresses:
Wherever Islam spread encouragement was given to the learning of Arabic and to the foundation of both small schools for teaching the reading of the Koran and higher schools for deeper study of the Arabic language and the literature of Muslim peoples—more especially the theological and legal literature which was to form the basis of both the spiritual and temporal life of the new converts. Once established in an area as the language of the religion, Arabic was soon put to other more worldly ends, for purposes of trade, politics and family records.3
Literacy in Arabic is of primary importance in Islam, because believers rely on the Qur’an not only to understand the religion but also to guide them in their daily life, to provide them with the right prayers for different circumstances, and to instruct them on legal matters and proper social behavior.
Contrary to the norm in Europe at the time, both peasants and girls were taught how to read and write. Concerning female literacy, French slave dealer Theophilus Conneau mentioned in his memoirs that while he was visiting the region of Timbo (Guinea), at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he saw “many elderly females … soon in the morning and late at evening, reading the Koran.”4 Lamine Kebe, a former Qur’anic teacher enslaved in the United States, made a point of mentioning that he had a few girls (7 percent) in his school in Futa Jallon (Guinea) and that his own aunt “was much more learned than himself, and eminent for her superior acquirements and for her skills in teaching.”5 He further gave his interlocutor the names of “women who have been devoted teachers for life, and have rivaled some of the most celebrated of the other sex in success and reputation for talent and extraordinary acquisitions.”6 This is not an isolated case; women in other parts of the Muslim world, including Africa, were recognized for their knowledge. Miriam, a daughter of Usman dan Fodio, the leader of the jihad in Northern Nigeria, was so reputed, as was his mother, Ladi.7 Nevertheless, female literacy was not as extensive as male literacy—usually girls form about 20 percent of the students in Qur’anic schools—and one of Usman dan Fodio’s grievances against the old order was that it did not do enough to encourage girls to go to school. He strongly denounced the men who treated women “like household implements which become broken after long use … this is an abominable crime. Alas—how can they shut up their wives, their daughters, and their captives in the darkness of ignorance while daily they impart knowledge to their students.”8
Not only were the schools accessible to boys and girls in a coed setting, but they were also open to non-Muslims. Some parents sent their children to the marabout (teacher, cleric) because literacy was prestigious and useful and those schools were the only educational structures available. This phenomenon is mentioned by Mungo Park, who visited Senegambia, Guinea, and Mali from 1795 to 1797, and by French explorer Gaspard Theodore Mollien, who was in the same area in 1818.9
The striving for literacy was quite strong in West Africa. When Al-Maghili, the Algerian scholar and counselor of King Rumfa, left Kano, Nigeria, at the end of the fifteenth century, the city boasted three thousand teachers, as Al-Maghili stressed in his accounts. One hundred years later, Timbuktu in Mali had 150 schools.10 Among the first acts of the religious leaders who founded the theocracies of Bundu, Futa Jallon, Futa Toro, and Sokoto, was to build more schools and encourage higher learning. It is telling that European visitors were quite surprised by the number of schools in West Africa compared to the norm in their own countries. Mungo Park, for example, noted that the Fulani of Bundu in Senegal had established little schools in every city. A director of the French trading company, La Compagnie du Sénégal who was very impressed with the Mandingo emphasized that almost all could read and write and that they had public schools in which marabouts taught Arabic to the children.11 Baron Roger, a governor of Senegal, remarked as late as 1828 that “there are villages in which we find more Negroes who can read and write the Arabic, which for them is a dead and scholarly language, than we would find peasants in our French countryside who can read and write French!”12
Even if only basic, literacy was widespread in Muslim West Africa, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century the French estimated that 60 percent of all Senegalese were literate in Arabic. In the 1880s, a French traveler remarked that “though Timbuktu is no longer a great center of erudition, the population is schooled, the majority of its inhabitants can read and write and know a large part of the Koran by heart, and they can discuss it.”13 By the end of the nineteenth century, Futa Jallon had three thousand schools and Northern Nigeria twenty-five thousand, as reported by the French and British colonial administrations.14
A large proportion of the Muslims could read and write in Arabic and in ajami, the generic name given to their own language transcribed in the Arabic alphabet. They were avid readers of the Qur’an, and many knew it by rote. Among these were thousands who ended their lives enslaved in the Americas, where their literacy played a significant role in their individual development, the shaping of their community, their relations with non-Muslims, their pursuit of freedom, and the rebellious movements they led or participated in.
Islam in Africa had a definite influence on governance, the administration of justice, and the institution of slavery. The Muslims who were enslaved in the Americas, like their non-Muslim neighbors, were familiar with slavery. Some had already been slaves while others had been slaveholders, and those who were neither had nevertheless experienced life in slave societies. How the Muslims viewed slavery, what form it had in Africa, how one became a slave, and how a slave could become free offer important clues to understanding how Muslims would live and react to their own enslavement in a foreign, Christian land.
African slavery did not follow one model; the institution varied according to region, people, time, and religion. There were, however, similarities among the different African systems and huge differences with American slavery. Whereas kidnapping in the early days and straight purchase of prisoners of war were the methods by which the Americans and Europeans acquired their African slaves, wars were the principal sources of captives in West Africa. The Africans’ viewpoint on the matter is of particular interest. When Frenchman Gaspard Mollien told a group of Senegalese in 1818 that the European battlefields were covered “with thousands of dead, they could not conceive that the Europeans could massacre men since it would be more profitable and humane to sell them than to kill them.”15
Besides war captives, in non-Muslim states criminals were enslaved, as, sometimes, were debtors who had first pawned themselves or members of their family to their creditor and could not repay their debt. With the development of the transatlantic slave trade, penal slavery increased very rapidly in these regions. Rulers added new categories of crimes punishable by enslavement as they saw fit. On this point British slave dealer Francis Moore emphasized, “Since the slave-trade has been used, all punishments are changed into slavery; there being an advantage on such condemnation, they strain for crimes very hard, in order to get the benefit of selling the criminal.”16
Slaves were used as porters, soldiers, palace guards, domestics, and concubines but mostly as agricultural laborers. They either lived with their owner’s family and worked partly for them and partly for themselves or were settled in slave villages to work as sharecroppers. In these arrangements, their status resembled that of the European serf, as historian John Thornton points out: “African slaves were often treated no differently from peasant cultivators, as indeed they were the functional equivalent of free tenants and hired workers in Europe.” In addition, “slaves were often employed as administrators, soldiers, and even royal advisors, thus enjoying great freedom of movement and elite life-styles.”17 The absolute chasm that existed between the slave and the slaveholder in the Americas was unknown in Africa. Several European travelers who were familiar with the American system expressed surprise at the “leniency” of the African model. Francis Moore noted in the 1730s that “some of the Negroes [in Gambia] have many house slaves, which are their greatest glory; those slaves live so well and easy, that it is sometimes a hard matter to know slaves from their masters or mistresses.”18 In Senegal, stressed another European, they were “treated so well, eating with their masters, working along with them, and being as well clothed … that it is impossible to distinguish them from free men.”19 Furthermore, African slaveholders did not mete out the horrendous punishments that were the lot of the American slave. A British traveler to Senegal remarked, “I never saw any whip or instrument of torture used on that part of the coast, nor do I believe, from the enquiries I made, that Slaves are treated with severity.”20 His assertions were for the most part correct; however, a small number of West African peoples—notably in present-day Ghana and Benin—who practiced human sacrifices killed prisoners of war and slaves on certain occasions. Finally, the selling of slaves born in the family was generally considered unacceptable and shameful, and only those who had been bought could be sold.
The adoption of Islamic law had a decisive effect on slavery in West Africa, for it significantly reduced the causes for enslavement while at the same time encouraging manumission. Islam neither condemned nor forbade slavery but stated that enslavement was lawful under only two conditions: if the slave was born of slave parents or if he or she had been a “pagan” prisoner of war. Captives could legally be made slaves if the prisoner was a kafir (pagan) who had first refused to convert and then declined to accept the protection of the Muslims. In theory, a freeborn Muslim could never become a slave; therefore, judicial process led to death for those who had committed a capital crime—since prisons did not exist—while the perpetrators of smaller offenses, including debtors, saw their property seized or received corporal punishment.
In areas where Islamic law prevailed, it was applied to the Muslims but not to the “unbelievers.” Slave dealer Theophilus Conneau, who was familiar with the Islamic state of Futa Jallon, described this situation: “Slaves and Caffrees are considered by the Mahometans as unbelievers, therefore as mere ignorants. Their punishment is applied with less vigor but with more contempt, and a crime which would be visited by death on a Mahometan is only considered a case of slavery on an unbeliever.”21
The West African Muslims largely followed the rule that prohibited them from selling their brethren, as was unanimously noticed by the European traders. As a result, in principle no condemned debtors, offenders, or criminals were among the Muslims who landed in the New World. Swedish naturalist Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, who visited Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Senegal in 1787, noticed that “no Foulahs are ever sold as slaves, for debts or crimes, and kidnapping seldom occurs.”22 The same phenomenon was observed by Jean Baptiste Léonard Durand, a former director of the slave dealing La Compagnie du Sénégal, who wrote about the Mandingo, “They love one another and help each other: one does not hear that they make captives; this punishment is given by the king only and only reserved to those who are guilty of something extremely serious.”23 Historian Paul Lovejoy has gathered data concerning Muslims from the Central Sudan that confirm the exceptionality of sentences of enslavement for criminal Muslims. Out of Lovejoy’s sample of 108 people, most of whom were Muslims shipped to Bahia in the nineteenth century, only one had been condemned to slavery as a result of judicial process.24 In contrast, up to 11 percent of a sample of diverse recaptives (Africans freed from the slave ships when Great Britain and the United States abolished their international trade in 1807 and 1808) forced by the Europeans to settle in Sierra Leone had been condemned to slavery for crimes ranging from murder to adultery, theft, and sorcery.25
A common rule among the Muslims was to redeem their coreligionists. Such redemption was widely practiced, but with the development of the transatlantic trade, old customs were often conveniently overridden, especially when the captives were deemed a political or religious “nuisance.”26 Sometimes, time was against the captives. Ayuba Suleyman Diallo, a Senegalese from Bundu who was sold to a British slaver in the Gambia in 1731, informed the captain that his father would redeem him. Diallo dispatched an acquaintance to his hometown, but when several slaves sent by his father arrived to take his place, the ship had already left for Maryland, where the young husband and father of four was to spend some eventful months.27
But there were successful redemptions. The transaction might involve exchanging one person for two or three; in other cases, the slave dealer was given money. Wadstrom reported three cases of the latter sort: a slave factor in Granville Town, Sierra Leone, seized two men because one man who had once lived in their town had defaulted on a debt. It did not matter that the men were not related to the debtor and did not even know him. But “a Mahometan chief … took compassion on them, advanced about 50 pound sterlings for their redemption, and sent them home. The same chief having lately sent a favourite free boy, with a message to a factor to whom he was in debt, the boy was seized by way of payments. The chief … endeavoured to trace the child from factory to factory.”28 The little boy was ultimately redeemed with the same fifty pounds that the penniless man went to claim back from the governor and gave to the factor. Wadstrom does not say why the Muslim was in debt to the factor, but it is possible that he had exchanged a slave or slaves for European goods and still owed the dealer some captives. He did not hesitate to redeem other Muslims and went to great lengths to do so, but he may very well have been involved in selling “pagans.” This practice was common among Muslims. Because the enslavement of “unbelievers” was lawful they were engaged in the slave trade, both trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic. Some of the men who were eventually deported to the Americas had been involved in this type of commerce, either as traders or as providers of prisoners of war. Such was the case with Ayuba Suleyman Diallo, Ibrahima abd al Rahman, and others whose life stories are explored in this book.
Although Islam prohibited the selling of free believers, the practice did not always follow the principle. African Muslims did sell their coreligionists, especially in times of war. The civil wars and the jihad of nineteenth-century Central Sudan, for instance, sent many Muslims sold by other Muslims to the Americas. Muslim rulers such as the Askia Muhammad of Songhai, Alooma of Bornu, al-Kanemi of Kanem, or Muhammad Bello of Sokoto often released their Muslim prisoners of war and kept as slaves only the “unbelievers.”29 However, examples of Muslims who knowingly sold fellow Muslims abound. Arabs and Middle Easterners did so routinely. One of the schemes used to circumvent the Islamic legal prohibition was to declare that the other Muslims were lax in their practices and beliefs, even to being borderline kafir. Men from Bornu who went to war against other Muslims declared to British travelers, “They were kaffering, and not saying their prayers! The dogs.”30 The charge was not uncommon. Heretics and apostates, real or not, could also be sold, since even more than atheists and polytheists they are considered the perpetrators of a heinous crime in Islam. Conneau reported the case of one apostate who was sent to the Americas: among the forty slaves brought on November 30, 1826, to the brutal and hated dealer John Ormond by Ama-De-Bella (Amadou Billo), the son of the almami of Timbo, was a Muslim who had abjured his religion and set fire to a dwelling, endangering the population. As a Muslim he would have been condemned to death, but since he was an apostate, he was sold to the Europeans—a fate that was considered worse than death.31
The application of Islamic law concerning slavery had a profound effect on manumission. The Qur’an makes ample provisions for the freeing of slaves, as a mark of piety or charity or for expiation. Therefore, the manumission rate in the Islamic world was systematically higher than anywhere else.32 Conversion to Islam was a prerequisite for emancipation, though it did not result automatically in liberation. However, once a Muslim, the slave could use the channels of liberation defined by Islamic law: ransom, self-redemption, exchange, or manumission. The children of concubines by their owners were born free, and the women, who could not be sold, usually became free at least after their owner’s death. In some circumstances, slaves and owners exchanged status: if both were taken as prisoners of war, a slave who had become a Muslim while his owner remained a “pagan” could become free while his owner became a slave.
Overseas, the Muslims were confronted with a completely different situation. There children inherited the status of their mother, so that even if their father was a free man, they remained slaves, unless their white father emancipated them (mostly done in French colonies). In the New World, there was absolutely no way by which a former owner could become a slave. Manumission was rare; redemption by family members was out of the question for first-generation Africans, and self-redemption was a long process. Conversion to Catholicism was not a prerequisite for emancipation but, on the contrary, was the justification for enslavement, with the logic that, through slavery, the Europeans were “civilizing” the Africans and introducing them to the one true faith.
Among the other fundamental differences between the African and American systems was the basic feature of American slavery, that is, its linkage of race, color, and servitude, which was foreign to the African Muslims. Islam has never linked slavery to a particular group except the “unbelievers.” The Qur’an and the Hadith (the sayings and deeds of Muhammad) do not differentiate among people of various colors but stress that the most pious are the most loved by God. Some of Muhammad’s earliest, most prominent, and most respected companions were black, such as Bilal, a former slave who became the first muezzin; the khalif Omar; Amr ibn al-As, who conquered Egypt and Palestine; Abu Bakra, also a former slave, whose son became a governor; Shuqran and Mihja, who fought at the famous battle of Badr. Yet by the end of the seventh century, a debate arose between Islamic writers who expressed antiblack prejudice and others who vigorously defended the dark-skinned Africans.33 But even at a late stage, slavery in the Muslim world was never a purely black phenomenon. Europeans were purchased by Muslims in the Middle East and Asia for centuries. Olaudah Equiano, who intimately knew American slavery and had visited fifteen American and Caribbean countries, believed that religion, rather than color, was the decisive factor in Islamic countries. He wrote about the Turks, “In general I believe they are fond of black people, and several of them gave me pressing invitations to stay among them, although they keep the Franks, or Christians, separate, and do not suffer them to dwell immediately amongst them.”34
For obvious reasons, among West African Muslims color and slavery did not have any linkage; the only criterion that determined who should or could be enslaved was, in accordance with Islamic principles, based on religion. The West African Muslims shared the view expressed by Ahmed Baba, the prolific scholar and jurist from sixteenth-century Timbuktu: “Let it be known that infidelity, whether on the part of Christians, Jews, idolaters, Berbers, Arabs, or any other individual notoriously rebellious to Islam, is the only justification for slavery; there is no distinction to be made between miscreants, Sudanese [black] or not.”35 People from Bornu, Kano, Songhai, and Mali were not to be enslaved, Baba maintained, because they were recognized Muslims; “as for the Djilfos [Wolof] they are Muslims according to what we have learnt, this has been proved; there are among them tolba and fuqaha [specialists in law] and people who know the Koran by heart.” The rule, then, was not to trade in people whose provenance was unknown, warned the scholar, who added, “This commerce is one of the calamities of our time.” Concerning the treatment of the slaves, Baba stressed that God commands they be treated with humanity, as stated in the Qur’an and the Hadith, and he concluded, “One must pity their sad fate and not treat them harshly because the fact of becoming the property of somebody else breaks the heart, because servitude is inseparable from the idea of violence and domination, especially when it concerns a slave taken far from his country.”36
Asked about the biblical “curse of Ham,” which vows that Ham’s descendants will be slaves of his brothers’ progeny (Gen. 9:20–25), Ahmed Baba answered that there was no difference between the human races in the Qur’an, and that even if Ham was the father of the Sudanese, God was too merciful to make millions of men pay for the mistake of one.
In Africa, a social stigma was attached to the condition of slave but not an ethnic or racial one, so that when a slave became free, he or she could become a full member of society, albeit, like the artisans, at a lower level of the social scale. Still it happened that monarchs were the sons of slave concubines or were former slaves themselves, but the condition of their birth had carried no negative consequences for their future.
The practice was extremely different in the Americas, where the status of slave was linked to the person’s color and, even many generations removed, remained an opprobrium. Thus, freed Africans and their children, who should have been—according to their own culture and religion—integrated into American societies, remained the objects of humiliation, segregation, discrimination, and racism.
Nothing in their cultural and religious background could have prepared the African Muslims (and non-Muslims) for what they encountered in the New World. Those who had never been slaves or who had been slaveholders found a system they certainly would not have condoned at home. Even the former slaves could not have expected what was in store for them. This new world not only was racially hostile but went contrary to what the Africans believed in, all they had learned from childhood and seen around them. The system must have been viewed as unacceptable, revolting, and inhuman, and this perception certainly shaped the response of the Muslims to their new existence as slaves of the Christians.
Kidnapping and enslavement had characterized the earliest contact between European Christians and the Africans. Dinis Dias, the first navigator to reach Senegal in 1444 for the Portuguese crown, abducted four of the men who came to his vessel in their canoes. A year later, a Portuguese expedition captured children. They met fierce hostility, however, and left many dead sailors behind.37 Because they had encountered organized, structured, and militarized societies that could not simply be pillaged, the Europeans had to negotiate with the authorities. By 1448 they had established commercial relations with the kingdoms along the coast of West Africa for the supply of local goods and captives on the one hand and the distribution of European merchandise on the other.
The development of the European-African slave trade was not unique or unusual; Europeans had been dealing in slaves for centuries. Medieval Europe traded in European slaves on a large scale. Slavs, Irish, Welsh, Greeks, Scandinavians, Russians, and Turks furnished the bulk of the enslaved population across Europe up to the middle of the fifteenth century. They worked as domestics, in mines, on farms, on the sugar plantations of the Portuguese, and in the harbors. Just as in Africa, most European slaves were obtained through raids and wars. As was also true in Africa, slavery in Europe was justified on the grounds that the slaves were different: they followed a religion other than that of their captors or belonged to a different ethnic group. The Christian Venetians, for example, could not trade in Christian slaves but sold and bought “pagan” Slavs. The Catholic Church forbade the Jews to own Christians but was not concerned with slaves who were not Christians.38
The patterns of slavery in medieval Europe and in Africa were similar initially; what became unique was that by the sixteenth century Europeans reserved slavery for the Africans, and the enslavement of whites totally disappeared from the countries they controlled. Slavery and color were linked for the first time, and adherence to Christianity on the part of the Africans did not make any difference. Their evangelization was a priority as a religious duty but served primarily as a justification for the slave trade.
The papal bulls of Nicholas V in 1454 and Calixtus III in 1456 justified Portugal’s slave trade as a crusade for Christianity. The Europeans immediately set out to “enlighten” the Africans, among whom, as they soon realized, were many Muslims. Father Barreira, a Portuguese Jesuit who traveled from Sierra Leone to Senegal in 1606, noted that “the Fulos … follow the sect of Mahomet … the Jalofo follow the law of Mahomet … the Berbeci … follow the law of Mahomet … the Mandingas follow the sect of Mahomet.”39 A Spanish priest writing about Senegal in 1646 was happy to report that he had baptized four hundred white children and adults, including twenty-five “white Hebrews”—Jews who had been expelled from Spain and had settled in Senegal—but that “concerning the natives, there is no way for us to convince them.”40 This refusal of conversion on the part of the Muslims was confirmed by a group of Portuguese living in Rufisque, near present-day Dakar, who informed the Spanish Capuchins that “unless God creates a miracle, [they] would obtain no results in the conversion of the natives.”41 He was certainly right; today, 94 percent of the Senegalese are Muslims.42
Among other testimonies of failure in Christian missionary endeavors, a letter sent by a Spanish Capuchin to his superior illustrates the Senegalese Muslims’ unwillingness even to consider conversion. Father Francisco de Vallecas reported around 1646 that he and other priests “were doing everything possible to attempt to convert these people. We talked to the kings of Dencallor and Lambaya; we showed them the truth of the Holy Gospel and the falsity of the sect of Mohama which is followed by all the natives of these coasts, and after several retorts, they ordered the interpreters to remain silent, and without them it was impossible to do any fruitful work.”43 Portuguese, Spanish, and French missionaries who visited Senegambia noted repeatedly the refusal of the Muslims to convert. The profound impact of Islam on its followers and their rejection of Christianity in Africa is important in view of how the “followers of the sect of Mohama” later reacted to forced conversion in the New World and what they did to preserve their own religion, as is discussed in chapter 2.
Senegambians taken to Spain by the Arabs had been known in Europe since the thirteenth century, but by 1447 they were coming directly from Africa to the Iberian markets. Between 1489 and 1497, 2,003 Africans—they were a minority among slaves—were sold in Valencia, Spain, and the majority were said to be Wolof.44 Many more were offered on the Portuguese markets. All slaves living in Catholic lands were forcibly baptized. A simulacrum of Christian conversion, coupled with nominal religious instruction, was deemed sufficient to turn the “idolaters,” and the “zealots of the sect of Mahomet,” into Christians called ladinos.
These ladinos were the first Africans to be introduced into the New World, as early as 1501. Direct trade with the African coast was forbidden for fear that with Africans coming straight from Africa, Islam would find its way into the new colonies. In the context of the period, the Spanish concern was wholly natural. Moorish control over Granada had ended only in 1492, and hostility toward the occupying Muslims and Islam ran deep. Spain was cautious because it knew firsthand the danger that Islam and the Muslims could represent. The Crown’s fears were well expressed in a royal order of 1543, which stated that the Muslims should not be introduced to Spain’s American possessions because “in a new land like this one where faith is only recently being sowed, it is necessary not to allow to spread there the sect of Mahomet or any other.”45
Given their different historical experiences, the French and the British never had a second thought about introducing “Mohammedans”—as they erroneously called the Muslims—to their American possessions, and early French sources mention the presence of Muslims, including many marabouts.46
The Spanish reluctance notwithstanding, bozales, or people coming directly from Africa, were introduced because the trade in ladinos could not meet the demand. Nicholas de Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola, considered trade in bozales a bad policy and asked for a complete stop to the “importation” of Africans in 1503. After the first slave uprising in the New World, led by the Wolof in 1522, a royal decree of May 11, 1526, specifically forbade the introduction of “Gelofes” (Wolof), negros (blacks) from the Levant (or Middle East), those who had been raised with the Moors, and people from Guinea without a special license from the Casa de Contratación, which regulated the slave trade and put levies on the slaves.47 All the groups that the decree prohibited were either completely or mostly Muslim. Within fifty years, five decrees were passed to forbid the introduction of African Muslims to the Spanish colonies. This insistent reissuing of the prohibition shows that Muslims nevertheless continued to arrive and to cause concerns and problems in the New World. The colonists claimed that the Muslims incited the other nations to rebellion, and it was feared that they would take Islam to the Indians, as is discussed in chapter 5.
These Muslims did not arrive in the New World by accident. There were political, religious, and social reasons why they were victims of the slave trade. The Americas may have demanded generic African laborers, but Africans did not sell other Africans indiscriminately. Specific events led to the deportation of specific peoples, either as individuals or as groups. Understanding the circumstances in Africa that resulted in the Muslims’ captivity is of crucial importance for understanding their reaction to enslavement in the Americas and the direction they gave to their new life. The history of Africa, in all its complexity, cannot be dissociated from the history of the people of African descent in the New World. Who the men and women were who were shipped away, how they had been captured and under which historical circumstances, and why they were sold to the Europeans and Americans are all elements that participated in the development of a new diasporic identity in the Americas. It is beginning from this African historical context, which has long been ignored by scholars of slavery—who place Africa at the periphery of the Diaspora instead of at its center—that the story of the Muslims in the Americas must be explained, understood, and evaluated.
Most Muslims in Western Africa destined to the Americas were enslaved in a variety of military actions over a period of more than 350 years and across territory ranging from Senegal to Chad and from the southern border of the Sahara to the northern fringes of the tropical forest. It would be impossible to account for all or even many of the conflicts, but some are of particular importance because they sent numerous Muslims, as groups, to the New World. These wars were not straightforward events; they consisted of many battles of unequal importance, of raids and predatory expeditions, and could last for years. So regardless of who the ultimate winners were, prisoners from both camps were sold, at one point or another, which meant that even when the Muslims were victorious and succeeded in establishing theocracies, they lost men to enslavement over the course of many battles.
A few years after the establishment of a regular slave trade between Africa and the Americas, a series of events led to the deportation of numerous Senegalese, among them many Muslims. This chain of events started in the Jolof Empire, founded in the thirteenth century by a Muslim dynasty originally from Walo on the Senegal River; the empire extended over most of what is today Senegal. Its population of Wolof, Mandingo, Tukulor, Fulani, and Serer was largely Muslim, except for the Serer. Each vassal kingdom—Walo, Takrur, Kayor, Baol, Sine, Salum, Wuli, and Niani—recognized the hegemony of Jolof and paid tribute.
The Fulani launched the first blow to unity. Between 1490 and 1512, they organized the autonomous kingdom of Futa Toro under the leadership of Koli Tenguela Ba, who founded the Denyanke dynasty. Then, in Sine, King Mbegan Ndour, who had benefited from the Atlantic commerce with the Portuguese, had become powerful and wanted his independence. He first successfully repressed a jihad launched by a Tukulor marabout, Eli Bana, and then established his autonomy from Jolof in the 1510s. Finally Kayor, which also traded with the Portuguese (contrary to landlocked Jolof), took its independence around 1550, and the Jolof Empire was no more.48
Every conflict that led to the disintegration of Jolof sent Muslim Wolof, Mandingo, Tukulor, and Fulani to Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Hispaniola. The presence of these Senegalese prisoners of war had profound repercussions in the Spanish colonies. In 1522 the Wolof of Hispaniola led the first African slave revolt in the history of the Americas, and they also rebelled in Puerto Rico and Panama. Between 1533 and 1580 the majority of the slaves in Cartagena, Colombia, were Wolof and Fulani.49 According to Father Alonso de Sandoval, a Jesuit who lived in Cartagena from 1605 to 1617, the Wolof, Berbeci, Mandingo, and Fulani were the main groups represented in that city and, despite their different languages and customs, were united through belonging to the “cursed sect of Mahomet.”50
The Senegambians—ladinos and bozales—were the first Africans to be sold to the New World. After this first wave, which the Spaniards tried to regulate and limit, African Muslims from a wider area were introduced in larger numbers.
One of the early movements that contributed to the deportation of significant groups of Muslims to the plantations of the Americas was the so-called marabouts’ war, or Tubenan (from the Arabic and Wolof tuub, to convert to Islam) revolution. Its leader was Nasir al-Din, a Berber marabout from Mauritania who belonged to the Qadiriyya brotherhood. He launched a jihad that reached Senegal in 1673. The movement was directed against the rulers, and its goal was strict religious orthodoxy. Nasir al-Din denounced the kings because they sold their subjects to the Europeans under the flimsiest pretext. He stated that “God does not allow kings to raid, kill, or enslave their people, he has them, on the contrary, to guard them from their enemies. The peoples are not made for the kings, but the kings are made for the peoples.”51
Nasir al-Din was welcomed by a population demoralized and scared at the rapid development of the Atlantic slave trade. With the help of the native and Moorish marabouts, he subdued the Senegalese kingdoms of Futa Toro, Jolof, Kayor, and Walo and replaced their rulers with marabouts. In Saint-Louis, the slave trading post located at the mouth of the Senegal River since 1659, the French were worried. The captives they bought came from the hinterland and were transported partly on the river. With the four kingdoms in the hands of hostile Muslims, all traffic was stopped. Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, an employee of the Compagnie du Sénégal, summed up the French predicament: “The leading marabouts … despise us a lot because of the difference between our religion and their superstition; they tell the people that we trade in captives to eat them; since they became Masters of the country, up to now not one has entered our canoe; without the powerful, it is impossible for us to trade in anything.”52
Nasir al-Din was not an abolitionist. He was not opposed to domestic slavery but had an interest in reestablishing the status quo that the transatlantic commerce was disrupting. Besides wishing to spread his faith, he was not averse to protecting the trans-Saharan trade in cereals, cattle, gold, and captives, which was declining due to the enormous demand of the French in Saint-Louis for the same goods. In other words, the marabouts did not want their coreligionists to be sold to the Christians but—justifiably, in the logic of those times—they were not opposed to selling “infidels” to the Moors.
After Nasir al-Din’s death in battle in 1674 the French maneuvered well, playing on internal divisions. Soon the brak (king) of Walo, installed by the marabout s’ party, turned against those who had put him in power and launched campaigns of terror, burning villages and selling, according to contemporary French documents, “quantities of captives” to the Compagnie du Sénégal. By 1677 the Marabouts’ war was over. The devastation was total: to crush the Muslims, the villages had been destroyed and the crops burnt. The resulting famine was so terrible that men and women were reduced to pawning themselves and their children for food, risking enslavement and sale to the Europeans. Chambonneau, who traveled in Futa in July 1676 for the Compagnie du Sénégal, stated that if he had had enough goods he could have bought six hundred men and women.53
The war had particularly devastating consequences for the Muslim clerics. A French traveler, Le Sieur Lemaire, emphasized in 1682, “They have no more marabouts in their country [Walo] and those they can catch, they enslave.”54 The slave dealer Jean Barbot concurred, remarking that the people of Kayor had resolved “never more to entertain any Marabout, but to sell all such as they should find in their country for slaves.”55 Barbot obliged: “The Alquayre of Rio Fresca [Rufisque] sold me a marabou sent to him by King Damet on account of some mis-deed he had committed. This black priest was abroad for two months before he spoke a word, so deep was his sorrow. I sold him in the American Islands.”56
The defeat of the marabouts sent numerous Muslims to the New World. Many of those who remained settled in Bundu, a large area between the Senegal River and the Gambia River. In a movement that got its inspiration from Nasir al-Din, Bundu in 1690 became the second (after Takrur) Muslim theocracy in West Africa, under the leadership of the almami Malick Sy. Bundu was the home of Ayuba Suleyman Diallo, who was born ten years after the establishment of the theocracy. Under the name Job ben Solomon, he was enslaved on a tobacco plantation in Maryland. His unique and rich life story has been documented by himself and by British officials on both sides of the Atlantic.57
As had been the case with the disintegration of the Jolof Empire and the marabouts’ war, armed conflicts supplied the largest contingents of men from West Africa to the New World. Some conflicts were purely economic in that they were launched for the purpose of rounding up captives for the American markets. The impact of the European demand for slaves on the African wars is no longer a matter of conjecture and has been widely explained and commented on. In the eighteenth century, a female mulatto slave dealer who was described as “the mistress of a large Mandingo town” and sold her captives to the Europeans in Sierra Leone, summed up this relationship very clearly: “She said there had been no wars in the interior country to hers for some time, and that wars do not happen when slaves are not wanted.”58
Africans had other “commodities” to sell, and they made a brisk business in gold, ivory, gum, hides, cattle, grain, and fabrics with the foreigners; but to get slaves in the quantities they wanted, the factors demanded captives for the most sought-after European products. A “deputy king” of Timbo explained to the Company of Sierra Leone that “the factories would not furnish them with guns, powder and cloth, which he considered as the chief articles, for any thing except slaves.”59 This policy was firmly applied all along the coast, and it locked the Africans into a terrible vicious circle. If a party acquired superior weapons, its potential rivals would have to do the same to avoid becoming its next victims. This meant getting and selling men, women, and children to secure arms in order to protect one’s population from enslavement. Weapons and ammunition were exclusively sold to the rulers, not to the peasants, because the trade companies wanted to ensure that the latter could not defend themselves and thus become easy prey.
To arm one side in a conflict was a strategy followed by the European countries to get their cargo of captives. A 1687 French document reveals how the tactic was used:
[The king of Baol in Senegal] must be told that, having learned he is at war with the Dhamel [king of Kayor], we are disposed to give him arms, powder, lead and other things if he needs them and we will be happy to assist him and be his friends … and that with the victory we wish he reaps against King Dahmel [sic], he will get many captives that he could send to Gorée and we will trade them for good merchandise, and we should encourage him to send us a considerable number because we are in great need of them at Gorée.60
To arm both sides in a conflict was another scheme. This policy was well illustrated by the British governor Charles O’Hara in Saint-Louis, Senegal, who, in 1773, provided ammunition to King Makodu Kumba Jareng as well as to his rival for the throne. “By pitting one against the other, the English have the exclusivity of the captives,” wrote a French official to his minister.61
But some wars were not good for commerce, for instance, when the disruption was so great that caravans of captives could not reach the seaboard, or when the opponents were of equal strength and used defense rather than aggression or were too busy to raid their neighbors. A letter dated March 28, 1724, from an employee to his directors at the Compagnie du Sénégal sheds light on the maneuvers of the Europeans who wanted peace to get slaves:
Whatever we have told … King Thin [Baol] and Damel [Kayor] to incite them to peace, has been useless because of the influence that the Maraboux have on Damel. They advise him to continue … this is why they only traded little at Gorée and why they do not dare raid their neighbors or their own subjects, as they usually do; they only guard themselves in their respective States, fearing surprise. It seems that this war will not end soon. Without it, the company could benefit from their avidity for our goods in exchange for the captives they could provide us if there was peace, to which I will devote myself entirely as well as to develop commerce in all the posts of the concession.62
Not every conflict was provoked by the Western demand for slaves. Africa had its own political wars—for succession, control, expansion, consolidation—and politico-religious conflicts, which were completely independent of the European presence. Most wars in West Africa were political or religious, but as with the economic wars, the prisoners were condemned to enslavement and some were sold to the Europeans. A succession conflict in Senegal illustrates how purely local events could be closely linked to the transatlantic slave trade and bring vast numbers of Muslims to the New World.
In the 1730s, Damel Maïsa Teinde Wedj had unified Kayor and Baol and encountered the ire of the French slave factors because, as a Muslim, he refused to sell slaves and to trade his goods for alcohol. When he died, his brother, Mawa, and his son, Maïsa Bige, started a series of civil wars for access to the throne that led to a massive deportation of Wolof. In 1753, Mawa sold four hundred captives, victims of the civil war and of a famine that had been going on for some time. Pruneau de Pommegorge, an employee of the Compagnie du Sénégal, recalled that, in 1754, he “traded the product of one of these wars; close to five hundred Yolofs, a war that could be called civil since it was the uncle of the young king who had gathered his people, to whom the discontent rallied. With this force, he entered Cayor and attacked his nephew.”63 The five hundred men subsequently conspired on Gorée Island to kill the whites and go back to Kayor, but their plot was discovered. On the ship that transported them to the Americas, they again organized a revolt. Fifteen men who had been unshackled to help the crew gave nails and pieces of metal they had stolen to the other captives, who got rid of their chains. After a fierce battle that left seven sailors dead, the rebels could be reduced only by a cannon fired right in their midst. Two-hundred-thirty Wolof warriors were killed, and the rest disembarked in the French West Indies.
At roughly the same time, in Futa Jallon, the mountainous area in the heart of Guinea, Muslims were also involved in a revolution. Led by Fulani and Mandingo originally from Macina (Mali) and Futa Toro, the movement was, as in Bundu, a reaction partly against the oppression that the Muslims felt at the hands of the non-Muslims and partly against the incapacity or unwillingness of the rulers to protect their populations from the European slave traders. In 1725 the almami (al-imam) Karamoko Alfa established a Muslim theocracy in Futa Jallon. It was a confederation of nine provinces, with an alfa (religious leader) at the head of each one, chosen from among the leaders of the jihad. Its political capital was at Timbo.64
After Karamoko’s death in 1751, the man chosen as the new almami was his cousin Ibrahima Sori, also called Sori Mawdo (Sori the Great). With almami Ibrahima Sori, the war party triumphed. Though he and the other leaders of the holy war had made the fight against the European slave trade one of the rallying cries of their struggle, their concern extended only insofar as the victims were Muslims. “The people on whom we make war,” explained a high-ranking official, “never pray to God: we do not go to war with people who give God Almighty service.”65 Sori Mawdo engaged in military operations against the “unbelievers,” and under his leadership, Futa Jallon provided record numbers of captives to the European dealers.
The interrelationship of religion, war, enslavement, and the Atlantic trade has been well described by Theophilus Conneau, a French captain who bought slaves for Cuba in the 1820s. When he wondered how the almami could provide so many captives from a country
where a true believer was a free subject, [Amadou Billo’s] response was that the Koran permitted the sale of their bondservants, and from that source many were yearly exchanged for European goods, which in turn supplied them with the means of carrying on the wars commanded by the Secret Book—to conquer and subjugate all tribes to the true faith. In order to carry out more fully the commands of a true Mahometan to destroy all unbelievers, they had recourse to the cupidity of the white man, whose milder religion authorized its votaries to enslave the African.66
Most wars in Futa Jallon were launched under the pretext of expanding the influence of Islam, but as Conneau pointed out, if the warriors had not expected to take captives, they might not have attacked the well-fortified “Caffree towns.” Amadou Billo’s answer was that the Muslims were no better than the Christians: one stole while the other held the bag. He also emphasized that if the whites had not come to tempt the Africans with powder and guns, “the commands of the Great Allah would be followed with milder means.”67
In Futa Jallon as in the rest of West Africa, a number of captives kept domestically were put to work in the fields to grow the grain, yams, and cassavas that were sold to the Europeans, which were to be the food distributed to the Africans during the Middle Passage. Thus as the demand for slaves to be shipped overseas increased, the “need” for more domestic slaves saw a parallel increase. With this influx of captives, the Muslim population as a whole had more time to devote to study and religious affairs. Mosques and Qur’anic schools flourished. The Qur’an was translated into Pulaar, the language of the Fulani, and as the holy book became more accessible, Islam grew deeper roots. Because trade in Muslims was forbidden, the kingdom experienced peace and security.68
Ibrahima Sori had several sons. One of them, Ibrahima abd al Rahman, was a colonel in his father’s army. In January 1788, at age twenty-six, he was sent with a contingent of two thousand to fight a population that had destroyed the vessels that came to the coast and had prevented the trade between the Europeans and Futa Jallon. In a bitter twist of fate, as Ibrahima was actively protecting the Atlantic slave trade, he was captured by those who were fighting against the infamous commerce. Remembering his ordeal forty years later, the Pulo prince wrote that his captors “pulled off my shoes, and made me go barefoot one hundred miles, and led my horse before me.… They carried me to the Mandingo country, on the Gambia. They sold me directly, with fifty others, to an English ship. They took me to the Island of Dominica. After that I was taken to New Orleans. Then they took me to Natchez.”69 For four decades, “Prince,” as he was nicknamed by his owner, planted and chopped cotton in Mississippi. Among the fifty warriors who went through the Middle Passage with him, one, Samba, ended up living on the same plantation. Futa Jallon, with its history of wars, was an active supplier of captives, but by the same token, it turned out to be an unwilling provider to the plantations of the New World of Muslim warriors defeated in battle.
The concentration of captives in Futa Jallon and on the coast in Sierra Leone, where they were put to work while awaiting departure, led to numerous revolts. Captives also fled and created maroon villages. One major revolt took place in 1785, when maroons allied to the Susu defeated their former Mandingo owners and killed numerous members of the aristocracy. For ten years the maroons conducted raids on Mandingo villages in Guinea and sold their prisoners to the Europeans, before they were defeated by an alliance of Mandingo and Susu.70
After Futa Jallon, another Muslim theocracy started to rise, this time located in Senegal. The Torodo (the Muslim cleric class of Futa Toro) revolution that gave rise to this theocracy again was in part a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade. Futa Toro, the land of the Muslim Tukulor and Fulani, had been the scene of a succession crisis since the first decade of the eighteenth century, and civil wars had sent numerous prisoners to the Americas. Between 1720 and 1743, the French provided their colony of Louisiana with a great many men and women captured during these conflicts. In 1763, Saint-Louis was ceded to the British by the Treaty of Paris, and the new governor, Charles O’Hara, engaged in large-scale slave raiding. Besides the official commerce of the British, he had established a personal trade. He provided his plantations of the West Indies with Senegalese workers and sold the surplus. He personally took part in raids in Futa Toro and Walo with the Trarza and Brakna Moors from Mauritania. In 1775 O’Hara furnished them enough weapons to attack Walo, which had threatened to cut off Saint-Louis from the Upper Senegal. In six months they destroyed the kingdom and took eight thousand captives, whom O’Hara shipped to the West Indies.71
In addition, a terrible famine had swept through the region. It had many causes: an invasion of locusts, cyclical droughts, the constant civil wars, the slave trade that decimated the farming population, the destruction of the crops, and the fact that the merchants in Saint-Louis had bought large quantities of grain to feed their thousands of captives on shore and during the Middle Passage. One of the results of the famine was that Senegalese slaveholders sold their slaves to the Europeans so they no longer would have to feed them, while many people bargained their freedom for food. They pawned themselves and their families, hoping to be released when conditions improved, but they were often sold as slaves instead.72
It is in this context that two Tukulor marabouts, Suleyman Bal and Abdel Kader Kane, launched a revolt against the Moors and the Denyanke regime that was incapable of assuring the peace and protecting its subjects.73 Bal and Kane had been students in the dahira (Qur’anic schools) of Koki and Pir in Kayor, which had been influenced by Nasir al-Din; they belonged to the Qadiriyya and had traveled to the Islamic states of Bundu and Futa Jallon. In 1776 they established the independent theocracy of Futa Toro, and Kane was appointed almami. In July, as a reprisal against the decimation that slave hunting had brought to Futa and Walo, the almami and his council stopped all British trade upriver. As in Bundu and Futa Jallon, the Muslims strictly forbade the selling of their coreligionists and succeeded in imposing this rule on the French when France repossessed Saint-Louis. In 1788, Abdel Kader Kane displayed his determination: he had a French slave convoy searched by his soldiers, who freed the almost ninety men from Futa whom they found among the captives. But this action did not stop the trade, and the almami threatened the French in no uncertain terms in a letter to the governor in Saint-Louis, dated March 1789:
We are warning you that all those who will come to our land to trade [in slaves] will be killed or massacred if you do not send our children back. Would not somebody who was very hungry abstain from eating if he had to eat something cooked with his blood? We absolutely do not want you to buy Muslims under any circumstances. I repeat that if your intention is to always buy Muslims you should stay home and not come to our country anymore. Because all those who will come can be assured that they will lose their life.74
With peace, stability, and security Futa Toro developed, and peasants from Jolof and Sine-Salum made their way to the river to escape the exactions of the ceddo (non-Muslim slave warriors) and the ever-present threat of the slave trade. Abdel Kader Kane, who was a learned man, encouraged the building of mosques and schools all over his country. He invited the kings of Walo, Kayor, Baol, and Jolof to join his Islamic reform, and they agreed. But in 1790, Damel Amari Ngone Ndella, a ceddo monarch, was back on the throne of Kayor, after some years of exile in Walo, and strife soon broke out between him and the marabouts. His slaves attacked a Muslim village in Ndiambur, and Amari Ngone sold the marabouts and their students to the Europeans. This event led the marabouts to a violent confrontation with the damel (king). They organized their own army led by cleric warriors, but the ceddo defeated them. Bloody battles were waged near the Islamic centers of higher learning at Pir and Koki. The leading marabouts, clerics and warriors of the faith, were killed or sold to the Europeans. Those who managed to escape took refuge in the Cap-Vert peninsula, where, with the local Lebu, they organized an independent Islamic state.
The refusal of Amari Ngone Ndella to renew the allegiance of Kayor to the almami and the killing and enslavement of the most prominent Muslim families of the kingdom, whom the almami knew and had been in school with, led Abdel Kader Kane to his own confrontation with the damel. He enjoined Amari Ngone Ndella to embrace Islam or become his vassal. The damel refused and continued his repression of the Muslims. Kane counterattacked by gathering an army of thirty thousand, including women and children, and marching on Kayor. The movement was as much religious as it was aimed at putting an end to the selling of Muslims to the Europeans and avenging the death or enslavement of the Muslims of Kayor. Samba Makumba, a Muslim deported to Trinidad as a result of these events, summed up the situation for a visitor about fifty years later:
He belonged to the tribe Fullah Tauro, which engaged in war with six other tribes in Africa to prevent them, as he said, from carrying on the slave trade. The Mahometans are forbidden to make slaves of those of their own faith, and when any of their people are concerned in this traffic, they believe their religion requires them to put a stop to it by force. It was for this purpose a war was commenced by the Fullahs against these other tribes and in this war Samba was taken prisoner and sold as a slave.75
Samba Makumba and his companions were poorly armed, mostly with sticks and faith. Many died of thirst and dysentery as they walked through a landscape of desolation: Amari Ngone and his army had burned every village, every field, and sealed or poisoned every well. This scorched-earth tactic was a success, and the Muslim forces were defeated at Bungoy in 1796. Kane remained a prisoner for three months before being sent back to Futa by a magnanimous damel.
For many Muslims, however, the nightmare had just begun. The French, who were opposed to Kane because he had forbidden the trade in Muslims, were waiting for them in the slave depots of Saint-Louis and Gorée where they were brought by the victors. As Baron Roger, the governor of Senegal, explained:
When the slave dealers in Saint-Louis, Gorée, and Rufisque learned that a war was about to erupt between Caior and Fouta, they rejoiced because whoever was the winner, there would be captives and the trade could only benefit. Damel asked them to provide him with weapons and ammunition to help him defend himself and was obliged to give them, in reimbursement for these advances, the first prisoners to fall into his hands.76
One of the prisoners was Kélédor (Clédor), a young Wolof from Walo who had been sent by his father to study in Futa Toro. He left Gorée Island on a boat with four hundred men, women, and children, almost all of them Muslim victims of the war. Many marabouts were among them, Kélédor reported, and several men committed suicide by jumping into the sea while chanting, “Iallah! Iallah!” which is how the Senegalese call God.77 The survivors landed in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), where the young man later fought alongside the Haitian liberator Toussaint-Louverture, and then moved to Puerto Rico before sailing home with a group of former Muslim slaves. Kélédor told his fascinating story to the French governor, who turned it into a very accurate, if romanticized, novel. Other enslaved Futanke were met by Scottish explorer Mungo Park as he was traveling “in the interior districts of Africa” with a slave caravan.78 Nine survivors of the Bungoy debacle were on the slave ship Park boarded on Gorée Island. They landed in Antigua after twenty-five days at sea.
This was not the last time Futa Toro turned into a major and unwilling provider of Muslim slaves. In 1804 the French, whose trade on the river had been interrupted by the almami between 1801 and 1803, sent twelve boats from Saint-Louis to burn a dozen villages. They took six hundred prisoners, the majority of whom belonged to the ruling class. Three years later internal strife, partly fueled by the French of Saint-Louis, led to confrontations between Kane and his allies, on the one hand and a coalition of Kaarta and Bundu rulers on the other. Abdel Kader Kane was killed with the complicity of a new generation of Futa leaders. These events probably led to the capture of Omar ibn Said, a scholar and trader from Futa who was shipped to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life enslaved in North Carolina.79
Throughout eighteenth-century Senegambia and Guinea, Muslim movements and theocracies were associated with the fight against old regimes that had reinforced their power by selling men and women to the Europeans. The Muslim movements appealed to the mass of peasants, who were the main victims of the slave trade. These theocracies became havens not only for the Muslims but also for the non-Muslims who accepted their protection. The Islamic “party” was able to expand and consolidate its power beyond the borders of the different kingdoms the Muslims inhabited. Starting with Nasir al-Din, the religious leaders of Futa Toro, Futa Jallon, and Bundu belonged to the Qadiriyya. They were all connected: they had studied in the same schools of Pir and Koki in Kayor; they had family relations; they shared the same vision of Islam and the same political views. Their followers moved from one Muslim area to the other, fought for Islam and against the enslavement of Muslims wherever they were, and sought refuge in their brethren’s enclaves when persecuted. Their networks extended throughout West Africa, with men from Futa Toro and Futa Jallon teaching in Kong (Ivory Coast) and Bouna (Ghana.) Islam in general and the Qadiriyya brotherhood in particular united the faithful, whoever and wherever they were. This unity that they experienced in Africa would become significant for the Muslims enslaved in the Americas, who formed a community of men and women linked by Islam, transcending restrictive notions of ethnicity and nationality.
The Muslims who joined the politico-religious wars that swept through West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had learned since their first years of school what was expected of a warrior of the faith. They knew that they must not be the aggressors and that they had to follow strict rules of conduct: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you,” enjoins surah 2 of the Qur’an, “but do not transgress limits; for Allah loves not transgressors” (2:190). Those who refused to take part in the war would be disgraced and punished: “And he who turns back, Allah will punish him with a grievous Chastisement” (48:18). But those killed in war “rejoice in the Bounty Provided by Allah: And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them in their bliss, the martyrs glory in the fact that on them is no fear nor have they cause to grieve” (3:170). Because of these teachings and an Islamic tradition of cleric-warriors, the deeply devoted marabouts, teachers, talib (students, novices), imam (prayer leaders); the whole Islamic community of ulama (scholars); the alfa or charno (religious leader), qadi (judge), and hafiz (memorizers of the Qur’an) were on the front line. These erudite warriors were numerous among the captives who were sent to the Americas.
The year 1804 saw important developments that would bring more of them across the Atlantic. One was a conflict in the Gold Coast (Ghana) that pitted the Muslims against the Asante. The asantehene (king) Osei Kwame, had been chased from power and strangled in 1803 because, it was feared, he intended “to establish the Korannic law for the civil code of the empire.”80 The Muslims of the northwest region rebelled and were assisted by their coreligionists from Kong and Bouna. Their coalition was defeated. It was in these circumstances that Abu Bakr al Siddiq, a fifteen-year-old student from an illustrious Muslim family that came originally from Timbuktu and Jenne, was captured. He was shipped to Jamaica, where he spent thirty years.81
The most significant events of 1804, however, took place in what is today Nigeria. From the end of the eighteenth through the nineteenth century, this region went through a series of conflicts. Some had a decisive impact on the formation of the Muslim communities of the Americas and are briefly described here.
The most significant conflict was the jihad launched by a devout and purist Pulo, Usman dan Fodio, whose family had emigrated from Futa Toro fourteen generations earlier. He, too, belonged to the Qadiriyya. A former teacher—he had been the personal tutor of Yunfa, the sultan of Gobir in Hausaland—and preacher, the Shehu (shaykh, “sheikh”), as the Nigerians call him, was born in 1754. Hausaland had been partly Muslim since before the fourteenth century, and the city of Kano had become a renowned center of higher learning that attracted scholars from Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Timbuktu, and all over the Sahel, particularly during the reign of Yunfa’s grandfather. The Hausa rulers were convinced Muslims who, because they reigned over a diverse population, had to make concessions to traditional practices in order to maintain political stability. Yet to Usman dan Fodio and his reformist movement, Islam appeared in decline, weakened by unorthodox practices. Yunfa was verbally attacked by the reformists, who presented him, in Usman dan Fodio’s words, as an “apostate … who mingles the observances of Islam with the observances of heathendom.”82
Feeling his power threatened, Yunfa—like his father, Nafata, who had forbidden the Muslims to wear the turban and the veil as a distinctive mark of their faith and had made conversion to Islam unlawful —resorted to anti-Islamic measures in order to keep the movement from growing. It was to no avail, as the Shehu rallied large numbers of followers through not only his vision of what a true Islamic state should be but also his denunciations of widely resented political oppression, heavy taxation, and social injustice. As a defiant gesture, Usman dan Fodio withdrew to the western part of Gobir in a move meant to emulate the hijra, the departure of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Thousands of Fulani and Hausa followed him in his new autonomous community, including numerous slaves whom he refused to return to the sultan, arguing that they were Muslims and thus free. Meanwhile, Yunfa, in reprisal, started to enslave Fulani pastoralists, hoping that the Shehu would stop his activities.83
The jihad was launched. It lasted four years and pitted the army of Yunfa, made up of one hundred thousand foot soldiers and a ten-thousand-man cavalry, against the few thousand followers of dan Fodio. Vastly outnumbered and underequipped, the Muslims were inspired by their faith, which made them accomplish heroic deeds. At Birnin Konni, after a thirty-two-mile walk during the night, they invaded the city, won the battle under a scorching sun, and walked back to their base in Gudu, all in less than thirty-six hours. The jihadists were victorious. By 1808 most of the Hausa states had been subdued and put under the leadership of the Sokoto caliphate, which lasted a hundred years before being defeated by the British. Kanem and Bornu, two Muslim states forged an alliance and were able to contain Usman dan Fodio’s forces.
During the jihad, Usman dan Fodio’s followers suffered heavy losses. As usual, the ranks of the scholars and students were decimated through death and enslavement. At the battle of Tsuntsua in 1804, Muhammad Bello, Usman dan Fodio’s son, recalled,
we lost about 2,000 martyrs, most of whom were our best soldiers, and of the most pious and virtuous of our men: as the chief Justice Mohammed Thaanbo, the noble Saado, Mahmood Ghordam, Mohammed Jamm, the learned and intelligent poet and reciter Zaid, Aboo-bakr Bingoo, the true diviner Es-sudani, and several others.84
The loss was such that when the caliphate was established, there were not enough of the Shehu’s scholars left to fill the posts of local emir, judge, or imam. Of the surviving men—on both sides of the conflict—large numbers ended their life in Brazil, Trinidad, and Cuba. (The impact the Muslims from Central Sudan had on the history of Brazil and Bahia in particular is discussed in chapter 5.)
Usman dan Fodio’s jihad was not the only event that provided the Americas with Muslims from Central Sudan. Before and after these events, Hausa were routinely sold by their southern neighbors, the Oyo (or Nago, or Anago)—the name Nago was applied first to western Oyo but later became synonymous with all Oyo in Brazil. They were collectively called Yoruba in the late nineteenth century. The Yoruba acquired their slaves by raids in the north and west and by purchase from the Nupe and Bariba. A large proportion of their domestics were Hausa. As the European demand increased, they sold many overseas. Islam had made some headway in Oyo in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and significant numbers of Muslims inhabited the region.
A major civil war took place in Oyo in 1817, for political reasons but with religious undertones. Afonja, the non-Muslim commander in chief of the army based at Ilorin, fomented a revolt against the king, the alafin. In the context of the successful jihad of Usman dan Fodio in Hausaland and of the holy war of the Nupe and Fulani in Nupe, Afonja hoped that he could count on the Muslims’ support. With the help of a Pulo leader, Alimi, he incited a jihad against the alafin and rallied the numerous Hausa slaves of the kingdom, the pastoralist Fulani, and the Muslim Yoruba. The slaves were promised their freedom if they joined the ranks of the jihad ists. Ali Eisami Gazirmabe, a Muslim Kanuri who had been enslaved at Oyo and later sold to the Europeans, remembered in his memoirs, “A war arose: Now all the slaves who went to the war, became free; so when the slaves heard these good news, they all ran there.”85 Meanwhile, the Muslim troops, composed of ethnically and socially diverse elements united under the flag of Islam, reaped some victories. They brought their fight into the heart of Oyo and burned parts of its capital but were defeated, and some were most probably sold away.
The Muslims ultimately were victorious, and after getting rid of Afonja, who had taken umbrage at their increasing power, they turned the old Oyo into the Ilorin Emirate, under the authority of the caliph of Sokoto. These events in Yorubaland produced prisoners of war who were deported to the Americas. Bahia alone absorbed about eight thousand Africans a year between 1800 and 1830, the vast majority being Hausa and Yoruba, coming from the ports of Bagadry and Porto-Novo (Benin).86
Other, smaller-scale conflicts also were responsible for the deportation of Muslims; but wars alone did not account for all the displaced. Abductions were another method of supply, less costly and less dangerous than war but also less rewarding, because the abducted were individuals or small groups. Like their non-Muslim neighbors, Muslims were the victims of organized gangs, unscrupulous traders, bandits, roaming soldiers, and occasional kidnappers. There was also, along the coast, a particular type of abduction called “buckra [white] panyaring.” It was described by a slave ship captain:
If a native there does not pay speedily, you man your boat towards evening, and bid your sailors go to any town, no matter whether your debtor’s town or not, and catch as many people as they can. If your debt be large, it may be necessary to “catch” two towns. After this your debtor will soon compleat his number of slaves.—But what if he should not?—Why then we carry our prisoners away, to be sure.87
Besides panyaring, which could also happen deep inland as the European ships went upriver, there were plain abductions. Nobody was safe: women at the well, men in the fields, children around the village became victims of the kidnappers. Evidently, those who traveled frequently and far were easy targets.
For reasons stemming from their religion, the Muslims were particularly mobile. Students, teachers, traders, and pilgrims moved around. An elderly Mandingo enslaved in Jamaica recounted in the early 1800s that he had been sent by his father to visit a distant relation in a country where the Portuguese had a settlement and that he had been made a prisoner there following a conflict. After a trip downriver in a canoe, he was sold to a ship captain.88 Mahammah of Kano had journeyed to Agadez (Niger), about 530 miles north; and Osman had traveled extensively through Northern Nigeria and spent eight years in Agadez among the Arabs and the Tuareg. Both were deported to Bahia in the late 1840s. Mohammad Abdullah, a Fulbe marabout from Kano also enslaved in Bahia, had gone to Mecca; and Ibrahim of Bornu (Northern Nigeria) had followed his father on the road to the Holy City.89
It was not uncommon for a family to leave its village or town and settle in another area, where, by preaching and through example, they would eventually make converts or bring knowledge and assistance to their coreligionists. Some families actually split, with brothers going in different directions for religious purposes or simply as a result of internal dissension. This situation is well exemplified by Abu Bakr al Siddiq’s family’s peregrinations. After his grandfather’s death, Abu Bakr’s father and uncles decided to go their separate ways because of differences between their families. As Abu Bakr recalled in his autobiography, his uncle Ideriza (Idriss) went to Macina and Jenne (Mali); his uncles Ahdriman (Abdalrahmane) settled in Kong (Ivory Coast) and Mahomet in Bouna (Ghana); Abon Becr (Abu Bakr) remained in Timbuktu, as did Abu Bakr’s father, Hara Mussa Sharif, whose wife came from Bornu (Nigeria).90
Extreme mobility was characteristic of the marabouts, who led a nomadic existence based on qira’ah (study), harth (farming), and safar (travel). Richard Jobson, a British trader who observed them in Senegambia, wrote in 1623:
These Mary-buckes are a people, who dispose themselves in generall, when they are in their able age to travaile, going in whole families together, and carrying along their bookes, and manuscripts, and their boyes or younger race with them, whom they teach and instruct in any place they rest, or repose themselves, for which the whole Country is open before them.91
The marabouts taught, provided guidance, manufactured protective amulets, recruited students, and sometimes mixed commerce with preaching. Deported marabouts were quite numerous in the Americas, as can be deducted from, among other pieces of evidence, the widespread use of talismans in the New World, as is discussed in chapter 4. In addition, several chroniclers and travelers acknowledged their presence there.
Other clerics ended their lives as slaves; we find their traces all over the Americas. Muhammad Kaba, from Guinea, was studying to become a lawyer, or faqi, like his uncle when he was abducted at age twenty and deported to Jamaica, where he lived in servitude for fifty-six years.92 Bilali, the slave driver of the Spalding plantation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, from the early 1800s on, was a former cleric originally from Timbo, Guinea. Brazilian authorities made references to ulama, whom they called “malomi” (from the Hausa malam, a corruption of the Arabic). Abu Bakr, who was captured and taken to Jamaica, was studying to become a cleric like his father and grandfathers. Ulama, qadi, marabouts—all these men who had devoted years to studying spent most of their lives performing the most menial and tedious work on the American plantations.
The teachers and talib were also hardened travelers. Many were attracted by centers of learning such as Timbuktu, Jenne, Kano, and Bouna. In this last town, as Abu Bakr al Siddiq recollected in Jamaica, “there are many teachers for young people: they are not of one country, but come from different parts, and are brought there to dwell for their instruction.”93 The concentration of learned men in some areas led parents to send their children there, even if the school was quite a distance from their homes. Consequently, teenage boys—girls went to the local schools—traveled long distances to acquire a good education. Such travel could have a terrible outcome. Salih Bilali was about fourteen when he rode alone on his horse from Jenne on the Niger River to his hometown of Kianah. He was “seized by a predatory party and carried to Sego and was transferred from master to master, until he reached the coast at Anamaboo” in Ghana.94 When his owner wrote these lines on Saint Simon’s Island, Georgia, Salih Bilali had been enslaved for fifty-nine years.
Like the students, the teachers were at risk. Tamerlan, a marabout and a teacher, explained to a French colonel in Saint-Domingue that “he used to write books; that the great king of Africa had chosen him as the teacher of his son.”95 One day, as he was traveling with the prince, their convoy was attacked; the young boy was killed, and Tamerlan, after a three-month walk to the sea, was sold to the Europeans and transported to the island. Other teachers were among the enslaved and freed men of Bahia who revolted in 1835, and Mohammed Sisei, from the Gambia, was a teacher when he was captured and sent to Trinidad.96
Muslims traveled to acquire or dispense knowledge but also, more prosaically, to obtain the supplies indispensable to their religion. Paper, for instance, was an essential item for marabouts and teachers, who used it for writing letters, books, or talismans. Muslim traders traditionally obtained it from their contacts in North Africa and the Middle East, but when the Europeans established trading posts on the African coast, it was often easier to purchase paper directly from them. British trader Richard Jobson stressed in his 1623 memoirs how much paper meant to the “Mary-buckes”: though costing three pence, “to them it is a rich reward.”97 Buying paper from the Europeans, however, meant that the teachers and clerics had to travel to the coast or the rivers, an endeavor that could be risky. Teacher Lamine Kebe was kidnapped while he was on a trip to buy paper for his school, and he spent the next thirty years enslaved in the American South. Ayuba Suleyman Diallo met the same fate while on a trade mission to the Gambia, where he had bought paper and sold two slaves.
In addition to proselytizing families, the teachers, and their students, traders were a peripatetic group. These merchants were a vital, dynamic part of West African societies. Most were Mande (Mandingo, Dyula, Malinke) and had been active in commerce before the advent of Islam in their areas, but the opening up of the wide Islamic market stimulated their activities. The traders became the first representatives of Islam to the non-Muslim populations, preparing the way for the religious leaders. They represented the link between the forest area to the south and the Maghreb to the north. They had established and controlled trade routes that crisscrossed the Sahel and the adjacent areas, bringing necessary as well as luxury goods to the southern populations and raw materials to the north. They had set up regional, interregional, and what would be called, in modern terms, “international” networks.
The traders’ commerce is well described by Mohammed Ali ben Said, a Muslim from Bornu who was enslaved in the 1830s in the Middle East and Europe and eventually became a teacher in Detroit and a soldier in the Union army. “Bornoo, my native country,” he wrote, “is the most civilized part of Soodan, on account of the great commerce carried on between it and the Barbary States of Fezzan, Tunis, and Tripoli. They export all kinds of European articles to Central Africa, and take gold-dust, ivory, &c., in return.”98 The merchants, part of what is now called the “Muslim Diaspora,” traveled hundreds of miles in every direction, their donkeys and slaves loaded with cotton cloth, gum arabic, musk, kola nuts, hides and leather goods, weapons, silk, books, gold, and ivory. For social, commercial, and security reasons, they traveled in caravans and were, in general, let free to go as they pleased. Nevertheless, they were sometimes the victims of organized bands of thieves.
When the transatlantic slave trade started to devastate Africa, the traders became ideal targets for kidnappers, who killed two birds with one stone: they stole the merchandise and sold the merchants. The merchandise also was sometimes men and women. Many a slave seller ended up in the same ship as his captives. Muslims were no exception. Many Fulani who sold captives in Sierra Leone were the victims of bands of kidnappers, who made their living by roaming the areas a few miles from the coast. A case witnessed by Carl Wadstrom serves as an illustration of the practice. Wadstrom met an old man in Timbo one year before Ibrahima abd al Rahman was captured, who begged him to inquire about his son,
who with six others, some of them related to the king, had been seized, in returning from Rio Pongos [where they had sold slaves], about four years ago. They had been sold to the British slave-factor at the Isles of Los, and immediately shipped off to the W. Indies, except one, who was recovered by the Foulah king.99
Two Omar, one Bubakar, and three Amadu, one of whom was the old man’s son, had joined the ranks of the Muslims in the Americas. Traders were also at risk when they owed merchandise or captives to the European factors. They could be taken as slaves themselves or see their children, neighbors, or whole town pawned and eventually shipped away.
People who lived in Mandingo areas were very much exposed. Wadstrom again explains that “a chief factor attributed the frequency of kidnapping among the Mandingoes to their head men getting in debt to the Europeans, and being then confined by them in which case, their people were obliged to kidnap some persons to redeem them.”100
Besides the teachers, traders, and clerics, the nobility also seem to have been well represented among the Muslims shipped overseas. Rulers, members of their immediate family or close entourage, any notables and aristocrats ran a particular risk of being enslaved as political prisoners and prisoners of war. Such was the case of Ibrahima abd al Rahman, son of the almami of Futa Jallon. John Mohamed Bath was a prince deported to Trinidad.101 Samba Makumba, also of Trinidad, presented himself as an emir.102 Licutan, a sultan from Central Sudan was shipped to Bahia.103 Arouna, a Hausa, came from a royal family and was enslaved in Jamaica.104 Makandal, in Saint-Domingue, was of an illustrious family.105 Mohammadou Maguina in Trinidad was “of noble birth,”106 and Anna Moosa, enslaved in Tortola, Barbados, and Jamaica, was the son of “a lord in the Carsoe [Khassonke from Mali] nation.”107 Abu Bakr al Siddiq mentioned in his autobiography that his father’s name was “Kara-Mousa, Scheriff.” Abu Bakr himself was addressed in the same manner in Jamaica by another Muslim, Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu, who referred to him in a letter as “Bekir Sadiki Scheriffe.”108 After obtaining his freedom, Abu Bakr spent some time in Morocco, where he was acknowledged as a mulay, the title given to a sharif. His family was noble indeed: only men who are recognized as descendants of the prophet Muhammad or of his clan bear the name sharif. It is not impossible that other sherufa were enslaved in the New World.
Besides their literacy and their dedication to their faith, what distinguished the clerics, teachers, students, rulers, and traders was their contact with the wider world: the intelligentsia of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, and Arabia whom they met in Mecca and Cairo or in their homeland when the foreigners visited. The scholars were familiar with the works of Muslim intellectuals from a wide range of countries who used Arabic as their vehicle of communication. They also had access to books from other religions in their Arabic versions, as confirmed by Mungo Park, who mentions having seen the Pentateuch of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the “New Testament of Jesus” that he called the Book of Isaiah during his travel in Senegambia at the end of the eighteenth century. European philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Euclid were also known in Arabic translations.109
The most dynamic segments of the Muslim population were thus made up of well-read, well-traveled, cosmopolitan, multilingual, resourceful, adaptable men who were prompt to see and seize opportunities, even in unfamiliar surroundings, and who were unafraid of the unknown. They were used to dealing with their coreligionists from diverse ethnic groups and cultures, as well as with non-Muslims. This particular background became helpful to those who were deported to the Americas. Not only did it enable them to remain intellectually alert, but it also helped many to ascend the echelons of the slave structure.
There is no doubt that uneducated, poorly educated, semiliterate, and illiterate men and women were among the Muslims of the Americas, but certain facts about Muslim life in this era, as testified in documents of the time, suggest that many Africans came from the intellectual elite. In such times of upheaval as the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, the disintegration of major empires and kingdoms, and the founding of Muslim theocracies, the mobility of the educated Muslims made them particularly vulnerable to human predators. In addition, though some clerics shunned wars, Islam has a tradition of the cleric/warrior, following the examples of Muhammad himself and of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Omar ibn Said and Lamine Kebe exemplify this heritage: at the same time that they stressed their twenty-five years of study and presented themselves as learned and devout men they also emphasized their warrior past, asserting that they went to the holy war against the “infidels.”110 The ranks of the clerics, high-level students, and marabouts became terribly depleted after each military operation, as Usman dan Fodio painfully discovered. The particularity of the jihad, with its exaltation of martyrdom, which appealed to the most devout, reinforces the hypothesis that a high concentration of learned men were indeed among the Muslims deported to the Americas as slaves.
Documentation on the Muslim women, in contrast, is lacking. Because their movements were more restricted than men’s and they did not directly participate in wars, they were less likely than their companions to be caught as a result of their activities. They were usually the victims of kidnapping and were also captured, with their children, after the males had been defeated in war. Because of social and religious realities, they were generally less traveled and less educated than the men. They could not hold positions as clerics, but the wives of clerics came from deeply religious families and had had access to schooling; some women were teachers and knew the Qur’an by heart. The female members of the aristocracy were as likely as the men to be deported in times of political unrest, but in general women were significantly less present than men among the captives; the transatlantic slave trade took away about seven West African men for every three women. Among Muslims the proportion of women was significantly lower because of the modes of enslavement of Muslims, that is, wars and jihad. Paul Lovejoy has shown that only 5 percent of the captives from Central Sudan deported to the New World were women and girls.111
Most Muslims (and non-Muslims) shipped across the Atlantic were young men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The vast majority were certainly husbands and fathers and wives and mothers, as men and women at the time married in their late teens or midtwenties, and African traditions as well as Islam are opposed to celibacy and actively promote marriage and the creation of large families. Ayuba Suleyman Diallo is a perfect example: when he was captured at age thirty-one, he had two wives and four children. Lamine Kebe left a wife and three children behind.
Among the kidnapped were men who had been vulnerable because of the life they had chosen based on their religious beliefs. Without a doubt, some of them had also participated in wars, religious or political, knowing the consequences of their choice. Many had a strong education, and all were aware that their involvement could result in only three alternatives: they could be victorious, they could be enslaved with a possibility of being redeemed, or they could be sold to the Europeans and leave their families and homeland forever for a completely unknown future. They were agents of their own destiny, and this particularity is of extreme importance in explaining the world they created in the places of their enslavement.
Islam, the Muslims, and the transatlantic slave trade were interconnected in a variety of ways. Muslims sold “unbelievers” to the Europeans because Islam allowed it. Non-Muslim rulers, for their part, sold Muslims to the Europeans because of their religion. By condemning the transatlantic slave trade, the Muslims rallied non-Muslims to their cause; Islam expanded in part because it forbade its followers to sell their brethren, and powerless peasants sought its protection against the European. By exchanging captives for firearms, the Muslim theocracies were able to defend their borders and protect their subjects, including non-Muslims who had asked for their protection. The Europeans were opposed to the Muslims, who, as a rule, did not raid their own people and were organized enough to resist them, but were eager to trade with them for non-Muslim captives. Although Muslims were enslaved and, later, colonization—which the Muslim movements opposed—was triumphant, Islam became associated with resistance to foreign rule and protection of the peasants—a distinction that it acquired during the centuries of the slave trade and that gained it support during military colonization. In the end, Islam became the dominant religion in most of West Africa. The transatlantic slave trade played its part in its success.
For the Africans who were the direct victims of abduction or war, life took a dreadful, inconceivably cruel turn. Each experienced a terrible personal tragedy and had to cope, using whatever resources he or she could find within and the support of the group. Little personal documentation about the forced march to the slave ship and the Middle Passage exists, but most of what we know comes from the testimonies of Muslims. Though narratives by Africans are rare, an unusually high percentage are the work of Muslims. Still, few described what they endured in the slave caravans or aboard the ships. Omar ibn Said, Abu Bakr al Siddiq, and Ibrahima abd al Rahman, for instance, mentioned these experiences only briefly. This discretion may have been due to the deep aversion Africans feel at relating personal matters, especially those of an intimate nature. Besides this cultural reason, these men may have gone through the psychological process of shutting off terrible memories and the refusal to open up old wounds that are frequently experienced by survivors of atrocities. A third explanation may lie in the censorship that men who were being helped by whites imposed on themselves. Too-vivid descriptions of the Middle Passage, for example, could only underline the barbarity of the society to which those whose assistance was requested belonged. So the few testimonies that exist are of inestimable value, not only because of their rarity but also because they put human faces on a tragedy of such enormous proportions that the individual too often disappears behind the numbers and the controversy surrounding them.
The first episode in the succession of events that led to the deportation of millions of Africans was the constitution of the slave caravan or coffle (from the Arabic kafila, “caravan”). Men, women, and children were rounded up in convoys that ultimately could number in the hundreds, as new captives were picked up along the way. Dorugu, a seventeen-year-old Muslim Hausa, described the caravan he was with when taken captive in 1839: “We went along, and passed another town near to our own. They took the people there, and I think we were then about four hundred; so we went together and they set the town on fire.”112
On the first leg of the journey, a succession of traders led the captives. Some caravans or individuals were destined from the outset for the European dealers on the coast, but others were sold and bought in markets along the way, with no final destination clearly established. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a Muslim from northern Dahomey (present-day Benin) who was deported to Pernambuco, Brazil, in the 1840s experienced a typical situation. He was sold three times before reaching the coast and never knew until he boarded the slave ship that he was to cross the ocean. His first buyer had secured him in the traditional manner: a six-foot branch with two prongs crossed the back of Baquaqua’s neck and was fastened with an iron bolt. In the caravans each branch was then attached to the neck of the captive in front, so that, as Kélédor recalled his own ordeal, “we formed a single line, a chain in which each one dragged by the head the one who followed him.”113 If a captive tried to escape, he had to carry the long branch in front of him; otherwise, it would get stuck in the ground or the bushes, preventing him from walking, let alone running.
Abu Bakr al Siddiq’s recollections of his first moments as a captive are succinctly described in his autobiography, written in Arabic: “As soon as I was made prisoner, they stripped me, and tied me with a cord, and gave me a heavy load to carry.”114 Abu Bakr’s experience was typical, since captives were used for carrying the slave dealers’ goods. They also carried their own meager rations, recalled a Muslim from South Carolina: “We had nothing to eat on this journey but a small quantity of grain, taken with ourselves. This grain we were compelled to carry on our backs, and roast by the fires which we kindled at nights, to frighten away the wild beasts.”115 Very large caravans sometimes experienced a shortage of goods to carry, but to ensure that all captives would be too exhausted to run away, the merchants gave forty-pound rocks to the captives who had no other load to transport.116
The walk to the sea could be very long. The South Carolina Muslim mentioned above walked for three weeks and went down a river for three days. The slave caravan—twenty-five Muslims among them—that Mungo Park traveled with came from Segu (Mali) and boarded a ship at Gorée Island (Senegal) after a two-month walk of more than seven hundred miles. Abu Bakr walked from Bouna to Lago (a few miles west of Accra), a total distance of more than 300 miles, and Baquaqua came to the coast from about 350 miles north. Tamerlan of Saint-Domingue walked for three months.117
The Atlantic Ocean, the European vessels, and the Europeans themselves were unknown to many captives. Baquaqua pointed out that he had never seen a ship before and thought it was some object of worship of the white man. He also imagined that they were all to be slaughtered on board.118 A Danish physician who founded a colony in the Gold Coast relayed the fears of other captives: “I was once asked by a slave, in complete earnest, if the shoes I was wearing had been made of Black skin, since he had observed that they were the same colour as his skin. Others say that we eat the Blacks and make gunpowder of their bones.”119 To the African Muslim from South Carolina, the whites appeared “the ugliest creatures in the world.”120
Before being sent to the slave ship, the captives had to go through what captain Theophilus Conneau described as a “disagreeable operation” and a “disgusting duty … which cannot be avoided.”121 In Baquaqua’s words, the operation went thus:
The slaves were all put into a pen, and placed with our backs to the fire, and ordered not to look about us, and to insure obedience, a man was placed in front with a whip in his hand ready to strike the first who should dare to disobey orders; another man then went round with a hot iron, and branded us the same as they would the heads of barrels or any other inanimate goods or merchandise.122
As Conneau explained, this measure was deemed necessary because the buyer in the Americas had to know which individuals had been bought for him, and when one died at sea, the mark made it clear whose loss it was.
After men and women alike had been shaved, an extreme humiliation awaited them. The sailors took away the pieces of cloth the captives had managed to keep, remembered the recaptive Ali Eisami Gazirmabe, and threw them overboard. Gazirmabe echoes the memories of Baquaqua, who stated that they were thrust naked into the hold of the vessel.123 The famous 1802 rendition of the slave ship Brookes with its men and women wearing white loincloths is a puritanical representation; the Africans were stripped on every ship. The fear of “vermin” was the reason given for such a policy. Paul Isert, the Danish colonist, offered another explanation: the Africans were kept naked so that they would not hang themselves with their clothes, “which has in fact happened.”124 It goes without saying that this state of affairs was terribly mortifying for the captives, but it may have been especially so for the Muslims, who had kept themselves very much covered because their religion demanded physical modesty.
Amid the sheer horror of their new condition, the Africans had to endure still another degrading process: the forced entertainment taking place on the deck, during which they were made to sing and dance in an attempt to keep their spirits up. Kélédor, through Baron Roger, described the scene as it related to the Muslims:
The serious men from Futa, the marabouts in particular, and they were in great numbers, did not take any part in a type of frivolous entertainment they would have refused at home and that in their deplorable position they viewed with much indignation. But [the sailors] resolved to make even the most reluctant dance without considering that their repugnance had its origin in education and religion. After roughing them up, and maltreating them, they beat them up.125
The filthiness of the slave holds can hardly be imagined. Four hundred men, women, and children were aboard Kélédor’s ship, and seven hundred on board Eisami’s. Baquaqua remembered the “loathsomeness and filth of that horrible place,” and that they were allowed to wash only twice, the second time right before going into port. Ali Eisami and his companions remained confined in the hold for three months, and another Muslim accurately stressed that only the women were allowed on deck. All emphasized the scarcity of food and water, the punishments, and the daily deaths.
Baquaqua may have summed up the frame of mind of many Africans when they disembarked: “When I reached the shore, I felt thankful to Providence that I was once more permitted to breathe pure air, the thought of which almost absorbed every other. I cared but little then that I was a slave, having escaped the ship was all I thought about.”126
The end of the trip for Baquaqua was Brazil; for Abu Bakr, Jamaica. Ali Eisami’s ship was captured at sea, and its passengers settled in Sierra Leone. Omar ibn Said disembarked in Charleston, Salih Bilali in the Bahamas, and Tamerlan in Saint-Domingue. Others, including numerous Muslims, were unloaded at Buenos Aires and walked hundreds of miles across the pampas and over passes through the Andes to reach the mines of Chile and Peru. Slave caravans consisting of hundreds of barefoot and barely clad, if not naked, men, women, and children endured a haunting trip in the cold of South America’s mountains and the heat of its plains, after having walked hundreds of miles to the coast in Africa and suffered weeks of dreadful confinement in the slave ship.
Muslims were scattered all over North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean Islands, but exactly how many crossed the ocean and how many actually landed is unknown. No precision regarding the religion of their human cargo appears in the documents produced by the slave dealers and the trade companies. One way to arrive at an estimate would be to study the number of Africans who were deported from areas where Islam was present during the slave trade, such as Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria. However, the actual number of Muslims in West Africa at any given time up to the twentieth century is unknown, and varies considerably according to area and era. The analysis would then have to be refined to include only the populations known to be either partially or almost totally Muslim. But again, the actual percentage of Muslims in these populations up to the twentieth century is difficult to assess. Then, of course, there might have been a small percentage of Muslims in a given population, but a large proportion among them might have been sold overseas after civil or religious disorders. Systematic comparisons between specific historical events in Africa and slavers’ logs of the same period can yield valuable information. Such research would have to cover a dozen African countries and more than half a dozen European countries, with documents scattered in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Paul Lovejoy, who studies captives from the Central Sudan and has produced a sample of 108 individuals whose backgrounds he uncovered, stresses that his material is scattered over thirty different countries.127
Research on the origins of Africans in the Americas is characterized by the same difficulties. Data exist on the number and percentages of different ethnic groups who landed in each region of the New World, but they do not give more clues about religious background than do the African data. Moreover, research is even more complicated because Westerners used their own nomenclature to describe the Africans’ origin. For example, when they called some of them “Senegal,” they were not referring to just any person born in Senegal; nor were they referring to an ethnic group of that name, which has never existed. Senegal meant somebody coming from the Senegal River area or sold at Senegal, which in those days was the city Saint-Louis du Sénégal. In Saint-Domingue, the Senegal were Tukulor and Sarakhole; in Louisiana, they were said to be Wolof. Confusion of one type or another exists for many other populations.
Suggesting figures for the Muslim presence in the Americas is, under these conditions, highly problematic and risky. The latest figures for the transatlantic slave trade are based on data collected from close to thirty-five thousand voyages—about 80 percent of the total—as well as estimates that propose that 12.5 million Africans were deported.128 Senegambians are estimated at 755,513. Although there were many Muslims among them, their percentage, as already stressed, is not known. Muslims were also present—sometimes substantially depending on the times—among the people deported from Sierra Leone (388,771), the Gold Coast (1,209,321), the Bight of Benin (1,999,060), and the Bight of Biafra (1,594,560). The Spanish colonies received the highest number of Senegambians (233,587), and they represented about 14.7 percent of the Africans. The British Caribbean, Brazil, and the French Caribbean followed, but it is in the United States that the proportion of Senegambians was the largest, even though their numbers were lower. Almost 24 percent of the men, women, and children who set foot in the thirteen colonies and later the United States were originally from Senegambia. This area had, potentially, the highest proportion of Muslims.
To be sure, there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas, and for the time being, that may be all we can say about numbers and estimates. What is important is that whatever their region of origin and their ethnic heritage, the Muslims shared a set of values, a common language, a similar education, and a lifestyle that, without erasing certain differences, made them part of a global community. Therefore, if counted as a whole, on a religious basis rather than on an ethnic one the Muslims were probably more numerous in the Americas than many other groups of Africans. Nevertheless, they were definitely a minority compared to followers of ethnic religions as a whole, for two reasons: they were a minority in Africa to begin with, and Islam offered them a degree of protection. The West Indian scholar, Christian missionary, and advocate of colonization Edward Blyden summed up the situation quite aptly: “Mohammedanism furnished a protection to the tribes who embraced it by effectually binding them together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by their united effort to battle the attempts of powerful ‘pagan’ slave hunters.”129