Frugal, serious, and for some dedicated to hard work in order to get their freedom or reach the upper echelons of the slave structure, the African Muslims may have appeared, at first glance, to be “model slaves.” These characteristics, however, represent only one facet of their experience in the Americas, that which drew on their education and discipline in Africa. They also brought with them a tradition of defiance and rebellion, because as Muslims, they could be only free men and women. They proved antagonistic toward their captors from the very beginning, and from a few years after the arrival of the first Africans in the New World, anti-Muslim measures were being implemented repeatedly to protect the colonies from their assault.
As early as 1503, one year after he had been appointed governor of Hispaniola, Nicholas de Ovando asked the Spanish Crown to put a complete stop to the introduction of Africans, because they fled, joined the Indians, and taught them “bad customs.”1 Nevertheless, Africans continued to be shipped, and in ever greater numbers; and the Muslims among them caught the colonists’ attention. On May 11, 1526, Spain passed the first item in a series of anti-Muslim legislation. A royal decree (cédula) specifically forbade the introduction of “Gelofes” (Wolof) from Senegal, negros from the Levant, blacks who had been raised with the Moors, and people from Guinea.
The Wolof were the only African population targeted by name. The Spanish settlers had reason to be familiar with them, because the Senegalese had just led the first slave revolt by Africans in the Americas. In 1522, Wolof revolted on the sugar plantation of Admiral Don Diego Colon—Christopher Columbus’ son—in Hispaniola, in the territory of what is today the Dominican Republic. As they went from plantation to plantation trying to rally other Africans, they killed a dozen whites.2 Wolof had also rebelled in San Juan, Puerto Rico; in Santa Marta, Colombia; and in Panama. It appeared as if they were establishing a trend, and so, six years after the first cédula, the Crown issued another, which made reference to uprisings having resulted in the deaths of several Christians and stressed the danger still posed by the Wolof. They were described as “arrogant, disobedient, rebellious and incorrigible.”3 This attitude is consistent with men who, as Muslims, thought themselves free. They could not accept being enslaved by Christians or being forced to convert. Their refusal of their new situation translated into disobedience and rebelliousness and, as noted by the legislators, could not be “corrected.” The arrogance is equally typical of men who, as Muslims, would think themselves better than “infidels” and Christians. The Wolof, in addition, were accused of fomenting trouble by preaching insubordination to the other nations, which were “more pacific and of good habits.”
The royal decree also excluded mulattos, Jews, gente bereberisca (a blanket name for Muslims), and moriscos, or Muslims (often Moors from Spain) who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism. These last were considered especially dangerous, an indication that they profoundly resented their conversion and were possibly disposed to go to great lengths to return to their former faith.
Still another piece of legislation was issued on August 14, 1543. It stated that Muslim slaves and free Muslims who had recently converted to Catholicism, as well as their children, were prohibited in the colonies because they had occasioned much “inconvenience” in the past. Unfortunately for the colonists, the situation did not improve, and on July 16, 1550, new instructions were given to the Casa de Contratación that again prohibited blacks from the Levant and Guinea, because they were “mixed with the Moors”—in other words, Muslims. The interdict was not respected, however, and the authorities in the Caribbean Islands, as well as in Mexico, Peru, and Chile, continued to protest the introduction of African Muslims.
No fewer than five pieces of anti-Muslim legislation were issued by the Spanish authorities in the first fifty years of Spain’s establishment in the New World. Though the decrees issued prohibitions concerning Jews and mulattos, only Muslims were targeted repeatedly and with extraordinary vigor. The Spanish Crown was worried for two reasons: it feared the expansion of Islam in America, and it was confronted with deadly rebellions fomented by Muslim slaves and maroons.
The inconvenience alluded to in the cédula of 1543 was indeed serious. At that time in the Spanish territories of the Americas and the Caribbean, Indians were still the majority population, even though their numbers had been decimated, and they lived in villages not too distant from the plantations and the mines. It was possible for the Africans who fled slavery to find refuge among them. In the French West Indies, they had formed maroon communities under the protection of the Caribs and were particularly destructive.4 African maroons, such as the three hundred men led by Antonio Mandinga in Panama, raided the plantations, stealing livestock, and destroying crops.5 In addition to the nagging and dangerous presence of the maroons, the Spaniards had to face full-blown revolts from Africans allied to the Indians. Such rebellions occurred in Hispaniola (1522–1532), Mexico (1523), Cuba (1529), Panama (1550–1582), Venezuela (1550), Peru (1560), Ecuador (1599), Guatemala (1627), Chile (1647), Martinique (1650), and much later, Florida (1830–1840).6 Repeatedly, the Spanish settlers and officials blamed the Muslims for their pernicious influence on the Indians. Confronted with a perilous situation, the colonists reacted with ferocity. Very early on, the presence of an African among the Indians was considered a major crime. For having been found in an Indian village in Costa Rica, Pedro Gilofo, a runaway who, being a Wolof, may have been a Muslim, was condemned to death on September 1, 1540; he was boiled alive.7
The colonists had a genuine fear that the Muslims would proselytize among the Indians. These concerns may not have been rooted in reality, but they were strong enough to make the Spaniards try to enforce a rigid segregation of Indians and Africans. Islam did not spread, but the Muslims may have made some attempts to reach out. Accusations and condemnations do not indicate that a deed or offense has been committed, but in 1560 the mulatto Luis Solano was condemned to death and the “Moor” Lope de la Pena to life in prison for having practiced and spread Islam in Cuzco, Peru.8
The Inquisition was very active in the new colonies and vigilantly condemned to death what it called “sorcerers.” Many Africans who dealt in the occult were among its victims. There is little doubt that marabouts involved in the making of protective and offensive amulets, as well as in divination, were killed by the church as a result of their activities. Just overtly retaining Islamic beliefs could lead a person before the Inquisition tribunal. Such was the case, for example, of many Wolof enslaved in Portugal during the sixteenth century, who were denounced for expressing their faith in the superiority of their religion. There is reason to believe that similar cases may have happened in the overseas colonies.9
Disobedience, rebellion, real or potential proselytizing, arrogance, and sorcery—the colonists had to contend with a series of problems that the Muslims posed. An additional one was their use of horses. As horses were unknown to the Indians and the Central Africans, cavalry gave a decisive advantage to the conquistadores and the slaveholders’ patrolmen.10 But African Muslims had been handling horses for centuries; they bought them from Arab merchants, who traded the animals against slaves.11 The Buurba Jolof, or king of Jolof, for example, had a cavalry of eight thousand to ten thousand mounted men, according to the Portuguese who visited the region between 1504 and 1506.12 Some of these cavalrymen were later enslaved in the Americas, having been taken prisoner when the Jolof Empire collapsed. Ironically, it was the colonists who had asked for the recruitment of Muslim horsemen. They needed men who were used to cattle raising and the handling of horses, and the slave dealers found such men in the Wolof, Mandingo, Tukulor, and Fulani areas of Senegambia.
The Wolof who rose up on Diego Colon’s plantation in Hispaniola were used to cavalry warfare, as is indicated by their behavior in front of the Spaniards. They did not panic when the horsemen charged but opened their ranks, let the horses pass, and regrouped to face the countercharge. By the 1540s, Wolof maroons had created their own cavalry with stolen horses and harassed the plantations of Hispaniola. The danger posed by these Africans who went “always on horses” and proved to be “skilled and audacious, both in the charge and the use of the lance” was stressed in a letter to the Spanish king written on June 28, 1546.13 The Wolof horsemen of the Spanish possessions impressed some of their white contemporaries, and Spanish poet Juan de Castellanos (1522–1607), who resided in Puerto Rico, saluted their dexterity:
Destos son los Gilosos muy guerreros
Con vana presuncion de caballeros
(The Wolof are skillful and very warlike
With vain presumptions to be knights)14
It goes without saying that not all runaways and rebels were Muslims; but the fact that between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century the Muslims were the only ones targeted with specific legislation, which attempted to prohibit their introduction, indicates that they must have been numerous and influential in the ranks of the rebels. That uprisings were trademarks of the Muslims is not surprising. They were used to fighting for their faith, and they were without a doubt indignant at being made the slaves of Christians. The policy of forced conversion that the Catholics launched could only have added to their resentment and hatred toward their enslavers. Warriors of the faith were not disposed to reject a religion for which they had fought, nor to accept their total subjugation by men they probably felt were morally inferior. As a minority, they understood they would not be able to defeat the slaveholders by themselves, that they had to find allies in the non-Muslim Africans and the Indians; they had to persuade others to join their ranks. Hence the accusations made by the Spanish colonists that the Muslims taught the “more pacific nations, bad customs.”
Another indication of the fear that Islam and the rebellious Muslims inspired in the Spaniards, as well as of the diversity of measures taken to control them, can be found in the Moros y Christianos. This was a special type of anti-Muslim play that the colonists imported from Spain and Portugal. The settlers made the slaves in the Americas play out the struggle between the Moors and the Christians in Spain which ended with the eviction of the former. The story was a good illustration to the bondmen of the superiority of the Christians over the Muslims. If the Moors, who had conquered parts of the Iberian Peninsula and dominated the Spaniards and Portuguese for seven centuries, finally had been subjugated, then it should have become evident to Muslim slaves that they could not hope to accomplish much in the Americas with their violent opposition to their Christian masters.
If the Spanish colonists were suspicious of and negatively disposed toward the Muslims for historical reasons, the French, for whom Islam and its followers were only a faint memory—they had defeated the invading Arabs on French soil in 732—had no qualms about introducing them into their new territories. The records of the Jesuits and other missionaries show that the French were well aware that Senegambian Muslims were living among them. They even acknowledged the presence of marabouts, as Father Jean Mongin, stationed on the island of Saint Christopher, did in a letter in May 1682: “There are even some who have marabouts among them, which is what mahometan priests are called.”15 A century later, Colonel Malenfant reported from Saint-Domingue, that “mahometan blacks” and “even dervishes”—Sufis involved in mystical practices and rituals—were living on the island.16 The French missionaries denounced the reluctance of the Muslims to embrace Catholicism, but they did not seem to have any other complaints.
What the French did not realize was that their most profitable colony, Saint-Domingue, was fecund ground for Muslim maroons and rebels. The island had always had numerous maroon communities, and an average of a thousand runaways were advertised every year. The notices posted by the plantation owners, who listed the disappeared give a measure of the place of the Muslims among the maroons. Although large numbers of Muslims had been forcibly baptized, some had retained their original names, and Ayouba, Tamerlan, Aly, Soliman, Lamine, Thisiman, Yaya, Belaly, and Salomon appear in the notices. Female runaways, such as Fatme, Fatima, and Hayda, are also mentioned. The Africans left individually and, more usually, in groups. For instance, twelve Mandingo men, aged twenty-two to twenty-six, fled one night in 1783 from their owner’s house in Port-au-Prince.17 They were all professionals—masons, carpenters, and bakers.
The most famous of the pre-Revolution maroon leaders was without a doubt François Makandal, formerly employed on a sugar plantation. One day, as he was working the sugar mill, one of his hands got caught in the wheel and had to be severed. As he could no longer cut the cane, he became a cattleman, later running away. For eighteen years Makandal was at large, living in the mountains but making frequent incursions on the plantations to deliver death. He organized a network of devoted followers and taught them how to make poison, which they used against their owners or against other slaves in order to ruin the slaveholders. His reputation was such that a French document of 1758 estimates—with much exaggeration, no doubt—the number of deaths he provoked at 6,000 over three years.18
An African born in “Guinea,” Francois Makandal was in all probability a Mandingo. He came from an illustrious family and had been sold to the Europeans as a war captive. He was a Muslim who “had instruction and possessed the Arabic language very well,” emphasized nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, who gathered information through the veterans of the Haitian Revolution.19 Some scholars have based their characterization of Makandal on an anonymous, fictionalized account published in 1787 in Mercure de France, a literary journal: “Makandal, histoire véritable.”20 It was translated and published in several newspapers in the United States in 1795 under the title “The Negro Makandal: An Authentic History.” Amid obvious fantasies, inaccurate names, and other literary licenses, the author claims that Makandal arrived in Saint-Domingue at twelve, already well versed in medicine and with “a fine taste for music, painting and sculpture.” Makandal was thus a preteen expert in medicine, landing on the island with an artistic baggage that included painting, an art form that he would probably have been the only one in West Africa at the time to know, let alone appreciate. Far from this grossly fictional narrative (and besides Madiou, a major historian), a much more credible source than this anonymous story has been overlooked. A. M. Melvil Bloncourt, the director of the Revue des Colonies, published a historical paper in the French Revue du monde colonial, asiatique et américain, about Makandal, giving background historical information about the slave trade and slavery.21 He too stated that Makandal, who spoke Arabic, had been made a prisoner while fighting in a war; in other words, he had arrived as an adult, not a pubescent boy.
Makandal was probably a marabout, for a 1779 French official document describes him as being able to predict the future and as having revelations.22 This hypothesis is reinforced by the man’s name. Melvil Bloncourt noted that Makandal likely came from makanda, “Guinean sorcerers.” In reality, in Mandinka mo kadan comes from ka mo kada, to tie someone either concretely with a rope or chain or in a mystic manner, which leads to naming as such people who are reputed to have these powers. In some dialects of Mandinka, makanda is a spiritual protection. Thus, Makandal acquired his name because of his mystical power and his involvement in amulet making—so much so that amulets became known, on the island, as makandal. In addition, Makandal was said to be a prophet, which indicates that he was perceived as having a direct connection to God. Thus besides being a marabout he may have been a sharif, a descendant of the Prophet; but no evidence exists to confirm this hypothesis.
François Makandal was much more than simply a maroon leader. He had a long-term plan for the island and saw the maroons as the “center of an organized resistance of the blacks against the whites,” stressed an eighteenth-century French document.23 He used practical symbolism to explain his vision for Saint-Domingue. One day, in front of a crowd, he put three handkerchiefs in a water container: one was yellow, one white, and one black. He took the yellow one out and said, “Here are the first inhabitants of Saint Domingue, they were yellow. Here are the present inhabitants”—and he showed the white handkerchief—“here, at last, are those who will remain the masters of the island; it is the black handkerchief.”24
To turn this prophecy into reality, Makandal planned to poison the wells of the city of Cap-Français. Once the slaveholders were dead or in the middle of convulsions, the “old man from the mountain,” as Makandal was sometimes called, followed by his captains and lieutenants, would attack the city and kill the remaining whites. Before he could launch his assault, however, a slave betrayed him and he was caught. Tied up in a room with two guards, he somehow managed to escape. If he had killed the men with the pistol that lay on a table between them, Makandal may have been able to remain at large. But he did not. The guards gave the alarm, and he was caught again, this time by dogs.
On January 20, 1758, Makandal was burned at the stake. The pole he was tied to collapsed, and the crowd saw this incident as a sign of his immortality. He had told his followers that as he was put to death, he would turn into a fly and fly away. The executioner asked to kill him with a sword as the coup de grâce, but his request was denied by the attorney general. Makandal was tied to a plank and thrown into the fire again. Makandal can best be described as a marabout-warrior. He used his occult knowledge and his charisma to gain allies to wage war against his enemy, and he participated in the action personally.
Another popular leader who attained quasi-mythical status in Haitian history was Boukman. Very little is known about him. He was not born in Saint-Domingue but came from Jamaica, smuggled by a British slaver. He became a professional and rose to the rank of driver, later becoming a coachman. Using a position that allowed him to travel from plantation to plantation, as well as his charismatic personality, he had built a network of followers in the north. He definitely entered Haitian history when he galvanized a large assembly of slaves gathered on the night of August 14, 1791, in a clearing in the forest of Bois-Caiman. During this Vodun ceremony, Boukman launched the general revolt with a speech in Creole that has remained famous. He denounced the God of the whites, who asked for crime, whereas the God of the slaves wanted only the good. “But this God who is so good, orders you to seek revenge,” he pounded. “He will direct our arms, he will assist us. Throw away the image of the God of the whites who is thirsty for our tears and listen to freedom which talks to our hearts.”25
A week later, two hundred sugar estates and eighteen hundred coffee plantations were destroyed. At the beginning of November, Boukman was shot dead by an officer as he was fighting a detachment of the French army with a group of maroons. His severed head was fixed on a pole and exposed on a public square in Cap-Français.
There are indications that Boukman was a Muslim. Coming from Jamaica, he had an English name that was rendered phonetically in French by Boukman or Bouckmann; in English, however, it was Bookman. Bookman was a “man of the book,” as the Muslims were referred to even in Africa—in Sierra Leone, for example, explained an English lieutenant, the Mandingo were “Prime Ministers” of every town, and they went “by the name bookman.”26 It is likely that Boukman was a Jamaican Muslim who had a Qur’an, and that he got his nickname from this. As many Muslims had done, and would continue to do, he had reached the top of the slave structure. He was a trusted professional. He was also at the top in another way: he was recognized as a priest. He has passed down in history as a Vodun priest, but this does not mean that he was such. Because the Muslim factor largely has been ignored, any religious leader of African origin in the Caribbean has been linked to Vodun or Obeah.27
There is thus compelling evidence that two major leaders in Haitian history—Makandal and Boukman—were not only Muslims but also marabouts. They were not the leaders of Muslims, they did not embark on a jihad, but they were the leaders of the enslaved population, irrespective of religion. What they provided was military expertise coupled with spiritual and occult assurance that the outcome of the fight would be positive. Both skills were of extreme value, each in its own way; but put together, they conferred on these leaders the aura of mythical figures. Because of their maraboutic knowledge they could galvanize the masses, push them to action and to surpass themselves.
Other marabouts, and the Muslims in general, played a role in the Haitian revolts and ultimately in the Haitian Revolution through their occult skills, literacy, and military traditions. The marabouts provided protections to the insurgents in the form of amulets, and the Muslims used Arabic to communicate during uprisings, as Colonel Malenfant recorded. Though their role and contribution have not been acknowledged, the Muslims were part of the success of the Haitian Revolution.
Brazil was another fertile ground for Muslim unrest. Starting at the turn of the nineteenth century, as indicated in chapter 1, the jihad of Usman dan Fodio in Northern Nigeria provided vast cohorts of Hausa and Fulani Muslims to the Portuguese colony. In addition, the Yoruba country to the south was a theater of Muslim expansion, and large contingents of Muslim Yoruba (Nago) were shipped to Brazil. In 1807 alone, 8,307 Hausa, Nago, and Ewe were introduced to Bahia.28 The same year saw the first attempt, by mostly Muslim Hausa slaves and freedmen, to organize an uprising. Like many others, the insurrection did not take place, because a “loyal slave” betrayed the plot. House searches led to the discovery of bows, arrows, knives, pistols, rifles, and talismans written in Arabic. The two Hausa leaders—one slave, one freed—were executed, and eleven conspirators received 150 lashes each.29
A year later, on the day after Christmas, Nago and Hausa men fled their sugar plantations of the Reconcavo (the Bay of Bahia). Another group soon joined them, and a party of several hundreds attacked the town of Nazare das Farinhas, but they were defeated after a fierce battle. About a hundred men were taken prisoner. For months the remaining maroons roamed the surrounding area, assaulting plantations, setting houses on fire, stealing, and killing.
Another major revolt took place on February 28, 1814, when about six hundred Africans under the leadership of a maroon Hausa marabout hit the fisheries where they had been employed and the town of Itapoan. Their group was diverse because they had succeeded in establishing efficient networks linking the slaves and freedmen of the Reconcavo to those on the island of Itaparica (ten miles from Bahia) and to the maroons living in the vicinity. The insurgent Africans, poorly armed, left fourteen whites dead and lost fifty-eight men, mostly Hausa. The repression that followed was commensurate with the gravity of the event: four men were hanged, a dozen died in prison, and twenty-three freedmen were flogged and sent for life to the prisons of Angola and Mozambique. The rest of the captured men were whipped and handed back to their owners.
Public punishments were no deterrent, however. Less than a month later, another revolt broke out and was quelled in Iguape, an area of large sugar plantations. No fewer than seventeen uprisings, all but one on the sugar plantations surrounding San Salvador de Bahia, erupted between 1816 and 1830. Muslims were clearly identified as leaders in at least five—and participants in all—including the first one to take place in the heart of the city of Bahia.
On April 10, 1830, about twenty Africans later recognized as Nago attacked three hardware stores, where they seized twelve swords and twelve long knives. They then proceeded to a slave market, where they freed newly arrived Africans and killed or wounded eighteen who refused to join them. The group was now more than a hundred strong and set upon a police station, where the insurgents killed one man. As reinforcements arrived, the Africans were met with rifles. Many were wounded and forty were taken prisoner, while soldiers and the crowd lynched more than fifty. Some managed to escape and took refuge in the bush outside the city. This was the first revolt to have actually taken place in Bahia, and it shook the town. The response was swift and ferocious. It took another five years before Africans dared to launch an attack on the city.
In the early morning hours of January 25, 1835, Africans sporting white pants, white shirts, and white caps and turbans took to the streets of Bahia armed with knives, lances, swords, and a few pistols. To the sound of beating drums, they assaulted the National Guard barracks, the city jail, and the police barracks and fought against the cavalry. When day broke, seventy Africans and about half a dozen whites lay dead. Some insurgents died later from their wounds, and others committed suicide.
Within a few months of the 1835 rebellion, over three hundred defendants had been tried, four men had been executed, forty-five had been flogged up to a thousand times in the course of three months, thirty-six had been deported, and twenty-four had been sentenced to jail or hard labor. The fate of other defendants is not known. Most were Nago (199), thirty-one were Hausa, ten Ewe, and thirteen Bornu. All were Muslims. They had also rallied ten Bantu from Congo and Angola, who may have been converts; fourteen West Africans from diverse nations; and five native-born slaves. While 186 were slaves, 115 defendants, or 38 percent, were free. There were at least twenty-six women among the prisoners.30
Hundreds of Africans, enslaved and freed, took part in the best planned and most daring slave uprising in American history, after the Haitian Revolution. The Bahia rebellion was not the first time that Muslims had risen up, but it was by far the most widespread, best organized, and most devastating urban insurrection they had staged. Their plan was to set buildings on fire, and while the police and the army were busy putting the fires out, the Africans would attack. The rebels would be joined by others from nearby plantations, and together they would leave the city, once taken, and proceed to conquer the rest of the bay.
Even had it been executed as planned, the plot might not have had much chance of success. As it was, the Africans were forced to launch their offensive precipitously; two freed Nago women betrayed them, the husband of one of whom was taking part in the uprising. Three hours after the denunciation, the police started searching the houses of the Africans. At 2 Ladeira de Praca, they came upon a meeting of the conspirators. It was 1 a.m., and the uprising had been scheduled to start a few hours later. Discovered, the insurgents decided to give the assault anyway. One conspirator was immediately bludgeoned to death by a neighbor helped by two young slaves, a Creole and a Nago. Numerous papers in Arabic were found on his body.
Divided into two groups, the men took to the streets and tried in vain to liberate the prisoners held in the city jail. Licutan, an esteemed religious leader who was called “the sultan,” had been held there since November 1834 as a guarantee for a debt contracted by his owner. After their unsuccessful attempt at a jailbreak, the rebels attacked the artillery and police barracks, killing a few soldiers; they were joined by Africans coming from the Victoria neighborhood. Because their original plan had been disrupted, they had to alert their coconspirators that the fight had already started. “Different groups of armed blacks spread out through the main streets of the city whooping and hollering,” stated the president of the region, “beating on their cohorts’ doors entreating them to join in. The only opposition they encountered was from patrols who shot at them from time to time.”31
The insurgents continued their march and attacked the National Guard and the police barracks on Lapa Square. Besides getting rid of the soldiers and policemen, their objective was probably to help themselves to their weapons. They did not succeed in entering the barracks but were not subdued by the troops. After some skirmishes, during which men on both sides were killed, they proceeded toward Itapagipe Peninsula, where rebels from the plantations were supposed to join them. But at Agua de Meninos, midway to the peninsula, the infantry and the cavalry were waiting for them. “It cannot be denied that the Malês [a generic term for Muslims in parts of West Africa, Brazil, and the West Indies] were prodigiously valorous,” admitted Father Etienne Ignace, who was not sympathetic to their cause.32 According to Ignace, the chief of police was so impressed by their courage that he asked them repeatedly to surrender. None accepted, however, and nineteen Africans were killed in the intense fight that ensued; others drowned or were shot as they jumped into the bay. Thirteen Muslims were taken prisoner, and many others fled to the woods. Meanwhile, in Bahia, six armed men dressed in white got to the streets at dawn, as originally planned. At Agua de Meninos, the small group was entirely wiped out by the troops.
The rebellion was frightening to the white citizens. The rebels had been bold, unafraid. They repeatedly had dared attack the well-armed soldiers. But after the first shock passed, the whites were in for a second one, when the magnitude of the conspiracy was discovered. As the police chief pointed out, “the insurrection had been contemplated for a long time and the planning was better than what might have been expected, in view of their brutality and ignorance.”33
It became clear to white Bahians that, with their schools, books, rings, mosques, multitudes of papers written in a foreign language, antideath amulets, and religious uniforms, the African Muslims truly constituted an unknown, secretive, mysterious, and dangerous group that had to be completely crushed. Scores of freed men and women were expelled from the country, many slaves were sold outside the province, and numerous prisoners died in jail. Others were whipped in a display of horrific brutality. Suspicion was enough to condemn a man to the lash. Licutan, who was jailed at the time of the uprising, was considered a leader because the Muslims deferred to him. They had repeatedly visited his cell, kneeling and asking for his benedictions. The failure of the uprising devastated him, a freed African working at the jail testified: “On that same Sunday he bowed his head and never raised it. He became upset and cried when the other negroes taken prisoners that morning were brought in. One of them brought him a book, or a folded piece of paper with letters on it, like those that have been found lately, and Pacifico [Licutan] read it and began to cry.”34 Though nothing could be proved against him, he received fifty lashes a day on four days in April, eleven days in May, and five days in June—one thousand lashes in all for the elderly religious leader. Forty-four other men received the same treatment, and one died from his whippings. When they were strong enough to be sent back to their owners, the Africans had to wear an iron collar with a cross around their necks and chains and shackles on their legs.
Of the eighteen men who were condemned to death for their part in the uprising, four were executed. An unexpected problem arose, however: the authorities could not find anybody willing to hang them. As late as a day before their scheduled execution, a reward representing a four-month salary was offered to prisoners who would agree to work the gallows. It was to no avail, and a baffled warden explained, “I have offered the job to the inmates, and no one will take it. I did the same thing today at the Barbalho and Ribeira dos Gales jails, and no one will take it for any amount of money; not even the other blacks will take it—in spite of the measures and promises I have offered in addition to the money.”35 Solidarity; respect; a sense of honor; fear of reprisals—overt or occult—from other Muslims or Africans; and despair at another failed uprising were certainly among the reasons that pushed blacks, both African- and native-born, to refuse to take part in the execution. Their passive resistance, which proves that the Muslims were not alienated from the rest of the black population, was successful. Jorge da Cruz Barbosa (a free Hausa whose real name was Ajahi) and Joaquim, Pedro, and Goncalo (Nago slaves) were executed by a firing squad of policemen on May 14. They were killed like soldiers, not common criminals.
The Muslim uprising has been widely studied and analyzed, and many interpretations of its nature have been given. Afro-Brazilian scholar Manoel Querino, who associated with the Muslims of Rio at the turn of the twentieth century, denied that Islam played a role in the revolt. Querino, who probably wanted to present the Muslims in the best light possible, went so far as to maintain that no Muslims took part in the uprising.36 Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Etienne Ignace, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Verger, in contrast, have placed Islam at the rebellion’s very core. João Jose Reis’s first reading of the event was that it was “a Malê plot but an African uprising.”37 His perspective has evolved with the close analysis of newly researched documents. He notes that the Nago were overrepresented. They formed only 30 percent of the African population of Salvador but were 73 percent of the people arrested; while the Hausa representation in the African population was 9.4 percent and a consistent 10.5 percent of the prisoners. Moreover, while dozens of Nago confessed or were implicated by others, only one Hausa admitted his participation, and only three out of thirty-one Hausa arrested were found guilty. Reis states, the “Nagos fought this war practically alone, Islamic ideology not being enough to unite, under the banner of Allah, all African Muslims.” Although there were Muslims from other origins, “the evidence suggests … that at least this particular revolt was largely an ethnic movement of the Nagos.”38 Noting the high proportion of free people among the defendants (38 percent), he concludes that Islam facilitated the convergence between enslaved and freed people.
The Bahia rebellion of 1835 was the most visibly Muslim uprising of all, but many previous revolts were launched in the same spirit. This has been pointed out by Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, who met several African Muslims in Bahia:
For the chroniclers at the beginning of the last century, these revolts were only the manifestation of the pervert and cruel dispositions of the blacks, which provoked their utmost indignation; for the more benevolent spirits, they were only just reprisals exercised by brutalized beings against inhuman masters; the more liberal writers saw in the blacks’ insurrection a noble revolt of oppressed people against the usurpation of their freedom, which they reclaimed by this heroic and courageous example. There may have been a little of all of this in these revolts, but they were forgetting the most important factor, the basis of all these uprisings, which in reality was the presence of Islam in Bahia.39
Roger Bastide went further and stated that the revolt “represented a real holy war waged by the Mussulmans against the Christians.”40 Pierre Verger had a slightly different take on the events: the revolts were, he explained, “the direct repercussion of the warring events that were taking place in Africa”; Usman dan Folio’s “holy war continued in Bahia in the form of slave revolts, and even free Africans’ revolts.”41 According to these authors, the Muslims had launched a jihad in Bahia, whatever their reasons for doing so.
Strictly speaking, a jihad could not have taken place in Bahia because the conditions were not met. A jihad must follow four rules: the Muslims must be oppressed to the point that they cannot follow their cult; they must be half the number of their oppressors; they must have the same weapons; and their territory must have been invaded. Only the first condition was met in Bahia. At first glance, the part played by the Islamic clothes, rings, talismans, and documents in Arabic can lead one to assert that religion played a leading role. While this is true, it does not mean that the revolt was a religious war. Islam, for a Muslim, permeates every aspect of life, from the way one bathes to what one can drink and wear. Everything that a devout Muslim does is done in reference to religion. It is inconceivable to start any important enterprise without asking for God’s blessings, without protective amulets, or without consulting a marabout, who will go into a khalwa (a retreat during which he will fast, pray, and do dhikr) to see the outcome of the endeavor. The clerics will perform special prayers for guidance, called salat al-istikharah, particularly in situations that may have a dramatic outcome such as military operations. Everything—material, spiritual, and occult—that will ensure a positive outcome is used: from astrology to numerology, from the recitation of the Qur’an to the symbolism of certain colors and the choice of a special date. This is especially true in Sufism.
The Africans in Bahia put every chance on their side. They chose to act during Ramadan, a sacred and blessed month; they wore white clothes, the symbol of purity and heaven; they had ample reserves of talismans; they had war drums, doubtless fitted with special amulets. Does this mean they were engaged in a jihad? At no point at all did the insurgents refer to freedom of the cult or to an action against the Christians or the unbelievers. The enemy was not defined in terms of religion. The insurgents did not take arms to defend the purity of Islam, as the shehu Usman dan Fodio had done, nor did they indicate any willingness to convert the “infidels.” It is a mistake and a stereotype to view every military action or uprising by Muslims as a jihad.
What the Africans said they wanted to do was “kill the whites.” Pedro, a wounded prisoner, testified during the trial that the conspirators had invited him to be ready to kill whites, and Belchior da Silva Cunha had heard people talk of waging war against whites. Another source mentioned that not only the whites but also the mulattos and the native-born blacks would be killed. One of the women who betrayed the plot, Guilhermina Rosa de Souza, said that her husband had heard talk of killing the whites, the Creoles, and the blacks who would not join the rebels and of sparing the mulattos to use them as slaves. Not much credit should be given to this last piece of hearsay, which sounds like the fabrication of somebody who wanted to present herself as having saved every living soul in Bahia. The men and women who had carefully planned their uprising, extended their bases through networks all over the Reconcavo, and been involved in or witnessed a few failed revolts should be credited with more sagacity. All the Africans put together represented 34 percent of the Bahian population, while the native-born blacks and mulattos made up 38 percent, and the whites 28 percent. Being such a minority, the African Muslims certainly would not have been willing to take on everybody, including those of their own who would not join them. As a matter of fact, even the supposed white killing spree was not reality, because the insurgents did not kill indiscriminately. The president of the Province acknowledged that “there is no evidence that they robbed a single house or that they killed their masters on the sly.”42
What the insurgent Muslims did was attack the strategic buildings—the police, National Guard, and army barracks—where they could destroy the defenders of the slaveholders and get much-needed arms and ammunition at the same time. After their professional protectors had been killed or disarmed, the white population, a minority, could have counted only on itself to stand up against the insurgents. Some slaves likely would have defended them, but the same cannot be said of the majority. By presenting the purpose of the uprising as the killing of whites, the conspirators may have wanted to attract as many blacks as possible—and those could be recruited among the Muslims, the other Africans, and the native born. It can be suggested that the African insurgents who had a few native-borns in their ranks—probably also counted on the support of the rest of the black population, without whom they could not hope to accomplish much. This support may not have been expected to come initially but rather at a later stage, when the African insurrection had succeeded in gaining momentum.
Although the uprising could not unfold as planned, it nevertheless involved as much as 5 to 7 percent of the African population in Bahia. As Reis points out, this percentage of men and women sentenced, if reckoned in today’s figures for a city of 1.5 million inhabitants, would number twelve thousand. The number of those sentenced and the number of people who actually took part in the plot and the insurrection clearly did not match—the latter number was probably higher—meaning that a total number of about two thousand participants should be considered. In today’s terms, this would be comparable to about thirty-six thousand people, an extremely high figure even for a city of a million and a half.
Because nobody talked about, confessed, or explained the reasons of the uprising, questions and speculations abound. One question is why there was a conspiracy to begin with. It may simply be that the Africans wanted their freedom. Though this undoubtedly was true, it does not explain why so many free Africans took part in the plot and the uprising. A better answer may be that what the Africans wanted was real freedom, not the nominal type that came with paying a slaveholder for their own bodies but having to defer to and obey any white. That freedom included, but was not limited to, the right to practice one’s religion at will. With the end of the white rule would come the end of humiliation and oppression and the possibility of reestablishing an African social order, based on African values. In their own sphere, the Muslims lived according to their African and Muslim values, beliefs, customs, and conventions; but they also had to live in the other world and go through the trauma of adapting to it every time they had to leave their community.
One can wonder why the Muslims were more successful than some of the previous rebels in carrying out at least part of their plan, and why they were the leaders. Islam was an excellent organizing force, if only for its own preservation. Makeshift schools and mosques had to be opened, maintained, equipped, staffed, and kept secret. Dates for the holy days, based on the lunar calendar, had to be calculated and communicated to all the believers. Baptisms, circumcisions, weddings, and funerals had to be arranged according to Islamic customs. Dues for the esusu had to be collected, special clothes sewn, rings made, prayer beads imported. Halal dinners had to be prepared. The Muslim community of slaves, freedmen, and maroons had to be kept informed not only in Bahia but also in the Reconcavo, the countryside, and the remote areas where the quilombos (maroon villages) were hidden. Just by virtue of being Muslims and wanting to remain so, the Africans had to be well organized and particularly discreet. Their ability to communicate by writing in Arabic or with Arabic characters was of considerable help. Thus, more than other groups, the Muslims had practical experience in organization and discretion. In addition, a large proportion had been shipped to Bahia as a result of their involvement in Usman dan Fodio’s jihad or in other Islamic-inspired movements, and so they had military experience. There is little doubt that the events in Central Sudan had an impact on the history of Bahia, but it was perhaps more the technical aspect of that war than its religious ideology that played out in the New World.
Islam was also a galvanizing force. It reinforced a sense of self-worth in human beings who were brutalized and constantly humiliated. It even instilled or strengthened a feeling of superiority over the “Christian and kafir dogs.” Muslims certainly thought that their religion was morally far above any other. Furthermore, to be a Muslim was prestigious because of the literacy Islam emphasized, and because it gave personal power to men and women who chose to impose a discipline on themselves rather than to submit to another people’s discipline. To be a Muslim meant to be part of a close-knit, upwardly mobile community that looked after its members, offered them diverse activities and services, and was charitable and well organized. It was a world in itself, with its own particular sets of beliefs that did not depend on the slaveholders’ view of the world. To be light skinned had no value; to be a domestic or a fieldhand meant nothing. A free man in this context was not superior to an enslaved one. Learned slaves were the teachers of free men; enslaved and jailed clerics were the spiritual leaders of the community.
In retrospect, the chance that a slave revolt would have succeeded in Bahia seems very slim, as the slaveholders could depend on well-armed militia, the police, and the army. But it is necessary to look at the context to understand why the Muslims were certain they could be victorious. At the time of the first attempted revolt, in 1807, two important uprisings of the downtrodden had already been successful in these Africans’ history. In Central Sudan, where most of the Muslims came from, Usman dan Fodio’s jihad, which counted many slaves among its combatants, was triumphing. Some years later, during the other Bahian revolts, the Muslims were reaping victories all over Central Sudan. The Africans had been kept abreast of the events through the continual arrivals of prisoners. They learned the latest political and military developments in their homeland as wave after wave of warriors disembarked in Brazil.
In the Americas, too, the former slaves of Saint-Domingue had defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, killed or sent away thousands of once seemingly invincible whites, and established the second independent country in the Western hemisphere, after the United States. What had happened on the island sent shock waves throughout the slaveholders’ world. It was known and commented on by the slaves and freemen as well as by the whites. Hardly a year after Haiti’s independence, according to a document of 1805, blacks in Rio de Janeiro were wearing pendants with the effigy of General Jean Jacques Dessalines, who had assumed the title of emperor of Haiti after Independence.43 Right after the Bahia uprising of 1835, a motion by the provincial assembly of Rio stressed, “It is obvious to all that the Haitian doctrines are preached here.”44 It is not a coincidence that the number of slave revolts increased all over the Americas after the Haitian Revolution. A dozen years before the Brazilian Muslim uprising, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, asked for the assistance of the Haitian president as he was planning a general revolt. The Haitians themselves were actively involved in recruitment, trying to entice free blacks to settle on the island. With the example of a working black republic in the New World, as well as news of Muslim ascendancy in the Old, the final separation of the two antagonistic worlds created by American slavery could be seen as a distinct possibility.
Another way for the Africans to escape the world of slavery was to leave it completely. The return to Africa was a recurrent theme in the slave cultures, expressed in folktales, funeral practices, and songs. On the Sea Islands, for example, slaves buried their dead near the water so that they could more easily cross the ocean. In the same spirit, tales of flying Africans leaving for their homeland abounded all over the Americas and the Caribbean. And for a small minority of Africans, going back became a reality.
As assessed in chapter 4, Muslims, because of their religion, may have had an added incentive to liberate themselves; for the same reason, once free they may have been more eager to leave the countries of their enslavement. This propensity is exemplified in an anecdote that Colonel Malenfant reported in 1791. After he had a conversation with Tamerlan, the teacher and marabout enslaved in Saint-Domingue, he wrote, “He is the only slave whom I found willing to go back to Africa; more than thirty to whom I talked about this, said that they preferred Saint-Domingue.”45 Malenfant added wisely, “Were they telling the truth?” Maybe not; but it is significant that only an identified Muslim, among some thirty people, clearly stated his desire to go back home. Tamerlan could not act on his wish, but freed African Muslims in different parts of the New World tried to, and some actually did, return to their native lands.
The first widely documented—if not the first actual—case of an African going back home is that of Ayuba Suleyman Diallo. After eighteen months of captivity, he left Maryland for London, where he was used as an Arabic translator by Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Royal Geographical Society. Touted as a curiosity for his writing ability, noble birth, and regal behavior, Diallo met the royal family and was the toast of the salons. He finally set sail to his native land, with letters from the Royal African Company that recommended to its factors in the Gambia to use him “with the greatest respect and all the Civility you possibly can.”46
Having landed on August 8, 1734, at Fort James, Gambia, Diallo started his journey back to Bundu in Senegal in the company of British factor Francis Moore. In an extraordinary coincidence, on the first evening of their trip Diallo came across the very men who had kidnapped him three years before. “Job, tho’ a very even-temper’d Man at other times,” wrote Moore, “could not contain himself when he saw them, but fell into a most terrible passion, and was for killing them with his broad Sword and Pistols, which he always took care to have about him.”47 Instead, the former victim engaged his abductors in conversation. He inquired about their king and learned that “amongst the Goods for which he sold Job to Captain Pyke there was a Pistol, which the King used commonly to wear slung about his Neck with a String …, one Day this accidentally went off, and the Balls lodging in his Throat, he died presently.” Diallo fell to his knees and “returned Thanks to Mahomet for making this Man die by the very Goods for which he sold him into Slavery.” There was much to be thankful for, as Diallo was only the second man, as a Pulo remarked to Moore, “ever known to come back to this Country, after having been once carried a Slave out of it by White Men.”48
Diallo’s father had died before his son’s arrival, but he had received his letters from England and knew that his son was free and on his way home. The son “wept grievously” at the news of his father’s death. His four children were well. One of his two wives had remarried, but he was philosophical about it. The woman and her new husband, he said, “could not help thinking I was dead, for I was gone to a Land from whence no Pholey ever yet returned.”49 There is no information on the man who preceded Diallo back to Bundu, but a third man soon returned. During and after his enslavement, Diallo did not forget Lamine Ndiaye (variously spelled Lahmin Jay, Loumein Yoai, Lahamin Joy, or Loumein Yoas in contemporary documents), the unfortunate Wolof companion who had been abducted with him. While in England, he had asked for Ndiaye’s release. On returning to Maryland, Thomas Bluett had found Ndiaye, and with funds provided by the duke of Montague, the man was redeemed in 1737. After a few weeks in London, he sailed back to Gambia in February 1738.
Diallo remained in Bundu but kept a close relationship with the British. They had hoped that with him as their ambassador, and through his connections, they would have easy access to the gold-rich Galam region and the gum-rich Ferlo savanna. Diallo made several trips with officials from the Royal African Company to prospect trade possibilities. The results were disappointing, but he maintained contact with the company and its successor, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, for forty years. He died in 1773 at age seventy-two.
Starting a few years after Diallo’s return, there was a steady, if not large, stream of men and women of African descent leaving the Americas for Africa. In the United States, as also in Great Britain and later in Brazil, the movement that sent blacks to Africa was concerned with protecting slavery by expelling the free blacks. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded by white men in 1816, had for its objective, as defined by Speaker of the House and future secretary of state and supporter Henry Clay, “to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.” It was expected that the free blacks, useless in America, would be useful in Africa, as they would “civilize” and Christianize the continent and develop the natives’ taste for American goods. Through the society’s efforts, fewer than seven thousand emancipated and free blacks out of a population of about four hundred thousand, which represented 12 percent of the black community, settled in Africa between 1816 and the beginning of the Civil War.
Most free blacks’ organizations were opposed to African colonization, seeing it as a racist, proslavery scheme. Their reasons ranged from their unwillingness to separate themselves from those who were still enslaved, to fear that their departure would make the institution of slavery more secure, to a sense of alienation from Africa. In fact, more than twice as many free men and women chose to emigrate to Canada as to Liberia. Very few Liberians coming from North America were first-generation Africans because the manumission laws in the United States, different from those in effect in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies, were restrictive and more favorable to the native born. Also, the African-born population was smaller in the United States than it was generally in Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of U.S. blacks who went “back” to Africa were, in fact born in America.
Given its general lack of success, the American Colonization Society was very eager to help anybody who wanted to leave. That was exactly Ibrahima abd al Rahman’s wish. Not only did he want to go back to Timbo, but his departure was a condition of his emancipation, insisted on by his former owner. It was therefore only natural that the man and the organization would work together.
Ibrahima and his wife, Isabella, were anxious to leave the United States, but one major problem prevented them from doing so immediately. When he had said his good-byes to Natchez, Mississippi, and forty years of servitude, Ibrahima had left, in the words of President John Quincy Adams “five sons and eight grandchildren—all in slavery, and he wishes that they might be all emancipated, and be sent with or to him.”50 If he were to go back to Timbo without them, emphasized the desperate father, he would not survive long. When President Adams turned down his request for help, Ibrahima found the support of the American Colonization Society. The society would not pay to free the family—this was contrary to its principles—but agreed to help him raise funds through its networks of friends, agents, and benefactors.
The society had its own agenda, however, and placed high hopes in the old man. It hoped that once he was restored as a ruler of Futa Jallon, Ibrahima could be of help to the ACS in Liberia, about three hundred miles from Timbo. Moreover, as was envisioned with a flourish in the African Repository, the organ of the ACS, Ibrahima might “become the chief pioneer of civilization to the unenlightened Africa—… armed with the Bible, he may be the foremost of that band of pilgrims who shall rock back the mighty waves of darkness and superstition, and plant the cross of the Redeemer upon the furthermost mountains of Kong!”51 (Kong was a Muslim trading enclave in what is today the Ivory Coast.)
Ibrahima was not given any handouts. He worked himself to release his family. In full “Moorish” regalia, with subscription book in hand, he attended events and parades and met members of Congress and government—including, once again, President Adams, who declined to subscribe—as well as the general public, for whom he wrote Al-Fatiha in the hope of raising the $8,500 demanded by Thomas Foster. He patiently sat through patronizing, ignorant, condescending speeches that described him as a former barbarian and pagan and Africa as a “dark region” thirsty for the gospel of Christ.
In the course of his continued efforts to take his children and grandchildren back with him to Africa, Ibrahima met two men who became instrumental in the elder man’s quest. The first was the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet, father of deaf-mute education in the United States. Gallaudet at first was shocked at the African’s criticism of the Christians and sent him a Bible in Arabic. He, too, had grand designs for the Muslim, envisioning him as the envoy of Christ to Africa. With age Ibrahima had mellowed, the pastor thought; enslavement had softened him, and maybe divine grace had touched him. To Gallaudet, these were all good reasons for Ibrahima’s having had to remain a slave for so long. Had he returned to Africa sooner, Gallaudet conjectured, Ibrahima would have done so with “his Moorish disposition and his Moorish sword.”52 The pastor saw Ibrahima’s and Africa’s redemption in the old man’s forty years of servitude and expected him to be the instrument of evangelization in the “interior of Africa.”
Ibrahima humored Gallaudet in his expectations. He sent the pastor a letter, assuring him that he would “get many to become Christians.” He went as far as to state that when he had left Futa Jallon forty years earlier, almost all the youngsters were Christians—an obvious lie. In fact, the letter in its entirety is woven with lies and deception. But Ibrahima’s reasons for deception can be found in the postscript: “I have five sons and eight grandchildren. I am sorry to go to my own country and leave them behind in slavery. If I can find any way to get them, I shall try to get them before I go to my own country.”53 Ibrahima was trying to sell himself as a missionary in the hope of raising sympathy for his only cause: the liberation of his family and their moving to Timbo.
Not only was Muslim Ibrahima to be a Christian missionary, but he was also to be the spearhead of a major commercial enterprise. His second helper was Arthur Tappan, a wealthy importer, an abolitionist, and New York’s foremost philanthropist. A supporter of colonization, Tappan envisioned a commercial venture that would send immigrants and goods to Liberia and import African products. His project was to use Ibrahima’s connections and influence as a member of a ruling family to open up trade with the hinterland.
Ibrahima abd al Rahman had suddenly become a precious asset to the ACS and was viewed as the main figure in its colonization scheme. But his financial, and therefore familial, needs remained unfulfilled. His efforts notwithstanding, Ibrahima and his wife left without their sons and grandchildren. On February 7, 1829, they boarded the Harriet with 150 settlers bound for Liberia. They arrived in Cape Mesurado on March 18, and Ibrahima immediately turned to the only God he had known. He had left a Muslim and come back a Muslim. Tragically, Ibrahima, who had been sick during the rainy season, died in Monrovia on July 6. He was sixty-seven and had been a slave for forty years. Ibrahima never saw Timbo again, but he made sure that his manuscripts in Arabic were sent to his family.
Ibrahima’s life was tragic to the end. Even though his dream of going back to Africa had materialized, it was bittersweet. He never saw his family or his country. All his descendants were still enslaved. For a full year he had tried to raise money in Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. He had met powerful and wealthy men, but in the end, his efforts had brought him only $3,500, less than half the amount requested by Thomas Foster. Nobody in America, not even the rich philanthropist Tappan, was willing to participate in the redeeming of Ibrahima’s children. Yet as soon as his family in Timbo heard about his children’s predicament, they sent him a caravan loaded with $7,000 in gold dust. In another bitter twist of fate, the porters learned of Ibrahima’s death before they reached Monrovia and turned back.
Two months after Ibrahima passed away, Thomas Foster died. His heirs were willing to sell the slaves he had bequeathed them. Tappan used the $3,500 Ibrahima had raised to redeem Lee; Simon; Simon’s wife, Hannah; and their five children. In December 1830 they landed in Monrovia, where they were reunited with their mother. Ibrahima and Isabella’s three other sons, daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren remained enslaved in Mississippi. When their parents had left them in slavery almost three years before, promising them their freedom, the sons, according to Andrew Marschalk, had had “a look of silent agony in their eyes.”54 One can only imagine the horror and despair that those who were forced to remain must have felt. At least three generations of Ibrahima’s descendants remained enslaved.
A few years after Ibrahima abd al Rahman made his way back to West Africa, another famous Muslim, Abu Bakr al Siddiq, left Jamaica, the country to which he had been deported as an adolescent. Years earlier the duke of Montebello had tried to redeem him, but his owner, Mr. Anderson, had refused to let him go because his ability to keep the property’s records in Arabic was of great value. On Richard Madden’s insistence, however, and with a compensation of twenty pounds raised by sympathetic inhabitants of Kingston, Anderson agreed to dispense with the four years of apprenticeship Abu Bakr still had to serve under British law. After thirty years of slavery Abu Bakr was free, but he had one more wish: he wanted to go back to Africa.
Madden had hoped that the Royal Geographical Society could use Abu Bakr as a guide and facilitator in its African explorations. The society, however, thought he was useless. The area he knew, Timbuktu, had been a mystery years before, but as the secretary explained in a letter to Madden, much had been learned in the past few years, and what were presently needed were accurate surveys and scientific examinations, “for which an uneducated native is quite unsuited.”55 Moreover, continued the secretary, having left thirty years before, Abu Bakr had become a stranger, and if he was indeed of noble birth, as he claimed to be, he would be even more useless, as political changes had affected the power structure. As a last straw, the society, displaying its ignorance of African culture, advised Abu Bakr to stay in Kingston where he had friends, because nobody in Africa would care for him.
Fortunately for the forty-five-year-old descendant of Muhammad, friendly men were willing to help. Another magistrate took Abu Bakr from Jamaica to London, and Madden recommended him to John Davidson, who was preparing a private expedition to Timbuktu. In September 1835, Abu Bakr sailed to Gibraltar and from there to Morocco. As soon as he set foot on African soil, orders came “from the palace to treat him with respect, as he was a Mulay (prince),” or descendant of the Prophet.56 Moreover, it was learned that one of his relatives was presently the “sheik of Tomboktu.”
After a year in Morocco, the expedition finally left for the Niger River in November 1836. Three weeks later it was attacked, and John Davidson was killed. In 1841, Richard Madden was appointed on the Gold Coast and made inquiries about Abu Bakr’s fate. In June the British vice-consul at Mogadore relayed to him the information that Abu Bakr had reached Jenne—about 250 miles south of Timbuktu—but that nothing else was known of his whereabouts.
Abu Bakr al Siddiq, like Diallo and Ibrahima, went back to Africa on an individual basis. Strong wills, a religion that excited curiosity and gave them moral strength, noble origins, and a cortege of sympathetic whites helped these men achieve a unique feat for Africans: going back to their families. The three men were redeemed by men who saw in them a unique opportunity to advance their own projects in Africa, whether missionary, economic, political, or educational. Living among the Christians, even in the terrible conditions of slavery, had somehow “civilized” the Africans in the eyes of their benefactors, and they could thus be used as facilitators. As far as the Westerners were concerned, the slaves’ release was not the end of their adventure; they still had to be useful. Diallo was a willing participant, but it is clear that Abu Bakr just wanted to be left alone. Lamine Ndiaye disappeared from the records and probably chose to stay clear of the British. As nothing is known about the “Pholey” who had gone back to Bundu before Ndiaye and Diallo, chances are that he, too, preferred to remain anonymous. What Ibrahima would have done is a matter of conjecture, but his behavior in Monrovia leads one to think that once his family had been redeemed, he would have had nothing more to do with the Americans. Another Muslim, Lamine Kebe, who went back to West Africa in 1835 after being enslaved in the American South, left no trace of his whereabouts.
The “philanthropic” policy, with its underlying self-serving goals, that sent some African Muslims back to Africa was not successful. It was an arrogant miscalculation on the part of the British and the Americans to think that these men could become the agents of Western acculturation in Africa. They all had demonstrated a fierce cultural resistance during their years of enslavement, at a time when they were completely subjected to the power of their owners; therefore, it should have seemed doubtful that they would, once free and at home, engage in a process that would lead to the Christianization of their homeland.
Diallo, Ibrahima, and Abu Bakr became celebrities of sorts, but there were anonymous Africans who succeeded in going back to their native land through their own efforts, and whose stories have not been told. What they accomplished was more difficult than what the three men did. They first had to liberate themselves, working overtime and saving money to buy their own bodies. Then they had to save again, to pay for their passage to West Africa. As they shared a communal life in America, worshiping together and being bonded by religion, they usually left together. Examples of these group departures appear in Baron Roger’s novel Kélédor, which well describes the chain of events that led Africans from enslavement to freedom and back to their countries.
In Puerto Rico, where Kélédor was living after the Haitian Revolution, Roger’s hero met a group of Senegalese Fulani who introduced him to coreligionists, among whom were men who, like himself, had fought in the almami Abdel Kader’s army. They informed him that they had formed the project of going back “to the fields of Senegal.” Eager to join them, Kélédor worked hard to get enough money to pay for his passage. Soon the group made up of twenty-nine men and women was able to charter a ship for the Canary Islands. They were encouraged by the fact that two previous expeditions of the same type had been successful, news that Kélédor and his companions may have learned from newly arrived slaves or from black mariners. Baron Roger specifies that in 1819 and 1822 two groups of Senegalese, formerly from Cuba, went back to their native land. The second contingent was made up of thirty-two individuals who had sailed from Havana to Tenerife, where they had boarded a French vessel that transported them to Senegal. Several groups of Africans whose religious affiliation has not been recorded also left Cuba for Africa, but in the three cases Roger mentions, the returnees were Muslims, and those who had been converted to Catholicism went back to Islam.57
A particular Muslim community’s efforts at repatriation have been well documented. Alternatively called the Free Mandingo of Trinidad, the Mandingo Society, and the Free Mohammedans, the group was made up of former slaves who had bought their freedom and of recaptives. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, they made a concerted effort at keeping their traditions alive, and their common religion was the cement that kept them together as well as the axis around which they built their community of successful men. They were all Muslims, but not all were Mandingo.58 On January 2, 1838, twelve men signed a petition giving their real and Western names. The former reveal their ethnic and geographic diversity. Mohammed Waatra (as spelled in the original document) was a Juula. The Watara came originally from Kong in Côte d’Ivoire and settled in modern Burkina Faso. Mohammad Sisei was a Manding from the Gambia. Abouberika Torre, or rather Toure, may have been a Manding from Senegal or the Gambia, a Bambara from Mali, or a Malinke from Guinea. Hammadi Torrouke was most likely Hammadi Toronke, whose roots were in Futa Toro. As such, he may have been Fulani or Tukulor. Samba Jaiih (Njay) was probably Wolof, as was Malick Job (Joop). Both came from either Senegal or the Gambia. In the letter, the association’s leader, the imam John Mohamed Bath, referred to a “countryman,” Mohammed Houssa, who was—as his name and return to Nigeria indicate—Hausa. He was actually Muhammad Aishatu, who wrote a manuscript in 1817 (see chapter 4). According to Sissei, Bath himself was Susu. Samba Makumba, also called Sampson Boissière and Fonta Torre (Futa Toro), was probably a Sarakole. His name should read Samba ma Kumba, or “Samba whose mother [ma in Sarakole] is Kumba.”59 The origin of Mohammed Habin and Mahommed Balliah is not clear, and two men only gave their first names: Salhiu (Saliu) and Brahima (Ibrahima). The association was thus clearly made not of “Mandingo” only but of men of various ethnic and geographic backgrounds whose bond was Islam.
It was a logical step for the Free Mandingo, or rather Muslims, to wish to go back to their homelands: “We cannot forget our country,” they wrote to the king of England. “Death alone can make us do.”60 Hence, in 1831, they asked the governor to be repatriated; but when they did not obtain satisfaction, they petitioned the British government directly two years later, asking it to buy up their properties and to repatriate them to Senegal or Gambia. They were businessmen and made clear in a letter to the king that they would not leave without being compensated for the property they would leave behind and without being able to pay their debts:
We know you can send us in your ships to our country, but permit us to say according to the law of Mahomet which we revere, a person who owes money and cannot pay is a slave. We owe money here. We want to sell our cocoa and coffee plantations and our slaves, and our houses in town. But there are no purchasers to be found here. We, therefore beg your Majesty to buy them for a fair price so that we may pay our debts, which we cannot do otherwise.61
Bath attributed the Muslims’ success to their cultural and religious principles; but those very religious principles that had helped them become free were now an obstacle. It was because of Islam’s requirements concerning debts that they could not leave. Ironically, besides their natural longing for home, the possibility of living their religion freely was undoubtedly an incentive to go back to Africa, but the willingness to respect the Qur’anic teachings in Trinidad could prevent them from actually setting foot in their native land. In January 1834, their request for payment and repatriation was denied.
Four years later the men once again appealed to the government. This time they stressed that they needed an armed ship to avoid falling into the hands of the slave dealers, still very active despite the official abolition of the international slave trade by most European and American nations. The British authorities denied their request once again. The governor summoned Bath on April 23, 1838, and informed him that the administration in London wanted the men and their families to know that they would face danger in going back to Africa, including the possibility of being enslaved again. Two days later, the association sent a determined and somewhat ironic letter to the governor:
We respectfully beg leave to inform your Excellency that we have communicated with our tribe, and have resolved to brave all dangers and run all risks, if the British government will only afford us a passage to Sierra Leone. Those dangers and risks, we do not apprehend to be either as serious or numerous as the philanthropic Secretary of State for the Colonial Department in his anxiety for our safety and welfare seems to anticipate, as some of our tribe have already performed the journey from our country to Sierra Leone overland. On our arrival at that settlement we shall meet with a number of our brethren, and we shall then make such arrangements as will ensure us a safe journey across the Country. This of course will be done at our own expense from our own resources. We never thought of taxing the generosity of the British government so far as to require an escort from the Sea Coast.62
The Muslims of Port of Spain were well informed of the political situation in West Africa. They may have obtained the information from recaptives settled in Trinidad or perhaps, given the precision of their knowledge and their plan, from letters entrusted to black sailors by their “brethren.” They knew they could count on their coreligionists and compatriots to take them home safely—another indication that Islamic networks were functioning very well on both sides of the ocean.
No further mentions were made of the Muslims’ efforts at repatriation. It appears they were promised free passage at some point, but the cost of chartering a boat and the precedent it would set finally convinced the British government not to grant their request. Bath died in September 1838, in Port of Spain. Another prominent member of the society, Mohammedo Maguina, whose signature appears on the 1838 petition, died in 1852 at one hundred years of age. According to his obituary, Maguina had first been enslaved in Saint-Domingue and lived through the revolution. He had enrolled in a black Grenadier company of the British army when Great Britain invaded and occupied the western part of the French colony from 1793 to 1798 and had arrived in Trinidad following the Treaty of Amiens between France and Great Britain, in 1802.63 Some of his coreligionists, however, may have managed to go back to Africa after the collective plan finally failed, as some had done on their own while the rest of the group was still engaged in its repatriation efforts. At least three men sailed to England with their families to appeal directly to the government. One, Mohammedu Sisei, a former Qur’anic teacher, was a recaptive who had served in the Third West India Regiment for fourteen years. When discharged, he should have received a plot of land or a pension. As neither was provided to him, he brought his case to the Colonial Office in London, asking for his pension and free passage to Freetown. Sisei, Muhammadu Aishatu (a.k.a. Philip Finlay and Mohammed Houssa)—who, according to Bath, met with Queen Victoria—and a third Muslim, named Jackson Harvey, finally sailed to Sierra Leone, whence they proceeded to their respective countries.64
Though a few individuals achieved their goal, the Trinidadian Muslims as a group were not successful in their efforts to go back to their native land. A combination of factors may explain their failure. Besides the religious argument concerning their reluctance to leave without paying their debts, they may indeed have faced serious obstacles. Because they had invested their money in houses, slaves, and coffee plantations that they could not sell, they may not have had enough cash to charter a boat. Ironically, less successful freed Africans may have had a better chance at leaving because their assets were not tied up in immovable investments.
Among the people who remained was a man named Slamank, who wrote a moving and fascinating petition to the lieutenant governor. In a few lines, he exposed and—firmly—denounced the reality of capture, forced labor, the separation of families, and the travesty of “abolition.” As was the norm with his coreligionists, his Muslim identity was crucial to him, and he presented himself clearly as such and as an imam, a member of a “sacred profession.” In another confirmation of the Mandingo association’s importance as a mutual-aid society, he stressed that it would take care of him:
To the Right Honourable Sir G. Hill, Bart. Colonel of the Londonderry Militia, Lieutenant-Governor, Sfc. fyo. The petition of Slamank, otherwise Adam, aged eighty-five years, a Mahomedan priest of the Mandingo nation, most humbly showeth: That he was thirty-five years of age when he was sold into slavery; and notwithstanding his sacred profession, has been forced to labour in the fields, and undergo the sufferings and degradation of slavery for fifty years. That all his family have been separated from him in his old age, his children from time to time having been sold; and that he now remains alone on the Marli estate without family or friend. That on the 1st August, 1834, the petitioner, then eighty-four years old, was told that the King had made him free, but that he must still be an apprentice to learn the same trade of digging cane which he had been practising for fifty years. The petitioner, whose blood had warmed at the prospect of enjoying freedom, even for the last few days of his wretched existence, must now abandon all hope of living to see the day of his redemption. He implores your Excellency to allow him to go free. He was born free, and he wishes to die free. He renounces all claim to remuneration for fifty years’ servitude. The Mandingo church in Port of Spain will support him. Extend your protecting arm, O your Excellency! and the petitioner, &c.65
At the same time that the Trinidadian Muslims were launching their repatriation campaign, scores of other Muslims were actually sailing back to Africa. In the aftermath of the failed insurrection in Bahia, hundreds of free Africans, most of them Muslims, were expelled from Brazil or went back to their homeland voluntarily. In November 1835, two hundred suspected men and women were deported to Whydah, in present-day Benin. But public opinion wanted more. All free Africans, it was proposed, should be sent back to where they came from. A decree authorizing the deportation of the suspects—even if they had not been sentenced—was issued in March, and it was made law two months later.
When the first contingent of deported Africans arrived in Whydah, it was well received by the local authority.66 The deportees, many of whom were masons and carpenters, were given a piece of land where they erected their own village and started to cultivate. The Muslims expelled from Bahia were doing well, and when word of the welcome they had received reached their former town, hundreds of freed Africans decided to sail home.67 Within a few months, more than seven hundred asked for passports. Two free Africans who were described as rich, Antonio da Costa and Joao Monteiro, chartered a British boat to take them, their families, and 150 other free Africans to their native land. They arrived safely and disembarked in the ports of Elmina, Winnebah, and Agoue in April 1836. Another group, of two to three hundred individuals, also chartered a British boat to take them back to Lagos, whence they had been taken in the first place. Their leader was a wealthy freed African who, in order to finance the operation, sold all his property and some of his slaves and liberated six others, who accompanied him. Interestingly, this man had been through the Middle Passage in 1821, and sixty of the individuals he took back to Africa had traveled with him on the same slave ship.68 They all had acquired their freedom within fifteen years. A strong solidarity existed among them, which had started on the slave ship or perhaps before—they may have been taken as prisoners of war at the same time—and lasted during and after their enslavement. They are a perfect example of the type of community built by the Muslims: a close-knit group made up of hard-working and successful people.
When these Africans left Brazil, Bahia was in the midst of a vicious anti-Muslim and anti-African fervor. For six months the Muslims who had been condemned to be flogged were whipped publicly, until their sentences of up to a thousand lashes were completed. Searches and arrests lasted for months. The repression was so violent and blind that the chief of police denounced soldiers who were killing and wounding “peaceful blacks.” Without a doubt, this hostile atmosphere contributed to the numerous departures of Muslims and other Africans.
The repatriation movement lasted until the abolition of slavery in 1888, with peaks between 1850 and 1860. In 1852 a delegation of Mina from Rio de Janeiro told representatives of the English Society of Friends that they, too, wanted to go back to Africa, but they wished to know if the coast was really free of slavers. They informed the missionaries that another group of sixty-three Mina had left the year before for the Bight of Benin. The shipbroker they had retained procured a copy of the charter for the Quakers; it showed that the group of free Africans, which included women and children, had paid $4,000 for the passage and had landed safely. As a token of their appreciation for the Quakers’ interest, the Mina of Rio gave them “a paper beautifully written in Arabic by one of their chiefs who is a Mohammedan.”69 The Mina were still involved in repatriation societies in the late 1860s, as reported by the Count de Gobineau.
Some Brazilian Muslims settled in the Gold Coast and became the avant-garde of the fast-growing Muslim neighborhoods in Cape Coast and Winneba.70 Another group of returned Muslims was made up of soldiers who had been forcibly recruited by the Dutch, after the close of the international slave trade, to serve in the Dutch West Indies and in their Asian possessions. They, too, established themselves in the Gold Coast, between Elmina and Cape Coast.71 There were many Hausa among them. The vast majority, however, relocated in Dahomey, Togo, and Nigeria.
The returned “Brazilians,” or Brésiliens, were generally successful. A British traveler to Dahomey (present-day Benin) in the mid nineteenth century described their achievements:
The country ten or twelve miles round Whydah is very interesting, the soil good, land level, and in many places well cultivated by people returned from the Brazils.… Many of them were driven away from Brazil on account of their being concerned in an attempted revolution amongst the slaves there, who turned against their owners. These people are generally from the Foolah and Eya countries. Many, it appears, were taken away at the age of twenty or twenty-four years, consequently they can give a full account of their route to Bagadry, where they were shipped. They are by far the most industrious people I have found. Several very fine farms, about six or seven miles from Whydah, are in a high state of cultivation. The houses are clean and comfortable, and are situated in some of the most beautiful spots that imagination can picture.72
In another example, hundreds of miles away from Whydah, in the heart of the Sokoto caliphate, a returned Pulo, drawing on his painfully earned experience in Brazil, had built a sugar mill and a refinery.73 The Brazilians were used to the ways of both the Africans and the Europeans, and some capitalized on this knowledge: they served as a sort of go-between. Souleiman Paraiso, for instance, whose father had been transported to Bahia as a child and had returned to Africa in 1848, became a powerful businessman and the adviser of King Toffa of Porto-Novo. His signature appears on the treaties signed between France and Dahomey.74
As they had been in their country of servitude, the Muslim Brazilians who returned to Africa remained a close-knit and devout community. In Whydah they formed their own neighborhood, called Maro. Those who settled in Porto-Novo erected the large central mosque, which looks like a cathedral. In Lagos, one of the main mosques was built by a returnee who went back home in the 1880s.
After the abolition of slavery, some returnees went back and forth between Africa and Brazil, strengthening the commercial, religious, and social ties that had existed long before Emancipation between Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic. An interesting case illustrates this continuing relationship between Brazil and Africa. The Nago Muslim Paulo Jose Ferreira, who was born in Bahia in 1886—two years before Emancipation—traveled to Lagos with his parents and sisters when he was three. As a young man he went back to Brazil, leaving his parents, siblings, and children behind in Lagos and Kano. He was fluent in Yoruba, Arabic, and Portuguese and made a living selling African goods in Rio and giving “confidential advice to blacks and whites on love, health, and religion.”75 Paulo Jose Ferreira may have been a marabout, genuine or otherwise. In any event, the large income he derived from his activities helped his children live very comfortably in Nigeria.
Because the Brazilians had returned to Africa as nominal Catholics, the priests who were stationed on the coast were eager to count them among their flock. Their Christian names notwithstanding, the Muslims did not display any intention of keeping a faith that had been imposed on them. They had remained secretly faithful to their religion overseas, and they went back to practicing it overtly once in Africa. The priests were puzzled and accused them of being deceivers, who had presented a facade to the white society of Brazil while retaining their old habits.76
By running away from the mines and the plantations; by organizing and leading revolts; and by trying to or actually going back to Africa, the Muslims firmly established their opposition to the world of their enslavement. They were indomitable opponents whose antagonism was rooted in the normal hatred the enslaved feels for the enslaver, in the ordinary longing from freedom, but also in religious certitude and cultural self-confidence.
Even though they were far outnumbered and had little, in material terms, to help them assault and weaken the power structure, the Muslims were persistent and at times successful in their endeavors. The manner in which they pursued their objectives was unique, in that they used all the advantages and tools Islam gave them: fortitude, faith, literacy, occult protection, common language, sense of community, organization, frugality, and hope.