A history of race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960
By: Bruce S. Hall
Series: African studies -- [115]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9781107002876
Subjects: Black race; Blacks; Slavery; Islam and culture; History
Description: "This book traces the development of African arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in the Niger Bend in northern Mali"--

"The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating - and intensifying - civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; Part I. Race Along the Desert-Edge, c. 1600-1900: 1. Making race in the Sahel, c. 1600-1900; title: 2. Reading the blackness of the Sudan, c. 1600-1900; Part II. Race and the Colonial Encounter, c. 1830-1936: 3. Meeting the Tuareg; 4. Colonial conquest and statecraft in the Niger Bend, c. 1893-1936; title: Part III. The Morality of Descent, 1893-1940: 5. Defending hierarchy: Tuareg arguments about authority and descent, c. 1893-1940; title: 6. Defending slavery: the moral order of inequality, c. 1893-1940; title: 7. Defending the river: Songhay arguments about land, c. 1893-1940; title: Part IV. Race and Decolonization, 1940-1960: 8. The racial politics of decolonization, 1940-1960; title: Conclusion