In recent years, enduring cases of anti-Black violence in the Maghrib targeting Black Maghribis and Black Sub-Saharans have lent greater urgency to the question of racial politics in the region. From Casablancan landlords refusing to rent apartments to Sub-Saharan African migrants to the stifled visibility of Black Tunisians, anti-Black violence in the Maghrib remains an ongoing reality. While much attention has been given to the contemporary causes from which the mistreatment of these disparate communities emanates, such a narrow focus belies a longer history of anti-Black racialized body politics within the Maghrib. Most notably, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth signaled to an aspect of this critical analysis of racial relations between the colonizer and the colonized in the colonial moment. Fanon's inquiry leaves open the non-European colonial dynamics in which Black bodies in the Maghrib were marked as other, slave, and inferior. In an effort to understand the historical antecedents of these varied manifestations of anti-Black racialized body politics, this panel examines the genealogy of racial politics within the Maghrib at different historical moments within the pre-modern and modern periods. In particular, we will examine: the historical roots of the distinction between black and non-black bodies in pre-modern writing and the ways in which it was used to mark a physical division between Morocco and the Bilad al-Sudan ("Land of the Blacks"); Morocco's invasion of the Songhai Empire in 1591 and the subsequent shift to racialized practices of slavery in Morocco; and the fundamental role of the abolitionist discourse in the establishment of blackness-slavery assemblage and the overall formation of semantics of racial captivity in Tunisia; and the Haratin's use of nationalist rhetoric within the Anti-Atlas region of Southern Morocco as a means by which to dismantle the patron-client ra'aya system, exploited as means to racialize their bodies and their labor. Collectively, these papers will shed light on how contemporary instances of anti-Black violence in the Maghrib today is best understood as afterlives of these earlier moments.
The earliest extant geographies of the African continent made distinctions between people based on skin color. The Ancient Greeks divided Africa into “Libya” and “Ethiopia” (“burnt-face”), with “Ethiopia” beginning at the Upper Nile and stretched to the Nubian desert in present-day Sudan and “Libya” containing the rest of Africa from the Mediterranean to the edge of the Sahara. While the Romans added different sub-groups to each category, the dichotomy of black and non-black bodies and their corresponding geography remained relatively unchanged.
This division between black and non-black bodies through geography continued in the emerging Arabic tradition. However, the physical territory of “Ethiopia”—translated into Arabic as “Bilad al-Sudan” (“Land of the Blacks”)—grew in scope as a result of the Arab conquests. At the same time, the spread of Islam opened up the possibility of erasing this previous geographical distinction by subsuming them into another geographic entity, the Bilad or Dar al-Islam.
However, the formation and expansion of Muslim states in North Africa during the pre-modern period preserved this geographical distinction between black and non-black bodies.
This paper will trace the ways in which the geography of black bodies interacted with the emerging geography of the Moroccan state during the pre-Modern period. It will track the ways in which Classical ideas of blackness in Africa emerged in Arabic geographies and examine how the construction of a specific and unified “Maghrib” came to rely upon the idea of a clear boundary line with the Bilad al-Sudan.
This paper situates Morocco’s invasion of the West African Songhai Empire in 1591 within the global histories of race, slavery, and capitalism. Morocco’s invasion, which took place during the height of the Sa`di dynasty (1554-1659), provided Morocco with an influx of capital through Black West African slave labor on Morocco’s sugar plantations and its newfound control over the lucrative gold and salt mines of West Africa. Such wealth and power bolstered Morocco’s regional and global position in the vital node where Africa, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Atlantic all converge. This paper will address the following questions: how did Morocco’s shift from enslaving non-Muslims to enslaving Muslim West Africans from the Songhai based on their race lay down the foundations for centuries of anti-Black violence in North Africa? 2) how did Black slave labor from the Songhai allow Morocco to become England’s primary source of sugar imports prior to the rise of sugar plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean? 3) how can we move beyond normative taxonomies that view North and West Africa as separate spaces instead of as regions whose conditions were shaped by one another? Ultimately, my paper aims to build upon Cedric Robinson’s conceptualization of racial capitalism by considering how the Sa`di dynasty was an active player in the rise of racialized forms of slavery that eventually dominated the Atlantic for centuries and whose afterlives continue to endure on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Haratin, socially marginalized within the Anti-Atlas because of their dark skin, began migrating from the Anti-Atlas to the bidonvilles of Casablanca in the late 1930s, which placed them squarely within the epicenter of nationalist protests. Migration from the Oued Noun-Masa-Draa region of southern Morocco constituted a significant portion of the migration into northern port cities. These new arrivals consequently became the bedrock of the modernizing projects of the city, and also the base support of nationalists like Allal al Fassi. Through their participation in wage labor, these newcomers became subsumed within the varied anti-colonial and nationalist struggles, and exposed to the idea of being “Moroccan”. I suggest that the experience of migration, labor politics, and the various nationalist rhetoric to which they were exposed, gave rise to a localized brand of nationalism within Draa river valley oases. This nationalism was largely expressed through economic terms by the Haratin, who for the first time since 1850, were able to use their earnings gained from wage labor activities in the North, to (re)purchase land. The purchasing land was then, the act of dismantling the last vestiges of the ra’aya system, the patron-client system by which their body and labor were racialized. By bringing together these two activities, out and in-migrations, alongside the increase in land (re)acquisition, this paper argues that the Haratin were politically and economically astute actors. It argues as well for the integration of the south into the discourses of nationalism, in contrast to its conceptualization as a region which remained outside the discourse of nationalism in Morocco.
This paper shows how the vanguard moment of abolishing slavery in Tunisia (1846), albeit unprecedented in the African/Arab worlds, did not only fail to unravel the social stigma attached to it in the contemporary moment, but had also racialized the practice and its memory, thereby rendering it an adjunct to blackness. Despite the multiethnic slavery system in which some black Tunisians’ ancestors were incorporated in Ottoman Tunisia, the specters of slavery continue to shape contemporary black Tunisians’ identity formation, stigmatizing them as a primordially foreign group of “genealogical isolates” in a society that is not only vulnerable to the contemporary global racial imaginary but equally to local premodern antecedents of anti-blackness, most embodied in lineage and kinship-based discrimination. Looking at the semantics of blackness in correspondence letters, the abolition edict and reports on slave flights between the first (1846) and the second abolition (1890), I argue that the blackness-slavery assemblage gets inaugurated at a moment of supposed recovery and redemption, heralding an epoch of social death that the color blind policies of the nation state failed to rehabilitate.
