The modern-day conversation over slavery In the Middle East and North Africa, is usually stunted by the oft-regurgitated apologetic trope on the benign treatment of slaves in the Islamic world, that stands in contrast to the brutality of chattel slavery. Although historians warn us from reducing the history of black presence in the Maghreb to slavery, the black-Maghrebean subject’s presence in the North African belt is still linked to his/ her servile origin. Even less are the visual and literary narratives on women within this particular demographic. Historically, female slaves have outnumbered male slaves in the northern Muslim milieu. Yet, their absence in contemporary historiographies and the scarcity of their narratives is striking. Stories of concubines and female slaves were only retrieved in the fictional and autobiographical writing of North African writers who spared little ink to flesh out their stories. Through an analysis of a literary Maghrebean artistic productions, this paper seeks to probe into the multiple ways in which the black-Maghrebean female is represented. I pay a special attention to the theme of gender, seeking to recover the buried stories of the black concubines and their female descendants, who in the word of historian Chouki Elhamel are the “tragic heroine in North African slavery”. I retrieve scenes I encounter in the fictive memoir of Moroccan Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass, Taher Ben Jelloun’s Moha Le Fou Moha Le Sage and the Libyan writer Najwa BenShatwan’s The Slave Pens.

Traditional sites of Turkish national memory carry little to no trace of the historic relationship between Turkey and the continent of Africa. The lack of statues, holidays and textbooks indicating the profound part Africa played in the emergence of a contemporary Turkey mirrors the collective unfamiliarity with idioms of ‘Africanity’ in the Turkish national landscape. This paper reads the relationship between land, power, and history within the context of Turkey to expose the Africa embedded within a Turkish national landscape. While land accumulation has been a primary concern for all nation-states throughout history, Turkey’s relationship to its physical geography is unique. Land acquisition and redistribution were fundamental parts, for example, of the Armenian Genocide and continue to remain relevant in Turkey’s investment in its “Kurdish Question”. African-descended Turkish people’s absence from the Turkish national memory is intimately tied to their history as landless peoples. Land-ful peoples, or peoples with historical claims to the lands that now constitute Turkey had to be accounted for in order to be regulated while land-less peoples did not need to be accounted for in order to be regulated. Still, Turks of African descent’s relationships to land are numerous. Many Turks of African descent along the Aegean coast come from generations of rural, land-laboring families. Land plays an integral part in their understandings of themselves as Turkish, African-descended peoples. This paper analyzes the plant medicines and plant practices that have been developed by Turks of African descent in communities outside of Izmir. From single plants, like vitex and shepard’s purse to whole mixes this paper takes the materiality of the land seriously to expose how the Turkish physical landscape maps historical ties to Africa. The research in this paper is based off 30 interviews with rural and mountain inhabiting Turks of African descent living in towns outside of Izmir, Turkey and has been done as a collaborative project with the Afrikal?lar Kültür, Dayan??ma ve Yard?mla?ma Derne?i (African Culture Solidarity and Aid Organization).

Colonial institutions have deep and long-lasting effects on colonized societies. South Sudan and Eritrea represent the only two cases of ethnic group coalitions successfully gaining independence from a rump African state. The two states underwent contrasting colonial experiences and legacies. In South Sudan, intra-ethnic conflict was a perennial characteristic of political life throughout the consecutive wars for independence. Whereas Eritrean ethnic groups mostly avoided intra-ethnic conflict during their independence struggle. This paper seeks to explain this dichotomy by arguing that the different colonial institutions put in place by Italy in Eritrea and Britain in (South) Sudan, respectively, led to divergent ethnic political arrangements. It will argue that Italy's settler approach to colonial rule, which led to the creation of an Eritrean national identity, fused pre-existing ethnic cleavages. However, Britain's "closed areas" policies made ethnic cleavages more salient and prevented the establishment of any identity category above tribe. Moreover, the different levels of institutional capacities left behind by colonialism, which informed the resulting post-colonial political institutions, led to the divergent approaches employed by those elites that mobilized and led the ethnic coalitions in the two countries. The leaders of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and its successor, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), were able to build coalitions upon the shared myth of Eritrean-ness created by colonialism. While the both the Anya-Nya Movement (1955-1972) and Sudan People's Liberation Movement (1983-2005) in southern Sudan were forced to put together fragile, negative coalitions of southern Sudanese ethnic groups in opposition to a northern-other. The paper posits a theory of identity category hierarchization that it uses to explain the process each country's elites underwent to create secessionist coalitions. The paper will have implications for understanding existing ethnic coalitional politics, as well as the historical legacies of colonial institutions in the region and beyond.

This paper seeks to examine the way Sudanese Muslims identify themselves in light of a White Arab Islamic hegemonic world through the discourse of the Sudanese Mahdist State. Throughout the inception of the Mahdist State, many scholars have produced works discussing its shortly-lived reign (1885—1898) in ways both disparaging and praiseworthy. The works for which disparage Muhammad ibn Ahmad, otherwise known as the Mahdi, are of the first produced sources regarding this topic. These are mostly English sources which are concerned with maintaining British hegemony on Egypt and sought to reclaim the territory of the Sudan which had been under Turkish governance since 1821. Thus, literature of this sort vilified the Mahdist State. Scholars such as Francis Reginald Wingate promulgated resentment against the Mahdiyya so as to influence British public opinion for support of an invasion on the Sudan. It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that published material started to reflect a more academic evaluation of the Mahdiyya as oppose to a polemical or propagandistic account. The literature on the Mahdist State would take a pivotal turn from narratives drawing on political inspiration to intellectually motivated charges. The narratives for which are praiseworthy belong to Sudanese scholars who had attempted to vindicate the Mahdi after years of orientalist and Arab repudiation. Examining Sudanese representation of the Mahdi will help determine the extent to which Sudanese Muslims crave out their own Islamic narrative in light of a tradition and clergy which view the Mahdi as heretical. Scholars such as Omar Beshir, Makki Shibayka, Muhammad Al-Qaddal, Abdallahi Ali Ibrahim, and more discusses the Mahdi in political terms whereas Arabs from other parts of the Muslim world reduces him to a religious deviate. These two contrasting narratives allow for the Sudanese Muslim identification to take form. By drawing on the Mahdi, this paper argues that Sudanese Muslims are able to distinguish their Muslim, Arab, and political contexts from what has long been overshadowed by White Arab centrism.