Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (review)

While much of the literature on the global African diaspora tends to focus on the Americas, for centuries significant numbers of black slaves were brought from West Africa to Islamic North Africa and the Middle East; yet only in recent decades have historians begun to examine the histories and experiences of enslaved Africans in the Islamic world. The nine chapters in Race and Slavery in the Middle East contribute to this effort, shedding light on slavery and the experiences of enslaved Africans (described here as trans-Saharan Africans) in the Middle East. By focusing on various nineteenth-century societies, the book demonstrates that enslaved Africans and their cultures made a substantial impact on the Middle East both economically and culturally. It shows that Africans worked as assistants or servants, and when freed, some of them often continued to engage in the kinds of occupations they had engaged in when they were with their masters. In Egypt, many of them, especially rural slaves, worked in the masters’ fields where cotton was grown; in Sudan, conscripted slaves served in Muhammed Ali’s military; across the region, female slaves regularly served as wives, caregivers for the elderly and the young, housekeepers, and cooks. Some of the slaves belonged to wealthy Arabs or Muslim clerics, and others were owned by not-so-wealthy people and Europeans.

There seems to be a consensus on the popular association of Africans’ color and origin with servile status. For example, Terence Walz indicates that the members of the largest group of trans-Saharan Africans, those listed in the 1848 census records of Cairo, were generally listed as Sudaniyyin (blacks) (52). Also, Liat Kozma argues that in Egypt, racial prejudice and detachment from their support networks marked the fate and life choices of manumitted slaves (199). Similarly, both Walz and Cuno found evidence in the census registers of an association of “blackness” or sudani origin with slavery. Nonetheless, the contributors, including Emad Ahmed Helal, offer the cautionary note that “notions of race may not have played a major role” in the enslavement of these sub-Saharan Africans in the Middle East (22). Put differently, the authors claim that it would be naïve to view race relations in the nineteenth-century Middle East as the same as in North American society. Yet race was indeed an issue: as Walz and Cuno point out, in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, black Africans were invariably and colloquially termed “Arabs,” and ethnic Arabs were termed “white Arabs” (9).

The book shows that trans-Saharan Africans (including slaves and ex-slaves) had agency and that they contributed immensely to the shaping of Middle Eastern societies. For instance, the study shows that these Africans made significant contributions to the development of urban popular culture in the Sudan. As Ahmad Sikainga’s chapter on Khartoum demonstrates, these Africans had an impact on Sudanese music, dance, ritual practices, dress, and sports (148). Other chapters also give the enslaved Africans a great deal of agency, as slaves or former slaves used songs, rituals, and more overt forms of resistance to express their concerns, aspirations, and frustrations. In other words, the marginality of slaves, especially women, gave them a relative degree of freedom that allowed them to challenge the social norms of their societies.

Outside of Sudan, in the Ottoman heartland of Turkey, slaves and emancipated slaves who armed themselves with talismans could be assertive. Y. Hakan Erdem’s chapter on magic, theft, and arson provides rare insight into the story of how in 1867 a newly acquired African female slave, Feraset, burnt down her master’s house and probably stole some jewelry. This story is particularly intriguing; especially knowing that Ottoman society sympathized with ill-treated slaves. Elsewhere, the...