Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions - Paul E. Lovejoy

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on context, ʿAlī would have been considered Yoruba if language was the determining factor, since he was fluent in Yoruba. Nonetheless, he was Kanuri by origin, was a Muslim, could also speak Hausa, and became a principal informant for Sigismund Koelle in his linguistic studies in Sierra Leone in the late 1840s.

      Although Barcia has correctly noticed the presence of Muslims in Cuba, his study also shows that the number of Muslims was actually very small.43 In Cuba people whom we now refer to as Yoruba were known as “Lucumí,” while in Brazil they were known as “Nagô.” In both cases their presence was closely associated with the jihād movement.44 As Henry B. Lovejoy has demonstrated, those identified as Lucumí in Cuba very largely came from Oyo and its dependencies, and most were not Muslims, a profile that is the reverse of the demography of Bahia, where Muslims were heavily concentrated.45 Lovejoy contends that there was a conscious attempt to reconstitute elements of the Oyo state in Cuba, including the promotion of Shango as the principal oriṣa in the Yoruba pantheon and the identification of Shango with Saint Barbara among the Catholic saints. Because of the timing of the Yoruba influx into Cuba, Oyo Yoruba were predominant in both rural and urban communities and therefore were involved in uprisings, conspiracies, and disturbances that have been associated with their presence in Cuba.46 By comparison with Bahia, it seems that very few Muslims were sent to Cuba.47 Although Atlantic merchants may have consciously directed enslaved Muslims and non-Muslims toward different destinations in the Americas, it also seems clear that the distribution reflected different migration patterns. Muslims were sent to Bahia in disproportionate numbers during the 1820s, while the overwhelming majority of arrivals in Cuba occurred in the 1830s, when relatively few enslaved Muslims left from Lagos. Oyo Yoruba emerged as dominant among the Yoruba population in Cuba, which was reflected in membership in religious brotherhoods (cabildo) and the importance of Shango as a deity of reverence. All the oriṣa, including Shango, were important in Bahia, too, but so was the concentration of Muslims. A comparison of Cuba and Bahia within the framework of black Atlantic history shows different forms of political and religious mobilization in response to slave society.

      How does the question of slavery in the jihād movement in West Africa inform the comparison of resistance among the different European colonies in the Americas? What similarities and differences characterized revolt in St. Domingue in the 1790s, the establishment of the revolutionary state of Haiti in 1804, and the revolutionary movement of jihād in West Africa in the same years? How did the influences of these two movements affect subsequent events of resistance in the Americas and the consolidation of Islam in West Africa? When the history of West Africa and, by extension, of west central Africa and southeastern Africa is included in an analysis of the Atlantic world, the history of people of African descent assumes a more influential role in the history of the modern world. The demography of transatlantic migration and the influences emanating from Africa on modern culture, particularly music and art, are obvious examples.

      Slavery was a factor in the jihād movement, specifically in regard to complaints that freeborn Muslims were being enslaved and that such enslavement was illegal under Islamic law and was condemned as a violation of the rights of Muslims. The concern was directed at protecting Muslims, not at opposing slavery, which became a core institution underpinning the society and economy of the Sokoto Caliphate as it expanded in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. Hence the revolutionary movement of jihād that swept West Africa in the period of the age of revolutions in Europe and the Atlantic world had a far different impact on the course of slavery, but nonetheless the revolutionary dimensions of the jihād were profound and require analysis of it as a parallel movement to the forces with which Hobsbawm and Genovese were concerned. The jihād movement served further to impose a level of autonomy on West Africa at the same time at which the incidence of slavery in the region expanded enormously, most especially in the central Bilād al-Sūdān and Oyo, from where many of the enslaved who went to Cuba and Brazil actually came. The interconnectedness and contradictions that emerged require fuller treatment than they have been given by most scholars who have examined slave resistance during the age of revolutions. Other topics of considerable importance include the debate within Muslim circles over the legitimacy of enslavement, as revealed in the diplomatic exchanges between Muhammad Bello and Muhammad al-Kānimī, the heads of state of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno, respectively, and the open warfare that erupted between these states in consequence of the failure to reach an acceptable accord over the course of jihād.48 Similarly, the little-known diplomatic negotiations between Caliph Muhammad Bello, supreme ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate, and Captain Hugh Clapperton, the official representative of the British government, over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1820s bring into focus contradictions in understanding the age of revolutions.49 Their discussions and resulting accord demonstrate that abolition has to be examined from broader perspectives than a British focus.

      I contend that the relative importance of Islam as an inhibiting factor in the provision of slaves for the Americas is underestimated. Limitations arising from controlled efforts to isolate West Africa from slavery in the Americas related to Muslim prohibitions.50 First, let us consider that the Muslim states of the region engaged in a conscious attempt within West Africa to establish autonomy. In this regard, there was a relatively clear break in patterns of trade, so that we can talk about at least two phases in the transatlantic migration. The first period was the period before around 1800, and the second was the nineteenth century. The jihād that resulted in the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804 effectively marked a break in the trade and politics of the deportation of slaves to the Americas between these two phases. Although there was involvement in the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades, the jihād movement undermined the deportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas from West Africa. Even so, there was a recognizable Muslim cohort both in the period before 1804 and after. The second period was also marked by the British campaign to abolish the slave trade after 1807, which initially attacked the trade of West Africa and thereby reinforced the political aims of the Muslim states of the interior to limit participation in the transatlantic slave trade, although unintentionally. The combined impact of Muslim jihād and British abolition reinforced a trend that pushed the slave trade from West Africa to west central Africa and Mozambique, the Bantu-speaking region from where approximately half of all Africans who went to the Americas trace their origins. After 1807, 1.9 million out of 2.78 million Africans came from the Bantu regions, amounting to 68 percent of total arrivals in the Americas, and if the Bight of Biafra is included, 80 percent of the forced migration after British abolition targeted Africans from regions where the jihād movement was not a factor.

      The significance of where enslaved people came from has been recognized as an important factor in the slave trade, but analysis so far has not appreciated why Muslim regions were marginal and underrepresented despite their relative importance in Bahia and North America and their limited impact in Jamaica, Trinidad, and St. Domingue. I suggest that during the age of revolutions west central Africa and southeastern Africa were constituted as the principal regions of slave origin, while West Africa was transformed from within by changes that resulted in the consolidation of Islamic rule and were as effective as British abolition in removing the region from the transatlantic slave trade. The basic thrust of this argument is not new.51 However, the argument has either been misunderstood or largely ignored or both, and my aim here is to make the argument explicit.

      My challenge is methodological. I am identifying what can be termed “the methodology of the tabula rasa” or can also be called the “argument in empty space,” in which the scholarship of the “other” is overlooked, but its exclusion in the end has to be recognized as a particularly challenging inhibition to historical reconstruction.52 When much of the historiography and readily available source material that underpin historical change is not incorporated into historical analysis, as I am claiming here, it is possible to propose interpretations that are isolated and distorted through a limiting perspective. Much of the scholarship that is associated with “Atlantic studies,” including the attempt to understand slavery and resistance during the age of revolutions, falls into this trap. Although it may not be clear why certain knowledge is overlooked, whether from naïveté, ignorance, or design, we have to assess responsibility for such an approach that shortchanges innovation and hard work. We have to recognize that the aim of scholarship is

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