Africanists and Africans of the Maghreb

Abstract

This article is the first segment of a two-part project that explores the role of textuality in scholarly conceptions of the origin of black Africans living in the Maghrib – the so-called Haratin. In this part I sought to identify the textual threads linking the current Anglophone historiography to colonial ethnography and, ultimately, nineteenth-century abolitionism. It shows how entrapment in a racialist conception of Africa and African, and analogy to the transatlantic slave trade have influenced Anglophone conceptions of the object of the (trans-Saharan) caravan trade and, hence, the origin of black Africans of the Maghrib.