Conferences 2024

The earliest written reference of Wangārī besides what we learn from the Mandinka oral traditions is that by Abu ‘Ubayd Abd Allah al-Bakrī of Cordoba (Spain), who, in 1068 A.D., wrote about a West African city, Yarasna, inhabited by a community of Muslims that he called “Banu Naghmarata,” –viz., “Banu Wanghmarata,” the tribe of the Wangāra–. He adds, “They are Blacks, traded in gold, and spoke a’jam–i.e., a’jamia, a transliteration of the Mandekan language using Arabic scripts–. Yarasna symbolized the 11th-century development of the Bure goldfields over the old famous ones in Bambuxu. Medieval Arab travelers might be equally familiar with Fulani or Takrūrī and the toponym and ethnonym that derived from it–viz., Takrūr and Tekayrne described it as a territory extending beyond the Senegal River to reach Kanem and Bornu. Takrūrī and Wangārī traveled to conduct trade, teach, and preach Islam. This paper is drawn from an ongoing book project, al-Safar: The Religious Art of Hiking. It explores the story of mobility between the 14th and 17th centuries within the shared cultural and geographic unity of West and North Africa. This mobility was shaped into a theoretical, cultural, and spiritual framework that established a code of conduct for the Takrūrī and Wangārī communities of West Africa. Mobility, or the “art of hiking”—the practice of traveling—developed its guiding principles as conceived by the 13th-century Mandinka scholar al-Haj Salim Suwari. Drawing from these principles, The Art of Hiking recounts what I term soft jihad—a shift from jihad as enacted by al-Majili, toward fostering ethnic fluidity and expansion beyond the dar al-Islam through preaching, trade, and teaching. The art of hiking also encompasses the diplomatic skills developed by the Wangārā and Takrūrī communities, enabling them to serve as courtly intermediaries, representatives, and secretaries in managing embassies and correspondences. Their involvement in politics, diplomacy, and state-building, combined with their mastery of mobility and literacy, gave rise to a sophisticated system for gathering and circulating information. Over centuries, this system produced advanced geographic and cartographic knowledge. This paper explores the roadmaps that were created and passed down through generations as written documents. These roadmaps guided the Wangārā and Takrūrī as they connected—through their journeys—the regions along the Senegal River to Morocco, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Sinai, Haifa, Acre, and Jerusalem.

Over many years of ethnographic and historical research in southeastern Morocco, I have observed how local families use historical objects and household artifacts to narrate their local family histories. Items like Qur’anic tablets, date-storage pots, and slave emancipation documents serve as storytelling vessels, amplifying the voices of Haratine and other marginalized groups. These narratives challenge elite-centric written accounts by centering material culture as an archive of subaltern voices and emphasizing the agency of objects in mediating memory and identity. Inspired by Daniel Miller, Arjun Appadurai, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I underscore how these artifacts intertwine with the sensory realities of Haratine communities, reshaping our understanding of history and identity through the material and embodied dimensions of marginalized lives.

In this talk, I follow the trajectory of a nineteenth century West African traveler. In 1835, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq Waṭara, a Timbuktu-born man who had been enslaved in Jamaica for thirty years, undertook a trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan journey, in a bid to return home. I explore the role and meaning of distance, diaspora and dislocation in Watara’s understanding of himself and of the world, by centering his family ties and upbringing in the Western Sahel.

The purpose of this paper is theoretical, normative, and historical. The aim is to explain and recommend a conception of the humanities – understood less a set of academic disciplines than as education in and through culture. This conception is objectivist in the sense that it is based on the idea that education is a process through which we not only acquire skills, but also become more sensitive to the qualities of the objects studied. The value of an education depends not only on its social utility, but also on the quality of the objects studied. This objectivist conception is borrowed from aesthetic theory, especially from a certain understanding of the judgment of taste.

The debate on the judgment of taste, from which this objectivist conception is derived, took place particularly in Anglo-Scottish philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century. It opposed Alexander Gerard to David Hume on questions that are essential to any reflection on the humanities in the plurality of cultures: Are common sense and anything resembling common or universal reason not tainted by Eurocentrism? Should not good taste, and more generally the progress of education and the refinement of culture, be understood as the development of a sensitivity to the qualities of objects – especially the products of art and technique, but also natural objects – itself based on the exercise of all the powers of the human mind? Is Eurocentrism not blind to the variety of objects that deserve to be appreciated and placed at the center of the humanities?

The aim is to show that the objectivist approach to the humanities has good arguments against a universalist approach. The latter relies primarily on features common to all human beings, especially their capacity for discussion and coordination; the former is compatible with reasonable relativism and relies only secondarily on these common features. It assumes that the humanities consist in the exploration of objects that deserve to be discovered and frequented. Thus, the first question a conception of the humanities should ask is not what we have in common as human beings, but what we value as human achievement from a particular culture.

African universities have arrived at a fork in the road. One path leads through the land of decolonization towards epistemic autonomy, the freedom to think through one’s own conditions through categories that correspond to those conditions. The other path passes through disruption, a transformation of the academic landscape in Africa through market-oriented education providers. How might the humanities in Africa be thought at such a juncture? Reflecting on a lecture I gave on Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945) in Saint-Louis, Senegal in the summer following the most recent presidential elections, I describe the present terrain and insights that the life and works of the colonial-era Muslim scholar offer for our times. Kamara wrote a monumental history of West Africa at a moment when colonial discourses represented Africa as a continent without writing or history. His dream of an Arabic-French edition of the work has yet to be realized. And yet, his body of work and his many returns present a parable about the fate of the humanities after colonial domination.

This paper will examine Moroccan arts and cultural diplomacy in light of Morocco’s return to “Africa” and shift towards the South Atlantic. In 2017, Morocco returned to the African Union, and Morocco and Cuba re-established diplomatic relations  (broken since 1980).  Morocco’s Latin American/South Atlantic policy is an extension of the African policy,  deploying a discourse of “Afro-convivencia,” depicting the kingdom as source and conveyer of Andalusian tolerance and African culture, a reversal of the Black Legend.