“Race” into the Circum-Saharan World

The Sahara Desert has usually been understood as a fundamental division separating the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa from those of the Mediterranean. Yet merchants, soldiers, scholars and slaves have traversed this space over time and brought the peoples on the different shores of this desert into webs of historical inter-relationship. This paper will argue that treating the Sahara as a geographical and historical unit allows us to understand African history in new ways. When the Sahara is taken as the unit of analysis rather than as a divide, the academic distinction between North and sub-Saharan Africa appears arbitrary, representing a racialized construction of Africa, and its history, as “Black.” If we can begin to de-link Africa’s history from European ideas about “race,” we can see than many areas of Africa south of the Sahara shared much more in common with North Africa than with, for example, other Africans living closer to the Atlantic littoral. Focusing on the Saharan itself allows us to interrogate both the links that connected Africans living within and adjacent to the great desert and the historical development of circum-Saharan discourses of difference that increasingly over time relied on local configurations of “race.” The Saharan and trans-Saharan slave trades that brought millions of Africans into and across the desert acted as a powerful catalyst for the development of racial ideologies that denigrated not only those who were enslaved, but also autochthonous “Black” populations in the Sahara and North Africa. The paper will use two 19^th-century Arabic texts to demonstrate how the Sahara was imagined as a space by its inhabitants, and how Saharan ideas about “race” acted to organize this Saharan space socially. In both their similarity and differences from historical sources in other ocean worlds, these sources will act to facilitate discussion with other panelists.