"Absolutely and Utterly Free": Kinship, Muslim Schooling, and Emancipation between Jamaica and the Middle Niger, c. 1790–1853

Born in Timbuktu around 1790, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq was raised in Jenne and received his Qur’anic training in Bouna, a trading and intellectual hub located in present-day Ivory Coast. Around 1805, as he prepared to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca, a war broke out between Bouna and the neighboring sultanate of Bondoukou. Al-Ṣiddīq was captured, sold to British slave traders in the Gold Coast, and taken to Jamaica. We know about Al-Ṣiddīq’s childhood in the Western Sahel from the translation of an Arabic-language autobiographical document he authored in 1834, shortly after the proclamation of the Slavery Abolition Act in Jamaica. In 1835, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq left Kingston for London. From there, he embarked on a ship headed to Morocco, as part of a Timbuktu-bound expedition organized by British traveler John Davidson. The Davidson expedition sojourned for a while in the Wād Nūn region of southwestern Morocco. On December 18, 1836, shortly after departing Wād Nūn, the group was attacked, and Davidson killed. It is unknown whether Al-Ṣiddīq survived and returned to his hometown. Drawing from the literature on the Muslim intellectual tradition in the Western Sahel–the field Ousmane Oumar Kane aptly names “Timbuktu studies”– and that on racial capitalism in the Atlantic world, my paper examines the broader historical context that surrounds Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq’s life and writings. On the one hand, Timbuktu and Jenne symbolize the rich Islamic intellectual history in the Western Sahel region of Africa. On the other hand, Jamaica epitomizes the colossal economic profit Europe yielded through the dislocation, violence, and coerced labor inflicted upon Africans. Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq and the Sahelian Muslim community in 19th century Jamaica help us better understand the ways in which these two worlds intersected through the forced migrations of West Africans, and the ideas they circulated as they moved.