From Mecca to Jamaica: Affective Geographies and Intimate History in the Sahel

This paper examines the affective geographies that shaped the life of Hafsa, a woman who lived in the Inland Delta region of today’s Mali, in the cities of Jenne and Timbuktu. Originally from Borno (northern Nigeria), Hafsa was born in her father’s absence, as he was away performing the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Later in life, Hafsa married a long-distance trader from Kong (northern Côte d’Ivoire), whose mobilities and family networks sprawled across the Sahel. Very little is known about Hafsa’s life. She only appears in a thin archival mention: a few sentences in the autobiographical document her son Abu Bakr wrote in 1834 while enslaved in Jamaica, in the wake of his own kidnapping, sale, and Atlantic crossing. This paper lingers upon the affective relationships shaped by distance, mobility, longing, and absence that partially shaped Hafsa’s life. In focusing on relationships and affective geographies, I propose a framework for a history of the Sahel told through intimate relationships, such as the ones Hafsa formed with various people around her. Broader phenomena of Muslim pilgrimage across the Red Sea, West African hinterland trade, and Sahelian Islamic education, respectively, sent Hafsa’s father, husband and son on the road, and resulted in her permanent separation from her child through the Atlantic slave trade. As such, Hafsa’s intimate history reveals how embedded her life was within an interconnected Sahelian space, lying at the intersection of the broader Atlantic and Saharan worlds.