The New Triangular Trade: Managing Inequality between Africa, the Arab Gulf, and the OECD during the Long 1970s

This paper begins with the Arab-African Symposium in Sharjah in 1976, where African intellectuals from across the continent converged in the newly independent United Arab Emirates and proposed an exchange. African intellectuals and professionals would lend their skills to the Emirates and other petroleum wealthy states across the Arabian Peninsula in exchange for Arab investment and cooperation. A number of these intellectuals like the Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui even framed this trade as a form of reparation for the long Arab-African slave trade. Mazrui argued that the independence of the Eastern Arabian states could be the catalyst for the long-awaited reconciliation between African and Arab peoples.

But beyond a social and cultural reconciliation, there was also the expectation that closer ties across the Red Sea, would allow both Africa and Arabia, what Mazrui called Afrabia to escape dependence and to actualize the long struggle for African independence in the words of the Sudanese intellectual Muhammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad. This paper ends in 1979 with Hajj Hamad moving from Beirut to Abu Dhabi. In Beirut, Hajj Hamad had helped to popularize the cause of Eritrean independence in the Arabic press. In the process he had become part of the early 1970s Third World cosmopolitanism of Beirut. While in 1979, he moved to Abu Dhabi where he helped to reorganize Emirati intelligence in the wake of Camp David and the Iranian Revolution. In the process, Hajj Hamad brought a mixture of African and Arab revolutionary networks into the service of the expanding Emirati state. This personal story becomes a microcosm of the ways that new Emirates were able to harness transnational networks of professionals, often imbibed with revolutionary ideals into the service of state power.