Tag Archives: slave trade

Article: The Emancipatory Strategies of Black Tunisians and Libyans

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Houda Mzioudet, “Yearning for Freedom, Reclaiming Agency: The Emancipatory Strategies of Black Tunisians and Libyans” in Mediterranean Mobilities: Between Migrations and Colonialism ed. Gabriele Montalbano (viella, 2024), pp. 175–184

The history of Black people in Libya and Tunisia remain shrouded in mystery and historical ambiguity; little is know with regards to their origin, movement and settlement in North Africa, and the slavery connection remains the quintessentially legitimate historical reason for this settlement. While more anthropological and historical work has been done since the 1980s by scholars such as Jouili, Bahri, Mrad-Dali, Montana, Jankowsky and Taleb on slavery and post-slave Libyan and Tunisian societies, numerous murky areas remain in the narratives of disenfranchised Blacks, alongside a lack of accounts where Blacks are no longer mere recipients, passive actors who lacked agency in building a Black North African history. In this chapter, I attempt to weave my arguments around Mrad-Dali and Montalbano’s historical and anthropological research on Libyan immigrants to Tunisia and enslaved Black Libyans who developed a web of solidarity to escape slavery in eastern and western Libya, all while stressing these marginalised groups’ activity as agents of change and of self-emancipatory action.

Article: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi

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Hargal, Salma. 2024. Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911). Middle Eastern Studies.

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte’s sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period.

Article: To Follow Bousaadiya

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A new article is the first (to my knowledge) study focused on the Libyan folkloric character Bousaadiya (بو سعدية). See also the author’s recent podcast episode on the same topic.

Tayeb, Leila. 2023. To Follow Bousaadiya: Mobility and Memory in Libyan Cultural Politics. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 16/3. 313–336. [not open access]

This article takes the figure of Bousaadiya, once performed in varying iterations throughout central North Africa, as an entry point to approach the problematics of mobility and memory in Libya. Bousaadiya performance, a multidimensional set of practices that I read critically as dance, produces an embodied social ground upon which Libyans have enacted and contested racialized practices of belonging and a mobile gravesite where it is possible to interrogate regional histories of enslavement and their material and symbolic legacies. While reading Bousaadiya performance enables an excavation of the trans-Saharan slave trade and its ghostly e/affects, performing Bousaadiya enabled the incomplete burial of these through surrogation, easing particular losses. In this article, I explore both of these aspects of the performativity of Bousaadiya’s dance, which is underscored by the forms of remembering it that continue to proliferate. To follow Bousaadiya is to grapple with the ongoing unresolvedness in Libyan cultural politics of the country’s histories of slave economies and the hierarchies left in their wake and to gesture toward the prospect of repair.