Ending Slavery

Front matter

PETE RUF REI E Uns PETE Slavery — — xev da Dependency ^.

QUEME Se and Genderin = m

ig Mas

Contents

Preface: esse ed E dte eed Soo A es UR 9 Introduction: s 42 bo es ee EM ae NN Rs e 19 Chapter 1

Contrasting Life Stories: . a veste es won owe e o dre oe 56 Chapter 3

Slave Women... 0. eh hi] es 93 Goneubinage:. tenta pesant Bas more eS as 99 Status and Split Origines eR ag nas Monde datant 105 Chapter 4

Preface

In 1980, slavery was abolished in Mauritania for the third time in the 20" century.! The issue is, however, of such longevity that it continues to attract the attention of abolitionists and human rights groups, but also of international donors and journalists up to the present day.’ Like the vast majority of these popular perceptions the present analysis focuses exclusively on Moorish, or, in the terminology that will be adopted here, on bizan society. However, to equate slavery within this largest ethnic group in Mauritania with slavery in this country, as is frequently done in the media, is misleading. Similar institutions existed, and still can be traced too, among the black African ethnic groups in Mauritania as well as among most other Sahelian and West African ethnic groups. This is acknowledged and highlighted by a number of human rights groups, such as *Human Rights Watch", *Anti-Slavery International" and the Mauritanian “SOS esclaves", to name only a few.?

Closer to the heart of the matter are statements from pressure groups which criticise the government of Mauritania for doing at best little or else nothing at all to promote the slaves’ and former slaves’ emancipation and economic development, and hence for allowing slavery to continue. While these accusations cannot be compared with those against the government of Sudan, which has been accused at least for tolerating if not promoting the enslavement of women and children in the country's south by northerners, the whole issue seems outdated: after all it is more than 150 years since the abolition of slavery by France under the initiative of Viktor Schoelcher. This declaration, however, only followed similar earlier declarations concluded in 1792 in Denmark, in 1807 in Great Britain, and in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. Today the framework of international consensus on the abolition of slavery, human rights and the rights of the individual is provided by the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights of 1948, the *Slavery Convention" of 1926, the *Forced Labour Convention" of 1930, the *Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery" of 1956, and the ILO convention n? 105 of 1957 concerning the “Abolition of Forced Labour". The various conventions not only condemn slavery and forced labour, but also call for measures to prevent these. In view of this long history of abolition, and the consensus on

10 Preface this issue within the international community, the accusation of continuing to tolerate slavery hits hard. It brings into the present an institution of domination and oppression commonly thought to have long been consigned to history, and thus puts back on the agenda the question of what *slavery" means.'

I became involved with Mauritania, and with the problem of slavery in this country, in 1992. Besides the many fascinating aspects of bizan society I got to know during this first stay, I was struck by people speaking publicly and without any uneasiness of their slaves and former slaves. A little later I became acquainted with settlements inhabited exclusively by slaves and former slaves, and I realised that these people live in the worst conditions I had ever seen thus far — though I had to admit that the situation many of their masters lived in was hardly more enviable. This experience, which is first of all one of social inequality, and thus in no way particular to Mauritania, would not have raised my concern so strongly, had there not been what may be called a mental state of slavery: arrogance on the part of the former masters, the bizan, and subservience on the part of the sidan, the slaves and manumitted slaves (haratin).

Having worked on local institutions of participation in a development project and beyond, and the sedentarisation of the bizan pastoral nomads while finishing my studies (cf. Ruf 1993, 1995), the wish to go to Mauritania for a further period and explore what remained of slavery persisted. A generous research grant for a Ph.D. thesis from the graduate school *Market, State, Ethnicity" at the Social Development Research Centre, which is part of the Department of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia, finally provided the material means to turn this project into reality.

Almost one year of fieldwork primarily among slaves and manumitted slaves (harätin), but former masters, the bizan, too, was a rich experience providing many insights into the complex universe of hierarchy and dependency in bizàn society. I was able to witness slaves still experiencing maltreatment by their masters, a great number of slaves and former slaves living in highly ambivalent relations with masters and former masters, and finally slaves and former slaves defying not only their former master, but the bizan as such. However, beyond all these differentiations, which highlight that things are indeed changing in Mauritania, I still feel anger whenever my thoughts go back to some of the experiences I had and which have to be named. There is the bitterness underlying many slave narratives telling how things used to be, and there is the memory of one particular old slave man, who, being no longer of any use, had to sit all day long outside in the courtyard, barely protected by a hut of branches from the beating desert sun, while his master, a likeable and learned man, resided in the modest house build of clay-bricks a few steps away.

This, and various other experiences which taught me what an end to slavery

Preface II can mean to those who still suffer from it made me decide that this analysis should contribute to changing this situation. Indeed, the vast majority of Mauritanians, living in one of the least developed countries of this world, need better living conditions. However, among these Mauritanians, the slaves and manumitted slaves, together with a number of other despised social groups, deserve special attention. Their deprivation resides not only in such domains as economy and welfare, but also in ongoing social discrimination, which is a result of their slave past. Change in this domain needs understanding and an open, unprejudiced debate about the nature of the past. This is, as recent cases show, a sensitive and most difficult task. Nevertheless, it is to such a future project that the present discussion would like to propose some arguments.

As far as this aim is concerned, the present study is far from all encompassing. Its intention is to unravel perspectives on bizan slavery that until today have remained largely ignored. Its leitmotif is that it is the points of view of the oppressed which need to be made explicit, and which have to be contrasted with those representations of the social provided by the discourses of the dominant strata? Such a perspective allows one to discern what makes up lines of conflict in society and how these are maintained, shifted or overcome. Social hierarchy in the light of such an analysis is free from that certain taste of social consent that common-sense definitions of difference in society tend to suggest and which the powerful like to maintain.

As a critical approach to the analysis of bizan society, the present work takes up a concern expressed by a long and illustrious list of social scientists. It was Karl Marx ([1846] 1983b) who stated that philosophical reasoning, which was judged to have only interpreted the world in different ways until then, should turn towards changing the world. Later this tradition lived on, among others in the works of Antonio Gramsci ([1929-35] 1971) and Frantz Fanon (1952). While the voices of these scholars continue to influence present discourses, engaging in public debate on political issues, however, still remains open to the reproach of leaving scientific territory. A most recent example for this divide is the recent debate in France concerning what has come to be the “case” of Pierre Bourdieu — as opposed to the social scientist (cf. Priester 1998).

Although I am aware that the present analysis could be vulnerable because of this impetus and its explicit premises, I prefer this more precarious status to hiding behind ritual and meaningless evocations of the ideals of scientific impartiality. The descriptions of social relations in Mauritanian society which will be developed in the subsequent chapters are laden with theory, and hence "thick descriptions" (cf. Geertz 1973). They are aimed at providing a narrative capable of changing the perceptions of the social topography of Mauritania. However, this means not engaging in unfounded polemics, but on the contrary unfolding a sound analysis enabling the reader to discern how relations of dependency, which have come to be known as slavery, evolve, how they are maintained, and what, today, brings them to an end.

12 Preface

This work is offered to all Mauritanians wishing to tackle the issue of slavery in their society further, as well as to scholars concerned with Mauritania, development sociologists and of course everybody interested in the study of slavery and relations of dependency. As a view from the outside, this study will, it is hoped, provide new insights, while it will undoubtedly also receive criticism for misunderstanding bizan society. Indeed much of Mauritania and bizan society still remains alien to me, but seeing this country and its people through the eyes of a stranger is not necessarily a disadvantage, nor does it systematically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge. On the contrary, strangeness to the object of study is a prerequisite to the production of knowledge. In the social sciences it is certainly one of the greatest strengths of social anthropology and ethnography to have developed systematically the productive tension resulting from strangeness to cultures observed and immersion in these cultures, regardless whether this is a subculture around the corner, or the culture of an ethnic group on the opposite side of the globe (cf. Knorr-Cetina 1991; Hirschauer/Amann 1997).

For those to whom Mauritania is alien, it has to be explained that the debate whether there is slavery, and what slavery has meant and continues to mean to members of bizan society, continues to go on both in the country and abroad. Periodically the issue surfaces in the independent Mauritanian press as well as among the Mauritanian emigrants, who today are linked by the newsgroup Mauritanie-Net./ Until today debates remain heated and highly controversial Points of view vary from denying both the significance of slavery in the past and especially its persistence until the present to denouncing continued slavery. This controversy is reflected also by the public debate between the government and various Mauritanian NGOs, aiming to defend the rights of slaves and former slaves. In January 1997, president Maouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya dealt for the first time in a public speech with the issue of slavery. Acknowledging this institution to be part of the nation's past, he altogether denied its persistence until the present. Consequently there are not remnants but only *sequels" of slavery to be witnessed in Mauritania (cf. Mauritanie Nouvelles, n? 234, 12.1.1997: 10).

The practical consequences of this kind of definition became obvious about one year later. On the 12 February 1998 five prominent Mauritanian anti-slavery activists were sentenced by a Mauritanian court to thirteen months of jail, and a 30,000 UM fine after having participated in a French television programme focusing, among other topics, on the issue of slavery in Mauritania.” On the 24 March the appeal of the human rights activists was refused and the sentence confirmed. However, numerous international protests and - probably more important — a meeting with a group of international donors scheduled for the next day, made the president of Mauritania, Maouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, lift the sentence (cf. L'Autre Afrique, 1.4.1998).

Witnessing these recent trends towards a more rigid handling of the issue of slavery in Mauritania by local authorities, the present study, which will be

Preface 13 the second one focusing on Mauritania's slaves and former slaves in only a short period (cf. Brhane 1997a,b), will provide some further substance to the debate, and thus contribute to a more thorough treatment of this serious issue. This indeed is needed, as the recent evolution has polarised opinions rather than encouraged to dialogue.

This book aims at describing the slave experience from a grassroots perspective; it wants to give the oppressed a voice, and to provide a forum where both their dignity and humiliation can be expressed. Indeed slaves resisted their masters, developed strategies to enlarge their autonomy, and much more, while still living under the threats resulting from their slave estate.

Tracking these slaves’ and former slaves’ experiences in quest of their point of view was done by conducting numerous individual interviews with people still bound to the slave estate and haratin (manumitted slaves). The locus of research was the region of Achram-Diouk, a small rural area in central Mauritania. Fieldwork consisted in many respects of learning by doing, as I failed to anticipate a number of issues sensitive to the interviewees and also because the latter had never been confronted with questions of the kind I confronted them with. Nevertheless, as will be outlined in detail later on (cf. p. 44-47, 50-57), the people of Achram-Diouk came to teach me a lot about their lives, and consequently about what it meant to have been a slave in bizàn society, or to be still bound to this estate. While some refused to take part in my investigations, most were ready to answer my questions. Ultimately they introduced me in a subtle and tactful way, to this particular social milieu, and I have to thank them for their readiness to endure and forgive my unawareness of many of the finer and more major points of good conduct.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Speaking of learning about bizan society and the slaves and former slaves, I need to mention those persons who helped me most both to get to know things, as well as to live my everyday life at Debissa near Achram. These people are Khalifa Ould Kebab, my research assistant, Boissil, who became so close a friend that it never occurred to me to ask for his full name, Nanna Ould El Vaida, who helped me drive and maintain a car for a good part of my stay, Mohamed Ould Abat, who helped considerably managing the little vicissitudes of daily life and knew a lot about the rearing of cattle and camels, and finally Boua Ould Beydyali, who took care that my son was initiated into the life of a Mauritanian child by regular visits to the village while making his first steps on his own, and who also taught me much about the problems adolescents have in rural Mauritania, which closely resemble those they have elsewhere.

Besides these sudan, numerous other Mauritanians have contributed to this dissertation, and I am grateful for their support. Professor Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh readily listened several times and at length to my very first reasoning, and did much to encourage me to carry it on. Professor Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara too was a thorough discussion partner and gave me advice for my research in Mauritania. The University of Nouakchott kindly lent its official support to my fieldwork, and Amadou Sall, head of the Department of Philosophy in 1995, was not only a lively discussion partner but also enabled me to get a glimpse of university life there and have an animated and fruitful discussion on fieldwork with Mauritanian students of the social sciences. Finally the head of the SO.NA.DE.R (Société Nationale pour le Développement Rural) of Tagant, Amadou Ba, together with Guy Rousseau and Hubert Jórg from the GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit) at Achram and the GTZ office in Nouakchott, greatly contributed to the success of my fieldwork by generously lending me a car, and providing me with comfortable housing at Debissa.

In Germany my thanks go to Professor Günther Schlee, who supervised this study, and contributed to its success by numerous discussions and welcome advice. To Professor Gerd Spittler I am grateful for having given me the opportunity to present and discuss a paper at Bayreuth and have discussions with Christine Hardung and Christina Ahr, both working on former

16 Acknowledgements slave populations in West Africa. Thanks go also to Professor Hans-Dieter Evers, Professor Gudrun Lachenmann, Professor Anna Spittler and Karin Werner as well as all fellows of the graduate school “Market, State, Ethnicity” who contributed to this study by giving me feed-back on various aspects of this study.

I also wish to thank Meskerem Brhane. Ever since we met in Nouakchott while both doing fieldwork for our Ph.D. theses, our continuing discussions about the harätin and Mauritania have always been a rich source of inspiration to me. Further scholars who helped me with their comments and criticism to reflect on my own reasoning are Professor Ann McDougall, Professor John Hunwick, Pierre Bonte, Raymond Taylor, Mariella Villasante-de Beauvais, Jean Schmitz, Olivier Leservoisier and Benjamin Acloque, all of whom are scholars of Mauritania and the desert edge who readily shared their experience and knowledge with me. A very special thank goes to Roger Botte, who was ready to share not only his experiences of earlier research in the Tagant area in 1978, but contributed decisively to my work by allowing me to have access to personal copies of Mauritanian archival documents.

Thanks too to Patricia Skorge, who tried her best to make improvements to my English, by carefully pointing out mistakes to me.

The staff of the University Library of Bielefeld deserves my gratitude for making available to me numerous documents on Mauritania difficult to obtain access to. This task indeed needed a good deal of work and ingenuity.

Finally, there is Jutta Bischoff, who went with me through all the ups and downs of these last years. Together both of us managed to succeed in finishing studies and doing our jobs. While this may not sound like much, we know well it is not. I also have to thank my son, Yassin Bischoff, for his presence continues to bear that immediacy which adults like me sometimes need in order to remember that there is a thriving world going on beyond one's desktop.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Two distinct types of Arabic transliteration are used throughout this book. Personal names of Mauritanians, such as interviewees, are transcribed in the Latin alphabet according to the practice common in Mauritania and used in newspapers for example. Names of locations and towns are transcribed in the same way, taking whenever possible as a reference the transcriptions provided by the Michelin Map n? 953 * Africa North and West". Expressions in hassaniyya Arabic dialect, as well as names of bizän tribes and of a few historical figures are — with a few changes revealing consonants specific to bassaniyya dialect — transcribed according to the system of transliteration of Arabic as suggested by the 19" conference of Orientalists in Rome in 1935 (cf. Krahl/Reuschel 1980: 31). Transliteration is documented on p. 395. By this choice I hope the interested reader might be able to further investigate the etymology and meaning of hassaniyya Arabic dialect terms (comprising also a number of terms which are derived from the Berber language), while good readability is maintained by avoiding the overloading of the text with diacritics.

Map 1: Islamic Republic of Mauritania

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Based on “Mauritania 1995”; Courtesy of The General Libraries, The University of

Texas at Austin

Introduction

Studying the end of slavery means studying social change. In the case of the bizän society of Mauritania, i.e. the Moors, who are the focus here, this process of transformation constitutes a challenge in many domains. It affects social structures as well as patterns of identification in the former slave society and underlies changes in the economy. While some societies managed to leave relations of slavery behind quickly, this process is one of long duration in the case of the bizän society. Struggles between new and old, between relations of dependency embedded in the slave system and social relations no longer moulded in this framework have now been going on for decades. However, while this process only began to take shape slowly after the French colonisation of Mauritania at the start of the 20" century, the transformation of bizan society evolved at a faster pace since the 1970s. During this decade the country was first hit by the beginning of the Sahelian drought cycle. Later Mauritania occupied a part of the former Spanish Western Sahara; the subsequent war with the POLISARIO liberation movement, which was soon lost, led into a long period of political and economic instability."

In the course of this fundamental restructuring of bizàn society all major sectors of social and economic life were affected. Undoubtedly the most striking and visible change has been the sedentarisation of the vast majority of the former pastoral nomadic population and the rapid emergence of the capital Nouakchott as the biggest city in the country, today home to about one third of the national population. This rapid and profound transition also challenged relations of hierarchy and dependency. Where masters lost the means to sustain even themselves, they also lost all means to maintain others in a state of dependence. Where new economic opportunities which no longer unequivocally favoured the former masters evolved, subordination to them lost much of its meaning” This recent turmoil in bizan society, however, helps the observer and researcher to investigate the change of social relations, for periods of accelerated transition make social relations transparent: they are discussed and contested publicly, taboos are broken, social norms and values questioned. In this respect, periods of crisis also provide information about the past when the present lines of conflict were already in place, but had not yet surfaced as a result of relations of domination still remaining largely unquestioned? Moments of crisis thus are moments in which the past becomes rationalised, and is remembered and expressed in new terms, for what is no longer self-evident needs explanation. These newly emerging discourses, far from simply representing the past, instead interpret it in order to speak about the present and the future. As such they are a crucial source in unravelling the past of subservient strata such as slaves and manumitted slaves. By discerning why and at which point relations of domination stop working, the researcher is able to see more clearly how they functioned in the past. This means dealing much more profoundly with one of the most crucial questions emerging in the context of a sociological approach to slavery, the question of how is slavery possible.

The present study aims to specify these questions and to suggest answers by analysing slavery in bizan society from different perspectives. Besides a discussion of theories of slavery and hence a definition of the problem in question, this means engaging in exploring the meaning of slavery in different contexts. Naturally descriptions of slavery differ depending on whether they are provided by masters or slaves, but they also differ among slaves because experiences are varied. The significance of slavery in bizàn society, which gradually changed into a social institution legitimated and regulated by precepts of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as slavery in other societies, cannot be understood properly without an understanding of its history. It is this perspective that makes it possible to discern how and in which domains of society slavery was practised and what kind of ambiguous interrelation evolved between the shape of society and the practice of slavery. Finally, as this study aims to reflect on the end of slavery in contemporary bizan society, those processes and articulations marking and fuelling change have to be highlighted. These can be found both in past and present trends of social and economic change as well as in discourses which reinterpret the past in order to give the present a new shape.

Throughout the following chapters arguments will be developed throwing light not only on what slavery in bizan society meant in different phases of history, but also on how it was perceived by the different social strata, and among these above all by the slaves and manumitted slaves themselves. Besides a factual reconstruction of the slave past in bizan society and of its — quite vigorous — remnants in the present, these arguments are able to give insights on how the divide between masters and slaves was upheld and reproduced. Stating that for some decades now there has been a great change going on in master-slave relations, changes that even go so far as to result in their dissolution, does not imply that in former times these relations were static. Individual slaves' conditions always resulted in struggles over where to set the limits of a slave's freedom of action. Although the relation of power between masters and slaves tended to be biased drastically in favour of the former, coercion as a means of rule was complemented by negotiation, and slaves had means to resist and to oppose their masters’ will.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Before presenting an overview of this book, an initial outline of the terminology of social hierarchy in bizàn society has to be given. Moorish society is divided essentially into two major groups — bizdn and sudan — but these notions may refer to different people in different contexts. Bizän refers either to all freemen, i.e. only freeborn people, or to all speakers of the bassaniyya language, and thus includes all constituents of bizan society besides the freeborn, namely the slaves and manumitted slaves. To make transparent this distinction, the idea of a bizan ethnic community constituted by a shared language and culture will be expressed by the term bizan society in the following, while the designation bizan will only refer to the status group of freeborn people. Slaves and freed slaves as a group also sharing some features will appear under the emic designation of sadan. However, the sidan are far from constituting a uniform group. They are essentially divided into ‘abid (Arabic: slaves; sing. ‘abd) and harätin (Arabic, sing. hartani). The latter term is commonly described as meaning freed slave or freemen of secondary rank. As many members of this social group lay great emphasis on their claim not to have a slave ancestry, the notion of haratin will be used to comprise all these meanings, which in fact all describe the idea of a group of freemen which is distinct from the bizan, and discriminated against in some respects. A detailed exploration of bizan social hierarchy, taking up these definitions, will be given in chapter one, p. 38-44.

THIS STUDY

Theoretical reflections on the ambiguities inherent in the master-slave relation and on the implications the practice of slavery has on the shape of society will introduce central arguments of the present study in chapter one. In a discussion of major theoretical contributions to the study of slavery in Africa, the case of bizän slavery in Mauritania will serve as a foil against which theoretical approaches to slavery may be critically evaluated. By synthesising the arguments thus developed, the theoretical devices underlying the present study will be outlined. These insights will be used to discuss social hierarchy and conflicting interpretations of bizan social order. The chapter's final section will reflect on the methods of field research that were used to gather data among residents of the region of Achram-Diouk in central Mauritania. As living in slavery is an experience of personal alienation and in many respects of the annihilation of individual personhood, inquiring into this aspect of people's life means embarking on the most sensitive topics of individual life histories. Enhancing one's individual status in these circumstances has much to do with deleting and reconstructing the past. Because slavery is nothing glorious to remember, neither for the former slaves nor their masters today, it does not become part of great public traditions and narratives. Instead it remains incorporated into tales of the past. There it figures as a subtext which can be deciphered and which is needed to apprehend fully how society worked. Despite all these problems individual accounts of life histories developed by biographic interviewing turned out to deal both directly and indirectly with the issue of slavery. The personalised character of this information was of great value. Individual data could be contextualised and related to information derived from other sources, but also be checked for internal consistency. Besides these analytical characteristics the narratives are a rich source of information because they gave those who had experienced slavery the option of describing their life in words of their own.”