Questionable Bills of Sale? Legal Opinions and Race-Making in the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade | Watch the full talk

Presented by Cristi Whiskey at Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Cristi Whiskey discusses Ahmad Baba’s Ladder of Ascent Towards Grasping the Law Concerning Transported Blacks (Miʿraj as-suʿud ila nayl majlub as-sudan) (c. 1615), a legal treatise composed in seventeenth-century Timbuktu, itself a response to the letter of Saʿid ibn Ibrahim al-Jirari of Tuwat (present-day Algeria). Embedding West Africa in its broader transregional map, Whiskey reviews the history of anti-Blackness in premodern Muslim societies while charting Ahmad Baba’s interventions in longstanding debates. How, Whiskey asks, were Black Africans subjected to legal and religious discursive forces that sustained transregional mercantile complexes of slavery? By looking into Ahmad Baba’s work, Whiskey highlights where distinctions imposed between Black Muslims and non-Muslims were blurred in service of rationalizing enslavement. The discussion also brings the context of early modern West Africa into conversation with work being done in Black Atlantic feminist work, Mediterranean Studies, and other fields for the sake of fostering a wider discussion on historical anti-Blackness.