Mohamed, Mohamed Hassan

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University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor History Publications Department of History 4-2011 Review of Lydon, Ghislaine, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa Mohamed Hassan Mohamed University of Windsor Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/historypub  Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Mohamed, Mohamed Hassan. (2011). Review of Lydon, Ghislaine, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. H-Net Reviews. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/historypub/127 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at Scholarship at UWindsor. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship at UWindsor. For more information, please contact scholarship@uwindsor.ca.  Ghislaine Lydon. On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009. xxviii + 468 pp. $95.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-521-88724-3.  Reviewed by Mohamed Hassan Mohamed Published on H-Levant (April, 2011) Commissioned by Amy A. Kallander (Syracuse University) In  their  discourse  on  the  network  of  tradelinking the historic Maghrib and Bilad al-Sudan,Africanists tend to emphasize the “trans” in trans-Saharan trade. The Sahara often comes across as abarrier  between what  Hegel  dubbed  “EuropeanAfrica” (north) and “Africa proper” (south). Anglo‐phone scholars often “skip” the Sahara and positthe Maghrib mainly as a depot for the gold andslaves  the  caravans  had  picked  up  from  itsAfrican beyond. Change and continuity are con‐ceived in terms of decrease in the quantity of goldshipments and increase in the volume of slavesheading northward. To account for the disparitybetween  the  small  number  of  Africans  in  theMaghrib and the projected increase in the volumeof slave shipments, Africanists invoke miscegena‐tion to turn “mixed” communities into signs of de‐scent from African slaves. The situation is compli‐cated by the standard complaint  about  the lack(or dearth) of local sources, often an alibi for theelevation of accounts by modern European trav‐ellers and consuls to authorities on what caravantraders were up to.  Against this backdrop, Ghis‐laine Lydon’s On Trans-Saharan Trails is  a wel‐come addition to Anglophone literature on north‐west Africa. On Trans-Saharan Trails is composed of sev‐en chapters and a conclusion (chapter 8)  whichaspire to provide a history of the caravan trade inthe longue durée. In the first two chapters, Lydontakes us back to the aborted “all Africa perspec‐tive” adumbrated by the (UNESCO) General Histo‐ry of Africa (1981-93). She presents the Sahara as“a dynamic space with a deep history” and hence,blames the area studies paradigm for its current“misperception” as an inhibitor of cross-culturalexchange (p. 4). This assertion is the beacon for asurvey of the history of the pre-nineteenth-centu‐ry caravan trade and the introduction of the con‐cepts and sources that illustrate the pitfalls of con‐ventional  wisdom.  Besides  a  wide  range  ofFrench,  English,  and Arabic  publications,  Lydondraws  on  an  impressive  array  of  “original  oraland  written  sources  collected  during  severalyears of field work” (p. 4). Chapters 3-5 revolve around what can be con‐ceived as the mechanics and modes of the expan‐sion of long-distance trade in the nineteenth cen‐tury. Lydon tends to predicate this expansion onthe combination of literacy and a steady supply ofpaper. Thanks to both, local sources enabled theauthor to capture changes in tradable goods andfacilitated her recovery of the portable identitiesof the traders who crisscrossed the Sahara as wellas  their  hitherto  understudied  “sidekicks”  --i.e.,Jews, “caravan workers,” women, etc. Lydon im‐puted a distant  origin for the vintage Wad Nuntraders  and  the  family  that  came  to  epitomizetheir  entrepreneurialism--the  Tikna  and  theBayruk respectively. According to Lydon, the Tik‐na are “distant relatives of the Almoravids” with adash of “Arab” and “victims of the trans-Saharanslave trade” (p. 172). This section is capped with achapter  (5)  on  the  organization  of  the  caravantrade  with  special  attention  to  mediums  of  ex‐change and the facilities of the journey itself. In contrast, the last three chapters deal withthe  culture  behind  the  caravan  trade  network.They  enshrine  what  appears  as  the  crux of  Ly‐don’s theory of a casual link between access to lit‐eracy and “faith-based institutions,” and the orga‐nization of trade (p. 3). In chapter 6, she outlinesthe “cultural and religious determinants” of whatshe calls  “the paper economy of faith” (pp.  274,342). In the absence of centralized states, tradersutilized  a  variety  of  strategies  to  minimize  therisks of trading in cross-cultural settings includingpartnership and a wide range of paper contracts.The efficacy of such arrangements, however, wascontingent on the omnipresence of judges, clerics,and muftis  who served as  guardians  of  Muslimethics of  trade.  According to Lydon, “documentssuch as contracts were not considered official le‐gal instruments in Islamic law” (p. 293). As a re‐sult, the system was not conducive to the kind ofinstitutional developments that could have “mod‐ernized” the caravan trade, though it would be in‐teresting to test this hypothesis. In chapter 7 Ly‐don explains the formation and transformation ofthe network of exchange linking Wad Nun to theSahara and West Africa as one that relied heavilyon trust. To simulate the centrality of trust to long-distance trade, Lydon adapts the ethnographic useof distance from, or proximity to, the seat of theMoroccan  government  (the  Makhzan)  to  locateautonomous (Berber)  tribes  in  space.  In  the ab‐sence of  institutions,  we are told,  the Wad Nuntraders relied on “concentric circles of trust andtrustworthiness” (p. 392). In spite of the efficiencyof such contraptions, however, there were limitsto cooperative behavior. Ultimately, the lack of le‐gal structures entailed serious risks, especially incases of dispute or death. Overall, On Trans-Saharan Trade is a signifi‐cant  contribution to  Anglophone scholarship  onthe caravan trade, by virtue of both the answers itexpounds and the questions it raises. The range ofevidence  informing  the  author’s  main  argu‐ments--the primary Arabic sources and the live in‐terviews in particular--is impressive. The diligentsearch  for,  and  recovery  of,  “African  sources”goes a long way towards rectifying the current en‐trapment in the caravan of abolitionism. The pro‐files of the Wad Nun traders and the glimpses oftheir subculture add tangible faces to a trade net‐work mired in elusive neologisms--e.g.,  “Muslim/Arab  traffickers,”  “dissident  tribes,”  “Africanslaves,” etc. The text, however, also reinforces some of the“misperceptions” Lydon has adeptly summarizedin the first  chapter.  First,  Lydon’s  conception ofthe origin and make-up of the Tikna harks back tothe  same  ethnographic  tradition  underpinning“the African divide” she sought to bridge. Despitethe healthy disclaimers, she predicates Tikna ori‐gin on infinite nativity to Wad Nun, descent fromGazulas of antiquity, and “connections” to ancientAlmoravids. Lydon’s quest for “Berber ethnicity”precipitated  the  classification  of  the  Tikna  as“Tashilhit speakers” (p. 172). This ethnic simplifi‐cation mystifies the Tikna invocation of the twoArabic (Hasaniya) proverbs cited at the beginningH-Net Reviews2of the same chapter (4). Lydon does not dwell onthe split between the ethnographic paradigm andeither the demographic history of  the space theTikna call home or their own “legends.” The read‐er is left with lingering questions pertaining to themaking of a Tikna “nation” and the role of literacyin  the  production  of  their  oral  traditions.  Thesame academic proclivity also oozes from the deftinvocation  of  miscegenation  to  explain  somaticdifferences among Saharans. The reader is led tobelieve  that  the  Tikna  were,  once,  “indigenousBerbers”  but  then  became  “mixed”  because  oftheir  consumption  of  black  slaves.  This  disposi‐tion  feeds  off  the  conflation  of  negritude  withservitude born in the bosom of abolitionism andsubsequently  codified  by  colonial  ethnographyand  the  postcolonial  academy.  To  date,  Anglo‐phone Africanists routinely posit African as a sig‐nifier  of  alterity  to  North  Africa.  Lydon  honorsthis tradition--it  lurks beneath the translation ofhartani as “freed slave" (pp. xix, 229). The second example of entrapment in textual‐ity is the split between statements regarding thetrans-Saharan slave trade. Lydon’s conclusions re‐flect  undue  deference  to  scholars  who  cannotboast  of  her  extensive  research  of  local  experi‐ences  and  as  a  result  tend  to  recycle  the  very“western sources” she censures as “tainted withdistortions,  misinformation,  and prejudice”  (p.122).  Fittingly,  caravan  traders  were  routinely“orientalised”  and  projections  of  their  slave  in‐take continue to languish in what she describes as“speculation” (p.  128).  Speculation also bred theerstwhile  oscillation  between  the  assertion  thatslave  exports  “grew  significantly”  in  the  nine‐teenth century and bewilderment over their “dis‐appearance” in the twentieth century. This is alsothe riddle that spawned the use of miscegenationto circumvent the pertinent question A.  G.  Hop‐kins posed back in 1973: “What happened to suchlarge  Negro  communities?”  he  wondered,  “forthey appear virtually  to  have disappeared fromnorth Africa and the Middle East today” (p.  82).That Lydon should return to this textual conven‐tion is particularly puzzling partly because of hersimultaneous  declaration  that  “the  distortionsabout  the  trans-Saharan  trade  ...  do  not  signifi‐cantly alter the overall facts” (p. 123)--i.e., the ideaabout the growth of the slave trade in the nine‐teenth  century.  The  reader  is  left  wonderingabout  the  identity  of  the  sources  behind  theseconclusions.  After all,  the crop of  her own fieldwork  does  not  warrant  such  an  assessment--in‐deed, it  did not even lend itself  to “quantitativeanalysis” (p. 129). The valiant attempt to vindicatecurrent Anglophone projections may also explainthe rather coercive reading of local sources--e.g.,muluk ala rijala (kings of its men) became “ownsmen.” Unfortunately, combined with the excessivesubtitles,  these  limitations  mar  an  otherwisepromising project . H-Net Reviews3If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, athttps://networks.h-net.org/h-levant Citation: Mohamed Hassan Mohamed. Review of Lydon, Ghislaine. On Trans-Saharan Trails: IslamicLaw, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. H-Levant, H-Net Reviews. April, 2011. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32726  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works 3.0 United States License. H-Net Reviews4

Review of Lydon, Ghislaine, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa

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Review of Lydon, Ghislaine, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa

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