Citizenship after Empire: Recognizing “French” West Africans in Sudan

1 In recent years, scholars have focused increasing attention on the history and development of the passport. In a study grounded in European history, John Torpey (2000) saw the passport as structuring sovereignty, as limiting and defining rights, and as allowing states to control entry into their territories, which was a new capacity of European states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Radhika Mongia (1999, 528) argued that the “passport not only is a technology reflecting certain understandings of race, nation/nationality and state but was central to organizing and securing the modern definitions of these categories ” (see also Mongia, 2007).

2 For instance, Christian Bawa Yamba’s invaluable Permanent Pilgrims (1995) is essentially a phenomenological study of the enduring liminality and paradoxically settled transience of Hausa in Sudan; in reading it for traces of governmentality, one must approach it from an oblique angle. Like that of Christian Bawa Yamba, 'Umar al-Naqar’s studies are superlative (1969b; 1972).

3 On the Muwallid, see Mark Duffield (1983, 15-16); Christian Bawa Yamba (1995, 4-5, quoting Balamoan, 1981) ; ‘Umar al-Naqar (1972). On the Islamization of Darfur via “holy men from the West,” see Sean R. O’Fahey (2008, 224-227). Note that this historical process by which Muslim scholars and pilgrims from West Africa established Islam in part of the Sudan is an important corrective to the idea that West African Islam is a derivative version of a purer “Arab” Islam coming from the East.

4 Sean R. O’Fahey (2008, 281, n. 24) notes that “there is a specifically Darfurian Fulani dimension to the Mahdiyya that invites further research”.

5 Awad Al-Sid Al-Karansi (1987, 386-387) states that the Tijaniyya first appeared in Darfur in the 1810s, and more of its adepts arrived after the defeat of the Umarian empire (in today’s Mali) in the 1860s.

6 On ambivalence among Sokoto’s leadership towards the hajj, see especially Muhammad Sani Umar (2006). Scholars of the Maliki school of law, dominant in West Africa, had long voiced ambivalence or even opposition to undertaking the pilgrimage from West Africa (Al-Naqar, 1969b). Muhammad Bello, caliph of Sokoto and son of Uthman don Fodio, wrote memorably that when the devil saw someone studying the Qur’an, he would tempt him to perform the hajj instead. The believer would set the Holy Book aside and set out, yet Mecca was far away and the voyage difficult. Finally, the believer would accomplish neither study of the Qur’an nor the pilgrimage. The devil would have won (ibid., 341-342).

7 A point of clarification: the Tijaniyya in the Western Sudan – particularly in parts of contemporary Mali, Guinea, Senegal – did not assume the functions of political organization that other turuq did in places such as Mauritania and Libya. The Umarian jihad created states. If not absolute, the distinction between segmentary lineage societies and state-based societies seems to me heuristically useful here.

8 Christian Bawa Yamba (op.cit., 63) in particular notes the importance of infrastructure, arguing that it helped to “sustain” the migrations.

9 The rails reached el Obeid in 1909, and Nyala in Darfur fifty years later (Birks, 1978, 18; O’Fahey, op.cit., 301).

10 J.S. Birks (1978, 64-65). J.S. Birks provides a map based on the 1955-1956 census. By “West Africans,” Birks means “those born of parents in or from West Africa,” which he defines as the area west of the Chari river that runs between Chad and northern Cameroon; (1978, xii, 62).

11 Although not without flaws (Birks, op.cit., 62), the 1956 census falls fortuitously within the period of greatest interest for my larger study. Some years later the anthropologist Christian Bawa Yamba (1995, 6) reported estimates of the number of West Africans in Sudan as ranging from between 900,000 and 3 million. It is not clear where the larger number comes from, and it likely includes Chadians. Ayoub Balamoan (1981, xiii, 4-5) claims that at the time of independence, over half of Sudan’s population may have been of foreign, predominantly West African, origin. This seems highly unlikely, and Balamoan was not a demographer.

12 Some of Christian Bawa Yamba’s interlocutors (op.cit., 5, 206-207, n. 4) perceived the term “Fellata” as pejorative, although as applied to himself, a visiting anthropologist engaged in fieldwork, he did not find it to be so.

13 See ‘Umar al-Naqar (1969a), who does not use the terms Ghana or Wagadu, referring instead to the Tukolor empire of the Senegal River valley. Ghana/Wagadu declined ca. 1000 AD.

14 “À la Mecque si tu as de quoi te suffire, autrement dit, si tu as de l’argent, les arabes ne te disent plus ‘takrur’ – c’est à dire noir – …[mais] un arabe noir”. Radio broadcast of interview with al-hajj Issa Ongoïba (2003). A cassette of this broadcast was obtained by Dr. Baz Lecocq and translated by Gomba Coulibaly. Writing on Eritrea, C.S. Grisman (1955, 42) offered a racialized etymology of “Takruri” as “from afar” or “sullied!” (sic). Terms derived from Takrur remain in use in contemporary Sudan and Saudi Arabia, although the general term ‘Fellata’ is more widely used to refer to ‘people from the West,’ especially settled pilgrim communities (personal communication, Dahlia el-Tayeb Gubara, 14 January 2008). To avoid giving the impression that West African origins were systematically denigrated in the hijaz, it is worth mentioning another term with a distinct valence, Shinqit (thus ahl Shinqiti, etc.), referring to the caravan town of that name in Northern Mauritania, whose scholars and scholarship were highly respected (Lydon, 2009, 6-7, 11, 82-84).

15 The first category, those of “doubtful nationality” numbered 63,388; the second a) 14,912; b) 106,413. The total given for the two categories taken together was 182,613, or 74.2 % of the “Persons from Abroad” in Sudan. This represented a mere 2.5 % of the national population.

16 See also Christian Bawa Yamba (1995), Sean O’Fahey (2008, 227-28), and Issa Ongoïba (2003). I take the phrase “world on paper” from Sean Hawkins (2002), although his analysis elides precisely this world in particular.

17 On the Hausa community in Chad, see John Works (1976).

18 The administration of Niger emphasized the Saudi origin of these demands (CADN, 1958b; 1957a).

19 The fact that Nigerian pilgrims were exempted from this requirement considerably boosted the value of Nigerian papers.

20 The AEF government also required a deposit for repatriation, again exempting Nigerians (CADN, 1957b). This had the effect of not only multiplying the motives for evasion of state scrutiny – which on Sudan’s long and porous western border, was easy enough to do – but also encouraging increasingly complex forms of criminality, such as the forgeries mentioned above, and the practice of Nigeriens passing for Nigerians (CADN, 1955b).

21 Although policies that look like Arabization began under the parliamentary regime, that process took full form under the military regime that came to power in 1958.

22 The distinction between the two approaches is largely heuristic. Elements of both appear in the texts themselves, as Patrick Weil’s study of French nationality would lead us to expect (Weil, 2002).

23 See Ayoub Balamoan (1981, 400-402) for a complete reproduction of “Definition of ‘Sudanese’ Ordinance,” 15 July 1948.

24 One also had to be “of good character.” Sudanese Nationality Act, 1957, as reproduced in Balamoan (op.cit., 402-407). See also Christian Bawa Yamba (op.cit., 219, n. 19).

25 By way of comparison, no competence in French was required of current or former French nationals migrating to France from West Africa before or after independence.

26 He counted 2,000 West African households, and estimated that there were 5 inhabitants per household “which would appear to be a minimum” (1958e). The previous study had been conducted by J. Mouradian, who would work in Jacques Foccart’s office after 1960, handling among other questions those relating to the pilgrimage (ANF, 1963-1964).

27 My understanding of this subject in the paragraphs below rely heavily on Baz Lecocq (2010), although all errors of interpretation are my own.

28 According to Baz Lecocq (2005, 48-49), the term Bellah is “originally a Songhay word for all Tuareg of lower social status or a derogatory term for all Tuareg, [which] quickly gained administrative and political acceptance to denote slaves.” In the late twentieth century, some “intellectuals of unfree origins” began to use it as a distinct ethnonym.

29 A note of caution should be expressed here. The French colonial administration had been concerned with possible trafficking along pilgrimage routes as recently as the 1950s; for the Red Sea region, see CADN, 1958a. African independence would change the stakes entirely.

30 Based on 1954 and 1955 reports, the second of which pays much more extensive attention to the question of slavery. For reasons that are unclear, but which may be related, 1955 was Fall’s last pilgrimage season. The 1956 report by Boubacar Diallo Telli leaves politics and slavery aside in favor of close attention to the logistics of the official pilgrimage. Note that Diallo Telli was a civilian (AMIM 1954; 1955; 1956). On passports, see AMIM 1955.

31 On Mohamed Ali, see Baz Lecocq (2010).

32 See also comments by Modibo Keita (ANM, 1962a; 1962c). On such racialist thought within independent Mali, see Baz Lecocq (2010).

33 Although Mali, and perhaps its neighbors, saw this as a victory of sorts, the French were themselves ambivalent. The MAE sought to keep a French hand in the organization of the pilgrimage, and asked its embassies to confirm the willingness of their host governments to see their citizens represented by France. On the other hand, Jacques Foccart’s office was content to cede the expense and the responsibility to African states and close down consulates like the one at Asmara rather than “démontrer notre impuissance à nos anciens ressortissants” (ANF, 1963).