Westerners along the Nile: West African Muslims in Sudan (19th and 20th centuries)
In a 2001 census, the government of Mali estimated the number of Malian migrants living in Sudan and Egypt to be 200, 000. This is twice as many as the 100, 000 Malians estimated to live in France in the same census. Yet, journalists and academics alike have traditionally devoted much more attention to those West Africans crossing the Sahara northwards towards Europe, to the detriment of those doing so eastwards towards the Red Sea.
The role and significance of these “Westerners along the Nile” has been relegated to the margins of academic writing and media coverage, due to a stubborn epistemological partition of the African continent that emphasizes national borders amongst African nations, cultural borders between North, East, West, or Southern Africa, and linguistic borders between the former French and British colonies.
This paper tackles part of this issue, by focusing on a group that transcended all of these borders: the history of West African Muslims’ migration to and settlement in the modern-day Republic of Sudan in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, the paper surveys and analyzes nine key works produced on this topic from the early 1970s up to 2015. After introducing each of these works in order of publication, this essay evaluates how scholars’s treatment of West African Muslims in Sudan has evolved. Here, I distinguish two periods, roughly corresponding to two trends in the scholarship. The first period runs from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, and the second one from the early 1990s to the present. I argue that while scholars in the former period seemed more concerned with the study of bordered spaces and geographical blocs, scholars in the latter period articulated their analysis around movement, and flows, rather than frontiers.
This analytical focus on movement, flows, and networks fits right into a broader, recent trend in the historiography of the Sahara. Indeed, scholars of this region have increasingly moved away from limiting descriptions establishing arbitrary borders between various geographical areas —e.g. sub-Saharan Africa vs. North Africa— and ascribing them with essentializing characteristics that failed to capture their intrinsic complexities and nuances. In two recent articles, Ghislaine Lydon and Baz Lecoq both argue that Eurocentric biases historically drove scholarship on Africa, leading many to consider the Sahara desert a dividing border in the middle of the continent. As this paper demonstrates, such geographical and epistemological borders are increasingly being abolished.
