ECAS 2013

Comparing the African religious field in Benin and Brazil, during the Atlantic Slave trade, we would like to stress that in both of them, it made strenuous changes in the religious field that one cannot explain in terms of acculturation or syncretism. In Benin, the old Dahomean kingdom strengthened itself by transforming ancestor cults into territory and political cults, making them part of a new cosmology, nowadays recognised as a unified set that was transferred in to the New world.

In Brazil, the African cosmology was constructed at the end of the XIX century with the help of Retornados making round trips between the old Slave Coast and Brazil during the illegal slave trade from l830 to 1888. In both cases, these African religious creations were mainly a means to cope within each ones political context. As such, the Dahomean religious universe, resulting from a transformation of ancestor cults and nature deities into a cosmology, helped to consolidate a kingdom strengthened by the slave trade. Meanwhile, Afro-Brazilian cults participated in the building of the nation State at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX century, taking part of the racial fraternity ideology raised by the elite to transform a colonial state into a modern one. The detailed analysis of a candomblé ritual during Corpus Christi will show how this ideology can be seen through the various entities presented during its different phases.

When Ali Eisami Gazir was interviewed by the German missionary Sigismund Koelle in ca. 1850, he had already reached high age. He was looking back on over 60 years of his Bornu childhood, enslavement, trafficking, freedom and resettlement in Sierra Leone. Being kidnapped by Fulbe warriors in 1806 he was only one victim of many of the Sokoto Jihad years that lead to the formation of a West African Caliphate.

Ali narrates his religious life caesuras and disastrous occurrences of regional scale in a parallel way. He went to an Islamic teacher; he was initiated together with other boys in a common circumcision. When his row of Islamic life rituals stopped because of Jihad attacks - he was about to marry - Ali lists this war after a sun eclipse, locust menace, a famine and the pestilence.

It was a missionary who finally gave Ali a voice in Latin letters, but Ali himself could read and write Arabic and dictated his story. Because his father was a scholar, Ali was engaged in the Royal Palace for four years and learnt the Yoruba language. In opposite to himself as a Muslim, he defines non-Islamic African regions as uncivilized: According to Ali they drink cow blood, alcohol, and ride their horses without saddles. He is not alienating the Spanish or British he met, but exoticizing some Bornu neighbours. Ali Eisami Gazir uses his literacy for class distinction apart from his slave status. He therefore is an example for steady religious identities defying new environments.

By the end of the 19th century, general Husayn was one of the last mamluks in the Muslim world. Trained and gathered originally in the first caliphs' entourage, in the 8th and the 9th centuries, the mamluks were mainly - but not only - slaves converted to Islam through the medieval and modern ages.

Legally General Husayn was clearly one those mamluks as a slave and then a freed one. But he was not converted as he was born in the 1820s in an Islamic area of Caucasus, in Circassia. What was original about his trajectory though, was his education in Tunis: he was one of the first mamluks trained in a military school, learning European knowledge and Arabic language.

Through his administrative letters, the aim here will be to understand to what extent the practices of writing were used by a former slave: how he did refer to his former legal status and how did he succeed to shape a public image linked to a broad political vision of Islam with the beginning of colonization of North Africa?

Stating your origin, describing the area you visited or listing the places where you have been taken or sold, appears to be a common feature of slave narratives collected in 19th century from people from central Sudan. If the interest of the collectors for the geography of this area introduces a bias, it doesn't change the fact that these slaves or ex-slaves remembered long lists of places and itineraries sometime several decades after having left the area. The memorization of geographical data and travel accounts are part of the oral practices in this area in 19th century, most of the time linked to professional practices. But in the case of slave narratives references to places and traveled routes seem to be part of a statement of whow you have been and whom you have become. This prominent feature of geographical information in these slave narratives call for an examination of the relation between geography, narrative of self and slavery in Central Soudan in 19th century.