ISLAM, SOLE NON-WESTERN SUBJECT

MOST STUDIES OF AFRICA'S PAST DEAL WITH PLACES FAMILIAR TO WESTERNERS, OR AN ASPECT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD 

Sole subject to deal with Africans alone: The 19th-century theocracies and their Islam. 

• But choosing Muslim rather than animist states, fervent Islam rather than "lax" (syncretic) beliefs and Islam rather than animism implies a value judgement...

• And emphasizing the theocrats' wish to "purify" Islam* makes it as un-African as possible.

* Though crowds follow an explorer as they follow al-hajj Umar Tall along the Senegal and Middle Niger; Amadu Tall has 800 wives and proclaims Segu a pilgrimage site equal to Mecca. 

The intensive slave labor that was at the core of the the 19th-century theocracies, the need for which explains the much more effective raids and whose presence meant that the Europeans could not impose their economies so long as it remained, attracts no attention. 

Yet memories are powerful: A member of a Mandara* noble clan states, "My uncles were taken as slaves. We do not forget, and Boko Haram reminds us of the times our elders described."

*Mandara: a territory south of Bornu, animist in the 19th century.

-- Donald Tada, 

 cited in Les Collines du Cameroun: les persécutés de Boko Haram
 by Joan Tilouine, « le Monde », May 25, 2018, p. 4.

Indo-Asian News Service, photo gone from the web.

Fighters of Boko Haram

 The art and music of African animists 

transformed that of the West
while the impact of Muslim Africans 
is only beginning.

Yet the latter alone attract attention. 
Because they are associated with the elites of the north,
who are urban, commercial, literate — 

and white?

*     *     * 

Next,
Africans take center stage