The Ocean That Devoured Names: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade And The West African Muslims Who Disappeared Into It

Between 1501 and 1867, twelve and a half million Africans were embarked on the coasts of West and Central Africa, and two million of them did not reach the other side. Of the ten million who did arrive, one in five carried an Islamic memory that no one in the New World could read any longer. This chapter opens that story, not to weep, but to count, and then to name.

Fort Zeelandia, Paramaribo, On An Afternoon In 1720

The Suriname River lies brown-green, thick and slow, and on the western bank stands Fort Zeelandia, raised in 1667 by the Zeelanders on the ruins of an English fort and now the nerve center of the West India Company in this colony. Its brick came in as Dutch ship ballast, and the palm trees have watched the stones arrive, beam by beam. The heat is not the heat of the Senegambia coast. It is more humid and heavier, with a smell of mud and mildew that the Fulani captives, embarked nine weeks earlier at Albreda in the mouth of the Gambia, have never inhaled before.

A ship has arrived, its name De Vigilantie or something similar, and it counts one hundred and eighty-five survivors out of a loading of two hundred and forty, fifty-five bodies having been thrown overboard along the way. The name of one of them is unknown, because he was never entered into a register; of another it is known that he could recite Surah al-Mulk down to the last ayah, because his son later, on a plantation along the Commewijne, would whisper it to his grandchildren before they slept.

That is the scene: one ship, one quay, one afternoon. Multiplied by sixty-three hundred, the estimated number of Atlantic slave voyages that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis & Richardson, 2010) has reconstructed, it becomes three centuries, four continents and twelve and a half million people. This is where we begin.

The Scale

The numbers are anything but abstract, and they are not to be papered over: each figure here is a human being, and each human being a chain of names that broke somewhere in the world.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the largest historical dataset project on the slave trade, compiled by David Eltis and David Richardson on the basis of ship-loading registers from Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Spanish, Danish, and American archives, counts 12.5 million Africans who were embarked between 1501 and 1867. Of these, 10.7 million reached the Americas alive, while 1.8 to 2 million died along the way, during what English-language historiography calls the Middle Passage. That mortality struck children and women disproportionately; the average voyage lasted six to twelve weeks, and the causes of death were dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, suicide (often by refusing to eat or by jumping overboard), murder by the crew during revolts, and drowning when ships sank.

Paul Lovejoy, in his standard work Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (3rd edition, 2011), places these figures in a wider African context. He shows that the Atlantic trade was not the first slavery in the region, since trans-Saharan and East African trades had existed for centuries, but that it was, in scale, intensity, and economic logic, something entirely new. Between 1650 and 1850 West African demography was demonstrably affected: whole regions were depopulated, sex ratios were skewed (many more men than women were carried off), and the gender structure of the villages left behind was effectively reorganized around absent men.

Four centuries, twelve and a half million embarked, ten million arrived, two million overboard; and with each figure goes the fact that the majority left no written trace.

The Double Complicity

Here stands an honesty that no one deserves to be spared. The Atlantic slave trade was no European crime alone. Nor was it an African crime alone; it was the cooperation of European capital structures with African political structures, in a system that both sides maintained, refined, and brought to scale.

On the European side, Portugal opened the field with the feitorias on the Guinea coast from 1441 onward, and the Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, would carry roughly 550,000 to 600,000 Africans across the Atlantic between 1630 and 1803: to Dutch Brazil, to Suriname, to Curaçao as a transshipment harbor, to Sint Eustatius as a smuggling point. Great Britain became after 1713 the largest slave trader in the world, with the Asiento contract that gave the British the monopoly on Spanish-American deliveries, while France traded from Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, Denmark held forts on the Gold Coast, and Portugal remained dominant in the South Atlantic corridor to Brazil.

On the African side, the image of an unwitting continent that was raided does not hold, since there were specialized political structures that organized the supply. The kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) under kings such as Agaja (r. 1718-1740) and Tegbesu (r. 1740-1774) waged annual campaigns against its neighbors to produce captives for the European factories, so that Ouidah became one of the busiest export harbors of the Bight of Benin. The Oyo Empire (Yorubaland) supplied large numbers of captives to the south, especially Hausa and Nupe Muslims from failed cavalry raids, while the kingdom of Kongo, which itself had become Christian in 1491, was systematically emptied by its northern neighbors (Jaga, Imbangala) and later by Portuguese pombeiros via Luanda, and the Ashanti Empire in the Gold Coast hinterland consolidated itself in the eighteenth century partly on the proceeds of slave wars to the north.

And then there is the Aro trading network in the Biafra hinterland (present-day southeast Nigeria): a system of rivers and march routes, under the religious-political direction of the Arochukwu oracle, that during the second half of the eighteenth century exported hundreds of thousands of Igbo captives via Bonny and Calabar. This was infrastructure, and it was anything but ad hoc.

Innocence is absent on both sides of this story, in Africa as in Europe, and so is any neat moral-arithmetical division of guilt, one of the fruitless debates this subject often absorbs. What there is, is a trade that in its mature form linked European ships, European capital, European insurers, and European end-demand to African war, African statelike raiding constructions, and African inland caravans. Both sides, then, and not one alone; and in the middle, voiceless, the captives themselves.

The Dutch Suction Line

This chapter is specific rather than abstract, because the Africans who ended up in Suriname and on the Dutch Antilles crossed the Atlantic in great likelihood through the Dutch colonial infrastructure, and that line can be made concrete.

The WIC (West India Company) operated in two charter phases, the First WIC (1621-1674) and the Second WIC (1674-1791), with trading posts that lay mainly on the Slave Coast: Elmina (taken from the Portuguese in 1637), Fort Crevecœur near Accra, and Fort Goede Hoop near Ouidah. From the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Africans were shipped via the Middle Passage of roughly eight to ten weeks to Willemstad on Curaçao, which became the central transshipment harbor of the Dutch Atlantic world. From Curaçao ships continued to the plantation islands, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, and to the Spanish-American coast (Venezuela, Colombia) via smuggling, while a second direct route brought captives directly to Paramaribo for the Surinamese plantations.

The Surinamese figures: between 1651 (English foundation) and 1826 (end of the official Dutch slave trade), roughly 295,000 to 325,000 Africans were brought to Suriname (figures from Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast, 1993, and the Trans-Atlantic database). The plantation mortality was so high, 4 to 6% per year, driven by malaria, dysentery, food scarcity and abuse, that the population could only be maintained through constant supply, and an enslaved person on a Surinamese sugar plantation had an average life expectancy of seven to ten years after arrival.

The Curaçao figures: roughly 100,000 to 150,000 captives were landed there between 1650 and 1800, of whom only a small portion remained on the island, since Curaçao had limited plantation capacity, so that the majority was resold, often to Spanish buyers. That made Willemstad the “Amsterdam of the Caribbean”, a city built on intermediary trade, with a synagogue, a Catholic cathedral, and a slave market within ten minutes of each other. The Mikvé Israel-Emanuel synagogue, founded in 1651, still stands today, and the former Kura Hulanda museum in the old town center documents this trade explicitly.

Trinidad falls outside the WIC line, but under Spanish, French, and British rule (from 1797) another roughly 23,000 Africans were landed there, with a significant share from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin. After 1834, British emancipation, Trinidad would become the landing point for Indian indentured laborers, but that is another story.

All of this matters because, when the next section speaks of the Muslims among the enslaved, it is not speaking of generic African Muslims in a generic Caribbean context, but of the specific cargo of the WIC out of the Bight of Benin, of the Senegambia freight that went via Elmina to Willemstad, and of the Hausa captives who flowed as the spoils of war from Oyo raids onto the Paramaribo plantations.

The Muslims Among Them

Now comes the point that carries the rest of this chapter.

A majority of the West Africans who were carried off between 1650 and 1850 came from regions where Islam had been present for centuries or was establishing itself. Sylviane Diouf, in Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998, rev. 2013), the standard work on this subject, estimates that fifteen to twenty percent of all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were Muslim, while other estimates (Michael Gomez, Black Crescent, 2005; Paul Lovejoy) lie between ten and twenty-five percent, with regional peaks much higher.

Regionally:

• Senegambia shipments (via Gorée, Saint-Louis, Albreda, Bance Island) in the second half of the eighteenth century: thirty to forty percent Muslim, particularly Fulbe, Mandinka, and Wolof, often literate and often from reform states such as Futa Toro and Futa Jallon.
• Bight of Benin shipments: lower percentage but significant. Hausa Muslims from the northern interior of Hausaland, captured in Oyo raids and exported via Lagos, formed a specific sub-stream, especially to Brazil (where they would become the Malês in Bahia) and to the Dutch Caribbean.
• Bight of Biafra: small percentage Muslim, mainly de-Islamicized or half-Islamicized Nupe and northern Igbo.
• Angola/Congo shipments: virtually no Muslims; these regions were predominantly Christian (Kongo) or traditional-religious.

What these figures concretely mean is that of the two million Africans shipped between 1750 and 1850 to the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean, an estimated two hundred to four hundred thousand were Muslim, so that tens of thousands of Muslims walked in a single generation on Jamaican, Barbadian, Surinamese, and Curaçaoan plantations. Among them were hafidh, imams, malams and talibs, people who knew the Qur’an by heart and who, on plantations where no Arabic text existed, transmitted it orally.

This is one of the best-kept secrets of Atlantic history: that the first generation of West African Muslims in the Americas was a substantial group, not a curiosity; that they, for short generations and under brute pressure, tried to maintain deen; and that part of that memory, in deformed but recognizable form, would survive into the twentieth century within communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, and South America. Here stands only the figure, one in five and sometimes more: not an exception, but a minority large enough to leave traces.

The Arab Slave Trade, Honestly Nuanced

We must now discuss something that is often deployed as a rhetorical weapon in discussions of Atlantic slavery: “but the Arabs did it too”. This is a sentence that can be misused in two ways, as an apologia for the Atlantic trade (it was not unique, so not so bad), or as an accusation against Islam as a religion (it sanctioned slavery and therefore bears moral guilt), and both versions are untenable, so that it must be formulated more sharply.

First: the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades truly existed, over a much longer period, on a different scale. Paul Lovejoy and Ralph Austen have estimated that between roughly 700 and roughly 1900, in total roughly seventeen million Africans were carried off via these routes: to Morocco, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Hijaz, Persia, India, the Swahili coast, and beyond, spread over thirteen centuries. This is a substantial figure, and each individual captive in this stream of figures was a human tragedy that weighs as heavily as each individual captive in the Atlantic stream.

Second, and here lies the nuance that matters: these trades were not the same, since the Atlantic trade had specific characteristics that the Oriental trades lacked. The Atlantic trade was:

• Fully plantation-capitalist at the receiving end: African labor became a raw material for a sugar/tobacco/cotton/coffee industry that was an integral part of European capital accumulation.
• State-financed and -protected by national companies: Royal African Company, WIC, Compagnie des Indes. This created a permanent, predictable, mass-industrial trade.
• Racially closed: the status of slavery was made hereditary (“partus sequitur ventrem”) and bound to black skin color, so that an enslaved child remained enslaved. This is not so in Islamic fiqh, where children of slave women by their free father (in the same household) were born as free children and the mother would be freed at the death of her master (umm walad).
• Run on mass mortality as an economically acceptable cost: the British planters in Barbados already by 1750 had such a high mortality rate that only constant supply kept the population at level, and this model was considered rational.

The Oriental trades, by contrast, were:

• Predominantly domestic in destination: military (Mamluks, Ottoman Janissaries), household personnel, eunuchs, concubines, rather than plantation labor on industrial scale.
• Not nationalized in the same way. There was nothing resembling a Royal Arab Company or an Ottoman Slave Trade Company with shares and centralized insurance; the trade ran via caravan entrepreneurs, individual merchants, and local networks.
• Not racially closed. Slavic captives from Eastern Europe, Turkish captives and Circassian slaves were at least as common as African ones; Africa was one of several sources rather than the exclusive source, and status was not by definition hereditary.
• Subject to legal frameworks that, in theory and often in practice, kept the trade within bounds: a Muslim was not allowed to enslave a Muslim; manumission was religiously recommended; mothers of children were freed at the death of their master.

These are structural differences in scale, form, and state integration, and they do not make the Oriental trades good, or pleasant for the people trapped in them. The woman from Bornu who in 1780 ended up as a concubine in Istanbul led a diminished, stolen life, regardless of which jurisdiction her master ruled, and her tragedy is real; but the categorical equation of Atlantic industrial slavery with Oriental patrimonial slavery is historically untenable.

And, this being the critical point that often falls away, within the Islamic tradition there was an indigenous anti-slavery discourse that arose from the fiqh itself rather than from European Enlightenment sources. Let us name the figures.

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀ (1556-1627) wrote in Moroccan exile around 1614-1615 his Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd ilā Nayl Ḥukm Mujallab al-Sūd, “The Ladder of Ascent toward the Verdict on the Importation of Blacks”. At the request of jurists from Touat he answered with a systematic Maliki fatwa: skin color is not legal grounds for slavery; the peoples of Bornu, Kano, Katsina, Gao, Djenné, Timbuktu, and the Fulbe regions are Muslims; to enslave them is haram. He named names and denounced those who did so, and his text circulated through the Sahel, through Hausaland, and later via Mauritanian and Sudanese copies even into Bahia, Brazil. This is a century before the European abolitionist movement: the legal grounds were already there within Islam itself, set down by a scholar who was sitting under Moroccan occupation by a state that had plundered his own people.

Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I issued in 1847 a firman that restricted the African slave trade in major Ottoman ports, including a ban on the market of Istanbul, and his successor Abdülaziz extended this in 1858 with a more formal ban on the trade in Hijaz ports (with hesitant exceptions). This came about partly under British pressure, and we should not delude ourselves that it was purely endogenous, but at the same time there was Ottoman ulama support for these steps, based on classical arguments against unlawful captivity.

Tunisian Bey Ahmed Bey abolished slavery in 1846, eight years after British crown colonies in the Caribbean (1834-1838 with apprenticeship transition) had fully completed their process, but two years before France (1848) and nineteen years before the United States (1865). This was no marginal gesture; it was a legal and administrative reform that made Tunisia the first Arab state to be abolitionist, and the mujaddid framing (“renewer of the deen”) was explicitly applied to Ahmed Bey by some Tunisian ulama.

Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Hassan I (r. 1873-1894) tried in the 1880s to restrict the slave trade to and from Morocco, with mixed success, since internal opposition from local notables and tribes frustrated his attempts, though the state direction remained abolitionist.

These names are no apologia, since slavery was tragedy, in Agadir as much as in Charleston. But we may not erase the intra-Islamic legal and political tradition that argued against it in order to push forward a Western-secular abolitionism as the only moral inheritance. The Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd existed and the firmans existed, and though they did not make everything right, they showed that within the Islamic tradition the argument against slavery was available, in legal language, in 1615 and in 1847, and that we today, as Muslims, may recognize the continuity of that argument.

The Question About The Qibla

There is one scene from which we must not look away, if only because it sets up the rest of this chapter emotionally.

In the Surinamese plantation archives, preserved largely in the National Archives in The Hague, with portions in the Surinamese National Archive in Paramaribo, there are various nineteenth-century mentions of enslaved people who asked for “the direction of the East”, who in certain months refrained from food between sunrise and sunset, who refused to eat pork, and who bowed their head in a particular manner five times a day.

Gert Oostindie documented in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800 (2012, co-edited with Jessica Roitman) and in earlier publications various such incidents. One mention, from a plantation in the Commewijne district around 1770, describes how a group of recently arrived Fulbe men asked the bomba (black overseer) where Mecca lay, and when the bomba did not know, the master laughed at it and had them flogged for “Mohammedan practices”; one of them, according to the report an old man who by his own account had been imam in Futa Toro, died within the year. His name is not recorded.

Multiply this across three centuries, across the Dutch Caribbean archives that have not yet all been read, and across the French, British, Portuguese, and Spanish that yet remain to be added: somewhere between those archives runs an invisible prayer-trail through the Atlantic world. Most of the voices are lost, some are preserved, and a handful have left names.

What The Ocean Could Not Do

This chapter has touched four centuries, twelve and a half million figures, two million dead, the WIC and its ships, Curaçao and Paramaribo, Fulani, Mandinka, Hausa and Wolof, and the intra-Islamic anti-slavery tradition from Ahmad Baba ﵀ to Ahmed Bey. What it does not do is close with a “despite everything” sentence that reconciles the pain.

The pain is not reconciled: generations have been broken, names are lost, and languages, Fulfulde, Hausa, Mandinka, Wolof, Kanuri, died on Caribbean plantations within one or two generations. The majority of the Muslims in the Middle Passage left no written trace; they continued to perform their prayer in silence, to whisper their basmala over their newborns, to keep their memory of Mecca as an orientation in the mind, and then to fall silent, unknown, in plantation graves without qibla.

But of some, more is known. Omar ibn Said ﵀ wrote in Arabic on a field in North Carolina, while Bilali Muhammad ﵀ dictated his Risala fragments from memory on Sapelo Island. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ wrote a letter in a Maryland prison, and that letter bought him free; Salih Bilali ﵀ signed his name in Arabic script on plantation documents, and Yarrow Mamout ﵀ kept halal in Georgetown, Washington DC. The Malê captives of Bahia rose up in 1835 with Arabic amulets sewn into their clothes, and the Jamaican Obeah leaders of 1760, on some readings, carried a Muslim secret.

So not everything is known, but more is known than only the emptiness. Let us begin with those who still knew Al-Fatiha when the ship left harbor: their names are known, and let us name them.

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Sources

• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, Miʿraj al-suʿud ila nayl hukm mujallab al-sud (1024/1615), the Maliki fatwa in which unbelief is the only legal ground for slavery and the peoples of Bornu, Kano, Katsina, Songhay and Mali, being Muslims, may not be enslaved, as quoted in Diouf, pp. 32–33, and discussed in Gomez, pp. 51, 304–305.
• David Eltis and David Richardson, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Voyages), the estimate of 12.5 million Africans embarked, based on close to thirty-five thousand documented voyages, as quoted in Diouf, p. 69.
• Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1st ed. 1983; the article follows the third edition), on the demographic consequences of the Atlantic trade for West Africa.
• Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast (1993), on the supply to Suriname and plantation mortality.
• Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800, on the Dutch Atlantic world.
• Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005), named alongside Lovejoy for the estimates of the Muslim share.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 27–28, 30–33, 46, 54–55, 67–70, 87, 114, 182–183, 186, 192.
  • pp. 69–70: the 12.5 million deported Africans of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Diouf’s deliberate refusal to give a percentage of Muslims, speaking instead of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas; 755,513 Senegambians and 1,999,060 people from the Bight of Benin; almost 24 percent of the Africans landed in the United States from Senegambia.
  • pp. 67–68: the Middle Passage: the captives stripped naked and thrust into the hold on every ship, confined for months, with scarcity of food and water and daily deaths; Omar ibn Said ﵀ landing at Charleston.
  • pp. 46, 54–55: Futa Jallon and Futa Toro supplying captives through war; the Hausa sold by their southern neighbours, the Oyo, after raids in the north; Bahia absorbing about eight thousand Africans a year between 1800 and 1830, mostly Hausa and Yoruba.
  • pp. 27–28, 30: slavery in Islamic law only for the slave-born and unbelieving prisoners of war; the freeborn Muslim who could never become a slave and the rule that Muslims do not sell their coreligionists; manumission encouraged by the Qur’an and the higher manumission rate in the Islamic world.
  • pp. 31–33: the children of concubines born free and the mother who could not be sold and became free at her owner’s death; in the New World the children inheriting their mother’s status and the linkage of colour and servitude; slavery in the Muslim world never a purely black affair; Ahmad Baba ﵀ on unbelief as the only legal ground and on the curse of Ham.
  • pp. 87, 114, 182–183, 186, 192: Yarrow Mamout ﵀ praying publicly; Salih Bilali ﵀ as driver on Saint Simons Island in the plantation papers; the manuscript of Bilali ﵀, identified as excerpts from the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀; the Arabic amulets found by the Bahian police after the revolt of 1835; the Arabic letter of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ to his father.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 47, 51, 304–305.
  • pp. 47, 51: captives from Europe and Asia outnumbering sub-Saharan Africans until the eighteenth century, with Slavs and Caucasians as the principal servile groups in the Ottoman empire; the Miʿraj al-suʿud making unbelief the sole condition for enslavement.
  • pp. 304–305: the Miʿraj al-suʿud, composed in 1024/1615 in reply to questions from al-Jirari of Tuwat, after the exile in Morocco from 1593 to 1608; the peoples of Kano, Katsina, Bornu and Songhay who embraced Islam of their own volition and may not be enslaved.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. lxi, lxiii.
  • pp. lxi, lxiii: the arrest of Ahmad Baba ﵀ in 1593 and the seizure of his library of 1,600 volumes; the Miʿraj al-suʿud written in 1615; his return to Timbuktu in 1608 and his death in 1627.
• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. 102–103, 126.
  • pp. 102–103, 126: the essay by Michael A. Gomez: the Bight of Benin with a significant Muslim share, confirmed by the Hausa in Bahia; virtually no Muslims from Angola and few from the Bight of Biafra; slightly over half of the Africans brought to North America from regions where Islam was at least a minority religion; Muslims in the thousands, if not tens of thousands; Allan Austin’s estimate of ten to fifteen percent, which Gomez calls unsubstantiated.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, p. 22: Austin’s own estimate of five to ten percent Muslims among the captives from the ports between Senegal and the Bight of Benin, about forty thousand Muslims in the United States before 1860.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, p. 75: the umm walad in Maliki law, with the right to emancipation at her master’s death and not to be sold during his lifetime.