Significant Experiments: Slavery, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Mauritania

Elycheikh Ahmedtolba

There are miscellaneous intellectual, cultural, and social challenges that any postcolonial nation is confronted with. These challenges manifest themselves in different significant experiments such as the social relations, the positioning of women, and through the racial lines which, sometimes, divide the historical and cultural unity of the one nation. Within this encompassing framework, I suggest to approach the issues of Slavery, Gender, and Ethnicity as some persistent challenges of the reconstruction of the postcolonial Mauritania. This postcolonial aspect is very important in understanding the continuity of these obstacles, which still remain the central debate for the political and cultural as well as the historical future of Mauritania.

Slavery, Gender, and Ethnicity are among the social and cultural issues that have been provoked by the emergence of the postcolonial theory and the rise of cultural studies. They play a pivotal role in reconsidering the dynamics of the modern postcolonial nation alongside the significance of the cultural diversity. In other words, this article concerns itself with problematizing the feasibilities of overcoming the overriding shortcomings encapsulated within issues such as slavery, gender, and ethnicity.

The claimed new political ease has proved to be open to renegotiate the social and racial mapping and thus to create a liminal space whereby the different Mauritanians could participate into visionalizing the promising future for the country. This future looms to be located somewhere between the political will and social determination to go beyond the racial lines that divide the postcolonial Mauritania. Besides, there is also the self-imposed question to integrate women within this process of political and social decisions.

Mauritania’s new arrangements make provision for prison terms of 10 years for slaveholders. Promoting or defending slavery carries a two-year term. Slavery is, in theory at least, illegal and punishable. Slavery is now “near-universally acknowledged as an appalling violation of human rights - indeed, denial of the right to live free is arguably the greatest human rights violation of all. It is also one depressingly common to cultures throughout history.”

But changing laws alone is not enough. The move to abolish slavery followed a public outcry over the sale in 1980 of M’Barka, a woman held in slavery, in the market in Atar. ElHor (the Free), a group working for the emancipation of black Moors, organized demonstrations in several towns. Protestors were arrested, tried and convicted on charges of creating and participating in an illegal association, distributing tracts and participating in an unauthorized demonstration, but no action
was taken against those who sold M’Barka and others. However, the protests appeared to facilitate the introduction of a decree abolishing slavery.

Socio-ethnic aspects:

The main communities in Mauritania are the two Moorish communities, the politically dominant white Moors and the black Moors, widely considered, including by themselves as former ‘slaves’ and known as hãrãtines -- and the black African communities from the south. White Moors are known also as bizãn (a name derived
from an Arabic word meaning ‘white’). They are of Arab and Berber origin and speak Hassaniya, a dialect of Arabic.

The hãrãtines are almost exclusively of black origin, but are closely associated with the Moorish population in terms of language and culture. In the words of Samuel Cotton: “[they] have lost virtually every aspect of their African origins except their skin color.” Their Moorish culture and their language are the result of generations of enslavement by the Moors. They are also referred to as ‘black Moors’ to differentiate them from the ‘white Moors’, and from black Mauritanians who have not been enslaved by the Moors.

The black or African population from the south consists of several separate ethnic groups, such as the Soninké, Wolof, Bambara and Halpulaar (speakers of the Peul language - Pulaar or Fulfulde - although some are also referred to as Toucouleur), who each speak different languages. Of these groups, “Peul are by far the largest, followed by the Soninké. Bambara and Wolof form a small percentage of the Mauritanian population.”

Statistics on the relative size of each population group are sparse or nonexistent and highly sensitive. Figures dating back to 1960 indicate that at that time the black Mauritanian group formed approximately 20 per cent of the population. The last official population survey which distinguished between the components of the Moorish community, in 1965, found that 60 to 70 per cent were of white and black Moorish background and 30 to 40 per cent were black Africans, according to the National Statistics Bureau archive.

Ethnicity and gender: the prospect of change

Another obstacle to the eradication of slavery lies in the complex interconnections between social stratification and ethnic division in Mauritanian society. Not only those considered as nobles but also those associated with artisan castes in all the different communities - whether Moorish or black Mauritanian – may hold others in slavery. However, “holding people in slavery is seen as socially acceptable in a wide range of socio-ethnic groups.”

The political role of the hãrãtines community has increased, but growing political alliances between the hãrãtines and the black Mauritanian communities were severely curtailed in 1989,11 when the government used Haratines militia to arrest, torture and kill unarmed black Mauritanians. The white Moor community therefore has an interest in maintaining the status quo in which the black Moors are almost entirely dependent on them for their economic and political well-being. It is important to note that “even after freedom has been gained; it is often very beneficial for the social and economic well-being of the formerly enslaved people to retain contact with the tribe which had power over them.”

However, to equate slavery within this largest ethnic group in Mauritania, as is frequently done in the media, is misleading. Similar institutions existed, and still can be traced too, among the black African ethnic groups in Mauritania as well as among most other Sahelian and West African ethnic groups. This is acknowledged and highlighted by a number of human rights groups, such as ‘Human Rights Watch’, ‘Anti-Slavery International’ and the Mauritanian ‘SOS esclaves’, to name only a few.

Closer to the heart of the matter are statements from pressure groups which criticize the government of Mauritania for doing at best little or else nothing at ail to promote the slaves’ and former slaves’ emancipation and economic development, and hence for allowing slavery to continue. Indeed, the vast majority of Mauritanians, living in one of the least developed countries of this world, need better living conditions. However, among these Mauritanians, the slaves and manumitted slaves, together with a number of other despised social groups, deserve special attention.
The deprivation resides not only in such domains as economy and welfare, but also in ongoing political and social discrimination, which is a result of their slave past. Change in the domain needs understanding and an open, unprejudiced debate about the nature of the past. This is, as recent cases show, a sensitive and most difficult task. Nevertheless, it is to such a future project that the present discussion would like to propose some arguments.

Although I am aware that the present analysis could be vulnerable because of this impetus and its explicit premises, I prefer this more precarious status to hiding behind ritual and meaningless evocations of ideals of scientific impartiality. The descriptions of social relations in Mauritanian society on which this project will be predicated are laden with theory, and hence ‘thick descriptions.’ They are aimed at providing a narrative capable of changing the perceptions of the social topography of Mauritania in the postcolonial era. However, this means not engaging in unfounded polemics, but on the contrary unfolding a sound analysis enabling the reader to discern how relations of dependency, ethnicity, and gender relations, evolve, how they are maintained.

Struggles between new and old, between relations of dependency embodied in the slave system and social relations, including gender and ethnicity, no longer moulded in this framework have now been going on for decades. However, beyond all these differentiations, which highlight that things are indeed changing in Mauritania, I still feel anger whenever my thoughts go back to some of the experiences I had and which have to be named. There is the bitterness underlying many slave narratives telling how things used to be, and there is the memory of one particular old slave man, who, being no longer of any use, had to sit all day long outside in the court yard, barely protected by a hut of branches from the beating desert sun, while his master, a likeable and learned man, resided in the modest house build of clay bricks a few steps away.

As far as this aim is concerned, the present article is far from all encompassing. Its intention is to unravel perspectives on bizãn slavery, gender, and ethnicity that until today have remained largely ignored. Its leitmotif is that it is the points of view of “the oppressed which need to be made explicit, and which have to be contrasted with those representations of the social provided by the discourses of the dominant strata.”16 Such a perspective allows one to discern what makes up lines of conflict in society and how these are maintained, shifted or overcome. Social hierarchy in the light of such an analysis is free from that “certain taste of social consent that common-sense definitions of difference in society tend to suggest and which the powerful like to maintain.”

Focusing on slavery, ethnicity, and gender will provide some further substance to the debate, and thus contribute to a more thorough treatment of this serious issues. This indeed is needed, as the recent evolution has polarized opinions rather than encouraged to dialogue. This project aims at describing the Mauritanian society’s experiences, mainly in the postcolonial era, from a grassroots perspective; it wants to give the oppressed a voice, and to provide a forum where both their dignity and humiliation can be expressed.

Studying gender and ethnicity means studying social change. In the case of the bizãn society of Mauritania, i.e. the Moors, this process of transformation constitutes a challenge for the postcolonial nation in many domains; “it affects social structures as well as patterns of identification in the former slave society and underlies changes in the economy.”18 These newly emerging discourses, far from simply representing the past, instead interpret it in order to speak about the present and the future. As such they are a crucial source in unraveling the past of subservient strata such as women and manumitted slaves. Although sources that make it possible to assess directly the gender specifies or detailed figures of bizãn society imports are lacking, a number of sources indicate a bizãn preference for slave women.


Conclusion:

Eventually, it is necessary to stride upon new grounds not only to provide an article about some issues that have never been brought under the light and which have been considered as political taboos, but rather to trace back the latent causes beyond the survival of such complicated, contradictory, and incongruous society. It is quite compulsory to conduct such academic projects in order to break down the social or ideological barriers and so to pave the way for the society to understand itself from within. It is to refute the conceptual dimensions that have been regarded as the only
viewpoint through which any traditional society is to be described. That is to say that
such way of reasoning is the ultimate way the intellectual to find himself destined to
speak truth to the societal power.