Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach
Hisham Aidi, Columbia University, Program on African Social Research
Marc Lynch, George Washington University, Project on Middle East Political Science, Program on African Social Research
Zachariah Mampilly, Baruch College, Program on African Social Research
Race, racialization and racial formations have become an increasingly popular conceptual framework for research on the Middle East and Africa.[1] A framework based on racial formations has opened the door for important comparative insights and new understandings about the mechanisms and legacies of marginalization and exclusion across regions which share deep historical connections but are too often treated in isolation from each other. From conflicts in Israel/Palestine, labor exploitation in the Gulf, the legacy of slavery in the Arabic-speaking world and Indian Ocean, and nationalist disputes in Ethiopia, Sudan and elsewhere, the Arab and African worlds are rife with seemingly racialized political conflicts, institutions, and identities.
Yet despite the obvious appeal of the racial frame for both actors and analysts, and the increasing global ubiquity of the framing, does it provide superior analytical traction for capturing the myriad tensions in a region shaped by conflicts over numerous other identity categories including religion, caste, gender, sexuality and class? What analytical purchase is gained by viewing these social processes and political struggles through the lens of race? What political work is done by mobilizations adopting racial formations as a framework for understanding the constellation of power relations, identities and institutional structures across very different contexts?
In February 2020, the editors of this volume organized a POMEPS workshop that explored the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East, examining issues that span both regions (i.e., cross-border conflict, Islamist politics, social movements and national identity, and Gulf interventionism.)[2] In February 2021, we convened another workshop, sponsored by POMEPS and the newly-founded Program on African Social Research (PASR, pronounced Pasiri) centered on racial formations and racialization across the two regions. Both workshops centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions while also taking seriously the distinctive historical trajectories and local configurations of power which define national and subregional specificities. The workshop brought together nearly two dozen scholars from across multiple disciplines to explore the historical and contemporary politics of racial formation across Africa and the Middle East.
The concept of racial formations moves beyond simplistic or essentialist understandings of race. In their classic work, Racial Formation in the United States (1986), Michel Omi and Howard Winant defined racial formation as “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings.”[3] Racialization is a process, then, deeply rooted in power relations and social dynamics, with racial formations emerging through cultural and political contestation rather than following naturally from skin color, phenotypical difference, or ethnic origin. Essays in this collection thus look at how racial formations in Africa and the Middle East were shaped by forces as different as slavery, colonialism, family and “tribal” ties, religion, genealogical discourses of purity and belonging, post-colonial state-building, and recent migration flows.
This project aligns with multiple projects recently launched at American universities looking at race and racism in the MENA region, but with subtle differences in purpose and scope. By focusing exclusively on the Middle East or on Africa, some of these initiatives risk reproducing the long-standing Saharan and Red Sea divides that we aim to transcend. Pasiri’s mission, in part, is to interrogate how Africa and the Middle East are configured and connected, how the border between the two regions is contingent, shifting, and constructed in competing ways by different political actors and scholars. The case for looking at racial formations comparatively across the Sahara and the Red Sea is obvious. North Africa’s main ethnicities extend deep into “sub-Saharan Africa.” If one is interested in racism and social norms in the Arabic-speaking world, it is worth recalling that Arabism stretches beyond the confines of the MENA region into northern Nigeria, Chad, Somalia, the Swahili coast and Zanzibar. Likewise, if one is interested in slavery in Berber/Amazigh societies, Amazigh identity and nationalism stretch into the Sahel – into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Nor can the Gulf and the littoral areas of Eastern Africa be meaningfully separated from the Indian Ocean, given their long interconnections.[4]
Our framework of transregional comparative racial formations examines how difference – from skin color to language to ancestry – forms the basis of exclusionary practices and state oppression. Looking at anti-black racism in Egypt, Yasmin Moll and Bayan Abubakr each show in this volume how the configuration of Egyptian national identity led to the erasure of the Nubian population of upper Egypt. Yet though marginalized by both colonial racial logics and post-colonial developmentalist dreams, Nubia remains a vibrant memory for those displaced from their ancestral homelands. Positioned as a living fossil of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, both authors show how Nubians are symbolically celebrated by the state even as they experience racism and economic marginalization.
A key contentious issue running through the study of racial formations is the question of “Blackness” and the centrality of dark skin to the broader questions of cultural marginalization and prejudice. A debate has arisen around the definition of “race,” with some scholars rejecting the expansion of the concept beyond black/Black people or those of sub-Saharan descent, arguing that this stretches “race” to the point of losing specificity, blurring it into a by-word for ethnicity, while others contend that it is the current usage of Blackness that treats being black like it is an (historically coherent) ethnicity.[5] The essays in this collection show that racial formations take shape around various forms of difference. Colorism infuses many racial formations described in this volume from Yemen and Turkey to the Sahel and the Gulf, but in others the cultural markers of race are not primarily skin color. The racialization of Kurds in Turkey or of Palestinians in Israel shows clearly the availability of other markers for essentialized difference. In her essay, Efrat Yerday reflects on the treatment of Israel’s Ethiopian Jews in comparison with that of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. Phenotypical differences reinforced by racialized logics contributes to their political and economic marginalization from the Israeli national imagination. Israel’s positioning of itself as the global refuge for Jews across the diaspora seemingly does not extend to those who fall on the “wrong” side of the national color line, revealing the complex interplay between racial and religious identification.
There is also a temporal dimension to racial formations. A transregional comparative racial formations framework can and must operate historically, tracing how the category of “race” was introduced and institutionalized by colonialism across the regions (say by the French in Algeria and subsequently in the Sahel, or by the British in Oman and the Swahili coast.)[6] Close attention to the historical process of difference-making helps us see similar processes operating in real time, for example assessing how the current global wave of xenophobia and populism is affecting migrant workers in Africa and the Middle East (whether it is Sri Lankans and Filipinas in Lebanon, Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia, Somalis in Kenya, or Nigerians in South Africa) who are facing mistreatment, racialized violence and occasionally mass deportation.[7] These essays thus adopt a race-critical lens to look at these questions and to examine more broadly how state oppression and human difference (whether coded as racial, ethnic or caste) operates in, inter alia, Nigeria, Israel, Mauritania or Madagascar.
Finally, racialization is coproduced at the global, regional, national and local levels. It is simultaneously a product of global efforts to categorize all of humanity into discrete and bounded types as well as a hyper-local phenomenon that maps onto micro-level disputes within communities and even families. As such, conflicts over which interpretation of race is “correct” or should be privileged remains highly contentious. Workshop participants debated at length whether frameworks and concepts (like “racial formations” and “racecraft”) that grow out of a North American intellectual-political milieu can be appropriately deployed in African and Middle Eastern contexts, or if local categories grounded in a specific context would prove more useful. No consensus emerged on this question. Some authors adopt a comparative approach that explores the meaning of key identity categories while others drill down into specific cases to reveal how concepts often positioned as universal are creatively adapted to give new interpretations to localized conflicts.
Colonial Legacies and the Afterlives of Slavery
In her study The Predicament of Blackness (2014), Jemima Pierre meticulously traces how norms of global white supremacy disseminated by colonialism continue to shape politics and social relations in contemporary Ghana.[8] This theme runs through the collection. Sean Jacobs, for instance, interprets the peculiar racialization of Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa as a colonial holdover. Dutch colonialists drew slaves from Southeast Asia, India, the Indonesian archipelago, and southern Africa. The southern African slaves were often Muslim, yet were labeled as Black, while slaves from Indonesia, perhaps because their ranks included clerics, who began to build the first madrasas, would be viewed as Muslim. The association of Islam with the Malay and colored population would be reinforced by apartheid policy and persists to this day in Cape Town.
The afterlives of slavery entwine with the legacies of colonialism across Africa and the Middle East. In 1905, the French colonial governor Ernest Roume outlawed slavery and the slave trade, by decree, throughout French West Africa. In French-controlled territories, colonial administrators would officially abolish slavery (including in Morocco in 1925) but tolerated existing slavery practices and did not emancipate slaves. Paul Silverstein shows how in southeast Morocco, the French would divide the Berber/Amazigh and Haratin/Iqablin groups along racial lines, as “white” autochotones/natives and “black” allochtones respectively, while not disturbing the former’s indentured exploitation of the latter. Reformist policies since independence and the increased migration of the Haratin have re-ordered social relations, but racial tensions still exist between the Imazighen and Haratin, often surfacing during electoral campaigns around the distribution of economic and political resources.
The Amazigh-haratin situation that Silverstein delineates in Morocco’s southeastern oases is reminiscent of the haratin-beidan dynamic and labor hierarchy of Mauritania, but it also bears parallels to the situation in central Chad with the Arabic-speaking Yalnas. After slavery was abolished, the Yalnas, a formerly indentured or enslaved community located in the “former slave reservoir” in the Guéra region of Chad, were recognized by French colonial administrators in the 1910s as a distinct group, given land and two “chef de cantons” as political representatives. Yet in the 1990s, decades after independence, with new land policies and increasing desertification, the dominant Hadjiray began disputing the Yalnas’s right to land as a colonial fabrication. Highlighting their alleged slave origins, the Hadjiray began calling them “Yalnas,” a stigmatizing label that the subordinate group has been trying to shed.[9] How slave descent, genealogy and historical appellations are used as a political tool to exclude groups from citizenship rights is, as described below, also a cross-regional phenomenon.
Labeling Difference
Various essays in this collection show how labeling (and identification) – whether it is done by scholars, activists or partisans to a conflict – is an intensely political act that defines categories, sets boundaries and hardens norms. When regimes impose racial or ethnic categories – or criminalize racial or ethnic identification (as the Rwandan government recently did[10]) it has dire consequences for activists on the ground. As Bendetta Rossi has argued in her work on “slave descent” in Niger and northern Nigeria, scholars must study the relationship between labels and practice, to understand why some people carry certain labels while others drop them: “When do slave descendants themselves reclaim their slave origins? When do politicians mobilize collective legacies of slavery as part of their political strategies? And what are the consequences of framing social, political, and economic relations in terms of slave and free descent?”[11] Sabria Al-Thawr does precisely this in her discussion of the impact of the Yemen conflict on the country’s marginalized groups – the muhamasheen (black Yemenis), abid (former slaves) and akhdam (servant group), describing how warlords will deploy a particular label to delegitimize an adversary or mobilize a group to the frontline. Gokh Alshaif, in turn, looks at the different strategies of self-identification adopted by black Yemeni activists: the Movement of Free Black People, founded in 2005, for instance, casts its struggle in explicitly racial terms. The muhamasheen-led organization, Ahfad Bilal (Grandchildren of Bilal), on the other hand, makes a genealogical case, claiming a link to Bilal, a former slave of Abysinnian origin who became the closest confidant of the Prophet Muhammad. Akhdam Allah (Servants of God) emphasizes the community’s economic exclusion and religious piety.
A recurring theme in this workshop was the question of “endonyms” and “exonyms,” that is internal names for a population (or language or place) versus names imposed from outside. As Ann McDougal discusses in an essay on the legacies of slavery in Morocco and Mauritania, she was reminded by informants that the haratin was not a self-identifier, but rather a designation imposed by Western observers.[12] Parisa Vaziri shows how the study of slavery in the Indian Ocean context has been distorted by the implicit and explicit comparison to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Even well-meaning applications of racialized language and conceptual frameworks derived from the North American experience can produce deeply misleading interpretations of the social meaning of local practices. When, then, should scholars use race, ethnicity or caste to designate difference? Can the (capitalized) American categories of Black and White be used to understand racial hierarchies in the Sahara?
The essays in this collection define “race” in numerous ways. Some use the term in the broadest sense to connote human difference, and racialization, in Foucauldian terms, as a process whereby states create and re-create differences (“caesuras”) within human populations to manage these populations. Others defined race as (anti)blackness; or involving specific phenotypes and physical characteristics. Deniz Duruiz shows how modern Turkish national identity was explicitly associated with whiteness, and the historical exclusion of the Kurds was based on racial stereotypes of Kurds as physically different and behaviorally deficient. Others understood lineage as a racializing device. Amélie Le Renard and Neha Vora, on the other hand, contend that “race” is a more useful concept than “ethnocracy,” because it can elucidate the workings of racial capitalism in the Gulf’s stratified economies and show how value is extracted from laborers of differing backgrounds. Yet racialization is not only a top-down process driven by state power: as scholars from Frantz Fanon to Leith Mullings have argued, but there is also “racialization from below” – as the cases of Israel, Mauritania and Tunisia show, wherein racially conscious movements lobby for new categories and the expansion or elimination of old ones.[13]
In recent years, caste has made a comeback as an analytical tool, being used to understand the situation of African Americans, the subjugation of the slave-descent Bantu Jareer in southern Somalia,[14] or the jiyaado of Upper Casamance region of southern Senegal.[15] In examining how race and caste interlink, Diana Kim suggests looking sideways, rather than vertically at how untouchability is produced. By looking horizontally within a caste-like system, one can observe the distinctions between different “inheritances of stigma,” based on untouchability vis-a-vis legacies of enslavement. Such an approach, Kim argues, shows how in Nigeria, the untouchable Osu were unlike the enslaved Ohu,who were free from pollution narratives; while in Korea, the Baekjeong of Korea were ostracized from othercommunities, a fate different from that which befell the slave-descended Nobi. Sabria Al-Thawr’s study of social and tribal hierarchies in Yemen most closely tracks the concept of caste, while Denis Regnier’s piece on Madagascar shows how pollution narratives surrounding the formerly enslaved Betsileo people does not justify wholesale social exclusion, but sharply regulates marriage between the free-born and slave-born.
Impossible Citizens
The intersection of migration, racialization and citizenship is a central issue in this collection. The migration of “Arab” Zanzibaris to the Gulf following the Zanzibari Revolution of 1964, and attempts at naturalization, show the malleability of racial categories as different Gulf states defined Arabness (and Africanness) in divergent ways. The Omani state would define Arab-Omani through lineage (nisba) and blood descent, though without adopting a “formal color bar.” From the state’s view, there were three categories of Arab-Omani – “pure” Omanis who never left Oman, Zanzibari Omanis who traveled to East Africa but did not intermarry, and Zanzibaris who traveled to East Africa and did intermarry. Acquiring Omani citizenship through marriage though was arduous, especially for women. As Nathaniel Mathews writes, “marriage to someone of Omani descent was itself not enough to immediately guarantee a non-Omani woman, especially one from East Africa, the same legal route to citizenship as a woman of Omani descent.”
In the UAE, Zanzibari returnees deemed not “African” enough to stay in East Africa, also had to prove an “Arab” bloodline to gain citizenship. As Noora Lori and Yoana Kuzmova show, the UAE’s constitution defines the Federation as an “Arab nation,” even as the rulers of its constituent Emirates have divergent understandings of who is Arab. Abu Dhabi’s definition, for instance, is centered on genealogy to a greater extent than other states – with Zanzibaris facing more obstacles to gaining citizenship than persons of Omani, Qatari or Bahraini origin. Curiously, the migratory and racial hierarchies of the Gulf, seem to have spread to other parts of the Middle East. The kafala system, where migrant workers from Africa and Asia have a sponsor, has now reached the Levant. As Sumayya Kassamali explains, the Lebanese civil war spurred a large outmigration (with almost forty percent of the population leaving), creating a demand for foreign workers. Lebanese migration to the Gulf, in turn, coincided with the arrival of Asian workers to the Arabian Peninsula, and would create the perception of domestic foreign servants as a status symbol. As female domestic workers began arriving from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, a new racial formation would emerge in Lebanon, the Srilankiyye, a catch-all category for all Asian workers regardless of their nationality.
As with the Algerian and Moroccan protest movements, the Sudanese revolution would expose tensions between national identity, citizenship and racialization. Zachary Mondesire contends that, in 2019, when Sudanese protesters hoisted the flag of independence (the blue, yellow, and green tricoleur), it was to draw attention to the marginalized populations from peripheral regions and neighborhoods who for reasons of language, lineage or phenotype are denied basic rights and state services. The Sudanese independence flag with its pan-African colors (resembling the flags of Rwanda and Tanzania) was also raised by protesters to highlight Sudan’s racially fraught relationship to South Sudan and to the wider Arabic-speaking world.
External Actors and Racial Formations
Another recurring theme was the political reconfiguration or re-mapping of Africa (and its relationship to the Middle East) as a result of external interventions by Western powers, Gulf states and increasingly, China. As Wendell Marsh observes, the collapse of the Libyan regime and the spread of war into the Sahel has prompted “a disciplinary moment” wherein northwest Africa in general and the Sahara-Sahel in particular, have become a “unit of securitization.” The Sahara, in particular, has emerged as a space of concern, requiring scholars to “think trans-locally, across a geographic, intellectual, and racial divide long assumed to exist in the material world.” Yet how to theorize and evaluate the role of external actors – the United Nations, development agencies, NGOs, American universities and foundations, Western-based diaspora movements (African-American, Jewish American, Middle Eastern American) – in inciting and shaping the discourse around racism in Africa and the Middle East? How can local actors address questions of racial exclusion and inequality when the demand for a racial politics is coming largely from outside?
Nathaniel Mathews makes a related point in discussing the importation of American-derived frameworks to the Gulf: “Western social frames exert an influence on the formal presentation of the history of slavery in the region, making it key to ‘remember’ the institution in a widespread and general way. The ongoing paradox is that high-level discussions about race, racism and diversity can occur in Gulf universities with little to no attention to the class politics of the convening itself, or the low-wage labor that sustains such discussions.” Neha Vora and Amélie Le Renard reinforce this point by highlighting the many ways in which racial hierarchies structure the production of knowledge about the Gulf region. Ironically, some Gulf states have begun memorializing the Indian Ocean slave trade (with Qatar building a massive slavery museum) in part to placate Western criticism of the kafala system.[16] But as Parisa Vaziri asks in considering the tensions between Trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean historiographies: “Without a demand for a politics of justice, for whom then, is historical recovery necessary and good in the Indian Ocean context?”
As the recently passed anti-racism law of Tunisia (the first in the MENA region, and second in Africa), and the ongoing pan-Maghrebi anti-racism awareness campaigns show, [17] local scholars and activists in both regions are working against overwhelming odds – braving repressive regimes and Western intellectual intrusion – to address the legacies of slavery and ongoing racism against migrant workers and other minorities. As new identity movements and anti-racism campaigns arise on the African continent, it will be interesting to see how activists and scholars decide to embrace the categories of caste, ethnicity or race, or if new concepts and frameworks will emerge. The career of octaganarian Egyptian scholar Hilmi Sharawy is a telling one. He spent decades – as a state official and then as an academic – trying to decolonize “African Studies” in Egypt, dismantling departments and research centers built by the British, while also countering “proselytizing” Arab nationalist approaches to Africa that foist “Arabism” on African languages, heedlessly treating pre-Islamic Africa as a tabula rasa. As Zeyad el Nabolsy points out, Sharawy would make it his life’s work to counter the “civilizing mission” discourse adopted by the Egyptian regime.
The Political Work of Racialized Framing
The adoption of racialized frames can be as much political as it is analytical. This can be seen clearly in the racialization of discourse surrounding Palestinians in Israel, as Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan demonstrate. Viewing the Israeli occupation and domination of Palestinians through a racial lens helps to validate the arguments for viewing Israeli domination over Palestinians as a form of Apartheid.[18] It also allows for creative, and politically effective, reframing of the nature of the conflict. In May 2021, Palestinian protestors in Jerusalem challenging the seizure of houses in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah effectively appropriated “Black Lives Matter” framing to appeal to American public opinion. By portraying their struggle against Israeli settlers and state expansion as a form of civil rights rooted in struggles for racial equality, Palestinian activists were able to sidestep longstanding obstacles to their search for Western allies and win over substantial new public support from American progressives.
Ultimately, what these essays demonstrate is both the value and limits of the racial frame for understanding identity-centric disputes in Africa and the Middle East. Despite being developed to explore the binary logic of racial conflict in the West, racialization and racial formation provide considerable intellectual traction when applied to regions outside North America and Europe. From the legacies of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade to the emergence of new racial orders produced through labor migration, taking racial formations seriously opens up new ways of conceptualizing and thinking through politics in both regions. Yet, these essays also reveal the fraught terrain of comparison. The essays conceptualize race, ethnicity and caste in substantively different ways that expose the dangers of concept creep, anachronism, and limits of applying a racialization lens on spaces where the concepts have very different historical antecedents and contemporary resonances.
[1] For recent examples, see “Race: Legacies and Challenges,” Middle East Report 299 (Summer 2021); Rayya Zayn, ed., “Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and Africa/Southwest Asia and North Africa,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 10, no.1 (Spring 2021) See Baz Lecocq and Éric Komlavi Hahonou, “Introduction: Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa” in Special Issue: Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa, The International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 48, No. 2 2015; Enrique Martino, “When ‘Modern Slavery’ Meant Colonial Rule,” in “Modern Slavery in Africa” special issue of The Republic (Lagos June/July 2021); Giulia Bonacci and Alexander Meckelburg, “Revisiting Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia,” Northeast African Studies (January 2017)
[2] Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divides. POMEPS STUDIES 40 (June 2020)
[3] Michel Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge 1986)
[4] Michel Christopher Low, ed., “The Indian Ocean and Other Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no.3 (2014); Nile Green, “Rethinking the Middle East after the Oceanic Turn,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no.3 (2014): 536-62.
[5] Annie Olaloku-Teriba , “Afro-Pessimism and the Logic of Anti-Blackness,” Historical Materialism 26 (2):96-122 (2018)
[6] Michael Hanchard and Erin Aeran Chun, “From race relations to comparative racial politics: A Survey of Cross-National Scholarship on Race in the Social Sciences,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race Issue 1(02) p. 319-343.
[7] “U.N. says Saudi deportations of Ethiopian migrants risks spreading coronavirus,” Reuters April 13 2020; “Kenya: Mass Deportation of Somalis,” Human Rights Watch (May 2014); “Lebanon: Migrant Domestic Workers With Children Deported, “Human Rights Watch (April 2017) “South Africa: Hatred of migrants reaches new heights,” DW, September 29 2020; “Achille Mbembe writes about Xenophobic South Africa,” Africa Is A Country,” (April 2015)
[8] Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2014)
[9] Valerio Colosio, ‘The children of the people’: Integration and descent in a former slave reservoir in Chad,” Doctoral thesis (PhD), Social Anthropology, University of Sussex (2018)
[10] “Rwanda has banned talking about ethnicity,” The Economist (March 2019)
[11] Benedetta Rossi, “African Post-Slavery: A History of the Future” Rossi, Benedetta. The International Journal of African Historical Studies; New York Vol. 48, Issue (2015)
[12]E. Ann McDougall, “Living the Legacy of Slavery ,” Cahiers d’études africaines, pp. 957-986 2005. See also E. Ann McDougall avec la collaboration de Mohamed Lahbib Nouhi, “Devenir visibles dans le sillage de l’esclavage :: la question haratin en Mauritanie et au Maroc” L’Ouest Saharien 10 & 11 (August 2020)
[13] Frantz Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox, Revised Edition, (New York: Grove Press 2007); Leith Mullings, “Race and Globalization: Racialization from Below,” in eds., Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008)
[14] Mohamed A. Eno, “Racial and Caste Prejudice in Somalia,” Journal of Somali Studies (January 2014) pp.91-118; Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House 2020)
[15] Alice Bellagamba, “Marriage is the Arena: “Inside” Stories of Genealogical Purity and Slave Ancestry from Southern Senegal,” Antropologia, Vol. 7, Issue 1 April 2020
[16] “Qatar Slavery Museum Aims to Address Modern Exploitation,” VOA News (November 29 2015)
[17] “Loi contre le racisme : “tournant historique” en Tunisie, mais où en sont l’Algérie et le Maroc?” Jeune Afrique (October 2018)
[18] A Threshold Crossed. Human Rights Watch (April 27, 2021), available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution