This dissertation probes historical intersections between space, freedom, and political change in the West African Sahel, particularly the area of the Inland Delta of the Niger river, in today’s Mali. The semi-arid Sahel region forms the southern shore of the Sahara Desert, stretching from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the Red Sea. The Sahel has long been characterized by its connectivity, fueled by its people’s short-and-long-range travels, as well as the expansive religious, commercial, and intellectual communities they formed. Because of these circulations and of its geographical location, the West African Sahel is a unique space where the production of race and Blackness, and political economies stemming from both the Atlantic and Saharan worlds, intersected. Sahelian networks through which people, words, and ideas circulated, spanned the lands tucked between the Senegal and Niger rivers, but also the expanse between the Caribbean and Red seas. Framing the West African Sahel as a nodal region in world history, the dissertation proposes an account of the coercive regimes that overlapped there, through the trajectories of three Sahelian Muslims who had to navigate them. Indeed, from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the West African Sahel underwent deep mutations stemming from the impact of three world-making political projects. These were the Atlantic political economy of capitalism and colonialism (sixteenth-twentieth centuries); Islamic revolutions and the rise of West African theocratic states (1804-1880s); and African decolonial struggles and political construction (1940s-1960s). The dissertation provides a layered and textured account of how Sahelian Muslims sought to emancipate from the systems of slavery, conquest, and colonialism that impacted them. It argues that they built freedom by relying on memory, intimacy, place-making, and the building of expansive cross-border communities. The dissertation is based upon research conducted in Mali, Senegal, France, Jamaica, Ireland and England.

The dissertation argues that there is a historical precedent for the existence of Jewish communities emerging in Western Ghana rather than a phenomenon derivative of colonial logic, historico-racial schema, suspicious financial motives, or modern technologies as scholars outside of African Studies have claimed. It examines the longue dur�e of Jewish presence (both physical and dialectical) in West Africa that has contributed to the manifestations of a Jewish present in western Ghana. In widening the temporal and geographic scope that has created scholarly blind spots, the dissertation acknowledges an interconnected history for a millennium (11th-21st centuries), forging a path between African and Jewish Studies. Through the lens of survival, incorporating acculturation and disguise, it paints Northwestern Africa as a place giving aid and refuge (not seeking it) and a space where history was preserved and transmitted before and beyond Western conceptualizations. The dissertation argues that intercontinental and international aspects of Northwest Africa (inclusive of the Sahara), and long-established networks that existed before and persisted after imperial lines were drawn, made survival possible for the Sehwi, and specifically the House of Israel.The Sehwi, a migrant group that settled in western Ghana to escape war and persecution, maintained their history through orality and ritual. Through examining the oral history of the Sehwi, the dissertation argues that key to their survival was maintaining secrecy and negotiating with imperial and global forces the boundaries of belonging: geographic, imperial, and ethnic. The House of Israel, a Sehwi community in western Ghana that has identified as Jews since the 1970s, also utilizes these strategies of survival to preserve their ancestral beliefs. By interrogating silence and whispers as well as embodied archives — the unspoken mechanisms of communication (largely via ritual) — the dissertation argues that instability of belonging and assurances of safety impacts how the past is transmitted.

With depictions ranging from anti-Muslim resistance warrior of the seventh century to mythical priestess, al-Kâhina looms large in the historical narratives of North African Amazigh, Jewish, and Arab peoples. Despite her legendary status, al-Kâhina's existence as a historical female figure who reigned over the Amazigh is disputed. In this paper, I highlight the long history of colonial occupation and continual resistance organizing by the Amazigh prior to al-Kâhina's battles with the Arab invaders at the end of the seventh century. Through analysis of secondary sources, I examine how both Arab and French occupations appropriated the legend to promote their agendas. I argue that al-Kâhina's story has been used to enforce or combat different political agendas, both historically and today. In the region today, al-Kâhina has been iconized and used as the "face" of Amazigh nationalist and cultural movements.

In this essay, I will focus on prison systems and inmate experiences in Kenya. Prisons and systems of punishment come in different contexts. Generally speaking, prisons are intended to rehabilitate and transform inmates into better people for themselves and society. However, in retrospect from the historiography of African prison systems and prison writing in Kenya, prisons have moved away from their intended purpose of rehabilitation. The structure of this research project is divided in two parts. In Part, I will historicize prisons in Africa and the historical context of the injustice of power and dominance in Kenya. Part II of this essay will uncover the truth of Kenya’s prison system through inmate experiences in the twentieth century. I argue that prison writings, which I call freedom papers, show that there is a continuity between colonial and postcolonial prisons, and that there were various forms of resistance against discriminatory and oppressive institutions. However, these forms of resistance depended on who was elite and non-elite.

This thesis explores the roles hawalas have played in Somalia since the early 1990s and provides a theoretical framework for understanding the contractual forms and underlying mechanisms of the hawala. Instability and a lack of financial infrastructure in Somalia, coupled with the mass migration of millions of Somalis abroad, have fueled increasing demand for money transfers. Hawala companies emerged to meet this growing need, which led to the formalization and transformation of hawalas themselves. In addition, hawalas are a financial mechanism used not only for business transactions, but also to remit and safely transport money over long distances. This, combined with the hawala’s potential for economic development in Somalia, makes them particularly useful in the modern Somali context.

This dissertation examines the place of the médersa, a Franco-Muslim school offering both European and Islamic instruction, in the colonial history of northwest Africa. It pays particular attention to the trans-Saharan nature of the institution, as it expanded from its original context in Algeria to an eventual presence in the West African colonies of Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania. It also demonstrates how the médersa evolved over the course of major changes in colonial policy from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, from the "Arabophilia" of Napoléon III to the civilizing mission of the Third Republic to the era of the French Union and decolonization. Tracing the médersa's history over this span of space and time reveals a process of domestication, a negotiation between African Muslim societies and French administrators that resulted in institutional adaptations and what I call a "multi-local" institution. In other words, the médersa's core mission, providing Franco-Muslim education and producing a class of Muslim intermediary employees for the colonial administration, remained the same while certain practices changed to suit local imperatives. Two of these "practices of order" receive special scrutiny in the dissertation. These are the curriculum, which evolved to include certain local practices of Islamic knowledge transmission, and student recruitment, which determined the makeup of the colonial intermediary corps in tandem with local and colonial ideas of religious, racial, and social identity.

Most scholars have dismissed the médersas as a colonial curiosity. The dissertation argues that the médersa's domestication in fact had a major impact on the intellectual, political, and institutional histories of northwest Africa, and that its influence is best understood through a new multi-local, trans-Saharan framework. Adopting this comparative perspective demonstrates how the médersa's institutional practices, and the médersa's students, influenced other developments in colonial society. As such, the dissertation argues for the importance of Franco-Muslim education as a mode of connection across northwest Africa in the colonial period.

This thesis historically traces the development and interactions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in Ethiopia. This analysis of the interactions between the Abrahamic faiths is primarily concerned with identifying notable periods of social cohesion in an effort to contest mainstream narratives that often pit the three against each other. This task is undertaken by incorporating a comparative analysis of the Ethiopian Christian code, the Fetha Nagast (Law of Kings), with Islamic and Judaic legal traditions. Identifying the common threads weaved throughout the Abrahamic legal traditions demonstrates how the historical development and periods of social cohesion in Ethiopia were facilitated.

This dissertation examines an early modern slave trade that extended from the Central Sahel into the Mediterranean in order to reposition Sicily’s dynamic role in defining ideas of race through its practices of slavery. From the late fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century, there were many enslaved Black Africans in Palermo, yet, scholarship on slavery in Sicily rarely focuses specifically on this population. More recently Sicily has been incorporated into studies of slavery on the Iberian Peninsula, as an export market of the wider Atlantic-European slave trades growing at the same time, or as an important source for captives from corsair warfare. I focus on Palermo as a Christian Mediterranean port city that became a major purchaser of enslaved West Africans from the Libyan coastline for the span of about one hundred years. First, I consider how ideologies of race were developed and transformed along this trans-Saharan slave trade route from the Central Sahel into the Mediterranean and how they justified the enslavement and forced migrations of West Africans. As enslaved Black populations grew in Iberian cities, and Spain and Portugal expanded their empires across the Atlantic, religious social hierarchies were reinvented in order to fit new marginalized communities into their world. By the end of the sixteenth century, these hierarchies had assumed a broader racial significance. Secondly, I examine the distinctions emerging in Sicily within its diverse enslaved community. Here, there was a dialectic relationship between practices of slavery and the formation of racial identities; and this is most clearly seen in how Black Africans moved into slavery differently than their North African counterparts, and had less mobility once enslaved. Black Africans were more likely to stay in Sicilian households and be converted in the Catholic church at the same time that they were in kept in subjugated social statuses even once freed. Ultimately, I am arguing that a history of enslaved Black Africans in Sicily highlights the fragile and violent nature of the boundaries between the interconnected worlds of the early modern Mediterranean, boundaries that continue to restrict mobility in the sea today.