This second section of our collection Shadows of Slavery explores how race, colour and origins shape social dynamics and political imaginations across northwest Africa and the Middle East.
Hard choices are made when arranged marriages collide with a slave past.
The UAE, like many other Arabian Gulf States, claims to be home to a homogenous Arab population. In doing so it assimilates rather than acknowledges the region’s slave past.
Connected first by a slave-master relationship and now by geographical proximity, the ‘white’ and ‘black’ populations of Ghbonton, Tunisia have a complex relationship with each other.
The racialisation of the anti-slavery struggle in Mauritania has created a patchwork of identities and alliances.
The shift towards a collective identity based on race has had major implications for Yemen’s most marginalised people.
Even student and young professional Senegalese migrants have to navigate the legacies of slavery in Morocco as ‘Africans’.
Former slaves and their descendants in North Africa and the Middle East might be formally free, but the racial legacies of slavery continue to affect intimate, social and political forms of life.
