All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By SYLVIANE A. DIOUF

The study of the retention of African linguistic, cultural, and social elements by the people of African descent in the Americas has usually focused its attention on Kongo, Yoruba, and Fon cosmogony, culture, and social organizations. The vigour of the African cultures and religions that withstood transplantation has been largely commented upon, but one area of research has been conspicuously overlooked: the retention, by the descendants of Africans, of Islamic tenets and Arabic vocabulary introduced by the Muslims enslaved in the New World. The presence and importance of this Muslim community of West Africans
has largely been ignored by scholars, even though it was repeatedly mentioned by their European and American contemporaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

It would have been inexplicable and perplexing indeed for these uprooted men and women to disappear without leaving any trace. And they did not. Their tracks, in fact, represent a kind of ‘missing link’ that, when studied systematically, will enable us to make sense of some of the unexplained features of the cultures created by the Africans and their descendants. A much-needed research in the retention of Islamic tenets and Arabic vocabulary will help form a broader as well as more detailed and comprehensive picture of the cultures of the African diaspora.

The retention in the Americas of a particular trait, among many others which eventually disappeared, is of primary interest because it indicates a concerted effort on the part of people to preserve the aspects of their native cultures, beliefs, and social organization that mattered most to them and helped their survival and adaptation. So it is with Islamic tenets that made their way across the Atlantic Ocean and firmly took root in the Americas. Research in the area of Islamic retention will also be crucial in what it will reveal about Islam and the Muslims in West Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will delineate more precisely who they were, how they lived their faith, what tenets they were more attached to, and what in their religion enabled them to withstand brutal enslavement by Christian masters in an unknown and cruel land.

Between the early years of the sixteenth century and the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of West African Muslims were shipped to the New World. They probably represented between 15 and 20 per cent of the 15 to 20 million Africans swept away by the transatlantic slave trade from modern-day Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria. Like their non-Muslim companions, the Muslims were sent all over America and the Caribbean and the footprints they left can be found in places as diverse as the United States, Jamaica, Brazil, Peru, Trinidad, Colombia, Guyana, Haiti,
Guadeloupe, Cuba, and Grenada.

Most of the deportees were young men between the ages of 18 and 28 taken prisoner during political, religious, and civil wars; while others—as well as women—fell prey to kidnappers. Many could read and write in the classical Arabic taught in the many Qur’anic schools that flourished throughout West Africa. They left proofs of their knowledge through documents written in Arabic—ranging from a copy of al-Fatiha to autobiographies—which have been preserved, or mentioned in the works of their European and American contemporaries. Some of these newly enslaved men had travelled to Egypt and Makka. There were students, teachers, marabouts, high-level clerics, and even descendants of the Prophet among them, such as Abu Bakr al Siddiq who was
enslaved thirty years in Jamaica before going back to Mali via Morocco, where he was received as a prince or mulay? Far from being absorbed into the dominant Christian world, the West African Muslims made tremendous efforts to keep their faith alive and to respect the Five Pillars of Islam as attested by numerous planters, travellers, court records, fellow slaves, and by the Muslims themselves. Not only did most Muslims refuse to convert—or did so superficially when coerced—but they continued to pray, to give alms, to fast, to refuse pork and alcohol, and to wear turbans, skullcaps, and veils. In Rio de Janeiro and Bahia they operated Qur’anic schools and makeshift mosques and there, as well as in the United States, Trinidad, and Jamaica, they managed to procure chaplets and Qur’ans in Arabic.

Muslims have left significant marks in several African-derived religions practised today by the people of African descent, such as Santeria in Cuba, Candomble in Brazil, and Voodoo in Haiti. They also have left Islamic-inspired music and some Arabic vocabulary.

One of the Arabic words and Islamic tenets that have survived and, in some areas, gone through an interesting transformation is sadaqa, freewill offerings. Now found in non-Islamic contexts, it nevertheless refers to acts that are related to its former orthodox meaning.

In Islamic texts, including the Qur’an, sadaqa and zakat are sometimes used interchangeably. But zakat is an involuntary, legal tax whose amount is fixed according to the person’s revenues and assets; while sadaqa, also called sadaqa al-tatawwu’ (alms of spontaneity), is voluntary, does not need to have a monetary value, and can consist of
anything the believer wishes to give. Sadaqa, which must always be given with goodwill, can be granted publicly or secretly. The second form is often preferred because the Qur’an stresses: ‘if ye conceal them [acts of charity] and make them reach those really in need, that is best for you’ (2:266). Some legalists argue that secret giving discourages
ostentation and envy and does not diminish the self-respect of the receiver; while others state that open giving promotes humility in the receiver and avoids any misunderstanding. These freewill offerings can be given to anybody, but there is a preference for the family, the neighbours, and, above all, the needy. It is recommended that the gift be accompanied by a supplication to God. The sadaqa differs from an ordinary gift in that it cannot be taken back and is meant to give the donor a heavenly reward. A sadaqa provides expiation for sins and affords the giver protection from evil and afflictions, which may happen in this life or in the hereafter. Giving sadaqa is an important part of the believer’s life as it is considered an act of worship.

An unlikely place, at first glance, to look for the word sadaqa linked to Islamic charity is the deep South of the United States. There, off the coast of Georgia, are small, isolated islands called the Sea Islands that were heavily populated by Africans until Emancipation in 1865. The African-born slaves who worked on the rice, cotton, and indigo plantations continued to be introduced illegally after the United States officially closed its international slave trade in 1808. The remoteness of the place made it easy for the slavers discreetly to introduce newly arrived Africans. Some of the islands were so hot, humid, and disease-ridden that most whites only lived there during short periods of the year. The rest of the time they let their workers who, on some estates numbered several hundreds, live a semi-autonomous existence that enabled them to preserve their original cultures, languages, and religions more than anywhere else in the United States. Among the enslaved men and women of the Sea Islands lived many Muslim Mandingo, Hausa, Vai, Fulani, and Wolof coming from Senegambia, Mali, Nigeria, Guinea, and Sierra Leone who transmitted to their children and grandchildren an impressive Arabic vocabulary in the form of nicknames. The material, cultural, and religious life of this Muslim community has been well documented during the Great Depression by the Work Progress Administration through interviews with former slaves, some of whom were the grandchildren of Muslims. Their daily, personal observations—as opposed to more distant descriptions by Christian whites—form the most complete and intimate portrait of a functioning Muslim community in the Americas during slavery. It is worth noting that the grandchildren interviewed in 1939 never mentioned Islam by name and related their grandparents’ or neighbours’ religion to a cult of the sun, because they prayed at sunset and sunrise. It is difficult to assess if they truly believed what they were telling the men and women who asked them so many questions or if they had some knowledge of Islam—though they were Christians—but were reluctant to admit it in a time and place disdainful of black people and violently hostile to religions other than Protestantism. What these elderly witnesses observed and relayed, nevertheless, is the deliberate continuance of Islamic practices by enslaved Africans in a Christian environment.

On Sapelo Island, Katie Brown remembered that her grandmother Margaret—a daughter of Bilali, a Guinean Muslim who left a thirteenpage document in Arabic—used to make funny cakes she called saraka, once a year, and it was an important day. Her sister Hester was said by her grandson to have made these cakes once a month. On nearby St Simon’s Island, Bilali, the son of Salih Bilali—a Muslim who had been abducted near Jenne, Mali as a teenager—made the saraka.Shadwick Rudolph of St Mary’s also recalled that his grandmother Sally made saraka.

Katie Brown described the saraka as being rice cakes made in the following fashion: ‘She wash rice, an po off all duh watuh. She let wet rice sit all night, an in mawnin rice is all swell. She tak dat rice an put it in wooden mawtuh, an beat it tuh paste wid wooden pestle. She add honey, sometime shuguh, an make it in flat cake wid uh hans.’

The rice ball depicted by the Georgian former slaves and grandchildren of Muslims is the charity traditionally given by West African Muslim women on Fridays. According to Islam, the spiritual reward for alms-giving, sadaqa, on a Friday is double that of charity given on any other day. The rice ball is not called saraka or sadaqa, but the act of giving it as an Islamic charity is referred to in that manner. The Arabic word has sometimes gone through some linguistic alterations.

For the Fulani of Guinea, Senegal, and Mali the word used to describe this charitable act has remained unchanged: it is sadaqa. But for the other groups, a linguistic alteration took place. The Wolof of Senegal call it sarakh, and the Mandingo of Senegal and the Bambara of Mali use the term sarakha. The Malinke of Guinea and the Hausa of Nigeria—just like the Sea Islanders—call the giving of charity, including rice balls, saraka. The retention of the word saraka in the Sea Islands of Georgia does not mean that only Malinke and Hausa women were involved in alms-giving. As a matter of fact, some of the grandchildren who talked about the custom were the descendants of Fulani, who, as noted, use the word sadaqa. The Hausa and Malinke women may have been more numerous, or the pronunciation of saraka as opposed to the rest of the words used to describe the same thing may have been easier. Sarakha and sarakh, for example, involve a guttural sound that may have been more difficult to pronounce for the native-born children who did not speak the language of their parents. In any event, the corruption of the word did not occur in the Americas, but had already taken place in Africa. There was no creolization of a term but, on the contrary, the retention of an ‘orthodox’ word.

From discussions conducted with sadaqa givers it appears that, as is true elsewhere in the Islamic world, there are four main reasons— personal and communal—for the West African sadaqa: one is simply to attract divine grace without any particular request or prayer; another is to reinforce a prayer; a third is to expiate a sin; while a fourth one is to conjure a potential danger. In the particular circumstances of the Sahelian countries, some of the general problems—as opposed to personal motives—mentioned were lack of rain or poor crops. In times of drought, for example, the religious leaders often ask the women to give rice, mil, or corn balls as a means of attracting divine intervention for the coming of the rain.

The giving of rice cakes takes place on Fridays, after the communal noon prayer, and is geared towards the children. The mothers hand out the cakes while saying a short invocation, ending with ‘amin’. In Georgia the saraka were also given to the children, as Shadrach Hall recalled: ‘Duh cake made, she call us all in an deah she hab great big fannuh full an she gib us each cake. Den we all stands roun table, and she says “Ameen, Ameen, Ameen”, an we all eats cake.’ Another informant also mentioned that the children’s hands had to be perfectly clean and the grandmother said ‘Ah-me, Ah-me’ as she gave the balls to the children. By using the words saraka and amin the women made it clear that the handing out of cakes was indeed a religious act and not a simple passing around of sweets to hungry children. The saraka of the African Muslims in Georgia was indeed a goodwill gesture towards the needy: enslaved children were poor, famished, overworked, and deprived of any comfort. The saraka were valued so much that the children created a special song about the cakes that can still be heard in the Sea Islands:

Rice cake, rice cake
Sweet me so
Rice cake sweet me to my heart.

But the saraka also filled other needs. The African women living in the harsh conditions of American slavery made a deliberate decision to continue fulfilling one of the precepts of their religion. They did so, even though it must have cost them dearly in terms of time and expense. Their charitable gesture, performed once a week in Africa, was reduced to once a month or once a year in America, but it did not lose any of its value and significance in their eyes. It would have been extremely interesting to know what monthly occasion or annual holy day they were celebrating with alms-giving, but no indication has been left. Their reasons for doing so were certainly the same as the ones that made them prepare the cakes in Africa: divine grace and conjuration. But the motives, of course, would have been linked to their particular circumstances. Rather than a medium to attract divine intervention for the survival of an agricultural society, the saraka in the Sea Islands would have been used in areas relevant to the women’s lives: to avoid the separation of families, for example, or punishment, or the apprehension of a runaway family member, or also for the protection—maybe from the slave dealers—of the family left behind in West Africa and for the well-being of the slave community. There is no way of assessing what
was in the Muslim women’s mind—and the reasons were certainly varied—when they gave sadaqa, but they obviously saw a need, maybe even more than in Africa, to attract divine grace and intervention in America. As this constitutes the only documented Islamic behaviour expressed solely by Muslim women, one can conclude that they viewed their transported tradition as particularly meaningful and useful to the survival and welfare of themselves, their families, and community. What this retention also shows is that the tradition, which still exist in West Africa, dates back to at least the 1700s, if we take into account the fact that it was done, in America, by women who were born during that century.

With time, although the custom continued in Georgia and the concept of freewill offering endured, their origin and the meaning of the Arabic word got lost. The Muslims’ grandchildren simply believed that saraka was the ‘African’ name of a special rice cake. This lack of understanding and knowledge is not surprising, for very few African Muslims passed on their religion to their children, let alone grandchildren. Islam was surrounded by cults and religions that were more appealing to youngsters than a religion which imposed extra sacrifices on its enslaved followers such as fasting, abstaining from meat and liquor, and praying five times a day. Moreover, literacy in Arabic, which is essential in Islam and proved to be of extreme importance to Muslim slaves because it enabled them to remain intellectually alert and was used successfully during revolts, was also a hindrance to the passing on of the religion to the children. Because of the lack of adequate structures, time, and opportunities, and because of the hostility of most slaveholders, it goes without saying that slave children could not learn to read and write Arabic as their parents had in Africa. Whatever they could have acquired would only have been passed on orally, but with the brutal dislocation of families at the owners’ discretion, and with the gradual disappearance of African-born people who could provide guidance and reference, their knowledge ran the risk of being very approximate and incomplete.

Rice cakes, Muslims, Islam, and sadaqa are clearly linked in the Sea Islands, but there are two instances in the Caribbean where sadaqa went from Islamic orthodoxy to becoming an integral part of an un-Islamic ritual in a way that is open to conjecture.

In Toco, a small town in the north of Trinidad, important ceremonies, such as weddings and funerals, always include the consultation of the ancestors, which is preceded by an offering of food and drinks called sakara. This sakara is offered to all the ancestors, starting with those who lived in Africa. At midnight an old man takes the food and drinks outside the house and says in a language that is said to sound like ‘Yarriba’(Yoruba): ‘All a me people from Guinea, all you come. Come, this are we own food … Who a drink rum, drink. Who a drink beverage, drink.’ The ‘beverage’, it is important to note, refers to a non-alcoholic beverage, a likely reference to the Muslim ancestors who do not drink
alcohol. Sakara is offered during the ceremonies held on the 9th and the 40th day after a funeral, a custom that strongly suggests a parallel with the Islamic tradition of marking the 8th and 40th day of a person’s death with prayers and a meal.

In a similar way, a few hundred miles north of Trinidad, in the islands of Carnacou and Grenada, people of African origin continue, to this day, to offer food to the spirits of their ancestors during the Big Drum Dance, also called the Nation Dance (African nations), or saraka. The representatives of the nations that perform the dances are Mandingo, Temne, Chamba, Congo, Koromantin, Arada, and Ibo who have passed on their music and languages to their descendants. With the exception of the Mandingo, all the nations represented in this ceremony are non-Muslim.

The two words, saraka and sakara, are associated with ceremonies whose function is to give freewill offerings. Neither saraka nor sakara involve the simple sharing of food and drink between participants. If this were the case, as in a ‘regular’ wedding, for example, there would not be a particular ceremony and libation preceding the distribution of food and beverages. Moreover, the people themselves refer to the saraka and sakara as offerings, and since they are linked to the cult of the ancestors both are sacred and religious in nature. Islam does not have such a cult, however, which means that the communities that perform these rituals have not inherited the word along with the ceremonies.

Three tentative explanations can be proposed for the use of an Arabic word to describe a non-Muslim ceremony with Islamic undertones. One could be that the Muslims exchanged orthodoxy for syncretism. They adopted the ancestors’ cult that they saw performed by the non-Muslim slaves who lived on the same plantations. This construction, though, is doubtful in light of the very considerable efforts that the West African Muslims undertook for the maintenance of Islamic conformity in the New World. In fact, as examples from the Sea Islands and Brazil show, even when enslaved Muslims and non-Muslims took part in the same celebrations, each group strictly stuck to its particular rituals. From the available evidence, the Muslims seem not to have engaged in what they would have called ‘pagan’ behaviour.
If the Muslims were not the originators of the saraka and sakara cults or even full participants, they still provided the names attached to the rituals. A second explanation for the retention of the word sadaqa and of its meaning could he, not in syncretism but in association. The Muslims of Trinidad, Grenada, and Carriacou, who were giving alms, probably followed the Qur’anic precept that states that sadaqa may be given to non-Muslims: ‘It is not for you to guide them to the right path. But Allah guides to the right path whom he pleaseth. Whatever of good ye give benefits your own souls, and ye shall only do so seeking the “Face” of Allah’ (2:272). If non-Muslim slaves benefited from the chanty of the Muslims, they certainly associated religious charity—as opposed to simple gift giving—with Islam and the Muslims. Therefore they used the word that came with an act that had made a lasting and positive impression on them, as they developed, adapted, or recreated their own rites.

A third explanation for the survival of the word involves borrowing. It is still based on the observation of the Muslims’ rites by non-Muslims, but what may have happened is that the non-Muslims attributed a particular potency to the offerings made by the Muslims. This phenomenon is far from exceptional in Africa in the contact zones where Muslims and non-Muslims cohabit. In Mali, for example, the polytheist Bambara call sadaqa the offerings they give to their different gods.They, of course, borrowed the word—as well as bismilla, for example, a term they use in their religious invocations—from their Muslim neighbours, some of them Bambara like themselves, others Fulani or Soninke. They attribute special powers to the word sadaqa linked to the effectiveness of the Muslim rituals as perceived through the success of the religion measured in terms of number of followers, frequency of conversions, and practice by knowledgeable and powerful people.

In Trinidad, Grenada, and Carriacou non-Muslims probably borrowed an Islamic trait and its Arabic name, and incorporated them into their own rites, without blending them, contrary to what happened in the Sea Islands, where the Muslims themselves perpetuated the sadaqa custom in an orthodox manner within their community.

In any case, almsgiving among the enslaved Africans was true to the authentic spirit of sadaqa since tradition states that the best sadaqa is the one given by a person who owns little, which certainly was the case with the enslaved Muslims.

What happened with sadaqa, in the Americas, is emblematic of what happened there with Islamic tenets and Arabic terminology in general. Part of what the West African Muslims brought with them, in terms of spirituality and rituals, lived on and was kept vital through their own concerted efforts within their community and the memories—even if not well informed—of their descendants. On the other hand, part of their legacy has been kept alive by their non-Muslim companions who attributed certain particularities to them, such as Arabic literacy, rebelliousness, occult knowledge, healing powers, and, as with sadaqa, religious charity linked to the welfare of the families and community.

Islam as brought by the West Africans has not survived in the Americas, but its impact has been deep and wide in a variety of ways. Though this phenomenon has not received enough attention yet, it is a crucial element, as stated earlier, in a better understanding of the cultures of people of African descent in the New World. It also gives useful clues on the impact of Islam on its practitioners. It is, furthermore, part of the world-wide history of the religion; and as Islamologists will turn their attention to the story of the African Muslims enslaved in the Americas, much more about Islam and Muslim populations, on a global scale in time and space, will come to light.

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