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African-Arab Relations: From Slavery to Petro-Jihad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2019

Dunstan M. Wai
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Extract

The history of the Arabs in Africa has included a number of contradictions. The Arabs have been both conquerors and liberators, both traders in slaves and purveyors of new ideas. With the Arabs came both Islam and commerce. Indeed, trade and Islam have been companions throughout much of the modern history of Africa north of the Zambezi. In Northern and West Africa caravans of Muslim traders go back for centuries. In East Africa others have come for a millenium from the Gulf of Oman and Southern Arabia, consciously engaged in cultural dissemination. The spread of Islam in Africa has been due far less to consciously organized missionary activity than to trade and conquest. Ali A. Mazrui

Type
Focus: Afro-Arab Relations
Information
African Issues , Volume 13 , 1984 , pp. 9 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984 

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References

Notes

1 Mazrui, Ali A., Africa's International Relations: The Diplomacy of Dependency and Change (London and Boulder, Colorado: Heinemann and Westview Press, 1977)Google Scholar, Chapter 7, pp. 130-55. I am indebted to this chapter, and many other writings of Professor Mazrui on African-Arab relations for enlightenment and intellectual stimulation.

2 For some of President Banda's denunciation of Arabs and particularly of the Arab Sudanese policies toward the Southern Sudan, see Africa Digest Vol. 15, No. 5 (October 1968).

3 For a detailed assessment of African-Arab relations, see Wai, Dunstan M., “African-Arab Relations: Interdependency or Misplaced Optimism,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1983), pp. 187–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Mazrui, op. cit., Chapters 4 and 7.

6 Ibid., p. 138.

7 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, The Philosophy of the Revolution, Economica English Edition (Buffalo: Smith, Keynes and Marshall Publications, 1959)Google Scholar, and Ismael, Tareq, UAR Policy in Africa: Egypt's Policy Under Nasser (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Ismael, Tareq, “The United Arab Republic in Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies vol. 2 (Autumn 1968), pp. 175-94.Google Scholar

8 See Mazrui, Ali A., “Black Africa and the Arabs,” Foreign Affairs vol. 53, No. 4 (July 1975), pp. 725-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Susan A. Gitelson, “Israel's African Setback in Perspective,” Jerusalem Papers on Peace Problems No. 6.

9 Quoted in Anthony Sylvester, Arabs and Africans: Cooperation for Development (London: The Bodley Head, 1981), p. 197.

10 Ibid., p. 201.

11 Ibid., pp. 199-200.

12 Some African states are now arguing that the Egyptian peace treaty with Israel and the subsequent Israeli withdrawal from Sinai provides rationale for re-establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. Zaire and Liberia have already done so.

13 See Margaret A. Novicki's article on the 1983 OAU summit in Africa Report vol. 28, No. 5 (Sept-Oct 1983).

14 Dunstan M. Wai et al., The Impact of the Oil Price Increases (1973-1980) on the Economy of Sub-Saharan Africa (Oxford: Center for Research on the New International Economic Order, 1983).

15 Ibid., especially chapter on conclusions and suggestions.

16 Brian Van Arkadie, “Notes on African-Arab Economic Relations” (mimeograph).