IRAQIS OF AFRICAN DESCENT ARE A LARGELY OVERLOOKED LINK TO SLAVERY
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From: Malaika Kambon
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Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 4:24 PM
Subject: [unioNews] IRAQIS OF AFRICAN DESCENT ARE A LARGELY OVERLOOKED LINK TO SLAVERY
NEW AFRIKAN MILLENNIUM
JANUARY 2004
Forwarding, courtesy of Dr. RASHIDI from [SOA] Digest #1939
Message: 18
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 17:10:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Runoko Rashidi
http://washingtonpost.com
A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight:
Iraqis of African Descent Are a Largely Overlooked
Link to Slavery
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01
BASRA, Iraq
The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in
school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she
sensed it was an insult.
Abd. Slave.
"The way they said it, smiling and shouting, I knew
they used it to make fun of me," said Youssef,
recounting the childhood story from her living room
couch.
"I used to get upset and ask, 'Why do you call me abd?
I don't serve you,' " Youssef said.
Unlike most Iraqis, whose faces come in shades from
olive to a pale winter white, Youssef has skin the
color of dark chocolate. She has African features and
short, tightly curled hair that she straightens and
wears in a soft bouffant. Growing up in Basra, the
port city 260 miles southeast of Baghdad, she lived
with her aunt while her mother worked as a cook and
maid in the homes of one of the city's wealthiest
light-skinned families.
In the United States, Youssef's dark skin would
classify her as black or African American. In Iraq,
where distinctions are based on family and tribe
rather than race, she is simply an Iraqi.
The number of dark-skinned people like Youssef in Iraq
today is unknown. Their origins, however, are better
understood, if little-discussed: They are the legacy
of slavery throughout the Middle East.
Historians say the slave trade began in the 9th
century and lasted a millennium. Arab traders brought
Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day
Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East
Africa to Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Turkey and other parts
of the Middle East.
"We were slaves. That's how we came here," Youssef
said. "Our whole family used to talk about how our
roots are from Africa."
Though centuries have passed since the first Africans,
called Zanj, arrived in Iraq, some African traditions
still persist here. Youssef, 43, a doctoral candidate
in theater and acting at Baghdad University's College
of Fine Arts, is writing her dissertation about
healing ceremonies that are conducted exclusively by a
community of dark-skinned Iraqis in Basra. Youssef
said she considers the ceremonies -- which involve
elaborate costumes, dancing, and words sung in Swahili
and Arabic -- to be dramatic performances.
"I don't complain about being called an abd, but I
think that's what provoked me to write this, perhaps
some kind of complex," said Youssef, who began
researching and writing about the practices of
Afro-Iraqis in 1997, when she was studying for a
master's degree. "Something inside me that wanted to
tell others that the abd they mock is better than
them."
A Long History
In the 9th century, as today, Basra was a major
trading city on the Shatt al Arab waterway, which
empties into the Persian Gulf. With date plantations
in need of laborers, Arab leaders turned to East
Africa -- Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, Sudan, Tanzania
and Malawi, and Zanzibar, an island off the coast of
Tanzania that gave the Zanj their name.
"By the 9th century, when Baghdad was the capital of
the Islamic world, we do have evidence of a large
importation of African slaves -- how large is anyone's
guess," said Thabit Abdullah, a history professor at
York University in Toronto.
Besides working on plantations, Abdullah said, some
African slaves were soldiers, concubines or eunuchs.
Arabs also enslaved Turks and other ethnic groups as
high-ranking army officers and domestics.
Unlike in the United States, slaves in the Middle East
could own land, and their children could not be born
into slavery. In addition, conversion to Islam could
preclude further servitude because, according to
Islamic law, Muslims could not enslave other Muslims.
Even though Islam teaches that all people are equal
before God, Abdullah said that medieval Arab slave
owners made distinctions based on skin color. White
slaves, known as mamluks, which means "owned," were
more expensive than black slaves, or abds.
To protest their treatment, Zanj slaves working in the
fields around Basra staged a revolt against Baghdad's
rulers that lasted 15 years and created a rival
capital called Moktara, believed to have been located
in the marshlands of southern Iraq. By 883 the Baghdad
army had finally put down the revolt. "This slave
rebellion is so important to the history of slavery in
Iraq because after that, no one wanted to take a risk
by trying plantation-style slavery again," Abdullah
said. Slavery continued until the 19th century, but
dark-skinned Iraqis never again organized as a group
to make political demands.
In a country that revolves around religion rather than
race, the term "abd" may be used by light-skinned
Iraqis in a matter-of-fact way to describe someone's
dark complexion. Dark-skinned Iraqis say the word may
or may not be considered an insult, depending on how
it is used and the intent of the speaker.
"We use the word abd in the black community," said
Salah Jaleel, 50, one of Youssef's cousins. "Sometimes
I call my friend 'abd.' Of course he knows that I
don't insult him, because I'm black also, so it's a
joke. We accept it between us, but it is a real insult
if it is said by a white man."
In many ways, the low visibility of dark-skinned
Iraqis has been a blessing. During his 35 years in
power, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party government
killed and tortured thousands of people based on
ethnic and religious affiliations. Ethnic Kurds in the
northern reaches of the country, and Shiite Muslims --
particularly the so-called Marsh Arabs -- living in
the south all suffered. The dark-skinned Iraqis were
spared Hussein's wrath.
'Proud of This Color'
Awatif Sabty, 47, is ambivalent on the subject of skin
color. A secretary at Basra Agricultural College, she
is more apt to talk about Hussein's wrongdoing than
about her own caramel-colored skin or her marriage to
a lighter-skinned man, Salah Mousa, 47.
Her mother was disappointed in her choice. Her
husband's mother objected to the union. Sabty said
Mousa's family even tried to intimidate her with
threatening phone calls. Now she shakes her head and
dismisses it all as long-ago history.
"Objections and barriers exist, but in the end it's
all solved," she said in her soft voice, smiling.
Her middle-class home in Basra's Abbasiya district has
painted concrete walls and two televisions and is
immaculate. Sitting on a couch draped in white
protective cloth, Sabty explained that intermarriages
like hers are common in Iraq: "We don't have a problem
with color, and we don't deal with someone based on
color."
For instance, she said, her older sister married a
light-skinned Iraqi and has a daughter with blond
hair. Her brother married a dark-skinned woman and
their child is dark-skinned. Sabty's two young
children have olive complexions and straight, shiny
hair, showing no trace of Sabty's caramel coloring.
Suddenly she paused. "In the coming generations we
will have fewer dark-skinned children, and this pains
us," she said. "We are proud of this color because
people of this color are a minority in Iraq. Maybe DNA
will bring us the color again."
Hashim Faihan Jimaa, 78, is more concerned with
survival than color. He has no income and lives with
his ailing wife, Dawla Shamayan, 68, who recently had
gall bladder surgery.
Jimaa says he believes in the African-inspired healing
ceremonies. He used to participate many years ago when
they were more frequent; the number of ceremonies has
decreased since the start of the U.S. occupation
because of fear of performing outside.
"These came from Africa and they are very important to
us, the abds," he said. Just as he used the Arabic
word for slave to refer to himself, Jimaa sometimes
referred to light-skinned Iraqis using the term for a
free person.
His wife, sitting across from him with about a dozen
of their children and grandchildren, gingerly
suggested that perhaps his grandfather or another
relative had been slaves from Africa.
Jimaa glanced down at the back of his dark-brown hand.
"You can't depend on someone's color, because maybe a
black man married a free woman and the children will
come out lighter than me," he said. To seal his
argument, he pointed to his caramel-colored daughter
and then his granddaughter, who was darker than her
mother.
Jimaa's wife and others continued to probe Jimaa's
answers. He grew exasperated. "I have nothing to do
with Africa, I don't know where it is or even what it
is," Jimaa said. "But I know that my roots are from
Africa because I am dark-skinned."
Few local government leaders in Basra, some of whom
were selected by the U.S.-led occupation authority,
are dark-skinned. In Hakaka -- a poor neighborhood of
600 families, about 100 of them dark-skinned -- town
council members elected last August vowed to make
changes. All of the eight council members are
light-skinned.
"People applied to be members, and no one black
applied," said council President Abdullah Mohammed
Hasan, 54, in the narrow sandwich and snack shop that
serves as the council's headquarters. Hasan has two
wives, one of them dark-skinned.
"They have good manners and are very easy to deal
with," Hasan said of dark-skinned Iraqis. "It would be
better if they were members."
Youssef, the doctoral candidate, grew up in Hakaka.
When she was a child her family did not have much
money, but the modest neighborhood was clean. Now it
lacks a septic system and reeks of waste because there
is no garbage pickup.
Youssef goes back at least once a month to see her
74-year-old father, who sometimes needs her help
because of his failing eyesight. She also visits with
her brother, Sabeeh Youssef, and his family.
Sabeeh Youssef, 47, dropped out of school early to
help support the family. He works fixing broken
lighters since losing his job at an oil company in
1989. But he is a self-taught carpenter, capable of
carving elaborate antique cars and miniature ships. He
proudly showed the objects lining the walls of his
modest home, which lacks running water.
He would love to have his own shop, "but I don't have
the materials and I don't have the money to buy them,"
he said, as his daughter Duaa Sabeeh, 5, grew restless
in his lap.
"I'm very happy and proud of my sister," he added.
"She did the things that I couldn't do, or that my
father couldn't do. She did it."
A Link to Africa
Each time Thawra Youssef returns to Hakaka,
well-dressed in pressed clothes and a loosely draped
black head scarf, she looks like a queen visiting for
a day among the poor families in house clothes, who
hover at their doorways and call out to Youssef by
name.
"I don't feel like a stranger here," she said one day,
stepping carefully to avoid the sewage as eager
children followed her. "I have something deep inside
of me that is connected to the local Basra ceremonies.
I can't abandon them."
The practices, she said, came from "the motherland
where we came from: Africa."
In her dissertation, Youssef mentioned seven open
fields in and around Basra where ceremonies take
place. The field in the Hakaka section is a dusty,
hard-packed courtyard with houses clustered around it.
Drums, tambourines and other instruments are stored in
a closet. Youssef said that only a local leader named
Najim had a key. Youssef had to seek his permission to
write about the ceremonies.
Najim declined to talk about them.
In her dissertation Youssef describes a song called
"Dawa Dawa." The title and words are a mix of Arabic
and Swahili. The song, which is about curing people,
is used in what Youssef calls the shtanga ceremony,
for physical health. Another ceremony, nouba, takes
its name from the Nubian region in the Sudan. There
are also ceremonies for the sick, to remember the dead
and for happy occasions such as weddings.
"The ceremonies are our strongest evidence of our
African identity," she said.
Youssef said she was raised to be a proud Iraqi and
Muslim, but that her mother also stressed the family's
roots in Kenya. Her grandfather and his relatives came
from Africa through slavery, her mother said.
"I knew that the word abd was used to refer to black
people, and I know that it was something embarrassing
that my mother was working in a white person's house,"
Youssef said. "I remember that if their son hit me, I
couldn't even push him. So that hurt me, that stuck in
my mind."
When she was 9, her mother sent her to stay with an
aunt, Badriya Ubaid. She lived in a more upscale
neighborhood and was the lead singer in the nationally
acclaimed band Om Ali.
"My aunt, she was the first one pushing me to study,"
Youssef said. "She said, why do we let them say that
black people can only do dance and music? Why don't we
show them that they can be an important part of the
community, that they can study? She wanted me to
answer this question."
In college and graduate school, as she studied theater
and dance, Youssef also sang with Om Ali. If someone
said that the dark-skinned Iraqis were only good for
entertainment, Youssef said, her aunt was quick to
point out that her niece was in graduate school
studying for an advanced degree. When Ubaid died,
Youssef sang regularly in the band but quit in 1999 to
pursue her doctorate full time.
Youssef also danced with a local arts troupe. She
found the moves reminiscent of the dances in the
ceremonies. She wrote her master's research on body
movement, and when it was time to pick a topic in 2000
for her dissertation, she decided to look at her
community's healing ceremonies.
"It's not only going to give ideas about dark-skinned
people, it will give an idea about our inherited
ceremonies, which we have to protect," said Youssef.
She wants to teach and to publish her work in a book.
"The most important thing is that I started it," said
Youssef. "People will come after me, God willing."
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this
report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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