Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib II: casualties of secularity

This article is the second segment of a two-part project that deconstructs Africanist conceptions of the origin of black Africans of the Maghrib. In the first part, I identified the textual threads linking Africanist discourses on Africans (blacks) of the Maghrib to abolitionism. This sequel is designed to accomplish two things. First, I will sketch a textual genesis for the twin concepts underpinning both the Africanist and abolitionist polemics: the notions of sensuality and miscegenation. Second, I will consider how this polemics measures up to pre-modern commentaries that lead back towards the advent of Islam at the Maghrib. Secularity, I argue, enabled Africanists not only to conserve what was, in essence, a religious discourse, but also to de-historicise black Africans of the Maghrib.