Onwuchekwa Jemie
Arab Expansionism in Africa, 640-1900 AD:
How many Africans today wonder how Arabs, whose homeland is the Arabian Peninsula, came to occupy all of supra-Sahara Africa, from the Sinai peninsula across to Morocco’s Atlantic coast? And what they did to the Black Egyptians, Black Berbers and other blacks who were the aborigines of all that expanse of land? Similarly, Africans need to inquire into why and how an Arab minority has ruled Sudan since 1956? And how did it come about that we hear of Arab tribes in Darfur, Chad and even in Nigeria’s Bornu state?
Until 640 AD, there were no Arab settlers of any kind in all those places.
But in that year hungry Arab hordes desperate for plunder and greener pastures charged out of Arabia, flying the flag of their new religion, Islam, and conquered Egypt by 642. Egypt thereafter became their base for invading and seizing lebensraum all the way west to Morocco and Mauritania, and southward up the Nile.
In the first phase of conquest, an Arab raiding army reached Tangier on the Atlantic in 682. Then in the 11th century, the Fatimids who were then ruling in Egypt, unleashed Bedouin Arab tribes, such as the Beni Hilal and Beni Sulaim, into the Maghreb. These Bedouin tribes overran as far west as Morocco in the 12th and 13th centuries, and brought about the Arabisation of the indigenous Berber population of the Maghreb whom they swamped. They reached northern Mauritania by the 14th century.
Also in the 14th century, Guhayna Arab tribes, edged out of Egypt, infiltrated up the Nile into Sudan. In 1820, Mohammed Ali Pasha sent an expedition from Egypt that conquered Northern Sudan by 1841. In 1869 Ismail Pasha attempted to annex the region from Juba/Gondokoro to Lake Victoria, a region that would become Uganda and Sudan’s Equatoria Province. He failed, but the British who ruled from 1899 to 1956 later incorporated Equatoria into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In 1874 the Jellaba-Arab slave raider Zubair Pasha conquered Dar Fur for the Egyptians.
Also in the 19th century, Awlad Sulaiman Arabs migrated, in the 1840s, from the Fezzan in Libya into the Lake Chad area, and Shuwa Arabs in search of pasturelands moved, in the 1810s, from Chad into the Bornu area of what became Nigeria.
From the late 19th century until the 1950s, Arab expansionism in Africa was stopped in its tracks by the European powers who conquered and partitioned Africa among themselves. Only with the retreat of European political rule did opportunity arise for Arab expansionism to resume its march. And it promptly did.
Read Also: Attacks on protesters is a declaration of war against Yoruba -YWC
Arab Expansionism in Africa Since 1956, i.e. in the Era of Continentalist Pan-Africanism:
Continentalist Pan-Africanism was launched in 1958 at the Accra Conference of Independent African States (CIAS). It has been the dominant tendency within Pan- Africanism ever since, and it has given birth to the Arab-dominated OAU/AU.
As some observers have pointed out, the Arab League, established in 1945, is the institutional organ for realizing the Arab aspirations for unity and imperial resurgence through “an Arab-Islamic empire across Africa into the Middle East.” Under its aegis, Arab nationalism resumed its expansion in Africa when, on attaining independence in 1956, the Jellaba-Arab minority government of Sudan defined Sudan as an Arab country and set out to enforce that definition on Sudan’s African majority.
Islamisation and Arabisation of Black Africa: the Pilot Project in Sudan:
It has been noted by Opoku Agyeman that Pan-Arabism, in its so-called ‘civilizing mission’ perceives Africa as a ‘cultural vacuum’ waiting to be filled by Arab culture “by all conceivable means” [Agyeman 1994:30] including Islamisation and the settlement of Arab populations on lands forcibly seized from Africans. The assumptions, objectives and methods of this project may be illustrated from the statements of its principal implementers in Sudan:
“You are aware that the end of all our efforts and this expense is to
procure Negroes. Please show zeal in carrying out our wishes in this capital matter.”
[Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ruler of Egypt, 1825, in a letter to one of his generals in Sudan, quoted in Nyaba 2002: 36]
In his 1955 book on the “orbital scheme” (the three circles at whose center he envisioned Egypt to be), President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt characterized Africa as “the remotest depths of the jungle,” and as merely a candidate for Egypt’s “spread of enlightenment and civilization” via Islamisation-Arabisation.
[quoted in Agyeman 1994: 34]
“Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent.” [Sudanese Prime Minister Mahgoub, 1968, quoted in Agyeman 1994: 38]
Sudan “is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission.” [President Nimeiry of Sudan, 1969, quoted in Agyeman 1994: 39]
“We want to Islamise America and Arabise Africa” [Dr. Hassan El-Turabi, chief ideologue of Jellaba-Arab minority rule in Sudan, 1999, quoted in Nyaba 2002: 27]
“The south [Sudan] will remain an inseparable part of the land of Islam, God willing, even if the war continued for decades.” [al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, from an edited translation of an audiotape attributed to him, parts of which were aired by Aljazeera on April 23, 2006]
This thrusting of Arab spears into the body and soul of Black Africa through deAfricanisation campaigns of Islamisation-Arabisation was, of course, not confined to Sudan, but has been done wherever Arabs spotted an opportunity to exploit African weakness, such as Mauritania, Chad, Somalia, Eritrea, Uganda. In the past 40 years, Libya’s Gadhafi has been particularly active in sponsoring chaos, anarchy and civil wars in Chad, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, etc., and in trying to Islamise Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, etc. For example, in a live broadcast on Rwanda Radio on 17 May 1985, Gadhafi said:
“First you must stick to your Islamic religion and insist that your children are taught the Islamic religion and you teach the Arabic language because without the Arabic language we could not understand Islam. . . You must teach that Islam is the religion of Africa. . . You must raise your voice high and declare that Allah is great because Africa must be Muslim. . . We must wage a holy war so that Islam may spread in Africa.”
[quoted in Bankie & Mchombu 2006: 239-240]
Why do Gadhafi and other Arabisers sponsor Islamisation? Steve Biko pointed out the fundamental reason why imperialists make a point of converting their victims to their Christian religion when he said:
“It has always been the pattern throughout history that whosoever brings the new order knows it best and is therefore the perpetual teacher of those to whom the new order is being brought. If the white missionaries were ‘right’ about their God in the eyes of the people, then the African people could only accept whatever these new know-all tutors had to say about life. The acceptance of the colonialist-tainted version of Christianity marked the turning point in the resistance of African people.” [Biko 1987: 56]
Steve Biko’s observation helps explain why Arab hegemonists like Gadhafi insist on Islamising their intended victims. Since the death of their prophet Mohammed, Islam has been the religious cloak and entry-dagger of Arab imperialism. Islamisation is used as a prelude to the project of Arabisation. Among the targeted victims, Islam privileges the Arabic language and culture. Arab names and customs are made obligatory, and the anathema on Jahiliya discourages remembrance of the pre-Islamic, non-Arab culture of an Islamised people.
It should be noted that the core Islamic countries that stretch contiguously from the Maghreb to Pakistan are fragments of the empire that Arabs conquered and ruled from 632 to 1517 when the Turks, under Selim the Grim, conquered Egypt and Syria and extinguished the Arab Abbasid Caliphate. Thus, the core lands of Dar-al-Islam today are a continuation of the Arab Empire. Just as the Commonwealth is the euphemistic PR name for the enduring British Empire, so too Dar-al-Islam is the euphemistic PR name for the enduring Arab Empire. In fact Dar-al-Islam is simply the Arab empire in religious camouflage, and the Umma are the Arab citizens/masters while the non-Arab are the subjects of the enduring Arab Empire.
Gadhafi and the Arab Lebensraum Project in the 21st Century:
In furtherance of his lebensraum project, in May 2003 Gadhafi proposed a tripartite union of Libya, Sudan and Egypt, a move reminiscent of Hitler’s Anschluss project that annexed, in 1938, Austria as well as Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
To appreciate the menace in Gadhafi’s invitation, Africans would do well to consider
Hitler’s Drive for Lebensraum and How it was Stopped:
Just as Gadhafi wants to enlarge Arabia inside Africa, Hitler wanted to enlarge Germany within Europe by “the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.” [Hitler 1971: 653]
