GLC@Lunch with Chouki El Hamel: “Unshackling the Past: Slavery, Marronage, and the Fight for Freedom in Morocco, 18th to 20th Centuries”

Chouki El Hamel (GLC Visiting Scholar; Professor of History and Director of the Center for African Mediterranean Studies, Arizona State University)

The transformation of Haratin (Black Moroccans) into a synonym for “former slaves” originated in Sultan Mawlay Ismaʿil’s (r. 1672–1727) project to construct a royal army through the systematic enslavement of Black individuals—whether legally enslaved, emancipated, or free. By conflating Blackness, African ancestry, and slavery, the initiative legitimized the subjugation of free Muslim Black Moroccans. The legally untenable project also functioned as an anti-marronage measure, targeting those who resisted enslavement by fleeing to sympathetic communities.

Narratives of marronage remain conspicuously absent from Moroccan historiography, despite the presence of archival fragments attesting to acts of defiance and agency among the enslaved, evidenced by flight, sanctuary-seeking, and other strategies of resistance. This study interrogates these archival traces to disrupt dominant historical narratives and recover suppressed histories of Black resistance. By reading historical documents against the grain, it seeks to reconcile Morocco’s past with its silenced legacies of slavery and freedom, offering a corrective to the erasure of Black agency in North African history.