A Slave per Day in Perpetuity

Abstract

A curious repetition occurs in narratives of the Muslims’ first encounters with polities along the Sahara’s edge, extending from Nubia to Niger. At each turn, agreements involving tributes of 360 enslaved persons were reached with local leaders. I use this recurrence to explore two aspects of Islamic conquest literatures: the significance within this genre of numbers in describing worldly events and the cosmic structures that background them, and the historiographical question of how to contextualize conquest numeracy in practices of statecraft and their representation. I argue that these agreements deploy a Late Antique symbolic vernacular that moved orally across domains of culture and knowledge to define diplomatic and trade relations between Saharan states and their new Muslim neighbors. Using the number of days of the idealized calendar year, authors signified these relationships’ continuous and cyclical returns. Attention to varying uses of the figure of 360 enslaved people allows us to track political and narrative developments as well as to critique the projection of borderland African regions as passive and perpetual “slaving zones.”