Ibrahima Thioub

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Ibrahima Thioub (born June 18, 1955 in Malicounda near M'Bour ) is a Senegalese historian and professor of modern and contemporary history and executive director of the history seminar at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar .

Thioub's areas of research are the history of marginalization and exclusion in Senegalese cities, the history of slavery and human trafficking in Africa, and prisons, alcoholism and juvenile delinquency in the history of West Africa. At the moment he is mainly researching slavery and human trafficking and the associated culture of remembrance in Senegal and Gambia, as well as the politics of knowledge control in the former West African French colonies. His mother tongue is Wolof , his working language is French . In the 2008/2009 academic year, Thioub was a fellow atWissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

Research focus

When Ibrahima Thioub took part in a conference on "Slavery in Contemporary Art. An Interdisciplinary Conference on Trauma, Memory and Visuality" of the "Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies" of the University of Trier in October 2006 , he spoke about the history of West Africa in terms of the participation of West African elites in the transatlantic slave trade and the East African slave trade . Thioub stated that a debate about one's own participation in the slave trade has been suppressed in West Africa to this day.

He showed how post-colonial national historiography in Africa avoided conflicted topics, such as illuminating the role of slave captors in the interior of Africa - the history of slavery in this interpretation only began on the coast, with the shipping of the slaves: “I always say: where from did the slaves come? Did they fall from the sky onto the coast? "

In his opinion, the memorials on the coasts of West Africa - such as Gorée in Senegal, Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana or Ouidah in Benin - mask the role of pre-colonial states like Futa Jallon , Asante and Abomey as hubs of the slave trade. And they ignore what happened in the interior of the continent, in today's Burkina Faso , Chad or Niger , where the majority of the victims came from. When French and British colonization began , the majority of the population in the Sahel belt from Mauritania to Sudan was owned by the few rich and recognized families and clans .

A real "historians' dispute" is underway among African historians over the official memorials for slavery.

In post- independence African history, which was shaped by nationalism, the main aim was to construct a glorious past. She wrote a story of the elites: one based first on Arab sources, then on the tradition of the dynasties , which was rehabilitated after independence . And it tended, according to Thioub, to take the social discourse of local elites at face value when they downplay or downplay social hierarchies and oppression within African societies.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ibrahima Thioub at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
personal data
SURNAME Thioub, Ibrahima
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Senegalese historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Malicounda at M'Bour