Pomegranate seller, Yemen. Rod Waddington/flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
In 2013, Nu‘man al-Hudheyfi – a man of akhdam origin – participated at the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held in Sanaa as part of the crisis reconciliation efforts following the 2011 Yemeni Arab Spring. At the time, Hudheyfi was the President of the National Union for the Marginalised and a member of the General People's Congress, the majority party in the country. In the past, he has defined the ‘marginalised’ as all “those people excluded from property and instruction, forced to live at the margins of society”. But during the conference, his focus was mainly his fellow people, the akhdam, as he condemned the NDC’s racism (‘unsuriyya) by pointing out that Yemen’s three million ‘black people’ had only one representative at the NDC.
Crucially, Hudheyfi brought attention to how the akhdam’s social, economic and political marginalisation intersects with discrimination based on their skin colour. By bringing into focus ‘blackness’ as a defining characteristic of the akhdam, Hudheyfi qualified his people as a discrete ‘ethnic group’ resting on a particular racial identity – a move that significantly expanded the meaning of the term ‘racism’, which was traditionally used to refer to descent-based discrimination in Highland Yemen.
