Photo by Alice Bellagamba. All rights reserved.
Between August 2014 and June 2015 I carried out fieldwork in Guéra, Chad, a mountainous region which lies between the desert of the Sahel and more fertile savannahs to the south. I tried to understand the way people handle the memory of the slave raids from the neighbouring Wadai sultanate: an important player in trans-Saharan trade from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. I was particularly interested in learning about how people talk about slave raids and the slave camps where raiders used to assemble their victims for months or years before handing them over to traders. The people of Guéra were not necessarily enslaved, but their history was shaped be the fact that they could have been. The memory of having been potentially enslaved lingers on in contemporary political dynamics. In this piece I am particularly interested in one group of people who are known locally as the descendants of slaves, although they reject this label: the Yalnas.
Who were the Yalnas?
Yalnas have two main characteristics that distinguish them from the Hadjiray, or the ‘people of the mountains’, which is a collective term for the people of Guéra. While the Hadjiray were pagans when the French colonised Chad, the Yalnas were already Muslim. And instead of speaking the local language at home, they use Chadian Arabic as their mother tongue.
