Abstract:
I will present the history of two men. Both were Tuareg from present-day Mali. One was a man of slave origins, very humble, called Awad el Djouh. The other man was called Mohamed Ali ag Attaher Insar. He was a very powerful politician in his days. He was the chief of a Tuareg tribe. He was a high-ranking member of the main political party in French Sudan, as Mali was called in colonial times. He was befriended with royalty in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. And he was even a friend of the French President. Both men had left together in 1948 to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage. But when Awad, the humble man of slave origins, returned, he accused Mohamed Ali – the powerful politician – of having sold him in Mecca as a slave. This accusation led to a court case and this court case led to international media attention to the continued existence of slave trade in Africa. This media attention in turn influenced international politics in the 1950s. It influenced the process of decolonisation in French West Africa. It influenced law in Saudi Arabia, and it influenced the shape of debates on human rights and labour in the United Nations Human Rights Committee and in the ILO. I would like to present this micro history as a focus to address two sets of issues. One set is related to the shaping of the postcolonial world in the 1950s. The other set of issues deal with the current reshaping of micro history and global history as scholarly practices.

Biographical Note:
I hold a master’s degree in African history from Leiden University and a PhD in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Social Science Research). I have specialised in the history of Africa and the Muslim World. I am fascinated by human, spatial and intellectual tensions of scale (singular case and generalization, individual and collective, space and boundary, micro history and global history), which come to play in politics, social connectivity and processes of identity formation (nationalism, ethnicity, religion, race), and their representations (poetry and song, media stories, oral histories and discourse, and, to a lesser extent photography and film). I try to analyse these through discourse analysis, translocality and, recently, structuration theory. My findings are usually presented as detailed micro histories, taking the connectivity between these histories and larger processes and structures as an integral part of those histories, rather than as their background. In my work, agency is central and it shapes structure, not the other way around (which, in my opinion, denies history to be human endeavour and would make me lose all hope for change).

Source: Baz Lecocq, Research Group Communities Comparisons Connections, “Members”, <http://www.ccc.ugent.be/bazlecocq>