Contribution short abstract:

The discusses Mande humanism (West Africa) as a relational or intersubjective ethic in contexts marked by inhumane othering and violence. Critically engaging with Arendt's work, it also reveals how humanity and inhumanity can become entangled.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper critically engages with Arendt’s work on the human condition and humanity through the privileged standpoint of Mande humanism (West Africa). It focuses in particular on Arendt’s emphasis on the relational or intersubjective understanding of humanity, which chimes with views of the human and ethical practice in the Mande area. Rather than friendship and honest intellectual exchange, as in Arendt’s essay, discussions of how humanity and intimacy are bound up with and exceed hierarchy, violence and even inhumanity are focused on hospitality. I will provide two interrelated ethnographic illustrations of this ethic of in/humanity in host-stranger relations. The first draws on my historical ethnography of domestic slavery in the Gambia. In the late 19th and early 20th century, while slavery was waning, Gambian farmers hosted (free) migrant labourers and sometimes facilitated their assimilation of migrant labourers as “slaves”. Though free and autonomous, slave descendants have been since discriminated as an inferior endogamous status group. This has not prevented a shared humanity, friendship and intimacy from developing between “freeborn” and “slaves”. The second case study regards Gambian and other Sahelian emigrants in contemporary Angola creating ethical, albeit precarious, spaces of host-stranger “humanity” with the Angolan police in a context marked by illegalization, deportation and predatory policing. Ironically, this wider political violence also favours forms of commoning across the free-slave divide among the Sahelian migrants.