ABSTRACT
When the medieval Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited the West African Sahel and Southern Sahara in 1352–53, he brought with him a North African conception of ‘racial’ difference that appears to have been unfamiliar to the people with whom he interacted. In recounting his travels, Ibn Battuta repeatedly distinguished between three principle types of people found in the area: Blacks, Berbers and Whites. It is clear that those he identified as ‘Whites’ included only people like himself who originated in North Africa or the Middle East and who resided in the towns of the desert edge, mostly as merchants. With one exception, colour terminology was not used to identify or describe the local Berber-speaking peoples that appear in the text, such as the Massūfa of Walata and Timbuktu, or the Bardāma and Hakkār 1 of the Southern and Central Sahara. 2 For Ibn Battuta, the term ‘Whites’ implied a set of Arab Muslim cultural practices that those local Berber-speaking peoples, although Muslims, did not share. Scandalised by the freedom Massūfa women enjoyed in their social interactions, and by their matrilineal system of descent, Ibn Battuta compared local Berber speakers to non-Muslims he had visited in South Asia. 3
