The Caliphate, the Black Writer, and a World in Revolution, 1957–69

In 1965, William Allen Brown (1934–2007) landed in Mali, a young socialist republic and former French colony that had become independent just five years prior. Brown was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and had come to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation on the Caliphate of H amdullāhi, a nineteenth century theocratic state that had once stood in Mali’s Mopti region. Born in North Carolina, Brown attended school in Manhattan and the Bronx. After a stint in the US Air Force, he enrolled at Kentucky State College, the state’s oldest Historically Black College, and graduated in 1959 with a degree in History and Government, and French. He then attended the Sorbonne University in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1960, he started graduate school at UW-Madison, where he studied history and African Studies, and obtained his MA (1964) and PhD (1969). What was it like to conduct fieldwork in mid-1960s Mali? Specifically, what could have been the experience of an African-American graduate student attuned to ongoing political struggles across the Black world? Which scholarly influences shaped Brown’s approach to dissertation research? And, which broader debates were occurring in Brown’s academic fields — African Studies, African history, and Black Studies — as he was crafting his dissertation? This essay provides preliminary thoughts on these questions through an exploration of the political and intellectual worlds that Brown inhabited during the years 1957–69, on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1960s were a tumultuous decade, a time of momentous intensity to be a student and rising scholar. Following the threads of the civil rights movement in the United States, decolonization and Cold War in Mali, the study of Islam in precolonial West Africa, and the place of Black scholars in academic fields concerned with the study of Africa and Africans, one finds them tightly entangled in William Allen Brown’s graduate experience. The circuits of knowledge Brown traveled through crisscrossed the Atlantic and the Sahel, as he made his way through Kentucky, Madison, Bamako, Mopti, and Timbuktu. He may have crossed paths with Martin Luther King, Jr., and he