Moor, Haratine (Black)

The Haratin (singular hartani; also Haratine, Harratin) are a dark-skinned people of the western Sahara and Sahel, descended from enslaved Africans and from older Black Saharan farming populations, who share the language and culture of the Arab and Berber peoples their ancestors served. Their heartland is Mauritania, where they are the largest community, an estimated 2.2 million people, nearly half of the citizens: there they speak Hassaniya Arabic and are called Black Moors, as against the Bidan or White Moors. Smaller communities live in Senegal, Mali, Western Sahara and the oases of southern Morocco and Algeria, where they speak the Arabic, Hassaniya, Tachelhit or Tamazight of their neighbours. The origin of the name is disputed: Berber ahardan ('dark'), Arabic al-hurr al-thani ('free of the second rank') and haratha ('to till') have all been proposed. In Mauritania the word meant freed slaves and their descendants, as against the 'abid still in bondage; it is now used for all Black Moors, and their movements have turned it from a mark of servitude into a political identity. What sets them apart is descent: the Bidan, and in Morocco the landowning Arab, Amazigh and sharifian families, still seldom accept a Haratin spouse, and many Haratin remain poor, landless and dependent on former masters. Whether they are Arabs, Moors or Black Africans is debated among the Haratin themselves; the 2013 Manifesto for their political, economic and social rights speaks of a distinct community with its own culture. No census anywhere counts them.

The Haratin share the Hassaniya language, the tea ritual, the dress (daraa robe for men, melhfa wrap for women) and the Islam of the Bidan, but keep songs and dances of their own. Haratin women sing and dance the bondja (benja), songs of daily life, caravans and relations between men and women; men sing the medh, praise songs for the Prophet with drum and clapping that carry their own spirituality; welcome songs and dances mark weddings and feasts, and young musicians play an electric-guitar style called banjey. Most rural Haratin live in their own villages (adwaba, singular adabay), founded by freed families near the fields and wells they worked, or in quarters of oasis towns, and farm sorghum, millet, rice and dates, often as sharecroppers on land held by Bidan families; others herd for Bidan owners or work as domestic servants. In the cities they live in the outer districts of Nouakchott and Nouadhibou and in small settlements between the villas where they work. Marriage is mostly within Haratin families. Family life is close and extended, but many households are poor and headed by women. In Morocco's oases the Haratin built the mud-brick ksour, climbed the date palms and kept the underground water channels; there the many-storeyed 'Haratin house' and the women's tassfift headband are their own.

The Haratin are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, like their neighbours. Everyday practice centres on prayer, Ramadan and the Eids, Qur'anic amulets against the evil eye and the jinn, dhikr gatherings, visits to saints' tombs and the medh, men's praise songs for the Prophet that express a spirituality sometimes parallel to, sometimes at odds with, the official teaching of the Bidan scholars. For centuries jurists of the Maliki school justified slavery, and masters controlled whether their slaves married or prayed in the mosque; religious learning was the preserve of the scholarly Bidan tribes. Haratin imams, scholars and preachers are now common, and the anti-slavery movement has challenged the texts used to defend slavery: in 2012 the activist Biram Dah Abeid publicly burned pages of Maliki legal works and was jailed. In Morocco some Black families keep Gnawa or Sidi Bilal lodges with trance ceremonies, and customary rules once kept Haratin at a distance from village sanctuaries.

Hassaniya, the language of most Haratin, has the New Testament, Genesis (2024), the JESUS film, GRN audio recordings and Bible apps; Moroccan Arabic has the complete Bible and Tachelhit the New Testament. No Haratin church is known, and believers, if any, are secret. In Mauritania the law makes apostasy and blasphemy capital crimes and bars citizens from churches; in Morocco enticing a Muslim to convert is a crime. Poverty, lack of schooling and identity papers, dependence on former masters and close family networks add to the barriers, while the Haratin's own struggle for dignity and justice is a theme that the gospel speaks to directly.

In Mauritania, the Haratin's heartland, slavery was formally ended by France in 1905 but not enforced; independent Mauritania abolished it by decree only in 1981, made slaveholding a crime in 2007 (Law 2007-048) and a crime against humanity with special courts in 2015. Few cases reach a verdict, and the government has long said only 'vestiges' remain; its social agencies (Tadamoun from 2013, Taazour from 2019) fund schools, water and housing in poor and slave-descended communities. Estimates of people still enslaved range from 43,000 (2016) to 90,000-149,000 (2025); far more Haratin live in dependence on former masters' land and patronage. The El Hor movement (1978), SOS-Esclaves, IRA-Mauritanie (2008) and the 2013 Haratin Manifesto made abolition a national political question.

The Haratin historically occupied a social stratum between chattel slaves and fully free persons in Moroccan oasis society. Under the khammasin system, they worked as sharecroppers receiving one-fifth of the harvest in exchange for labor on lands owned by Arab or Berber families. Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif (1672-1727) conscripted large numbers of Haratin into his Black Guard (Abid al-Bukhari), a slave army that served as the backbone of his military power. While formal slavery has long been abolished in Morocco, the social hierarchies it created persist in southern oasis communities, where Haratin may still be socially segregated and intermarriage with other groups remains constrained.