Race and the Legacy of Slavery in Yemen Magdalena Morthi Klose

Sami Al-Shatibi

When your eyes fall on an academic study titled Race and the Legacy of Slavery in Yemen, you might at first think it’s a dive into a distant past. But once you delve into Magdalena Morthi Klose’s pages, you discover you’re looking into a polished mirror held up to Yemen’s present, with all its open wounds. This is not a study about slaves. It’s about us, the living, who still carry their burdens on our shoulders, and who are asked about a guilt we never committed except for being born on the margin of the story.

The researcher opens her article with a thesis that cuts through doubt and puts her finger on the wound we pretend has healed:
“Racism in modern Yemen cannot be fully understood without looking at the country’s long history with slavery. The link between black skin and slavery became entrenched since the Middle Ages as a result of popular myths such as the Curse of Ham and the fact that most of the enslaved were of African origin.”
With these words, Klose demolishes the idea that racism in Yemen is the product of temporary economic circumstances or passing ignorance. It is a structure, a legacy, a whole language formed over centuries, and it has become part of our social fabric to the point that we only notice it when it strikes us.

Klose goes on to deconstruct what we call “the marginalized” in Yemen, showing that we are not a monolithic mass, but layers of exclusion and marginalization that vary in severity:
“The Akhdam marginalized: the most isolated group, their origins obscure and debated, living on the edges of cities in mahawi settlements and working in manual jobs such as sanitation.
The slaves: formerly enslaved people and their descendants, often more integrated into the tribal system through the wala’ patronage system, yet still facing discrimination in marriage and status.
The muwalladun, Hujur, and Zubud: other groups whose identities intersect between African and Yemeni origins and who face varying forms of discrimination.”

This precise deconstruction exposes that Yemen’s racial hierarchy does not operate on a single color, but on gradations of stigma. The marginalized are expelled to the mahawi—which, as the researcher describes, are “informal settlements often lacking basic services, which reinforces their social stigma and isolation from the rest of the urban fabric.”
As for the “slaves,” their fate is the cage of tribal wala’. They “enjoy greater integration within tribal structures through the patronage system; they bear their tribes’ names, but this belonging remains incomplete and does not grant them equal rights in marriage or justice.”
And we, the muwalladun, are placed within this narrow circle. We are counted among the “slaves” even if our ancestors’ feet were never shackled, because society decided that mixed blood is another form of slavery.

The study delves deeply into the structure of Yemeni “race” to reveal that it is not biological, but genealogical and moral. Klose states plainly:
“In Yemen, blackness is not defined only through visual difference, but is defined genealogically through lineage. Groups such as the marginalized are classified as non-moral subjects due to their alleged lack of South Arabian origin.”
Here lies the fatal paradox: you may have dark skin but be “tribal” and be respected; you may be closer to whiteness but be “without origin” and be despised.
That is why “the label ‘black’ still carries connotations of subordination and foreignness in Yemen, and this description is usually applied only to Yemenis of low social status, and is not used to describe members of the elite even if their skin is dark.”
Color, then, is a mask. The essence is nasab—lineage. And lineage in Yemen is power: the power to grant you rights to land, to marriage, to speech.

To explain how this power was formed, the researcher returns to the Middle Ages and the founding myths of discrimination:
“Although the story of the Curse of Ham does not exist in the Qur’an, medieval scholars transmitted it as fact. It is the myth that made black skin not just a color, but a foundational mark linking blackness with slavery and eternal servitude.”
This myth was not a tale told at night; it was an unwritten law. It was accompanied by the realities of the slave trade documented in Rasulid state records, where “administrative documents from the 13th century describe how Rasulid officials in ports such as Aden and Zabid inspected enslaved children arriving from Zeila to select those most suitable for service in the sultan’s court.”
From the ports of Aden and Zabid, from those small bodies inspected like goods, a collective memory was born that sees every black person as a “potential slave,” and every intermarriage with them as a “defilement of lineage.”

And literature was not innocent of this crime. Klose cites medieval poetry to show how language entrenched discrimination:
“Medieval poems about an enslaved black woman reveal how racial discourse was used to draw the boundaries of collective identity. Beauty was linked to whiteness, while blackness was seen as a mark of subordination, making love across these racial boundaries an act that provoked controversy and social unrest.”
The black body, especially the body of a black woman, became a field on which the boundaries of “us” and “them” were drawn. Love was betrayal, and marriage was a crime against imagined tribal purity.

The study then moves to the 20th century, to the moment of “grand promises” that betrayed us all. The 1962 revolution in the north, which came with slogans of equality, entrenched exclusion in its own constitution:
“The republican constitution in the north after 1962 defined the people as Arab and Muslim, a definition that made those considered of non-Arab origin second-class citizens.”
This was not a passing phrase in a document; it was a wall built between us and citizenship.
As for the socialist experiment in the south, although it was “the boldest in attempting to integrate the marginalized by granting them land and education,” those gains “receded after the 1990 unification in favor of traditional elites.” The unification we dreamed of reproduced the old hierarchy and dressed it in a republican tie.

Klose details the manifestations of this structural discrimination that remain alive. The marginalized are “traditionally prevented from owning agricultural land and are subjected to a sharecropping system that keeps them in a state of economic dependency, with popular beliefs claiming that their presence has a polluting effect on crops.”
The land we plow curses us, and the water we drink fears touching us.
On the moral level, discrimination is harsher:
“Race in the Yemeni context is closely intertwined with notions of origin, lineage, and morality. Discrimination against blacks operates as a spectrum, where elites are portrayed as pious and chaste, while marginalized groups are portrayed as lacking these qualities.”
She adds bitterly: “Tribal and religious elites portray marginalized groups as lacking honor and piety. Black men are often portrayed in this hierarchy as effeminate, while black women are portrayed as unchaste as part of the process of marginalization.”
They were not content with stripping us of rights; they stripped us of virtue. In the collective imagination we became “children of sin,” and we now need a “certificate of good conduct” just to be recognized as human.

But the study does not stop at dissecting pain; it also notes the seeds of resistance. It points to a qualitative shift in the consciousness of marginalized groups:
“In recent years, activists have sought to adopt the identity of ‘Descendants of Bilal’ to link the marginalized to a central Islamic figure—Bilal ibn Rabah—in an attempt to reject prejudices about their religious and moral deficiency and to seek a shared blackness that connects them to the global struggle against racism.”
This shift is not merely linguistic.
“The adoption of the name ‘Descendants of Bilal’ by black activists is a strategic attempt to reframe their identity; instead of being associated with the pejorative term Akhdam, they are linked to a revered companion to claim religious and moral recognition of their status.”
It is a symbolic battle against the “Curse of Ham.” If the myth made us children of slavery, Islamic history gives us another lineage: we are the children of the first muezzin, the children of the freedom that rang out from above the Kaaba.

Magdalena Morthi Klose concludes her study with a conclusion that admits no interpretation, a conclusion that should be written on the walls of every school and every court in Yemen:
“The legal abolition of slavery did not lead to its social abolition. Blackness in Yemen remains a stigma linked to historical subordination, and the solution requires confronting this long history and dismantling the notions of lineage that place certain groups at the bottom of the human hierarchy.”

This is the naked truth our political discourses evade. We abolished the slave market, but we did not abolish the market of lineages. We closed the prison of slaves, but we opened the prison of “no origin.” We freed bodies, but we left souls shackled by invisible chains called “tribal honor” and “racial purity.”

The value of this study is not that it revealed what we did not know, but that it named what we know and deny. It placed its hand on the deep meaning of color in Yemen: color is not a pigment, it is a caste.
And we, the muwalladun, who are treated as part of the “slave” circle even though we are the product of marriage, not of captivity, stand today before this text as we stand before a mirror. We see in it our erased history, our trivialized pain, and a future that will not be built unless we confront this truth:
Yemen will not truly be free until its blackness is freed from the stigma of slavery, and until lineage becomes a memory in a history book, not a sword hanging over the necks of the living.

Magdalena’s article called things by their names, and said to the executioner: enough.