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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
April 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139022552
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022552
Subjects:
Area Studies, African Studies, History, African History
Information

Book description

Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.

Reviews

‘By combining so many studies that give voice to enslaved Africans into a single forum, Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein have transformed the study of slavery in a way that will require a revolutionary reassessment of what we think about slavery and how we study enslavement and resistance … a tour de force of global significance for historians, students, and all people concerned with social justice.’

Paul E. Lovejoy - Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History, York University

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Contents

Page 2 of 3

Contents
  • 19 - Introduction:
    pp 213-213
  • Accounts by European Travelers
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on slave proverbs and has three goals. First, it seeks to validate proverbs as a source of data on slavery. Second, the chapter considers how slavery is memorialized across generations. Third, given that slave proverbs remain popular several decades after the legal abolition of slavery, it establishes the continued salience of slave origins and uses this to modify certain received ideas about the institution. The chapter provides an overview of slave-related conflicts in Yorubaland, and examines some slave proverbs and their (possible) origins, use, and meaning. Owe (proverb) is a Yoruba oral literal and figurative tradition whose full meaning is subject to translation and unpacking. Slavery in Yorubaland played an important role in Yoruba state formation and administration. Slaves functioned as administrators in the Oyo kingdom and were a powerful force in supervising provincial chiefs.
  • 20 - The Story of Saaba
    pp 214-219
  • Slavery and Colonialism in the Algerian Sahara
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Vodun, or Vodou as it is known in the Caribbean and the Americas, is the predominant religious system of southern Bénin and Togo. Domestic enslavement is the source of a Vodun complex known as Tchamba. This chapter begins with some general information about transatlantic and domestic slavery in this region. It introduces an example of domestic slavery via a landmark piece of African francophone literature. The chapter demonstrates how the visual within Vodun marks people and spaces as dedicated to the remembrance of slavery. It focuses on Tchamba Vodun shrines and temple paintings as primary documents, emphasizing the main iconographic symbology. The chapter then describes a new Tchamba spirit with contemporary meanings derived from the growing cognizance of the transatlantic slave trade. It presents two field stories, Couchoro's L'Esclave and tracing Tchamba roots, addressing present-day complications revolving around histories of domestic slavery.
  • 22 - The Ordeals of Slaves’ Flight in Tunisia
    pp 239-248
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Slavery and the heritage of slavery have been important in many African societies. It has been so important that many Africans have tried to suppress memories about them. This chapter gathers together three very diverse documents which inform us Africans' thought on the institution of slavery. The first comes from Cameroon. Ahmadou Sehou, a scholar from that country, has found documents associated with Lamido Iyawa Adamou, a powerful chief who defended slavery and maintained control over slaves in his chiefdom until his death in 1966. The second document comes from Ute Röschenthaler, who did research in an area that was on the major trade route to the coast in Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria. The third document comes from Ghana, known as the Gold Coast during British rule. These documents indicate the diverse ways Africans related to slavery and the slave trade.
  • 23 - African Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Manuscript of Jean Godot
    pp 249-262
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In Cameroon, a country of Central Africa which stretched from Lake Chad to the Gulf of Guinea, slavery had a triple dimension. Slavery and the slave trade had the particularity of increasing in Adamawa at the very moment when abolition was spreading in other parts of the world. This chapter presents three documents, which localizes the region concerned and presents some facets of slavery as it developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Adamawa. The first document contains a letter from the Lamido to the chief of the region of Adamawa opposing the progressive elimination of slavery. The second document describes a confidential letter from the chief of the Adamawa region to the chief of the subdivision of Banyo forbidding him from proclaiming the liberation of slaves. The last document presents different penalties and sanction to which the slaves of the Lamidats of Adamawa were subject to.
  • 24 - Introduction:
    pp 265-266
  • Colonial Reports and Documents
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Analyses of textbooks that were written during the early part of the twentieth century for use in the colonies can, in fact, reveal a great deal about the ways in which both European officials and African educators sought to use history in the context of colonialism. The slave trade is a particularly interesting topic for review. While early textbooks in the Gold Coast generally treated the slave trade only briefly and did not provide any remarkable details about it, E. J. P. Brown's book Gold Coast and Asianti Reader was an important exception. The overall goal of Brown's text was certainly in line with a nationalist agenda, particularly in its focus on African agency. After announcing his intent to focus on the slave trade in the subtitle, he went on to explain that Birempon Kwadwo was a prominent member of the elite coastal African trading community during the slave trade.
  • 26 - Witchcraft and Slavery
    pp 283-306
  • Accusations of Remote Vampirism – The Colonial Administration of Mauritania Investigates the Execution of Three Slaves (1928–1929)
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Pre-twentieth-century Europeans have long reported on their experiences in Africa. As travelers, traders, and colonial officials, they were moving around the continent from as far back as the late fifteenth century. Diaries, official reports, and published accounts abound with information on what specific individuals saw, heard, and experienced while in Africa. As slavery was ubiquitous, it is mentioned in many of these accounts, often as simply a fact of life, whether reported prior to or after the European abolition of the slave trade in Africa in early nineteenth century. While European travelers' accounts of slavery are not uncommon, rarely have they been examined as a means of unearthing the voices of the enslaved. Written by Europeans, it is their voices that predominate in these records. The reports span several centuries and geographical locations, and range from the seventeenth-century Gold Coast to the mid-late nineteenth century in Tunisia.
  • 27 - Tracing Their “Middle” Passages
    pp 307-318
  • Slave Accounts from the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the story of a young Fula-speaking woman known as Saaba who was sold as a slave in the Algerian Sahara in 1877. Many people had arrived in the Sahara as slaves as a result of the endemic wars that plagued the middle Niger River region in the second half of the nineteenth century. Concealing slavery was important at this time when, on one hand, colonial leaders had publically pledged themselves to abolishing slavery in Africa, and on the other, when slave-traders sold captives from Saaba's homeland, the middle Niger River region, despite the fact that they were freeborn Muslims like her. Saaba was one of many who received neither the emancipation promised by colonial rule nor the full protection and rights of the precolonial legal system. A witness and victim of criminal activities on both sides of the colonial situation, Saaba was destined to oblivion.
  • 28 - Gender, Migration, and the End of Slavery in the Region of Kayes, French Soudan
    pp 319-330
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Zenneb was an enslaved woman from Dar Fur who became the female companion of M. Saint-André, a French pharmacist serving in the Egyptian army. Slavery was a very old institution in Egypt and the Sudan. Zenneb words and actions reveal her views, her range of self-presentation, and the complexity of her position as the slave companion of a European in a Muslim society. She could defend Saint-André against Musa's accusations by praising his treatment of her, which she contrasted to that of her earlier Muslim masters who had insulted and beaten her. Contesting versions emphasized superficial differences or deeper similarities between races. Aware of cultural differences in the perception of racial hierarchies and standards of beauty, she sought to present herself to her best advantage according to the culture of the places she was in.
  • 29 - Introduction:
    pp 333-333
  • Voices of Slaves in the Courtroom
  • View abstract

    Summary

    For the past five centuries, slavery constituted the most striking aspect of personal dependency in Africa. It affected quite high percentages of the population and only came largely to an end in the early twentieth century. More challenging is the task of finding African slave voices within the early-modern European-language sources on African slavery. The document presented in this chapter is an early-eighteenth-century French manuscript in two volumes listed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France under the label Voyages de Jean Godot tant a l'Amerique, Afrique, Asie. The manuscript, long forgotten in a miscellanea collection, was brought to the attention of African studies scholars by Jean-Claude Nardin and Hermann Spirik, who realized its relevance not only for the history of the French presence in West Africa, but as an important source of information on African societies.
  • 31 - “Being a Slave, I Was Afraid...”
    pp 343-359
  • Excerpt from a Case of Slave-Dealing in the Colony of the Gambia (1893)
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The colonial state was a bureaucracy. It wrote things down and preserved written records. When the colonial state was gone, it left behind masses of paper, which can be found in the capitals of former empires and in administrative centers all over Africa. They record both the minutiae of daily administrative life and the larger questions, both the ways Africa's colonial rulers saw the people they governed and how they responded to Africa's problems. Working in colonial archives involves a lot of persistence, but it can be fruitful. There are files labeled "Slavery" in many archives. They often date to periods when the colonial administration was struggling over what to do about slavery. They also include reports that colonial governors asked the administrative officers to make. Some include African voices, albeit filtered through European eyes.
  • 32 - Interpreting Gold Coast Supreme Court Records, SCT 5/4/19 Regina (Queen) vs. Quamina Eddoo
    pp 360-377
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes a story about Kwadwo who was a trader from Wassa. Kwadwo was no ordinary peasant. He was a retainer of a prominent titleholder who employed him as a messenger. Kwadwo's story is crowded with the names of Europeans important in the history of the Gold Coast and West Africa. Kwadwo's case provides a rich set of materials to explore a range of issues: the circumstances faced by local government officials in their efforts to suppress the slave trade; the extent to which relations between different Europeans powers influenced their relations with one another in Africa; and the different ways Africans and African institutions interacted with Europeans and European institutions. Especially interesting is the way the language recorded in these materials illuminates notions about hierarchy and dependence. Kwadwo used his overall knowledge of European policies and practices to regain his freedom.
  • 33 - A Tale of Slavery and Beyond in a British Colonial Court Record
    pp 378-386
  • West Africa and Brazil
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes an investigation conducted in 1928 and 1929 following the murder of three slaves accused of witchcraft in northwest Mauritania. Many old people and a few younger ones shed new light on the remembered events and on beliefs about the remote vampirism of which the three slaves were accused. The three slaves were two brothers (Hamadi and Souélim) and a sister (Zénabou), owned by Cheikh Ould Abd El Aziz, a notable of the religious qabila of the Ahel Barikallah. The chapter explains Bizhan beliefs about magic, particularly the remote vampirism that led to the death of the three slaves. Although Bizhan society harbors many magical practices and belief in witches' evil spells, several indications suggest that the specific belief in sell is imported. A link has been made between vampirism and shortages of meat, an essential food source for nomadic herders.
  • 34 - Aballow’s Story
    pp 387-403
  • The Experience of Slavery in Mid-Nineteenth-Century West Africa, as Told by Herself
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the last three decades, our understanding of the Indian Ocean slave trade has greatly expanded. Recent studies document that African slaves were moved quite extensively around the western Indian Ocean that included the East African coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. The western Indian Ocean is the vast maritime region located between the western coast of the Indian subcontinent and the East African coast. It also includes the Red Sea and the Gulf. Trading in slaves is known to have taken place in this region as late as when Periplus Maris Erythraei was written (c. 150 AD). The 1820 General Treaty of Peace that the British concluded with all major sheikhs along the Arabian coast of the Gulf can be regarded as the starting point of British anti-slave trade activities in the western Indian Ocean.
  • 35 - A Case of Kidnapping and Child Trafficking in Senegal, 1916
    pp 404-414
  • View abstract

    Summary

    French Soudan was a former French colony now known as Mali. From the end of the nineteenth century onward, with the gradual abolition of slavery in this part of West Africa, newly emancipated slaves began to leave their former masters. At the end of the nineteenth century in the region of Kayes, the economy relied heavily on slave labor. Female slaves formed the majority of the slave population. Women had a greater value than men. A closer examination of the colonial archives shows that former female slaves in the region of Kayes, alone or with their family, even if they were the wives or the concubines of their masters, did participate in the migratory movements spurred by the abolition of slavery. This chapter presents two petitions filed in the archives so as to give the reader a glimpse of the historical work of reconstituting slaves' histories using scattered documents.
  • 36 - Introduction:
    pp 417-420
  • Missionary Records
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Historians have increasingly found evidence from the courtroom to be very valuable, particularly in reconstructing social history. Two kinds of problems exist. The first is with the transcript. In many cases, there is only a list of decisions, though even such evidence can be valuable, as Richard Roberts has shown. The second problem is the nature of the court. Even where there was a court with the full apparatus of European judicial procedure, as in Lagos or the Gold Coast, the operation of the court was influenced by the strategies of opposed attorneys, the accused, and the different witnesses. The slave witness was usually in an unfamiliar court situation, where his or her interests were secondary to these strategies and where he or she was being pressed in Stickrodt's terms, "to say the 'right' thing".
  • 37 - Experiencing Fear and Despair
    pp 421-436
  • The Enslaved and Human Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Southern Ghana
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Alimaamy Dalu Mohammedu Dumbuya (Dalu Modu) was a Muslim headman and trader expelled from Freetown in November or December 1806. Three years later, he was interrogated by British officials at Freetown about the circumstances of his expulsion. The interview shows his understanding of servitude within the settlement and provides information about slave trading and selling within a colony formed originally as the province of freedom. For Dala Modu, there were certain issues that dominated his testimony. One was the difference between what he perceived as legally acceptable behavior for a European or a settler within the settlement and that permitted for Africans who lived alongside the settlement. Thomas Ludlam, who had preceded Governor Thomas Perronet Thompson as governor of the colony, was never brought to trial, and from his center at Lungi, Dala Modu continued to play a prominent role in the colony's commerce until his death in 1841.
  • 38 - The Testimony of Lamine FilalouA Young Man’s Experience of Enslavement and His Struggle for Freedom in French West Africa
    pp 437-444
  • View abstract

    Summary

    For most of the nineteenth century, British control of the Gambia River was limited to a number of small enclaves. Slave labor was crucial both to the household economy and the expansion of commercial groundnut cultivation, which had boomed along the river in the second part of the century. This chapter describes the nature of slavery and slave-dealing in Gambia. It presents the testimonies of Yahling Dahbo, Dado Bass, and Maladdo Mangah in light of the particular vulnerability that enslaved women experienced. Yahling, Dado, and Maladdo together provide detailed recollections of their life in slavery. Domestic slavery could indeed have a benign face that mitigated the intrinsic vulnerability of having being enslaved. Legal abolition did not completely erase the social boundary between former slaves and masters, as slave origins still carry significance in contemporary Gambian social life.
  • 39 - The Blood Men of Old Calabar – a Slave Revolt of the Nineteenth Century?
    pp 445-465
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the framework for understanding a particularly moving document: the testimony of Abina Mansah in the case of Regina vs. Quamina Eddoo. The particulars of the case appear to have been written down by the magistrate, William Melton, in the Judicial Assessor's Record Book as testimony was being given. This record book was subsequently filed away, to enter the archives as file number Supreme Court Records (SCT) 5/4/19. The interpreter in Regina vs. Quamina Eddoo, James Davis, was a well-educated African of mixed parentage and a member of an important merchant family in the region, and might have been expected to act in a similar manner. Unlike the witnesses who accused them of enslavement, the defendants were generally somewhat familiar with court procedures or were able to employ trained lawyers like James Hutton Brew, who represented the defendant Quamina Eddoo and his sister Eccoah in this court case.
  • 40 - Makua Life HistoriesTestimonies on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar
    pp 466-480
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The town of Lagos on the West African coast, located in what is today southwestern Nigeria, developed into a major port in the Atlantic slave trade only at the end of the eighteenth century, late in the history of the ignoble commerce. About 60 percent of the approximately 540,000 slaves shipped from the Bight of Benin between 1801 and 1867 were taken to northeastern Brazil. A succession of slave rebellions in Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, that culminated in the Malê uprising of 1835 led slaveholders and government officials there to fear freed blacks, whom they believed had conspired with slaves in the revolt. Despite the interpretive challenges with which British colonial court records present historians, they constitute one of the few sources for Lagos and other British settlements where stories told by persons of slave origin about their lives are documented in significant numbers.
  • 41 - Introduction:
    pp 483-484
  • Islamic Sources
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The effort to curtail slavery, the slave trade, and kidnapping in French West Africa has a long and tortuous history. In 1905, slaves in the French Soudan took the initiative and began to leave their masters. The slaves' exodus actually pushed the colonial administration to act upon its rhetoric and to decree the end of enslavement and the alienation of any person's liberty. This was the decree of 12 December 1905, which was to play a role in the court case described in this chapter. The case was heard at the district tribunal of Louga in Senegal. The 1903 decree established two sets of courts, one for French citizens and other European nationals and the other for African subjects. Demand for children as slaves was high. Kidnapping was one of the earliest forms of enslavement and it continues to this day.
  • 43 - The “Hidden Transcripts” and Legal Rights of Slaves in the Muslim World
    pp 503-510
  • A Legal Case from Nineteenth-Century Mauritania
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Missionary societies operating in mid-to late-nineteenth-century Africa sought first and foremost to convert African men and women to Christianity. Among the assumptions held by European missionaries was the inherent sinfulness of the long-standing universal institution of slavery and the practice of human sacrifice. Slavery remained a general phenomenon in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Africa and was widely condemned by missionary workers. European religious workers simply did not have the power to prohibit the continued existence of these practices in the communities where they worked. They were guests who could exhort and attempt to persuade, but they had little power to force their values upon their hosts. They did use the power of the pen to condemn these and other practices and to publicize their existence in publications read by audiences in Europe. Missionary records are especially useful for hearing the voices of the enslaved.
  • 44 - Slave Wills along the Swahili Coast
    pp 511-518
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The killing of innocent individuals so they could serve their social superiors in the afterlife is a topic that has attracted for centuries the attention of Europeans writing about western Africa. In the eighteenth century, English apologists for the slave trade claimed that the purchase of West African war captives for enslavement in the Americas should be seen as a humanitarian act because these same individuals would have otherwise become the victims of human sacrifice in Africa. Slaves were not the only individuals who could potentially suffer such a fate. Convicted criminals and war prisoners were held by the Asante state in specific villages until needed for execution at annual religious rituals. Thus fear of being the victim of a ritual sacrifice was hardly unique to the enslaved, nor was this the only source of dread in their lives.

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