In this chapter, the subjection of the Israelites in Egypt and their later liberation from oppression is examined with extracts from the Hebrew Torah, and the Greek Septuagint. The vocabulary of servitude of both Hebrew and Greek is discussed through the account of Joseph’s service and disgrace in the house of Potiphar, followed by the suffering of the Israelites, the later descendants of Jacob. The oppression inflicted by the Egyptians and their pharaoh on the Israelites in Egypt is to be seen in their forced labour in making bricks and construction work. Liberation involved leaving the country together, under the leadership of Moses. A final section examines a few further literary texts dating from the Hellenistic and Roman periods that treat related Jewish subjects.

From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.

Chapter 6 analyses systems of bondage on the lakeshore. It builds on recent works in Indian Ocean World history that have blurred the distinctions between slavery and freedom, and challenges trends in Africanist scholarship that have tended to analyse labour and social relations in these terms. It argues that the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ do not do justice to the wide variety of bonded forms that existed on Lake Tanganyika’s shores. Most labourers living on the lakeshore were not concerned with the distinction of being either a ‘slave’ or ‘free’. Rather, they were concerned with who they were bonded to, the conditions of their bondage, and what this meant for their social status. In this instance (and perhaps paradoxically), some bonds(wo)men were able to claim ‘freeborn’ social status. They demonstrated this status through their display of material objects, their primary occupation, and their spiritual capabilities.

The introduction lays out the complex matrices of bondage, freedom, terror, and possibility that defined the period and place under investigation in this book: the gradual abolition of slavery (1821-1852) in the frontier, gold-rich lowland province of Chocó in the Colombian Black Pacific. Barragan calls the thirty-one years from the law’s enactment in 1821 to the final abolition of slavery in 1852 the time of “gradual emancipation rule” in the northern Andes in order to see this period as a distinct moment in the history of liberal racial governance rather than an inconsequential and benign prelude to the final abolition of slavery. While ostensibly designed to gradually destroy slavery, Barragan argues that speculating slaveholders in Colombia paradoxically came to have an even greater stake in slavery through gradual emancipation rule. After a historical and historiographical exploration of slavery and gradual emancipation rule in Colombia, Atlantic World, and Chocó, the introduction concludes with two sections on sources and methodology and chapter outlines.