State of the Field: Slavery

The study of slavery in Africa is a relatively recent phenomenon, to some degree a spinoff of  the concern with slavery in other parts of the world. This is not to say that earlier generations were not aware of slavery. The slave trade shaped perceptions of Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but the rulers of colonial Africa played down the slave trade heritage. They were ruling Africa in collaboration with chiefly families that had been Africa ’s most important slave-owners and in some cases, still depended on hereditary rights to service rooted in slavery. With few resources, colonial regimes often  limited themselves to abolishing trading, raiding and slave status. Others collaborated. Missionaries, whose first converts had been slaves, were interested in wider target groups, and anthropologists were largely not interested in slavery. The more formal oral traditions of large states generally do not deal much with slavery and there were no coffles of chained slaves criss-crossing Africa .

Two groups led the change: French Marxist anthropologists and North American historians. For both groups – Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray, Bazin among the French[1]  — Cooper, Miers and I among the historians,[2] followed within a decade by Joseph C. Miller, Allen Isaacman, Patrick Manning, Paul Lovejoy and Richard Roberts[3] – what was crucial was that slavery popped up all of the time, in the archives and in ordinary memories – for example, the elderly peasant in 1963, who told me that the best thing about the colonial conquest was that they no longer had to carry guns to the fields.

We have won. It is impossible to deal with the African past without recognizing that the slave trade and the exploitation of slave labour were widespread. Some of us, Cooper and Roberts for example, have moved on to other questions. Some, particularly the cliometricians still follow Philip Curtin in trying to treat human beings as just another trade commodity. Founding Father, Very important – but wrong. There are few parts of Africa not touched by the slave trade. I would like to single out some of the newer areas and to stress some of the work that is particularly pregnant with questions and approaches.

First, South Africa has been pulled into the equation. South Africa is interesting because the last decades of apartheid saw the emergence of a body of radical scholarship. Most of the English-speaking Marxists writing on Africa were white South African exiles, who put exploitation of various kinds at the center of their understanding of South Africa ’s growth. Traditional historiography had minimized the role of slavery. There are still lively debates, perhaps the most important being whether slaving was crucial to the rise of the Zulu king, Shaka, and other state-builders in eastern South Africa . But several things are clear. One is that Capetown, which had most of the colony’s population, had a slave majority, and that the slave population in the city became largely Muslim in a visceral response to the ascendancy of the Dutch Reformed Church. A second is that the first exports, wine and grain from the area around Capetown, were produced largely by slaves. The third is that the rapidly expanding frontier depended heavily on labour, which was largely coerced and often captured. Slavery in South African was largely a small-holder phenomenon, but its omnipresence shaped South African culture. South Africa has been important to attempts at comparative history, like George Frederickson’s comparison between South Africa and the United States – but the areas open for comparison are numerous, particularly comparing those societies that originated as colonies of settlement, such as the United States, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Research on slavery and the slave trade in South Africa has been largely archival and has profited from the discovery of new sources. Probably the best book on South African slavery is John Mason’s Social Death and Resurrection, which is based on the archives of a protector appointed during the last years of slavery, when the British parliament was debating what to do about slavery. Slaves took their grievances to the Protector, and those grievances give us a picture of the nature of slavery in a highly coercive society.[4]

Second, scholarship on African slavery has increasingly focused on women. In 1983, Claire Robertson and I published a book entitled Women and Slavery in Africa.[5] Much of the credit for this book must go to Claire. Among her accomplishments was getting me to recognize that most slaves within Africa were women, and to think about the demographic implications of that fact. Most of those enslaved in Africa were women, and women were kept within Africa because Africans preferred women.  If there is a deficiency, it is that we did not pay attention to sexuality– a point made in a criticism of my work by Paul Lovejoy. For his part, Meillassoux argues that female slaves were preferred more for work than for reproduction. The flaw in this is that men want to have sex with women because they have a sex drive. The book is the best-selling book I have published, but when Women and Slavery was reprinted by Heinemann in 1997, we were surprised at how little influence the book had had. To be sure, there were fine studies by Edna Bay of Dahomey palace women and by Margaret Strobel on Muslim women in Swahili East Africa, but they were few.[6] Perhaps, the problem is that many feminist scholars are divided between a concern for women as victims and a belief that women can be as nasty as men. The most brilliant book to emerge on slave women is Marcia Wright’s Strategies of Slaves and Women, which looks at the ultimate victims, women caught in the whirlpool of the late nineteenth century slave trade, many of them women who were enslaved and re-enslaved several times before finding their way to a Christian mission.[7] Wright’s argument is that these women struggled to survive. The struggle often involved seeking a protector, but the picture Wright gives stresses that even the most oppressed of human beings has will and intelligence and will use them. At times, survival is success.

The notion that survival is success is also important in the third area I would like to discuss, the history of decentralized or stateless societies. There was tendency for earlier students of the slave trade in Africa to make a division between the predators and the prey. Most of us looked at the predators. They were easier to research, more visible in the archival record, and as states, often with richer oral traditions. There were certainly victims. Curtin, for example, notes a society called the Tenda, which was important in two early lists of slave origins, in Mexico and Peru , but which have almost ceased to exist. Most societies respond to challenges. Recent research, however, has forced us to make more subtle distinctions. Let me single out three works. Robert Baum did research among the Diola, a small community of rice-growers in the Casamance area of southern Senegal .[8] Research in decentralized societies is made difficult by the secretive nature of many such societies and the fact that traditions are diverse and highly localized. Over a 25 year period, Baum went back to the small community he studied – about 15,000 people – seven times. The essence of the process he described was that the Diola adapted to external threats by becoming slavers. Central to the process of adaptation was the creation of a series of shrines. Whereas earlier shrines were based on charisma, these were based on wealth, and some were specifically concerned with the slave trade and were used to stock slaves until they could be moved and sold.

Andrew Hubbell (a scholar who unfortunately has chosen to leave the academic profession) has written a thesis on a community in Burkina Faso that was threatened by slave raiding.[9] He describes the mechanisms by which they defended themselves – such as walled villages, collective and armed work groups – but also describes a process by which the slave trade eventually penetrated these communities, exploiting both greed and the decentralized nature of the community. You will note that the subject of that sentence was “the slave trade” because no single trader was responsible for that penetration. Rather, what was crucial was that the creation of a market for slaves also created an outlet for some persons to kidnap children, to raid other communities and in general to prey on their brethren. The central dynamic of this process lay in a tension between elders and younger men rooted in competition for young women. The young men preying on their neighbours were largely interested in getting goods to be able to pay their own bride price.

A similar dynamic shows up in Walter Hawthorne’s brilliant research on the Balanta of coastal Guinea .[10] The Balanta responded to the threat of slavers by walling their villages and shifting from millet to rice, a crop that was more intensive and was worked by collective work groups that could more effectively defend themselves against raiders. To work rice, they needed metal tools, which provided an incentive for them to shift from prey to predators. Population was more concentrated, the society became more war-like, but it defended itself.

I was so struck by the implications of these works that I worked through the literature on stateless societies in Western Africa and found a series of parallel responses. People walled their villages. They developed complex forms of architecture that made it difficult for an attacker. The gates to villages were often so low that an attacker had to bend over to enter. They went to the fields in groups and carried weapons. Others moved into hilly areas, often with elaborate defenses, and sometimes developed new crop systems. They posted guards and had warning systems. Sometimes they submitted to a slaving power and paid tribute rather than endure raids. All in all, a wonderful display of human resilience, but one marred by the intrusion of greed.

This research forced me to re-think the larger pattern of the slave trade in Africa .[11] The early trade depended on societies having a small pool of slaves and unwanted persons: criminals, adulterers, witches. As European demand increased, more and more societies began systematically raiding their neighbours. Those neighbours increasingly learned to defend themselves, in some cases, by becoming slavers themselves. This forced the trade to seek further and further into the interior. Asante received most of the slaves it marketed as tribute for conquered societies to the north. Dahomey , which started by selling only its own war captives, increasingly become a market for slavers further to the north.

A fourth area I would like to talk about is the increasing involvement in larger patterns of world history. The New African History of the 1950s and 1960s was primarily concerned to endow Africa with a history. Most of us were caught up in the nation-building imperatives of the new African states, which sought a meaningful past—which in fact, needed a history in order to be able to create national unity and to give their children an identity and a civic education.  That has changed.

The change results from a series of thing. In part, it is simply the challenge of teaching. Many of us not at major African centers are involved in some kind of world history or non-Western history course. Also when we look for theoretical models, we pick up models originally rooted elsewhere: dependency theory in the 1970s, subaltern studies, post-modernism and post-colonialism in the 1990s. But I would like to underline two. First is the development of world history, a response, I think to the fact that the study of history has become so specialized that many of us have become unsure whether we are saying anything of any significance. Not surprisingly, some of the key figures have been Africanists, most notably Patrick Manning, who was criticized in a recent debate on H-World for trying to give world history an Afrocentric twist.

World history has involved primarily the quest for connections—and they are numerous; Alfred Crosby’s Columbian exchange is a case in point—but is paralleled from early times by movements of crops, diseases and people into and out of Africa . The Swahili coast of East Africa is as much a part of an Indian Ocean world as it is part of mainland Africa . Ethiopia and the Sudanic regions of Africa were involved in exchanges with North Africa and the Middle East . These exchanges involve involuntary movements of people. The Malgache were at different times importers and exporters of slaves. African slaves moved to India and to the islands of the Indian Ocean , which in many ways parallel the islands of the Caribbean . There was a slave trade from Ethiopia and the Horn into the Middle East . A number of people are now doing research on communities of African origin in India .  Slaves moved from one corner of the Indian Ocean to others. The patterns of slavery in South Africa were shaped by the fact that it was part of a Dutch empire based in Batavia , an empire where slavery was common. The Malays of Capetown, not all of them descended from Malayo-Indonesian slaves, are part of this heritage.

For students of African slavery, the most important area of global interest has been the diaspora and work on Atlantic history. Just as historians of colonial America are increasingly seeing the Atlantic roots and African influences in the development of the United States , so Africanists, pushed by African-American concerns, are increasingly concerned with what happened to the slaves after they got on the boat.  John Thornton and Joseph Miller have looked at both sides of the Atlantic and the Middle Passage itself. Michael Gomez, trained as an Africanist, has followed Africans into the United States in Exchanging Their Country Marks.[12]

The UNESCO Slave Routes project has stimulated the formation of a number of programmes. Probably the largest is Paul Lovejoy’s Nigerian Hinterland Project. Incorporating scholars from Brazil , Costa Rico, Jamaica , Scotland , Morocco and Benin , Lovejoy has sponsored conferences in at least a dozen countries and has graduate students working on areas in a broad crescent-shaped area from Rio de Janeiro to southern Iran .

The fifth and last area I would like to look at is culture. The most difficult problem facing us as historians of Africa is to understand how slavery and the slave trade shaped African societies. It is possible, I think, to describe the shaping of institutions, for example, the development of military structures by slaving states or the development of forms of defensive architecture. It is more difficult to define the ways in which the slave trade shapes culture, religion and values. Slavery is not something that disappears when it is abolished. Slave masters fought to maintain their control over the labour of their former slaves just as they did in the Americas , but even after they lost that fight, they maintained and in some cases, entrenched values, beliefs and institutions that reflected the slavery experience. The stigma of slave origins remains, though there is in most cases no racial difference between masters and slaves. This stigma is based on beliefs about honor and values. The question is how do we understand these matters. What is cause and effect?

A number of scholars have made a substantial contribution. One is Roger Botte, a French specialist on Guinea’s Futa Jallon, who has published a number of fine articles and edited a special issue of the Journal des Africanistes on the heritage of slavery,  the persistence of old structures and the struggles to fight against them. He has another special issue coming out soon, this one in Cahier des etudes africaines.

Another is Laura Fair, an historian at the University of Oregon who has worked on popular culture in Zanzibar , which had one of the most highly structured slave societies in Africa . Most of her book dealt with the ways in which former slaves struggled for respectability or against the values that imprisoned them. Starting with clothing – once slavery was abolished, there was no one to tell slaves they could not dress like gentlemen – she goes on to discuss popular music and sports.[13]

But the most important recent work is a book by anthropologist Rosalind Shaw entitled Memories of the Slave Trade.[14] The core of her argument comes from Bourdeiu’s notion of habitus, events which are embedded in social structure and culture, though forgotten as history.  Using sixteenth and seventeenth century accounts of religion in what is now Sierra Leone , she argues that there was a significant transformation of the spirit world during the period of the slave trade. Perhaps most important, spirits behave as slavers once did, ambushing, seizing and seducing people, converting people into commodities. Divination existed in the earlier period, but not in the secretive and defensive manner that exists today. Studying witchcraft and divination, Shaw argues that the effect of the slave trade was the creation of a world that was suspicious, secretive and defensive. Her book looks in detail at the ways people use divination to create a kind of ritual stockade to protect the vulnerable from a dangerous world. This is a tremendously suggestive book, though one that involves very difficult research. Like Baum’s work on the Diola, it involves a gentle effort to peel back the layers of culture and understand the fears and tensions of contemporary people.

The most important thing about slaving and the slave trade is that it is like no other kind of economic activity. This is where I part company with Curtin and the cliometricians. There are embedded in human cultures certain beliefs about the value of human life. These ideas are present in pre-Abrahamic cultures, but are deeply embedded in modern religions. Our great challenge, I think is understanding how that affected us.