Indigenous African Slavery

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Indigenous African Slavery [with Commentary] Author(s): Paul Lovejoy, Igor Kopytoff and Frederick Cooper Source: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 6, No. 1, Roots and Branches:

Current Directions in Slave Studies (Summer/Eté 1979), pp. 19-83Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41330418Accessed: 21-07-2015 14:33 UTC

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2

Indigenous African Slavery

Paul Lovejoy York University

It is now generally understood how widespread slavery was in Africa before the colonial era. In many areas slaves constituted a majority of the population, at least by the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, even before that time, slave raiding and kidnapping contributed to insecurity and instability almost everywhere. The extent to which this political situation was a result of the trans- Atlantic, trans-Saharan, and Indian Ocean slave trade is still a matter of debate, and the nature of slavery in African societies is only beginning to be understood. Were external market forces strong enough to alter social and economic relations within Africa? More particularly, did the institution of slavery change with the impact of the slave trade and the economic adjustments associated with that trade? This study addresses itself to these issues in an attempt to delimit some of the major directions in current research.1

The source material available for the study of slavery presents a particular problem that must be discussed in some detail. Most data are from the last one hundred years, after the external slave trade had ended. It is perhaps because these data were collected at a time when Africa was the last bastion of slavery that some scholars have been led to the conclusion that the institution in Africa had little to do with slavery elsewhere. In fact this last phase of slavery as an institution was an outgrowth of earlier developments not only within Africa and the larger Islamic world but also in the Americas. The data have a bias in that they relate to an institution which had largely been isolated by the demise of slavery virtually everywhere else. The attitude of many European scholars and observers in this period has been strongly influenced by the now established view that slavery is an archaic institution. The main issues of the period have been how and when slavery should end. This situation has strongly affected the sources, their collections, and the analysis of them.

The materials are considerable; they vary greatly in quality and are not uniformly spread over the continent. Much of the published material is listed in Joseph C. Miller's excellent bibliography,2 but there is also extensive contemporary observation, both for the period since ca. 1880 and for earlier times in some places. Of the published studies, the collections of essays by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopy toff and by Claude Meillassoux stand out, and more collections are

1 1 wish to thank the following people who have assisted in my collection of material for this study: David Tambo, Joseph Miller, Murray Hofbauer, Steven Giles, Martin Klein, and Dennis Cordell. In addition, Martin Klein commented on an earlier version. 2 Joseph C. Miller, Slavery: A Comparative Teaching Bibliography (Waltham, Mass., 1978).



20 Historical Reflections

forthcoming.3 Individual monographs include those by Frederick Cooper on the Swahili coast, John Grace on West Africa, Denise Bouche on freed slave villages in West Africa, and J. P. Oliver de Sardan's edition of slave memoires from Niger.4 Among archival material is the К series in Archives Nationales du Senegal, which contains a series of dossiers on slavery, including an extensive survey of French West Africa in 1904. There are also various and voluminous reports from areas of the British sphere, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century. The Belgians initiated a comprehensive survey of Zaire in the 1930s, which resulted in one hundred responses to a detailed questionnaire. Besides these and other large-scale in- quiries, mission archives contain much that is valuable, since slavery was frequently a central issue to the missions.5 Anthropological studies, besides the most recent ones that deal specifically with slavery, also contain much material. These include such early work as that by R.S. Rattray on Asante, Northcote Thomas on the Igbo, and A.B. Ellis on the Ewe.6 Finally, there are numerous holdings of oral data on slavery, some of which have been collected on tape, transcribed and deposited at various archives, incliding the one at Indiana Univer- sity and at many places in Africa. Martin Klein has worked in Senegal; Richard Roberts has done the same in Mali; J.S. Hogendorn has worked in Zaria; my own data was collected among the Hausa, Tiv and others in northern Nigeria; Dennis Cordell has worked in the Central African Republic; and Allen Isaacman has material from Mozambique.7 These collections are mentioned here as examples.

3S. Miers, and I. Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977); Claude Meillassoux, ed., L'Esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris, 1975); forthcoming volumes include Martin Klein and Claire Robertson, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa. 4 F. Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977); Denise Bouche, Les Villages de liberté en Afrique noire française , 1887-1910 (Paris, 1968); John Grace, Domestic Slavery in West Africa (New York, 1975); J. P. Olivier De Sardan, Quand nos Pères étaient captifs. Récits paysans du Niger (Paris, 1976). 5 For a discussion of the French archival material, see: J.L. Boutillier, "Les Captifs en А. О. F. (1903-1905)," Bulletin de l'l.F.A.N., sér. В, XXX:2 (1968): 513-35; C.N. Newbury, "An Early Enquiry into Slavery and Captivity in Dahomey," Zaire 14 (1960): pp. 53-57; and Martin Klein, "Women in Slavery in the Western Sudan," African Studies Association Annual Convention, Baltimore, 1978. For a discussion of British sources, see Grace, Domestic Slavery ; and for the Belgian sources, see E. De Jonghe, and J. Vanhove, Les Formes d'asservissement dans les sociétés indigènes du Congo Belge (Brussels, 1949). 6 R.S. Rattray, A shanti Law and Constitution (London, 1929), pp. 33-55; Northcote W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on the Ibo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria , (London, 1914); and A.B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London, 1980). 7For information on these various collections, see: Martin A. Klein, "Servitude Among the' Wolof and Sereer of Senegambia," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 335-366; Richard L. Roberts, "Production and Reproduction of Warrior States: Segu Bambara and Segu Tukolor, 1712-1890," International Journal of African Historical Studies (forthcoming); Roberts, "Long Distance Trade and Production: Sinsani in the Nineteenth Century," paper presented at the African Studies Association, Baltimore,



21 Indigenous African Slavery

The problem with virtually all this material is that it comes from the period in which slavery was undergoing tremendous change. By the time most data were collected the trans- Atlantic trade had already ended, but other changes that were the logical outcome of the European attack on the slave trade were equally profound, including the imposition of colonialism itself. The material, massive as it is, tells more about the period of decline and transition than it does about the earlier periods. Hence such data must be used carefully, for, even with the collection of more oral material, we are not likely to uncover new information for the period before ca. 1880, and for many areas not even for then.

Available sources enable us to examine slavery during its final stages of decline and transition, from ca. 1 890 to 1940, but our task must be much broader. We must examine the data for bits of information that relate to earlier times, and we must relate the problem of slavery to wider historical developments. When this is done, at least in the rudimentary fashion that is possible here, the following periods are discernible: the medieval Islamic era from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the era of the trans- Atlantic slave trade from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century, the period of "legitimate" trade in the nineteenth century, and finally the period of abolition and transition in the half

1978; Roberts, "The Maraka and the Economy of the Middle Niger Valley, 1790-1908" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1978); Jan Hogendom, "The Economics of Slave Use on Two 'Plantations' in the Zaria Emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate," International Journal of African Historical Studies X, 3 (1977), 369-83; Paul E. Lovejoy, "Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate," Journal of African History XIX, 3 (1978), 341-68; P.E. Lovejoy and J.S. Hogendorn, "Oral Data Collection and the Economic History of the Central Savanna," Savanna, forthcoming; Dennis Cordel 1, "Dar Al-Kuti: A History of the Slave Trade and State Formation on the Islamic Frontier in the Northern Equatorial Africa (Central African Republic and Chad) in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1977); Barbara Isaacman and Allen Isaacman, "Slavery and Social Stratification among the Sena of Mozambique: A Study of the Kaporo System," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 105-120; and A.F. Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution, the Zambesi P rozos, 1750-1902 (Madison, 1972). Besides these, there are numerous other collections that have been deposited in archives or are located in the private libraries of the collectors; see the bibliographies for the various contributions to Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, and some of the contributions to Meillassoux, L Esclavage; Emmanual Terray, "La Captivité dans le royaume abron du Gyaman," in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage, pp. 389-454; Terray, "Long Distance Exchange and the Formation of the State: The Case of the Abron Kingdom of Gyaman," Economy and Society 3 (1974): 315-345; Terray, "Classes and Class Consciousness in the Abron Kingdom of Gyaman," in Maurice Bloch, ed., Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology (London, 1975), pp. 85-136. Also see Rattray, Ashanti Law; Norman A. Klein, Inequality in Asante (manuscript; I wish to thank N. A. Klein for showing me a copy of this manuscript); Claire Robertson, "Post Proclamation Slavery in Accra: A Female Affair," African Studies Association, Baltimore, 1978; Norman A. Klein, "West African Unfree Labor before and after the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), pp. 87-95.




century from ca. 1 890 to 1 940. These periods overlap because the influence of the major external influences that are identified with each period were not felt uniformly in all parts of the continent at all times. Nonetheless, this framework can serve as a convenient starting point for the analysis that follows. From the perspective of those interested in slavery in the Americas and the impact of the trans- Atlantic trade on African society and economy, only the middle two of these periods are of direct relevance. From a comparative perspective, the last period is of concern to those interested in the transition from slavery to other social and economic forms, and the earliest period is significant because it relates to the question of the origins of the institution.

The major features of these four periods, which are examined in greater detail below, relate to the incidence of slavery within particular societies, the connection with external demand for slaves, the ideological framework for slavery as an indigenous institution, and the uses to which slaves were put. In the first era, the medieval Islamic period, slavery was concentrated in those areas in direct contact with the larger Islamic world of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean. Hence slavery was most developed in the northern savanna and along the East African coast, and the institution was conceived to a greater or lesser extent within an Islamic framework. In the second period, the era of the trans- Atlantic slave trade, additional areas that had been unaffected or only marginally affected by earlier patterns of slave use and enslavement became increasingly involved with the institution. These areas included the coastal regions along the Atlantic basin. To a great extent slavery here was not connected with Islam but was conceived within kinship terms that related to the social structure and cosmology of the people who were most exposed to European demand for slaves. In the third period, the nineteenth century when "legitimate" trade developed, slavery expanded dramatically in both the areas that had responded to European slave demand in the previous period and in those regions that had continued to be exposed to Islamic influence. In the final period, after ca. 1890, the whole of Africa underwent the transition from societies and economies that depended to a very great extent on slavery to colonialism and the emergence of other forms of social and economic organisation. It could be argued that the last two periods should be treated as one, and that, in fact, the long-range trend was towards the elimination of slavery. This approach is quite valid, but here the nineteenth century is distinguished from the twentieth in order to emphasise the immediate response within Africa to the abolition of the trans- Atlantic slave trade, namely, the tremendous increase in the incidence of slavery in Africa during the nineteenth century.

The division into four periods reveals a fundamental approach of this analysis, namely, the identification of regions within Africa and the exploration of links between these regions and an external demand for slaves. The approach is comparative: three regions are examined, including the Islamic region of the northern savanna and southern Sahara (but also including Ethiopia), the West African coastal zone from Nigeria to Sierra Leone, and the predominantly Bantu-speaking areas of eastern, equatorial central and southern Africa. It is argued that these three regions developed distinctive characteristics, however



Indigenous African Slavery 23

wide the range of practices and customs within each, and however important the similarities between them. As with any regional approach, the units of analysis have been determined somewhat arbitrarily. It could be argued that all Islamic areas should be treated together, particulary in certain periods, and it could be argued that the Senegambia area, which was within the Islamic zone, should be considered part of the West African coastal region. Moreover, the Angolan coast could be included in a discussion of the Atlantic coastal basin, at least during the period of the European slave trade. In fact, in the interpretation that follows, regional boundaries are bridged for analytical purposes when the trends of particular periods warrant such a digression. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the division into three regions will have the advantage of providing a useful framework, particularly for those who are relatively unfamiliar with the literature on African slavery.

From the perspective of those interested in slavery in the Americas and the impact of the trans- Atlantic trade on African society and the economy, only parts of these three regions were directly affected by the developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the European slave trade was at its height. For the northern savanna, only the Senegambia basin lay within the orbit of European demand, but patterns of slavery there had already been firmly established. Along the West African coast, where the impact of the European trade was dramatic, some sections were more profoundly influenced than others, while in Bantu Africa, only the Atlantic coastal zone was strongly affected. Virtually all of East Africa and most of the northern savanna was beyond the range of the trans- Atlantic trade until after 1800, and then some areas never experienced any direct effects. The nineteenth century is more complex, for parts of East Africa then became major suppliers for the Americas, at least for a few decades, and slaves came from a greater portion of the northern savanna than just the Senegam- bia, including the region east as far as Lake Chad. Thus the recognition of three regions, while influenced by developments in the trans- Atlantic trade and its abolition, does not imply a formal causal link between external trade and African supply. It is argued that internal patterns of slavery and slave supply were strongly related to political and economic factors that were of an indigenous character.

The regional approach is considered essential because minute case studies, while necessary and extremely valuable, can disguise major historical developments. The problem remains the unit of analysis, and on this point the approach adopted here is at odds with the standard one that emphasises ethnicity. Ethnic groups are not necessarily useful units of analysis if they are part of economic regions or if they are located on the peripheries of major states. James Vaughan's study of Margi slavery is a case in point.8 Vaughan considers Margi slavery as a "limbic" institution, by which he means that slaves "exist in the hem of society, in a limbo, neither enfranchised Margi nor true aliens." This conception is central

8James H. Vaughan, "Marakur: A Limbic Institution of the Margi (Nigeria)," in Miers and Kopy toff, Slavery in Africa, p. 85. It should be noted, however, that elsewhere Vaughan takes the regional context into account, although he does not develop the point; see "Caste Systems in the Western Sudan," in A. Tuden and L. Plotnicov, eds. , Social Stratification in Africa (New York, 1970), pp. 62, 68, 81, 86-87.




to the analysis of Kopytoff and Miers, who treat slavery as 4 4 institutionalized marginality."9 Its functionalism is essentially ahistorical. This conceptual framework seems informative in describing the major characteristic of Margi slavery, but it considers the institution out of its historical context. It fails to appreciate the geographical location of the Margi between two major Islamic states, Borno and the Sokoto Caliphate, and hence Vaughan misses the important historical funtion of the Margi in supplying slaves to these Islamic states. Treated in isolation the place of the Margi in the history of the northern savanna is obscured, if not lost. In a slightly different vein, Terray's analysis of slavery in the Abron state of Gyaman is somewhat distorted, for his treatment of the subject loses much of its importance when he fails to develop the crucial link between Gyaman and Asante. 10 Gyaman was indeed a state, but it was independent only after 1874. Before then it had been a province of Asante since the middle of the eighteenth century. In this case the particularism of the case study disguises the wider historical connection, and the relevance of the study is reduced accord- ingly. Similar critical observations could be made about many of the studies in the Meillassoux and Miers and Kopytoff volumes.11 One of the main aims of this analysis, therefore, is to identify significant arenas of interaction within Africa in order to overcome the narrowness of the case study approach.

9Vaughan, "Margi," p. 100; and Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, "Introduction: African 'Slavery' as an Institution of Marginality," in Miers and Kopytoff , Slavery in Africa, pp. 3-81 . For a detailed critique, see Martin Klein and Paul E. Lovejoy, "Slavery in West Africa," in H. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), pp. 181-212; Frederick Cooper, "The Problem of Slavery in African Studies," Journal of African History XX, 1 (1979); and M. Klein, "The Study of Slavery in Africa: A Review Article," Journal of African History XIX, 4 (1978): 599-609. 10 K. Poku, "Traditional Roles and People of Slave Origin in Modern Ashanti - A Few Impressions," Ghana Journal of Sociology V, 1 (1969): 34-38; G. M. McSheffrey, "Slavery, Indentured Servitude and the Impact of Abolition on the Gold Coast, 1874-1901," paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Conference, Fre- dericton, 1977; and Grace, Domestic Slavery. It can be expected that the work of R. A. Kea will also be significant in a study of slavery among the Akan.

1 1 In Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, for example, the three studies that relate to Sierra Leone are treated in isolation, despite their proximity and the possible influences of regional economic and political forces; see Svend E. Holsoe, "Slavery and Economic Response among the Vai (Liberia and Sierra Leone)," pp. 287-303; John L. Grace, "Slavery and Emancipation Among the Mende in Sierra Leone, 1896-1928," pp. 415-434; Carol P. MacCormack, "Wono: Institutionalized Dependency in Sherbro Descent Groups (Sierra Leone)," pp. 335-366. Similarly, the various cases in Meillas- soux, L'esclavage, that deal with the Tuareg do not attempt to examine similarities and differences; see Edmond and Suzanne Bernus, "L'Evolution de la condition servile chez les Touregs Sahéliens," pp. 27-47; Pierre Bonté, "Esclavage et relations de dépendance chez les Touregs Kel Grass," pp. 49-76; André Bourgeot, "Rapports esclavagistes et conditions d'affranchissement chez les Imuhag," pp. 77-98. For a different approach that examines slavery within a regional perspective, see Paul E. Lovejoy and Stephen Baier, "The Desert-Side Economy of the Central Sudan," International Journal of African Historical Studies VIII, 4(1975): 551-81; S. Baier and P.E. Lovejoy, "The Tuareg of the




One feature of this regional approach is that it does not cover all parts of Africa for all periods. Indeed, the spread of slavery as an institution appears to have occurred along a broad frontier from areas of extensive involvement in the external market to areas only marginally involved. Hence the chronological framework identifies major changes in the expansion and direction of this frontier. The first period, the medieval Islamic period before 1600, discusses slavery only in the northern savanna and along the East African coast. The second period, the era of the trans- Atlantic trade, identifies new focal points in the development of the institution and connects these with European demand. In both periods there were large areas, including the interlacustrine zone, parts of southern Africa, and the Ubangi basin, where slavery was not an important institution, as far as can be surmised. In the third period, the nineteenth century, slavery spread very rapidly into virtually all the areas that had not been affected earlier, so that only for the nineteenth century and for the last period, after ca. 1 890, will we speak of slavery in all parts of the continent. Finally, a special word should be said concerning Ethiopia, which is included here under the rubric "northern savanna," although its adherence to Christianity sets it apart. Despite the religious difference, which provided another ideological setting for slavery, Ethiopia was generally in contact with the Muslim world. Even the geographical differences of the Ethiopian highlands from the savanna grasslands does not alter the general similarity with northern savanna patterns.

The chronological framework and the regional perspective that are advanced here are related directly to external influences on the development of slavery. For some scholars this approach will appear extremely tentative; for others it will seem plainly contentious. Nonetheless, the argument here is that slavery in Africa can only be analysed within the context of world slave trade, including the Indian Ocean, trans- Saharan, trans- Atlantic, and domestic sectors. Although African slavery was in some ways unique, its development was strongly influenced by slavery in the Islamic and European worlds. Hence to speak of an "indigenous" slavery is an analytical convenience that should not be construed as an indication that African slavery developed in isolation. Quite the contrary, the Islamic connection began with a demand for slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, and this demand continued through the nineteenth century. But Islam also became the religion of slaveholders in large parts of Africa, so that the Islamic dimension became an indigenous factor at the same time that it remained an external influence. European involvement in Africa has been so closely associated with slavery that to disassociate Europe from the study of the institution is impossible, except for the period before ca. 1500.

The issue of external influence has been associated most often with the writings of Walter Rodney, who has argued that the European slave trade created pressures within African society that led to greater stratification. 12 This is

Central Sudan: Gradations in Servility at the Desert-Edge (Niger-Nigeria)," in Miers and Kopy toff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 391-41 1 . The importance of considering slavery within a regional context is also discussed in Cooper, "Problem of Slavery."

12 Walter Rodney, "Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade," Journal of African History VII, 4




certainly true, although it is argued here that African slavery was a response not only to European needs, but to trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean demands as well. Equally important, however, is a perspective that considers the evolution of institutions within African societies for the enslavement of people. This relates particularly to kinship structures which allowed the transfer of rights over people and which permitted the development of dependent relationships that in certain situations could lead to slavery. Individuals could find themselves in such dependent situations as a result of capture in war, kidnapping, or other means, but without the institutionalisation of such dependency relationships there would not have been an indigenous system of slavery. Servile institutions, therefore, had to exist within African society before the advent of the European trade. Otherwise no institutional mechanism would have existed to supply slaves. Europeans could kidnap people or seize captives in wars, and this did happen in Angola, but the crucial breakthrough was the adaptation of distinctly African networks of enslavement and trade for external purposes. When this was done, slavery was institutionalised. Slaves were not only dependents. They were also commodities that could be bought and sold. This transformation of people into things is of fundamental importance. It was a necessary condition for the existence of slavery, and as is evident in the history of slavery in Africa the degree to which slaves were dependents or commodities shifted. As an item of trade, slaves were pure commodity but potentially dependent. Once settled they were dependent but potential commodity. Hence, in this paper they are often referred to in both these capacities.

One problem in the approach of both Rodney and his critics is that they implicitly compare slavery in Africa with slavery in the Americas, but viewing each in static terms. Rodney offers an important insight in that his analysis allows

(1966): 431-43; and "West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade," Historical Society of Tanzania, Paper No. 2, Nairobi, 1967; Basil Davidson, "Slaves or Captives? Some Notes on Fantasy and Fact," in Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (New-York, 1971), I, 54-73; J. D. Fage, "Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History," Journal of African History X, 3 (1969): 393-404; Christopher Fyfe, "The Dynamics of African Dispersal: The Transatlantic Slave Trade," in Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 57-74; Christopher Fyfe, "The Impact of the Slave Trade on West Africa," in The Transatlan- tic Slave Trade from West Africa , (Mimeographed, University of Edinburgh, 1965); Marion Johnson, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Economy of West Africa," in Roger Anstey and P. E.H. Hair, eds. , Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, vol. 2, (1976), pp. 14-38; M. D. Kilson, "West African Society and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1441-1865," in Huggins, Kilson, and Fox, Key Issues, I, 39-53; G. N. Uzoigwe, "The Slave Trade and African Societies," Transactions of the Historical Society ofN. Ghana XI V, 2 (1973): 187-212; Albert van Dantzig, "Effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Some West African Societies," Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer LXII, 1-2 (nos. 226-227) (1975): 252-269; and C.C. Wrigley, "Historicism in Africa: Slavery and State Formation," African Affairs LXX (1971): 113-124.



Indigenous African Siavery 27

for change within Africa (i.e., servile institutions increase in direct relationship to the development of the Atlantic slave trade), but he fails to appreciate that slavery also changed in the Americas. There was no standard institution for all periods and all places in the Americas. Nineteenth-century plantations in Cuba and the United States had many resemblances with earlier plantation systems, but nonetheless there was evolution in many aspects of the institution, including the degree of harshness with which slaves were treated and the scale of production. In fact slavery changed over tiqie on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is more accurate to relate these changes to their link - the trans-Atlantic trade. The greater availability of slaves in Africa enabled the development of a harsh slave system in the Americas, while the pull of this market had a strong effect on the evolution of slavery as an institution within Africa. To divide the subject of slavery into African and American components is perhaps necessary for research and analytical purposes, but the relationship between the two must be kept in mind. Such approaches as those of Kopytoff and Miers, who appear to posit a model of American slavery which is a static representation of the fully developed institution, fail to keep this interconnection in mind.13 Their approach isahistori- cal , and it presents a false situation that allows them to treat African slavery as if it occurred in isolation. The gap that is created in this way is in fact wider than the ocean that separated the slave institutions in their American and African settings. While this problem has been examined with respect to the Americas, similar observations also apply to North Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

Furthermore, an indigenous approach to the study of slavery that does not make reference to external influences fails to account for many instances of slavery within Africa. Such cases include slavery at European outposts in the Senegambia region and along the Gold Coast, Brazilian and European invest- ments in nineteenth-century Dahomey, the Portuguese use of slaves in Angola, São Tomé, and the Zambezi valley, and the Dutch colony and its slaves at Cape Town. Such an approach also creates problems in considering plantation slavery in East Africa during the nineteenth century. If Arab plantations on Pemba and Zanzibar are included, despite the fact that most Arabs were recent immigrants to Africa, then why not include the islands further off shore, where Arabs, Swahili, and Europeans sometimes invested in slaves on the same islands? The isolation of the indigenous factor becomes more of a problem in considering Egyptian expansion up the Nile in the 1820s and the subsequent reaction to this "foreign" domination, and in both phases slavery was an essential ingredient of historical developments. Freed slaves in West Africa, many of whom converted to Christ- ianity, present another problem, especially since some of them became slave owners and others became involved in the anti-slavery crusade. Clearly, as the European occupation of Africa advanced, often with the aid of escaped slaves who enlisted in European armies, the issue of indigenous slavery becomes even more blurred.

Let us consider the four periods in greater detail: that is the medieval Islamic

13 Kopytoff and Miers, "African 'Slavery,' " pp. 3-81; and Kilson, "West African Society," pp. 39-53.




era from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the period of the trans- Atlantic slave trade from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the era of 4 4 legitimate" trade in the nineteenth century, and the period of abolition, transition, and colonialism from ca. 1890 to 1940.

The major features of the first period related to the development of international trade and states under Islamic influence in the northern savanna and along the East African coast, with the important exception of Christian Ethiopia being an anomaly in terms of the religious factor. Slaves became an important element in society during this era. They were found at court, in harems, in the military, in the salt mines of the Sahara, and on plantations, a term used here for comparative purposes in order to identify concentrations of agricultural slaves in villages and on estates. Servile institutions elsewhere in Africa were probably marginal, although this hypothesis is based on inference, since there are virtually no data for areas outside the Islamic zone. Trade routes did stretch beyond the centres of Islamic influence, south from the northern savanna, and inland from the East African coast along the Zambezi valley. Slavery along these routes, moreover, appears to have been connected with Muslim merchants. Slavery, therefore, developed in conjunction with external influences from the Islamic world. In the northern savanna, the medieval states of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, and Kanem developed militaristic aristocracies and Muslim commercial networks that enabled the enslavement of enemies, their settlement on plantations, at salt mines, and in court harems, as well as their shipment across the Sahara to North Africa. Slaves were crucial in trade, along with gold, desert-side goods, and other commodities. Along coastal East Africa and Madagascar, there were a series of commercial centres and related plantations that catered for trade between Africa, Arabia and India. Gold from the interior of the Zambezi valley, some ivory, and grain were the main items of trade, although some slaves were also exported. 15

The last century and a half of this early period, from ca. 1450 to 1600, coincided with the early stages in the development of sugar production in the western Mediterranean, Madeira, the Canaries, and São Tomé, and it is significant to note that both sub-Saharan developments and the origins of sugar expansion both traced their ancestry to the Mediterranean world.15 They were to

14 J. O. Hunwick, "Notes on Slavery in the Songhay Empire," paper presented at the Conference on Slavery and Related Institutions in Muslim Africa, Princeton University, 1977; Nehemia Levtzion, "Slavery and Islamization in Africa: A Comparative Study," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; Claude Meillassoux, "The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa," paper for the seminar on the Economic History of the Central Savanna of West Africa, Kano, 1976, translated by R. J. Gavin; L. Sanneh, "Islamic Slavery in the African Perspective," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; and M. Tymowski, "Domaines princiers au Songhay," Annales 25-26 (1970): 1637-1658. Also see Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," and for the East African coast, see the forthcoming work of Abdul Sheriff.

1 5 Philip D. Curtin, "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Basin: Intercontinental Perspec- tives," in Huggins, Kilson, and Fox, Key Issues, pp. 74-93; Charles Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans Г Europe médiévale: péninsule Ibérique-France (Bruges, 1955); Charles Verlinden, "La Colonie vénitienne de Tana, centre de la traite des esclaves au




diverge dramatically, of course, but the early parallels are important to keep in mind because they show that the links between slavery in Africa and slavery elsewhere have been there for a long time. Even in this period, some slaves from sub-Saharan Africa were employed in the early sugar industry.. In short, the enslavement process within Africa had already become institutionalised, although nowhere near the extent that was to occur. Slavery in Africa, moreover, was already related to developments elsewhere. The use of slaves in the medieval states was a by-product of the trans-Saharan trade. The ideological framework and the treatment of slaves appears to have corresponded to Islamic norms as they developed on the periphery of the Islamic world, and in this sense African slavery was already diverging from the emerging European style of slavery.

In the second period, from the end of the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth century, the connection between the slave systems of Europe and the indigenous institution within Africa was consolidated, just as in the earlier period the slavery of the Islamic world and Black Africa were connected. In this second period, the trans- Atlantic slave trade was the agency of contact, and it had the effect of circumventing most of the Islamic areas where slavery was already established. The coastal regions of the Atlantic basin were brought into a single network of slave supply, slave trade, and production, that Curtin has referred to as the "South Atlantic System."16 For most of this period, only the Senegambia region, that was already part of the Islamic world of the earlier period, was incorporated into this new system. Otherwise in the northern savanna, the Islamic pattern of enslavement, slave use, and export continued as before, although the East African sector was shattered and did not re-emerge until the late eighteenth century. Instead a European presence was established in the Zambezi valley and at the Cape of Good Hope. The dynamic sector, therefore, was, as might be expected, the coastal basin, and here a series of states and commercial networks developed that were directly related to the trans- Atlantic trade.

With the collapse of Songhay in the 1590s, western regions of the northern savanna entered a period of political fragmentation that affected slave institutions only marginally. 17 Patterns of slave use continued as before: slaves were common in harems, at courts, on plantations, as commercial agents, in the military, and as items of trade. In other parts of the northern savanna, the pattern was the same.

XlVe et au début du XVe siècles," Studi en onore di Gino Luuatto (Milan, 1949-1950), II, 1-25; Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London, 1949-50); and Marian Malowist, "Les Débuts du système de plantations dans la période des grandes découvertes," Africana Bulletin 10 (1969): 9-30.

,6P. D. Curtin, The A tlantic Slave Trade. A Census (Madison, 1969); Curtin, Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds .,Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975), pp. 107-128.

17 Allan G. B. Fisher and Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (London, 1970); J. R. Willis, "The Servile Estate," paper presented at the Conference on Slavery and Related Institutions in Muslim Africa, Princeton University, 1977; and L. O. Sanneh, "Slavery, Islam, and the Jakhanke People of West Africa," Africa XLVI, 1 (1976): 80-97.




Only Borno, in the Lake Chad basin, was a relatively large state in this period, but its policies were similar to those of smaller states. The state undertook extensive slave raiding, and it collected slaves and other commodities as tributes from dependencies. Further east, such states as Dar Fur and the Funj sultanate of Sennar also adhered to Islamic forms of government and society. Their connections with the trans-Saharan slave trade were important, and they relied on slaves in agriculture, court life, administration, and other sectors of society, government and economy.

Furthermore, except for the Senegambia, these areas of the northern savanna were virtually unaffected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Senegambia had exported slaves across the desert before the development of the European trade. After ca. 1550, however, slaves were sold to Europeans as well. Nonetheless, as Curtin's research has shown, slaves seldom constituted as much as half the total value of exports from this region. 18 Gold, gum arabic, beeswax, and other goods were of comparable importance. Elsewhere in the northern savanna slaves were exported across the Sahara, but few were sold to Europeans before the end of the eighteenth century. Even then they were a small proportion of the total number of slaves exported across the Atlantic.

The basic features of slavery in the northern savanna during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries arose from the relationship of economy and society to patterns of trade and production along the desert- savanna divide and similar ecological frontiers to the south. 19 Commodities generally followed a north-south axis, and transport costs, that might seem prohibitively high, were kept low because of the transhumant movements of livestock breeders. Slave labour facilitated trade by provisioning caravans; supplying cotton, grain and other goods for transport to areas that were undersupplied; and assisting in craft production, particularly textile manufacturing. Besides its productive dimension, moreover, slavery was crucial to the political structure. Slaves were incorporated into the army and hence were a vital component in the further enslavement of people. They were used in administrative capacities which were equally important in the management of enslaved populations and in the preparations for further enslavement. Without a doubt, slavery had long been and continued to be fundamental to savanna society. It remained cast within an Islamic mould that was beyond the influence of the trans- Atlantic trade. The only exception, the Senegambia, is perhaps conclusive proof of this marginal European influence from the Americas, for despite the export of slaves from this sub-region, patterns of slave use and supply conformed more to the practice and ideology found elsewhere in the northern savanna than it did to the areas along the Atlantic basin that came most profoundly under the influence of the trans-Atlantic trade. The case of Futa Jallon, a new state created in the eighteenth century as a result of Islamic holy war (jihad), demonstrates this point. Located in the highlands of Guinée, Futa Jallon became the centre of a slave-based economy, with many war

18 Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa. Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 2 vols. (Madison 1975).

,9Lovejoy and Baier, "Desert-Side Economy," 551-81.




captives sold to Europeans on the coast but with many others settled on the plantations of the victorious Fulbe aristocracy. Islamic tradition provided the rationale for the enslavement of people, for their sale, and for the exploitation of their labour domestically.20

The era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade resulted in major changes in the political economy of the regions along the Atlantic basin, and in this sense Futa Jallon and other parts of Senegambia were part of a wider pattern in many areas that became large suppliers of labour for the mines and plantations of the Americas, slavery became important for the first time, and this development was directly related to political and economic changes connected with the export of slaves. In both the West African coastal zone and in Bantu Africa there were areas in which change was highly dramatic, while other areas remained more isolated and less influenced by the institution of slavery.

In West Africa, beyond the Islamic areas of the Senegambia, the most dramatic change occurred in the area from modern Ghana through Nigeria, as a series of states and commercial federations developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.21 From west to east, these included Asante, Oyo, and the Aro-Niger Delta confederacy. Asante absorbed a series of smaller Akan states by the first decade of the eighteenth century and expanded by mid-century to include most of the territory of modern Ghana. Oyo, which incorporated large parts of southeastern Nigeria and the modern Republic of Benin (Dahomey) by 1650, remained the strongest state in the interior of the Slave Coast, particularly after the Kingdom of Dahomey was reduced to tributary status in the early eighteenth

20 William Derman , Serfs, Peasants and Socialists (Berkeley, 1973); Dr. Patenostre, "La Captivité chez les peul du Fouta-Djallon," Revue outre-mer 3 (1930): 241-54, 353-72; Mamadou Saliou Baldé, "L'Esclavage et la guerre sainte au Funta Jalon," in Meillas- soux, L'Esclavage, pp. 183-220; and J. Suret-Canale, "Les Origines ethniques des anciens captifs au Fouta-Djal Ion," Notes africaines, (1969): 123.

21 P. E. Lovejoy, and J. S. Hogendorn, "Slave Marketing in West Africa," in Gemery and Hogendorn, Uncommon Market, pp. 213-235; E. Adeniyi Oroge, "The Institution of Slavery in Yorubaland with Particular Reference to the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1971); Dov Ronon, "On the African Role in the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade in Dahomey," Cahiers ď études africaines XI, 1 (1971): 5-13; David Northrup, "The Growth of Trade Among the Igbo Before 1 800," Journal of African History XIII, 2 (1972): 217-236; Peter Morton-Williams, "The Oyo Yoruba and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1670- 1 830," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria III, 1 (1964): 25-45; Robin Law, "A West African Cavalry State: The Kingdom of Oyo," Journal of African History XVI, 1 (1975): 1-15, Law , The Oyo Empire: The History of a Yoruba State, principally in the Period с . 1600-1836 (London, 1977); A.J.H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600-1891 : The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (London, 1973); Philip A. Igbafe, "Slavery and Emancipation in Benin, 1897-1945," Journal of African History XVI, 3 (1975): 409-29; Richard D. Graham, "The Slave Trade, Human Sacrifice, and Depopulation in Benin History," Cahiers d'études africaines, VI (1965): 317-334; A. E. Gibson, "Slavery in Western Nigeria" Journal of the Royal African Society 3 (1903): 17-54; and Ralph A. Austen, "Slavery among Coastal Middlemen: The Dualaof Cameroon," in Miers and Kopytoff , Slavery in Africa, pp. 305-333.




century. The Kingdom of Benin, the only state of any significance along the West African coast when the Portuguese first arrived in the fifteenth century, was reduced in importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in part perhaps because the state limited slave exports. The final "state" of this region was the Aro- Niger Delta confederacy, which developed in the eighteenth century in response to the commercial possibilities of the slave trade. Merchants at the ports of Calabar and Bonny established alliances with Aro traders, located inland at Aro Chukwu, and together with the Niger River port of Aboh, these centres in effect controlled this area of present day south-eastern Nigeria.

Slavery in these areas became an important institution during these two centuries. Whether it was the manipulation of the religious oracle at Aro Chukwu, the establishment of tributary relations with subject states, or commerical links with the far interior, including the northern savanna, large numbers of slaves passed through these states. Raiding, kidnapping, warfare, and judicial punish- ments all produced slaves, and many were used domestically, although their number cannot be calculated. Several million were exported, and there is no question that the possibility of export became an important dimension of the domestic institution. So was slave sacrifice at the funerals of dignitaries. Slavery became connected with the very power of the new commercial and political elites of these coastal states. Slave labour in agriculture, as porters, on canoes, in gold mining, in households, and as wives and concubines developed as a major feature of economy and society.

Slavery was perceived in these areas in terms of kinship, but external influences were such that the legal dimension of the institution was in fact more complex. For Asante and Oyo, the two largest states of the eighteenth century in this region, there was a strong Islamic factor, because of commercial and political connections with the northern Savanna.22 Both states had a large number of slaves from Muslim areas, and Asante included provinces that had significant numbers of Muslims who owned slaves. In short, interregional connections with the interior balanced the pull of European demand, and the result affected the institution of slavery. In part slavery was related to kinship structures. The ideal was that slaves could be incorporated into families, if they were raised from childhood, married to free people, or born into the society. Large concentrations of slaves for administrative, military, and economic reasons mitigated against an assimilationist policy, however. So did the presence of Muslim slaves, whose religious beliefs prevented their full incorporation into households that were not Muslim. Finally, the pockets of Muslim commercial activity, which had continued from the period before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the development of the coastal state system, were important economically, both because of their links with the northern savanna and because of the productive capacities of slave plantations. Here patterns of slavery that were more similar to those of the northern savanna predominated.

22Lovejoy and Hogendorn, "Slave Marketing," pp. 223-224; Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery;" Ivor Asante in The Nineteenth Century (London, 1975); Law, Oyo Empire, pp. 75-76, 204, 211-217, 245-249, 256-260.




In the interior of the Niger Delta, the Islamic factor was absent, except for commercial contacts along the Niger River. There were no Islamic centres, and there were few if any Muslim slaves. Furthermore, the entry into the trans- Atlantic trade was later than for other parts of West Africa. Exports became significant only after ca. 1740. Before that time, little can be said about the institution of slavery, but from the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery developed as an important indigenous institution. Again the dominant ideology related the institution to kinship structures. Ohu could be and apparently were incorporated into families. In the Delta itself, they were attached to commercial establishments through the institution of the trade canoe. Inland they probably assumed a major role in the activities of the Aro, who expanded from several villages at Aro Chukwu to a series of satellite settlements throughout the region. Here again, slaves appear to have been largely assimilated with full rights of other Aro. But there were also osu , slaves attached to religious shrines, who were outcasts, and there were funeral slaves, sacrificed at the ceremonies following the death of an influential person. The similarity with slavery in Asante and Oyo relates to the dual nature of the institution. One dimension allowed for assimilation to kinship structures. The other allowed for the existence of a different kind of slavery, Islamic for Oyo and Asante, osu for the interior of the Niger Delta. To characterise this region in terms of a type of slavery that was only tied to kinship would be overly simple.23

In the areas of the West African coast that were less affected by the export trade in slaves, similar changes took place, although on a reduced scale. There was an Islamic factor connected with interregional trade, but only in the rivers area of Sierra Leone and Guinea was this an influence on the coast itself. The trade was largely an inland one, connecting areas where kola nuts were produced for sale to savanna merchants. Along the coast itself and in the areas of kola production, there were no centralised economic and political structures like those of Asante and Oyo. Consequently, the institution of slavery remained weaker, and there were probably fewer slaves here than in areas further east and north.24

23 J. S. Harris, "Some Aspects of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria," Journal of Negro History 27 (1942): 37-54; Rosemary Harris, "The History of Trade at Ikom, Eastern Nigeria," Africa 42 (1972): 122-39; W. R. G. Horton, "The Ohu System of Slavery in a Northern Ibo Village-group," Africa 24 (1954): 31 1-36; Horton, "God, Man and the Land in a Northern Ibo Village-Group," Africa 26(1956): 17-28; S. Leith-Ross, "Notes on the Osu System among the Ibo of Owerri Province, Nigeria," Africa 10 (1937): 206-20; David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonia I Economic Development in South-eastern Nigeria (London, 1978); David Northrup, "Nineteenth-Century Patterns of Slavery and Economic Change in Southeastern Nigeria," International Journal of African Historical Studies 12 (1979); K. Nwachukwu-Ogedengbe, "Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Aboh (Nigeria)," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 133-154; and Victor C. Uchendu, "Slaves and Slavery in Igboland, Nigeria," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 121-132.

24Grace, Domestic Slavery; Rodney, "Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast," 431-43; Claude Perrot, "Les Captifs dans le royaume anyi du Ndényé," in Meillassoux, U Esclavage, pp. 351-388; Claude-Hélène Perrot, "Hommes libres et captifs, dans le royaume anyi du Ndényé," Cahiers d'études africaines IX (1969): 482-501; and Marc




The third region, Bantu Africa, must also be sub-divided for the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The western coastal area that bordered the South Atlantic experienced the most change, but the interior of the Congo River basin, the interlacustrine belt, and parts of southern Africa remained largely outside the influence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Small-scale societies predominated, and they contained little social differentiation. Only in the interlacustrine belt, where Bunyoro, Rwanda, Burundi, and other states were located, did something approaching slavery develop, but this institution was connected with access to political office, monopolised by cattle herders, and with tribute payments demanded of the agricultural population.25 Along the East African coast, the Islamic sector was checked, indeed virtually eliminated in Mozambi- que and the Zambezi valley. Instead it was replaced by European settlement in Zambezia and around Cape Town in South Africa, although in both cases the impact on the interior was marginal at this time.

The area of the Bantu region that was most dramatically affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the interior of the south Atlantic coast, which includes modern Angola, Zaire, and Congo.26 Here the political economy became tied to the export of slaves, and slaves became common in those areas most

Auge, "Les Faiseurs d'ombre. Servitude et structure lignagère dans la société alladian," in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage, pp. 455-476. 25 Jacques Maquet, "Rwanda Castes,' ' in A. Tuden and L. Plotnicov, eds., Social Stratifi- cation in Africa (New York, 1970), pp. 93-124; Melvin L. Perlman, "The Traditional Systems of Stratification among the Ganda and the Nyoro of Uganda," in Tuden and Plotnicov, Social Stratification in Africa, pp. 1 25- 161. For the area further north that may relate to the origins of servility in the interlacustrine zone, see Aidan W. Southall, "Rank and Stratificaiton among the Alur and Other Nilotic Peoples," in Tuden and Plotnicov, Social Stratification in Africa, pp. 31-46. 26 Joseph C. Miller, "The Formation and the Transformation of Mbundu States from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries," in Franz-Wilhelm Heimer, ed.. The Formation of Angolan Society (forthcoming); "Slaves, Slavers, and Social Change in Nineteenth Century Kasanje," in Franz-Wilhelm Heimer, ed.. Social Change in Angola (Munich, 1973), pp. 9-29; "Legal Portuguese Slaving From Angola. Some Preliminary Indications of Volume and Direction, 1760-1830," Revue française ďhistoire d outre-mer LXII, 1-2 (226-227) (1975): 135-176; "The Congo-Angola Slave Trade," in Kilson and Rotberg, The African Diaspora, pp. 75-1 13; and, "Imbangala Lineage Slavery (An- gola)," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 205-233; A. S. Orlovä, "Institu- tion de l'esclavage dans l'Etat du Congo au Moyen âge. (XVIe - XVIIe siècles)," VII Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques, Editions NA- OUKA (Moscow, 1964); Wyatt MacGaffey, "Economic and Social Dimensions of Kongo Slavery (Zaire)," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 235-257; P. P. Rey, "Articulation des modes de dépendance et des modes de réproduction dans deux sociétés lignagères (Punu et Kunyi du Congo Brazzaville)," Cahiers d et iules afiicaines IX (1969): 415-40; and "L'Esclavage lignager chez les tsangui, les punu, et les kuni du Congo-Brazzaville," in Meillassoux, L' Esclavage, pp. 509-528; W. G. Clarence-Smith, "Slavery in Coastal Southern Angola, 1 875- 1 9 1 3 "Journal of Southern African Studies, II, 2 (1976): 214-23; Robert Harms, "Competition and Capitalism: The Bobangi Role in Equatorial Africa's Trade Revolution, ca. 1750-1900" (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wisconsin, 1978).




closely associated with the export trade. To the north of the Congo River slaves were increasingly common among the Vili and Tio, who controlled the route inland to Stanley Pool, on the Congo River, where slave traders, including the Bobangi on the Congo River itself, gathered from further inland. To the south, the routes inland from Luanda and Benguela became the avenues of similar change. The Mbundu states in the interior were the major conveyors of slaves to the coast, and they also were centres of slave concentration. Outside these relatively restricted commercial avenues, however, slavery remained marginal. Indeed it is in this region more than anywliere else in Africa that slavery remained closely associated with patterns of kinship and dependency, as Douglas, Miller, and Rey have shown.27 Generally social stratification was less developed in Bantu Africa. The social system was able to reduce people to slavery, but the economy was not sufficiently developed to exploit slave labour. Porters were needed along the trade routes, canoemen were used on the rivers, and agricultural labour was needed to produce foodstuffs for passing caravans and slaves in transit. Slaves were also needed as retainers, and women were incorporated into households through slavery, pawnage, and polygamous marriage, which were closely related. The dominant pattern, to cite the Isaacmans' term for slavery among the Sena of the Zambezi valley, was one of "adopted dependency," especially for children and women.28 Commerce, whether within the corridors that fed the trans- Atlantic slave trade or outside them, was based on the control of iron, salt, slaves, and other goods. The relative importance of these commodities varied, but only within the Angola and Congo interiors did slavery develop as a vital institution.

In contrast to the dominant pattern along the trade routes into the interior, the Islamic sector of East Africa collapsed in this period. Portuguese naval activity reduced the importance of commercial centres along the coast, although Por- tuguese attempts to supplant the earlier commercial system were less than successful. Nonetheless, some aliens, Europeans and Indians, did settle in the Zambezi valley, where they attempted to establish a viable plantation sector.29 This resulted in the concentration of some slaves on prazos , but local political conditions and the distance from Europe prevented this nascent plantation sector from becoming competitive with the plantations of the Americas.

More significantly, but equally isolated from the dominant patterns in the interior, was the Dutch settlement at Cape Town.30 Located on the sea route to the

27 Miller, "Imbangala Slavery," pp. 205-233; Rey, "Esclavage lignager," pp. 415-440; and "Modes de dépendance," 509-28; Mary Douglas, "Matrüiny and Pawnship in Central Africa, ' * Africa 34 ( 1 964): 30 1 -3 1 3; and "Blood-Debts and Clientship among the Lele," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 90 (1960): 1-28.

2sIsaacman and Isaacman, "Kaporo," 105-20. Also see Monica Wilson, "The Nguni People," in Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Oxford History of South Africa (Oxford, 1969): 1, 121.

24 Isaacman, Mozambique. 30 Lewis J. Greenstein, "Slave and Citizen: The South African Cas e," Race XV, 1 (1973): 25-46; Isobel E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery (Cardiff, 1 942); Victor De. Kock, Those in Bondage: An Account of the Life of the Slave




Indian Ocean, this port became the centre of a European community in the seventeenth century that supplied passing ships and protected Dutch and later English interests. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were approximately 25,000 slaves at this settlement and in the immediate hinterland. Many were owned by the Dutch East India Company, but there were also sizeable holdings among the settler population. Here, the pattern of slavery more closely resembled that in the Americas, particularly at comparable commercial centres like eighteenth-century Havana. Finally, there were two last outposts of European penetration of Bantu Africa. The first was located on São Tomé, the island off the coast of Gabon where a small plantation economy was established by 1500. The last was at the mainland port of Luanda, where there were also some plantations that supplied the settlement and European slave ships.31 In both the Portuguese and Dutch cases, the significance of slavery was that it remained relatively isolated from interior patterns.

This survey of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries allows the following conclusions. Despite the increase in enslavement, slave exports, and domestic slavery, the areas where slaves were central to economy and society were still relatively restricted, outside the northern savanna. The major sources of slaves for the trans- Atlantic slave trade and the major concentrations of slaves were roughly in two belts. The first was the northern savanna, which largely remained attached to regional economies along the desert-edge but which were also connected with the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East. The second was that stretch of coast from where most slaves came who were shipped to the Americas. Some of these came from the Senegambia, which thereby had contacts with both areas of slave concentration, but the great bulk of slaves came from the states and societies from the Akan areas of modern Ghana eastward and south- ward to Angola. In this belt the impact of the slave trade probably did not extend inland in any significant manner further than about 200 kilometres. Certainly Manning's survey of Dahomey and Miller's study of the Angola interior would suggest this finding.32 This does not mean that slaves did not come from further inland. Rather, it implies that most came from relatively close to the coast, and the corollary to this is that slavery became most fully developed within the same area.

Along trade routes that connected the West African coastal belt with the northern savanna, slavery was found in pockets around commercial towns, but in general there were large areas with considerable populations (e.g., the Senufo of the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, the Guro, Dan, Kpelle, and others in the kola forests of Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea) where slavery was

at the Cape in the Days of the Dutch East India Company (Capetown, 1950); and M.F. Katzen, "White Settlers and the Origin of a New Society, 1652-1778," in Wilson and Thompson, South Africa, 1: 204-8, 224, 232. 31 Cited in Miller, "Mbundu States."

32 Miller, "Mbundu States"; Patrick Manning, "Growth Despite Slavery and Taxes: The Bight of Benin, 1640-1960," paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, 1978; and Law, Oyo Empire, pp. 275-278.




probably a marginal institution, if it existed at all in this period.33 Nonetheless, the trade routes through these areas are an important distinguishing feature for the West African coastal zone. There were links with the Islamic savanna as well as with the trans- Atlantic world. There was no such dual orientation for most of Bantu Africa, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The nature of slavery in the two centuries from ca. 1600 to 1800 varied with the region. In the northern savanna, slavery conformed to a greater or lesser degree to Islamic custom and law.34 Wealthy men had concubines after they acquired the legally acceptable number of four wives. Slaves were used in administrative and military capacities, often with titles derived from Islamic history. Emancipation of slaves was also conceived by the tenets of Islam as a form of piety. There were plantations and other concentrations of slaves, and the status of slavery was inherited. The style of the institution had long been established, however. It was an acceptable institution in which slave raiding and enslavement through kidnapping and war were recognised as legitimate.

Along the coastal basin of the South Atlantic, whether in West Africa or Bantu Africa, slavery was perceived more in terms of kinship structures.35 Interpretations varied between matrilineal and patrilineal societies. The former were more common in central Africa, including Kongo, Tio, Mbundu, and other inland people, while the patrilineal patterns predominated in West Africa. The exception to this was the Akan, including the Asante state. Matrilineal patterns influenced the course of slavery in that men sought to establish control over women and their children through slavery and pawnage in order to circumvent customs that tied rights and obligations to the children of sisters. In both cases, however, there was a tendency for wealthy men to marry as many women as possible. The major difference between the areas most affected by slavery in West Africa and Bantu Africa was that state and commercial structures were more centralised in West Africa. Hence, while Asante was also matrilineally based, more significant was the fact that its economy was more developed, its state institutions were more centralised, and its links with the interior and Muslim society reflected a more complex situation.

The nineteenth century, the third period in our analysis of slavery, was a time when the trans- Atlantic slave trade was in decline but the use of slave labour within Africa greatly increased. In part this trend reflected the redeployment of slaves who otherwise would have been exported; partly it signifies that the momentum caused by the stimulus of external demand for slaves had not yet subsided within Africa. This direct link between the ending of the European slave

33 P. E. Lovejoy, "Kola in the History of West Africa, " forthcoming. 34Fisher and Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society; Cooper, Plantation Slavery; H. Brunschvig, "Abd," The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Paris 1960), 1: 25-41; and Bernard Barbour, "The Micraj: A Legal Treatise by Ahmad Baba on Slavery," paper presented at the Conference on Slavery and Related Institutions in Muslim Africa, Princeton Univer- sity, 1977. 35 The best introduction to slavery within the context ot kinship structures is коруют ana Miers, "African 'Slavery'," pp. 3-81. Also see Douglas, "Pawnship"; Rey, "L'Esclavage lignager."




trade and slavery within Africa is an important indication of the interconnection between different parts of the South Atlantic system. Continued enslavement in those parts of Africa which had been associated with the trans- Atlantic slave trade had an atavistic dimension. Institutions that had developed in order to cater to the trans- Atlantic market continued to function even after demand decreased. Indeed relatively easy access to new slaves permitted their use within Africa on a scale which probably exceeded that of the previous centuries. The abolition of the European slave trade, therefore, had the ironic effect of increasing the incidence of slavery within many parts of Africa.

The rise of "legitimate' ' trade, that is the shift from the export of slaves to the export of other commodities, particularly palm products, peanuts, cloves, rubber, ivory, and other goods, is the most characteristic feature of the nineteenth century, as Hopkins has shown in his analysis of the West African economy.36 The term is used in a qualified sense implied by the quotation marks because it is partially misleading and because of the ironies of nineteenth-century developments. Although it is widely accepted in the literature to highlight the fight against the slave trade, its obvious Euro-centric implications have to be considered in any discussion of slavery in Africa. Large parts of Africa, particularly those areas that previously had been within the orbit of the trans-Atlantic trade and new areas in southeastern Africa that were incorporated in order to bypass the naval blockade of West Africa, were indeed affected to a considerable extent by the shift to legitimate trade. The former areas were affected because they began to export agricultural commodities, particularly palm products and peanuts, on a greatly increased scale, but ironically much of the labour involved in production, transport, or supplying areas of production was done by slaves. The latter area, particularly the Zambezi basin, was affected by the shift to legitimate trade because it became a new source of slaves. Thus the era of legitimate trade resulted in increased use of slaves in production within the West African coastal region, and it led to the increased enslavement of people in the Bantu region.

The final irony of this era of legitimate trade is that changes in the northern savanna and parts of the East African interior which were largely unrelated to the European abolition movement also resulted in the enslavement of great numbers of people, probably on a scale that had never been seen in these areas before. Expansion of the enslavement process and the use of slaves domestically were related to a renewed and dynamic Islamic factor. In part this expansion was also connected with legitimate trade, at least in East Africa and on some islands in the Indian Ocean where Arab, Swahili, and European planters developed plantation agriculture to produce cloves, grain, coconuts, sugar, coffee, and other goods.37 But while this development, which had far-reaching consequences for the interior

36 A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), pp. 124-135. Also see Martin Klein, "Slavery, the Slave Trade and Legitimate Commerce in Late Nineteenth-Century Africa," Etudes d'histoire africaine 2 (1970): 5-28; and Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," 205-7.

37 Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 23-149; Alpers, "East African Slave Trade," 3-26; J. Martin, "Les Débuts du protectorat et la révolte servile de 1891 dans l'Ile d'Anjouan," Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer LX, 1 (no. 218) (1973): 45-85; J. Martin,




of East Africa, was connected with nineteenth-century commercial growth, there was a correspondingly large expansion throughout the northern savanna. There Muslim slave raiders reduced a considerable population to slavery, and the result was the development of plantation agriculture on an equally massive scale, although many slaves were also exported across the Sahara, particularly to Egypt and the Middle East. The use of increasingly more sophisticated firearms was a major factor in the expansion of enslavement almost everywhere.

The revolutionary changes that swept the northern savanna were related to Islamic holy wars (jihads ), which despite a long tradition in Black Africa, had an especially devastating impact in the nineteenth century.38 Among the many wars

"L'Affranchissement des esclaves de Mayotte, décembre 1846 - juillet 1847," Cahiers ď études africaines XVI, 1-2 (1976): 207-233.

38 The literature on slavery in the northern savanna during the nineteenth century is extensive, and the following sources do not include the numerous contemporary accounts. See Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," for a survey of parts of the northern savanna. Also see Cordeil, "Dar Al-Kuti"; Lovejoy, "Plantations," 341-68; Baier and Lovejoy, "Tuareg," 391-411; Klein, "Women in Slavery"; Roberts, "Maraka"; Klein, "Wolof and Sereer," 335-66; Hogendorn, "Two Plantations," 369-83; Patenostre, "Capitivité," 251-54, 352-72; J. L. Boutillier, "Les Trois esclaves de Bouna," in Meillassou L'Esclavage, pp. 253-280; J. Clauzel, "Les Hiérarchies sociales en pays Touareg," Travaux de l'Institut Sahariennes 21 (1962): 120-75; David C. Conrad, "Slavery in Bambara Society: Segou, 1660-1861," paper presented at the Conference on Slavery and Related Institutions in Muslim Africa, Princeton University, 1977; Kalidou Démé, "Les Classes sociales dans le Sénégal pré-colonial," La Pensée 130 (1966): 11-31; Roberta Ann Dunbar, "Slavery and the Evolution of Nineteenth- Century Damagaram (Zinder, Niger)," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 155-180; Polly Hill, "From Slavery to Freedom: the Case of Farm-slavery in Nigerian Hausaland," Comparative Studies in Society and History XVIII, 3 (1976): 395-426; Constance B. Hilliard, "Slave Status among the Futanke: A Preliminary View derived from the Shaikh Musa Kamara Papers," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; M. Hiskett, "Enslavement, Slavery and Attitudes towards the Legally Enslavable in Hausa Islamic Literature," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; Michel Izard, "Les Captifs royaux dans l'ancien Yatenga," in Meillassou x,L' Esclavage, pp. 281-296; Marion Johnson, "The Economic Foundations of an Islamic Theocracy - The Case of Masina," Journal of African History XVII, 4 (1976): 481-495; Martin Klein, "Domestic Slavery in the Muslim Societies of the Western Sudan," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; M. A. Klein, "Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia,"/0wrra7/ of African History 13 (1972): 419-441; Peter F. M. McLough- lin, "Economic Development and the Heritage of Slavery in the Sudan Republic," Africa 32 (1962): 355-391; Michael Mason, "Population Density and 'Slave Raiding' -The Case of the Middle Belt of Nigeria," Journal of African History X, 4 (1969): 551-564; Mason, "Trade and the State in Nineteenth-Century Nupe," paper for the Seminaron the Economic History of the Central Savanna of West Africa, Kano, 1976; Mason, "Captive and Client Labour and the Economy of the В ida Emirate , 1 857- 1 90 1 , " Journal of African History XIV, 3, (1973): 453-47 1 ;Claude Meillassoux, "Etat et conditions des esclaves à Gumbu (Mali) au XIXe siècle, "Journal of African History XIV, 3 (1973): 429-52; Allan Meyers, "Slavery in the Hausa-Fulani Emirates," in Daniel F. McCall and Norman R. Bennett, eds. , Aspects of West African Islam, Boston University Papers on Africa, vol. V (Boston, 1971), pp. 173-184; R. S. O'Fahey, "Slavery and Society in Dar Fur," paper




that erupted, the most important led to the creation of several large states, including the Sokoto Caliphate, centred in northern Nigeria; the Caliphate of Hamdullahi, in Mali; Segu Tokolor, also in Mali; the Samorian state of Guinea, southern Mali, and Ivory Coast; the theocracy of Rabih ibn Fadl, which originated in southern Chad and the Republic of Sudan but spread to Nigeria; and the Mahdist state of the Nile valley. The effects of these wars was to eliminate or to revolutionise virtually all previous states in the northern savanna, including Oyo, which had been so important in the trans- Atlantic slave trade. Of those states that survived, several (Futa Jallon, Futa Bondu, and Futa Toro, all in Senegambia) had originated in jihad and hence represented earlier, although smaller, examples of the nineteenth-century pattern. Only Wadai and Ethiopia were not upset by jihad , but Wadai nonetheless was allied to a similar Islamic reform movement, the Senusiyya, and Ethiopia continued to supply slaves to the Muslim world and to use large numbers of slaves domestically in a manner not unlike the general pattern. When combined with the impact of European abolition of the slave trade, these political upheavals had the effect of depressing the price of slaves. War created slaves, but the trans- Atlantic markets steadily decreased. The only alternative was to use the slaves within the new states or to export them across the Sahara Desert and the Red Sea. In fact both alternatives were pursued.

Increased slave use within the northern savanna was related to three factors. First, some areas benefited from the rising demand for legitimate trade. Maures along the northern bank of the Senegal River, for example, directed their slaves in the collection of gum arabic, while the southern parts of the Sokoto Caliphate were able to export goods down the Niger River, once steamers began to ply as far north as the confluence of the Niger and Benue.39 Second, the export of slaves

presented at Princeton University, 1977; and "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Dar Fur," Journal of African History XIV, 1 (1973): 29-44; E. Pollet and G. Winter, "L'Organisation sociale du travail agricole des Soninke (Djahunu, Mali)," Cahiers ď études africaines VIII, 4 (1968): 509-534; Paul Riesman, Société et liberté chez les Peuls Djelgôbé de Haute-Volta (Paris, 1974); M. G. Smith, Government in Zazzau, 1800-1950 (London, 1960); and "Slavery and Emancipation in Two Societies" in his The Plural Society- in the British West Indies (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1965), pp. 1 16-161 ; Gabriel Warburg, "Slavery and Labour in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; Jan Hogendorn, "Slave Acquisition and Deliv- ery on Precolonial Hausaland," in R. Dummett and Ben K. Schwartz, eds., West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives (Chicago, forthcoming); Jean Bazin, "Guerre et servitude à Segou," in Meillassou x, L'Esclavage, pp. 135-182; Richard Gray , History of the Southern Sudan, 1839-89 (London, 1961); Lawrence Mire, * * Al-Zubayr Pasha and the Zariba Based Slave Trade in the Bahr al-Ghazal, 1 855- 1 879," paper presented at Princeton University, 1977; Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800-1935 (Addis Ababa, 1968), pp. 73-134; Pankhurst, "The Ethiopian Slave Trade in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Statistical Inquiry," Journal of Semitic Studies IX, 1 (1964): 220-8. 39 Rene Caillie, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo (London, 1830), 1: 90-92; George E. Brooks, "Peanuts and Colonialism: Consequences of the Commercialization of Peanuts in West Africa, 1830-70," Journal of African History XVI, 1 (1975): 29-54; and Lovejoy, "Plantations," 341-68.




across the desert reflected increased purchasing power in Islamic North Africa and the Middle East, where most slaves were employed as domestics, incorporated in harems, and not used in more productive activities.40 Nonetheless, this increased demand is indirectly connected with the general economic expansion of the nineteenth century. Third, and most important, increased demand for slaves was felt most strongly within the northern savanna itself. This related to the reorganisation of society and economy through the various jihads and to the revitalisation of the regional economy that straddled the southern edge of the Sahara. Economic expansion was in part deceptive, since it occurred at the centres of Islamic revival and at the expense of outlying areas, but there appears, also, to have been real growth, in part because there was an absence of extremely serious droughts that periodically ravaged this region.41

One important dimension of this intensified use of slaves within the northern savanna was their concentration on plantations.42 The plantation sector was an old one, dating back to the medieval period, but in the nineteenth century it was a more crucial part of the economy than ever before. Concentrations of slaves, often in their own villages and numbering several hundred or more at many locations, were found around all the major commercial centres, including the northern towns of the Asante state. Thus at Salaga and Bondoukou, both in Asante, a ring of plantations suppled visiting caravans. Similar centres of plantation development were found around Kankan, Gumbu, Sinsani, and other places. Plantations were also common near the capitals of the new jihad states. War captives were settled in defensible positions in order to provide the agricultural and manufacturing basis for sound economies. In some cases output was co- ordinated to supply armies and palace staffs, while in others harvests were sold on the market. These plantations were especially important in large parts of the Sokoto Caliphate, the Samorian state, Segu Tokolor, and the client states of Wadai and the Mahdist state of the Nile valley. In many places slaves constituted well over half of the population, and much, if not most, of this population was settled on plantations. Finally, plantations were found along the southern edge of the desert, where desert nomads and traders were able to settle slaves on estates that could provide regular income from agriculture. Throughout the northern savanna, therefore, plantations were an important dimension of economy and society. Their development, based on merchant capital and aristocratic control of war captives, was quite different from the experience of the Americas. Market forces were more regional, and the level of technology was lower. Nonetheless,

40Bernard Lewis, "The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam," in Kilson and Rotberg, The African Diaspora, pp. 37-56; Norman Robert Bennet, "Christian and Negro Slavery in Eighteenth-Century North Africa," Journal of African History I, 1(1960): 65-82; and Gabriel Baer, "Slavery in Nineteenth Century Egypt," Journal of African History VIII, 3 (1967): 417-441.

4,Lovejoy and Baier, "Desert-Side Economy,"55 1-581 . 42Lovejoy, "Plantations, 341-368; and The Characteristics ot Plantations in tne Nineteenth Century Sokoto Caliphate (Islamic West Africa)," American Historical Review (forthcoming); Roberts, "Maraka"; Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slav- ery," 196-198; and Cooper, "Problem of Slavery."




in this period and for this region, at least, the situation was far from the assimilationist model of African slavery that is often pictured.

The type of slavery that predominated in the northern savanna during this era of intensified use of slaves contained many contradictions. On the one hand Islamic practices, including concubinage, administrative and military employment, and emancipation as a form of alms, continued to operate. Some harems, such as those of the rulers of Kano, Yola, Dar Al-Kuti, and Sokoto, contained hundreds of women, so that palace staffs could number a thousand or more slaves. These establishments alone required the output of numerous plantations. Islamic government allowed for the use of slaves in high offices. Indeed dynastic rivalries encouraged the creation of administrative staffs that were loyal because they were unconnected with factional politics.43 Consequently, throughout the northern savanna, slaves, including eunuchs, were important in the functioning of the Islamic states, and many officials had numerous slaves attached to their positions.

Emancipation, recognised as a pious act and, therefore, very common in these societies that were dedicated to a renewal of faith, was another feature of savanna slavery that distinguishes it from other slave systems. Death-bed grants, court decrees, arrangements for self-purchase, ransoming, and the freeing of concubines with children were common practices. Hence masters could arrange to free those slaves who assisted on caravan journeys and who might even act as agents. Or slaves who traded on their own account could be allowed to purchase their freedom by paying regular instalments. Even the status of slave officials in effect placed them in a category of persons that for most purposes should be included as ''free." That slave officials were not technically free related to their constitutional position. They held appointments that were defined as slave and that were not open to freeborn citizens. Nonetheless, their status should not be confused with the majority of slaves who never had access to such privileges.

The range of uses to which slaves were put and the various avenues to freedom within Muslim society are informative of the particular operation of slavery as an institution in the northern savanna. But the context for these practices must be kept in mind. Most slaves not only lacked special privileges, but they lived close to the subsistence level.45 They worked hard in the fields during the rainy season.

43Fisherand Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society, pp. 127-148; Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," pp. 192-193; and Cordeil, "Dar Al-Kuti." 44 Smith, "Slavery and Emancipation," pp. 1 16-161; and Fisher and Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society, pp. 43-51. 45 Some scholars would argue that free peasants also lived close to subsistence, and that in fact slaves and peasants lived very similar lives. These scholars would still agree that slaves performed the most difficult tasks despite the claim of equality on the basis of poverty. At the same time, the fact that some slaves were used in positions associated with wealth and power is used to balance the generally lower status of most slaves. The issue, therefore, is conceptually muddled. Slaves and peasants were similar, but slaves worked more and harder. Slaves and freemen had comparable political status, but some slaves had rights that derived from political power. The approach adopted here is meant to avoid the problems of the standard interpretation.




spun and wove cotton during the dry season, carried firewood, repaired and built houses, and dug wells. They were granted their own plots and allowed to raise small livestock, but they were also expected to feed themselves when they were not working on the main plantation fields. Extra earnings from retail trading were reduced through payments to their masters, and even the day or two per week that were supposed to belong to the slaves could be cancelled when necessary. The possibilities of social mobility, moreover, were as much a feature of easy access to new slaves as it was to Islamic norms. The distinguishing feature of slavery in the northern savanna, in my opinion, was the close relationship between the practice of slavery and the availability of more slaves. Slaves could be freed, but slaves were cheap and could be easily replaced.

Beyond the borders of the Islamic states, in the hill retreats of independent peasants, in walled towns of ousted aristocracies, and on the plains of the savanna, hidden by the vastness of space, were people who practised other forms of slavery that differed from the Islamic norm. These were the people who were subjected to slave raids and the expansive wars of the jihad states. Many were forced into tributary relationships. Others found themselves in situations of dependency on the very states they fought. Slavery appears to have been found everywhere, but the incidence was much lower than near the Islamic centres, the legal basis of the institution varied from an emphasis on kinship structures to Islamic law, and the rate of assimilation could be quite fast. It is likely that the types of slavery found in these more segmentary societies was exceedingly old, much older than our sources. Vaughan's study of Margi slavery, among others, fits into this category. A crucial dimension of this institution, however, was its marginality, not in the sense that Miers and Kopytoff use in describing slavery as an institution of marginality, but in the sense that slavery among such people as the Margi permitted the sale of individuals in times of crisis so that independence from the Islamic states could be maintained.46 Often the Margi and other people on the frontiers of the major states were forced to fight each other over scarce resources, including people who were passed on as tribute, so that the relationship between these societies and the Islamic states could be indirect and complex. Slavery was a vital institution in this relationship. It allowed the tight control over land and other resources among people who faced the perpetual danger of raids, famine, and the unexpected inability to trade for necessities. Enslavement and the slave trade connected the dominant pattern of slavery in the Islamic states with these peripheral areas, therefore. To consider them in isolation is to miss a fundamental dynamic that has influenced the relationship between Muslims and non- Muslims of the savanna country for centuries.

The second region to be considered in discussing slavery in the nineteenth century is the West African coastal zone. Here the era of "legitimate" trade had its most profound effect, for the location of the British navy off the coast meant that established patterns of slave trading had to be altered. Furthermore, the proximity to Europe meant that this region could benefit most easily from new demand for agricultural goods, particularly palm products, rubber, and other

4(,Vaughan, "Margi," 85-102. Also see the forthcoming Ph.D. thesis by David Tambo.




goods. In this regard, the Senegambia was well situated to export peanuts to Europe. The fight against the slave trade, the shift to legitimate commodities, and the growth of European presence in Sierra Leone, on the Gold Coast, at Lagos, in the Niger Delta, and at Fernando Po have been explored in great detail by historians.47 It only needs to be noted that the transition from slave exports to other commodities did not result in the decline in slave trading and slavery within the coastal zone. Again it is now generally well accepted that the reverse is true: slavery increased in scope. In the Niger Delta and its interior, slavery continued to assume a major role in society and economy, both in the settlement of large concentrations of slaves in new agricultural lands in the northeastern border area of Igbo country and to the development of plantations near Calabar.48 In the Yoruba area, civil war and the collapse of Oyo resulted in many new towns, with large percentages of slaves who were used in the military and in agriculture.49 In Dahomey, which became independent once Oyo disintegrated, the royal family developed its plantations to meet the palm oil trade, while traders, both foreign and native, established other plantations near coastal ports.50 A few of these planters were Brazilians and Europeans. Finally, in Asante, the last of the major slave exporters considered earlier, slaves were diverted into the production of kola nuts for internal West African markets and slaves were used in gold mining, perhaps involving several thousand.51

47 Grace, Domestic Slavery; Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London, 1975); Klein, "Legitimate Commerce," 5-28; Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 124-135; E. Philip LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies , 1821-1865 (New York, 1977); David Northrup, "The Compatibility of the Slave and Palm Oil Trades in the Bight of Biafra," Journal of African History XVII, 3 (1976): 353-74; and Ralph A. Austen, "The Abolition of the Overseas Slave Trade: A Distorted Theme in West African History,' 'Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria V, 2 ( 1 970): 257-74. 48 Northrup, Trade without Rulers ; Kannan Nair, Politics and Society in Southeastern Nigeria , 1841-1906 (London, 1972); Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 37-39; G. I. Jones, Trading States of the Niger Delta (London, 1963): 51-62; E. J. Alagoa, "Long-Distance Trade and States in the Niger Delta," Journal of African History XI, 3 (1970): 3 19-329.

49Law, Oyo Empire, pp. 205-207, 233; Oroge, "Yoruba Slavery"; A. G. Hopkins, "Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos," Economic History Review XXI, 3 (1968): 580-606; and B. A. Agiri, "Aspects of Socio-Economic Changes among the Awori Egba and Ijebu Remo Communities during the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria VII, 3 (1974): 465-83.

50Catherine Coquery, "De la traite des esclaves à l'exporation de l'huile de palme et des palmistes au Dahomey: XIXe siècle," in C. Meillassoux, ed., The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), pp. 107-123; Patrick Manning, "Slaves, Palm Oil, and Political Power on the West African Coast," African Historical Studies 2 (1969): 279-288; David A. Ross, "The Career of Domingo Martinez in the Bight of Benin, 1833-64," Journal of African History VI, I (1965): 79-90; and Robin Law, "Royal Monopoly and Private Enterprise in the Atlantic Trade: The Case of Dahomey," Journal of African History XVIII, 4 (1977): 555-77.

51Terray, "Classes and Class Consciousness," pp. 81-136; and, "Long-Distance Trade," 3 15-345; Edward Reynolds, "Agricultural Adjustments on the Gold Coast after the End of the Slave Trade, 1807-1874," Agricultural History XLVII, 4 (1973); 308-318; and Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 93-94, 177, 264, 675.




Equally important in the transition to the legitimate trade era, parts of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast were brought more fully under the influence of foreign markets, and as was the case in Asante, Dahomey, the Niger Delta interior, and other places, this led to the use of slaves for purposes of carrying goods to the coast and to their settlement on plantations along trade routes into the interior.52 Thus the far western Guinea coast was brought more fully into line with areas further east. Nonetheless, parts of this coast and its interior still remained more isolated, with less differentiated societies, and a lower incidence of slavery than was the general pattern.

Legitimate trade and the European fight against the export of slaves brought with it a new dimension to slavery, namely, the presence of European colonies that offered sanctuary to escaped slaves. These were small in size and few in number, but they increased as the century progressed, and this dramatically influenced areas located close to European positions. Sierra Leone was the first of these, but the French freed slaves in Gorée and St. Louis in 1848, the British did the same on the Gold Coast in 1874, and Lagos, first occupied in 185 1 but made a British colony in 1861, became another focal point of emancipation and sanctuary.53 The activities of missionaries and the recruitment policies of local British and French military officials compounded the problem. The logic of European attacks on the slave trade led to an attack on slavery itself, and despite repeated attempts by the British and French to minimise the effects of general slave emancipation and to satisfy neighbouring African slave owners and rulers that decrees were not meant to upset society and economy in areas beyond formal European control, the general effect was subversive. Even after the external slave trade was no longer an issue with African states and merchants, therefore, the issue of slavery was. The significance of this was profound, since this was the very time when the percentage of slaves in local societies was at its greatest. The

52 Kenneth C. Wylie, "The Slave Trade in Nineteenth Century Temneland and the British Sphere of Influence," African Studies Review XVI, 2(1973): 203-217; Wylie, "Innova- tion and Change in Mende Chieftaincy, 1880-1896," Journal of African History X, 2 (1969): 295-308; Perrot, "Hommes libres et captifs," 482-501; and "Captifs dans le royaume anyi," 351-87; Augé, "Servitude et structure lignagère dans la société alladian," 455-75; and Dwight N. Syfert, "The Liberian Coasting Trade, 1822-1900," Journal of African History XVIII, 2 (1977): 217-235.

53Grace, Domestic Slavery ; Robertson, "Post-Proclamation Slavery"; McSheffrey, "Slavery on the Gold Coast"; M'baye Gueye, "La Fin de l'esclavage à Saint-Louis et à Gorée en 1848," Bulletin de l'I. F. A.N., Série B, XXVIII, 3-4 (1966): 637-656; R. Pasquier, "A propos de l'émancipation des esclaves au Sénégal en 1848," Revue française d'historié ď outre-mer, 54 (1967): 188-208; F. Renault, "L'Abolition de l'esclavage au Sénégal: l'attitude de l'administration française 1848-1905," Revue Française ď histoire ď outre-mer 58 (1971): 5-81; Renault, Lavigerie, Г esclavage Afri- cain, et l'Europe 1868-1892, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971); Renault, Libération d'esclaves et nouvelle servitude (Abidjan, 1976); E. Adeniyi Oroge, "The Fugitive Slave Crisis of 1859: A Factor in the Growth of Anti-British Feelings among the Yoruba," Obu 12 (1975): 40-53; and "The Fugitive Slave Question in Anglo-Egba Relations, 1861-1886," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, VIII, 1 (1975): 61-80.




full impact of this trend was not felt until after ca. 1890, but its origins and the logic of the trend date to the fight against the slave trade.

Patterns of slavery along the West African coast in the nineteenth century reflected contradictions that were similar to those found in the northern savanna. On the one hand slavery continued to be conceived within an ideological framework that was well established, but there were significant variations in the actual treatment of slaves. This ideological setting associated slavery with kinship structures, so that the ideal allowed for the incorporation of slaves into society as full members. In places that were relatively isolated, such as Baule country in the eastern interior of the Ivory Coast, slaves were seldom found in large concentrations, and practice adhered closely to the theoretical norm.54 Wherever plantations were found, on the other hand, slaves had less chance of full assimilation, and their presence in society correspondingly affected attitudes toward slaves in general. Thus in Asante, it was unacceptable to refer to slave origins precisely because slaves constituted such a large portion of the population in some areas and slave origins were often referred to. Indeed whole villages and lineages could be identified as slave.55 The government attempted to adhere to custom by decree, probably as a result of domestic political pressure. Certainly the dynamics of the slavery issue have to be examined in much fuller detail for particular historical situations than has been the case hitherto.

Slaves were such a significant portion of the population of Calabar that their exclusion from the high ranks of the Ekpe secret society was essential, and slaves were used frequently in funeral ceremonies as a form of ostentatious display and, of course, social control. At mid-century the plantation slaves of the Calabar hinterland rebelled against the worst abuses and were successful in forcing reforms. That slave institutions did not conform to the dominant kinship ideology is perhaps best reflected in the constant problem of escaped slaves, particularly those who fled to European installations once these became havens of freedom. It appears that European missions at Calabar in the 1840s and 1850s affected local developments, just as British interference on the Gold Coast, culminating in emancipation at British positions in 1874, had influenced the course of change in Asante.56 As Oroge has shown for the Yoruba region, moreover, fugitive slaves arriving in Lagos reached crisis proportions in 1859 and continued to plague British- Yoruba relations for the next three decades.57 Is it not likely that such an 54 Mona Etienne, "Women and Slaves: Stratification in an African Society (The Baule, Ivory Coast)," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 1976; Timothy C. Weiskel, "Labor in the Emergent Periphery: From Slavery to Migrant Labor among the Baule Peoples, c. 1880-1925," paper presented at the Agrarian History Conference, Columbia University, 1977. A. N. Klein, "Inequality in Asante"; and Wilks, Asante, p. 34. 56 Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 91-96; Nair, Southeastern Nigeria, pp. 48-54; Robertson, "Post-Proclamation Slavery"; McSheffrey, "Slavery on the Gold Coast"; E. J. Alagoa, "Nineteenth Century Revolutions in the Eastern Delta States and Calabar," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria V, 4 ( 1 97 1 ): 565-574; and for a contemporary account, William H. Marwick, William and Louisa Anderson: A Record of their life and work in Jamaica and Old Calabar (Edinburgh, 1897).

?7Oroge, "Crisis of 1859," and "Fugitive Slave Question."




influence would promote assimilationist tendencies during this period? That escape offered such a viable alternative for slaves suggests that, even with reforms, domestic slavery was harsher than some scholars would admit.

Slavery in Bantu Africa, the third region to be considered for the nineteenth- century period, underwent an expansion that was similar in scale to the tremendous increase in the number of slaves in both the West Atlantic coastal area and in the northern savanna. The impact of this intensification was somewhat different for Bantu Africa, however. On the one hand "traditional" patterns of slave use continued, although the scale was so much larger that the impact of this "indigenous" slavery was more profound than had been the case earlier. As in the period of the trans- Atlantic slave trade, which in effect continued in Bantu Africa for a longer period than in most parts of West Africa, slavery remained closely associated with the incorporation of people through adoption into kinship groups, marriage, and military conscription. On the other hand, the "intrusive" slavery associated with the European presence in South Africa and elsewhere and with plantation agriculture in East Africa and in the Indian Ocean expanded dramatically. In effect these developments, which began in a modest way during the last half of the eighteenth century on the Mascarene Islands, represented the extension of the South Atlantic System to the Indian Ocean. The combined impact of both trends was towards massive enslavement, greater use of slaves domestically, and closer ties with the world economy.

The region as a whole suffered from waves of armed conflict and raiding.58 In

58 E. A. Alpers, The East African Slade Trade (Nairobi, 1967); Alpers, "Trade, State, and Society among the Yao in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of African History X, 3 (1969): 405-420; Alpers, "The French Slave Trade in East Africa (1720-1810)," Cahiers d'études africaines X, 1 (1970): 80-124; Pierre Bonnafé, "Les formes d'asservissement chez les Kukuya d'Afrique centrale," in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage, pp. 529-555; Adolphe Louis Cureau, Les sociétés primitives de l'Afrique equatoriale (Paris, 1912); Lewis Gann, "The End of the Slave Trade in British .Central Africa," Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 16 (1954); Gerald W. Hartwig, "Changing Forms of Ser- vitude among the Kerebe of Tanzania," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 261-285; Allen Isaacman, "The Origin, Formation and Early History of the Chikunda of South Central Africa," Journal of African History XIII, 4 (1972): 443-462; Allen Isaacman, "Central Africa History, 1800-1880," in J. F. A. Ajayi (ed.), The UNESCO History of Africa, vol. VI (forthcoming); Isaacman and Isaacman, "Kaporo," 105-120; Henry H. Keith, "Masters and Slaves in Portuguese Africa in the Nineteenth Century: First Soundings," Studia 33 (1971): 235-249; Andrew Roberts, "Nyamezi Trade," in Richard Gray and David Birmingham (eds.), Pre-Colonial African Trade. Essays on Trade in Central and East Africa before 1900 (London, 1970), 39-74; John Lamphear, "The Kamba and the Northern Mrima Coast," in Gray and Birmingham, Pre-Colonial African Trade, pp. 75-101; Phyllis Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576-1870 (London, 1972); Joseph C. Miller, "Cokwe Trade and Conquest," in Gray and Birmingham, Pre-Colonial African Trade, pp. 175-201; M. D. D. Newitt, "An- goche, the Slave Trade, and the Portuguese, c. 1844-1910," Journal of African History XIII, 4 (1972): 659-672; R. P. Charles Tisserant, Ce que j'ai connu de l'esclavage en Oubanqui-Chari (Paris, 1955); Thomas Tlou, "Servility and Political Control: Bot- lhanka among the BaTawana of Northwestern Botswana, ca. 1750-1906," in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in America, pp. 367-390; Arthur Tuden, "Slavery and Stratification




the Zambezi valley , chikunda bands, the slave regiments from the Portuguese and Indian prazos , raided for slaves, and some of these soldiers even severed their connection with the prazos to form the nucleus of an independent ethnic group, Chikunda. From ca. 1820, other bands of warriors, associated with the political upheavals referred to as the difiqane and initiated by the Zulu in South Africa, spread northwards, and they, too, took slaves, many of whom were incorporated into their own ranks. In the Angola interior the Cokwe undertook similar expansion. Initially they hunted for elephants, collected beeswax, and searched for rubber, but they raided for slaves, too, and eventually were responsible for the disintegration of the Lunda state of the mwaat yaav. From East Africa, Arabs, Swahili, and Nyamwezi vied for power, slaves and ivory under the dynamic leadership of such men as Tippu Tip, Msiri, Mirambo and others. Similar slave raiding spread south from Ethiopia and the Nile valley, so that areas that had previously been beyond the pull of the slave trade no longer were. All these cases demonstrate that the slave raiding frontier had greatly expanded.

Many of these developments were indirectly associated with the demands of legitimate trade. Until slave exports from the Zambezi valley and Angola were finally ended in the 1850s, many captives, particularly males, were exported. Other captives were used domestically often in connection, with the export of legitimate goods. From the 1850s, the Cokwe, in particular, were involved in exporting legitimate commodities - ivory, beeswax, and rubber, but a byproduct of their ravages was the enslavement of many people. They were particularly interested in women and children, whom they incorporated into their villages, even founding whole villages with such captives. Similarly, the Çobangi of the Congo River continued to incorporate large numbers of slaves in support of their commercial domination of the river traffic. Along the river, the requirements of trade meant that slave women became wives and farmers, while slave men became canoemen, and commercial agents, with the opportunity for promotion, de facto emancipation, and full access to the upper sections of Bobangi society, including the possibility of establishing independent commercial firms. In many ways the Cokwe and Bobangi were representative of earlier patterns of commerce and slavery.59 They were both oriented towards supplying the export market, and their patterns of incorporation were similar to those established during the period of slave exports to the Americas. The major change in the Angola and Congo interior during the nineteenth century, besides the general increase in the number of slaves in society, was the attempt by the Portuguese to found a plantation economy in the interior. The plantations of São

among the Ila of Central Africa," in Tuden and Plotnicov , Social Stratification in Africa, pp. 47-58; Jan Vansina, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880-1892 (London, 1973): C. M. N. White, "Clan, Chieftainship, and Slavery in Luvale Political Organiza- tion, Africa 27 (1957): 59-73; and Marcia Wright, "Women in Peril: A Commentary on the Life Stories of Captives in 19th Century East Central Africa," African Social Research 20 (1975): 800-819; J. D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath. A Nineteenth- Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (Evanston, 111., 1969). Joseph Miller has been particularly helpful in the formation of my ideas on the Bantu region. Miller, "Cokwe Trade," 175-201; and Harms, "Bobangi."




Tomé and the Luanda hinterland provided the precedence for this interest, and the trend towards the abolition of the trans- Atlantic slave trade provided the incentive. Beginning in the 1830s, but reaching a modest level of expansion only in the 1870s and 1880s, a few dozen coffee plantations, using slave labour, were founded in Cazengo, inland from Luanda.60

By far the more important development in plantation agriculture occurred along the East African coast, where Arab and Swahili merchants established plantations to produce cloves, grain, and coconuts for export, and here, along with related developments in the interior, the connection between the increased incidence of slavery and the expansion of legitimate trade was most pronounced.61 Most of the production along the coast was destined for the markets of India, but islands further out in the Indian Ocean, including Mauritius and Reunion in the Mascarene Islands, but on the Comoro Islands, too, produced sugar, coffee and indigo. Europeans were the major investors in the Mascarenes, while Europeans and Arabs both developed the Comoros. This plantation sector had great similarities with the plantation economy of the Americas, as Cooper has shown for Pemba, Zanzibar, and the Swahili centres of Mombasa and Malindi. The system also extended into the interior, where slaves were procured. Along the trade routes, Swahili, Arab, Nyamwezi, and Yao founded plantations that supplied the caravans of ivory, slaves, and other goods. These inland plantations differed from the coastal ones in that they did not produce commodities for export, but they were a necessary dimension of a system of slave supply for the production and export of legitimate goods.

In South Africa, Dutch slavery was extended into the interior during this period, expecially after 1830 when English laws for slave emancipation were enforced.62 Dutch settlers, now referred to as Boers, spread inland with their slaves, now called "apprentices," and cattle, and for the rest of the century slavery remained an important aspect of frontier life. The Boers were able to take advantage of the devastation of th edifiqane wars, which had cleared the best land of settlement. Now Europeans and their slaves took over, and the basis of a racist South African society was established. Unlike other areas of European expansion in Africa during the nineteenth century, the movement of the Boers inland did not encourage the flight of slaves from African societies. A parallel movement, the founding of missions, did offer some sanctuary, however. The missions enforced British laws of emancipation in Natal and other coastal areas, but the Boers remained independent inland until the mineral wealth of South Africa led to the

60 David Birmingham, "The Coffee Barons of Cazengo," Journal of African History XIX, 4 (1978): 525, 528-529, 535, 538.

61 Alpers, "Yao in the Nineteenth Century," 405-20; and Cooper , Plantation Slavery, pp. 47-113.

62Edwards, Towards Emancipation, ch. VI; Greenstein, "Slave and Citizen, 25-46; T. R. H. Davenport, "The Consolidation of a New Society: The Cape Colony," in Wilson and Thompson, South Africa 1: 272, 292-3, 305-6; Leonard Thompson, "Co-operation and Conflict: The Zulu Kingdon and Natal," in Wilson and Thompson, South Africa, 1: 355; Thompson, "Co-operation and Conflict: The High Veld," in Wilson and Thomp- son, South Africa, 1: 437, 445.




British defeat of the Boer states at the end of the nineteenth century. Thereafter British antislavery laws were enforced everywhere in South Africa.

In the region of Bantu Africa, and particularly evident for the nineteenth century, slavery varied considerably in practice. Indeed, different slave systems can be thought of as falling on a continuum, ranging from the relatively benign varieties in many small-scale societies in the interior to the relatively harsh plantation type of the East African coast.63 Following this approach, we see a mild slavery in some small-scale societies, a type of military slavery that incorporated men into the army and women into marriage, a commercial slavery that used captives as porters and as farmers, and plantation slavery.

Certainly there were societies in which slavery remained closely associated with marriage and kinship structures and was relatively mild. The Sena of the Zambezi valley, the BaTawana on the borders of the Kalahari Desert, and the Kerebe on the shores of Lake Victoria provide three examples.64 In these cases there were few slaves, at least for the early part of the nineteenth century, as far as can be known. Nonetheless, some Kerebe acquired more slaves later in the century and put these slaves to productive uses. The Sena never had this possibility. Slave raiding and warfare kept the scale of society small, and their slavery shared the characteristics of slavery among the Margi; i.e., they were among those raided rather than among those benefiting from the institution. Similarly, the BaTawana appear to have developed an institution of slavery only late in the nineteenth century, apparently when the larger developments of the d ifiqane and the general increase in enslavement expanded to their area. All these cases on this end of the continuum lead towards a consideration of the militaristic and commercial dimensions of slavery in Bantu Africa, for their particularisms cannot be understood without reference to larger, regional developments.

The dynamic factor in nineteenth-century slavery was the activity of Sudanese Arabs and Ethiopians in the north; Swahili, Arab and Nyamwezi from the east; Chikunda and the bands of the diflqcine in the central and south; and the Cokwe in the west. These movements resulted in the incorporation of captives into the armies of enslavement and political consolidation. All these groups used relatively advanced military technology, either increasingly sophisticated firearms or the Zulu-type regimental formation with short, stabbing spear and shield, to overwhelm the opposition. Both techniques of warfare allowed for an economy based on plunder, and captives could be coerced into co-operation through the superior force and organisation of the raiders or encouraged to participate through the incentive of booty. Slavery, therefore, allowed for incorporation. It was an effective means of recruitment, and it resulted in the rapid spread of these exploitive systems.

Military expansion had its parallel commercial networks that were most fully developed among those dependent on firearms, although even for the difiqane

63 An approach that considers different slave systems as falling on a continuum is suggested in Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 15-20.

64Issacman and Isaacman, "Kaporo," 105-120: Tlou, "BaTawana," 367-389; and Hart- wig, "Kerebe," 261-283.




bands trade was necessary. Cokwe, Yao, NyamWezi, Arab, and Swahili all traded to the coast for firearms among other goods. Slaves were sometimes used as porters and they were settled at defensible locations along the trade routes to raise crops. Here we see a transition towards a type of slavery that is more restrictive in the possibilities of incorporation. The tendency culminated in the plantation slavery of Zanzibar, Pemba, Mombasa, Malindi, the Mascarenes, and the Comoros . Indeed Portuguese slavery in Angola and on São Tomé also fits into this model. Only European slaverý in South Africa, which also falls on the harsh end of the continuum, was not directly related to other slave institutions in the same way that East African plantation slavery was dependent upon the enslavement process and the institutions of slavery in the Bantu interior.

If we compare the developments in Bantu Africa with those elsewhere in Africa, we find a similar continuum in the institution of slavery, but its evolution occurred much earlier than for Bantu Africa. As has been shown above, slavery existed in a relatively mild form at the edge of the major political and economic developments, and in these peripheral places slavery often allowed for incorporation on the basis of equality or nearly so. The striking feature of slavery in the northern savanna and along the West African coast was the division between the military and commercial sectors. Bazin, Meillassoux, and Roberts have examined this dichotomy most fully for the Islamic areas, but it seems that a similar pattern is evident along the coast, too, although the commercial sector was more tightly controlled by the coastal states, at least until the nineteenth century. This split between enslavers and producers widened very rapidly in Bantu Africa in the nineteenth century. Although there were some local variations, moreover, enslavers and producers tended to be more separated geographically than was the case in other regions. Elsewhere, slaves were concentrated at the centres of the states responsible for the acquisition of the greatest number of new captives. In Bantu Africa, most productive activity was on the East African coast, along the trade routes that supplied the external trade, and in the European enclaves. The closer integration of slavery with enslavement outside Bantu Africa highlights the most impressive difference that distinguishes the Bantu region from the other regions, the greater level of social and economic disintegration. Despite the tremendous increase in the numbers of slaves everywhere in the nineteenth century, slave raiding and war in Bantu Africa caused more destruction, particularly since no new political order, comparable to the Islamic states of the northern savanna, emerged that offered the possibility for a new stability. People were transferred, as slaves, into productive activities in Bantu Africa, but it is unlikely that the resulting output even approached the productive potential because of the extreme waste of the enslavement process. The intensity of the destruction in nineteenth-century Bantu Africa brings into sharp focus the overall negative effects of the long history of enslavement, the slave trade, and slavery on African society and economy.

The last period in this discussion of African slavery, i.e., from 1890 to 1940, is a transition period that is closely associated with colonialism. The spread of Christian missions, the operations of colonial armies, and the intellectual opposition of Europeans to slavery provide the background for this transition. Slavery




was abolished in some areas, but it persisted in many. European policy was far from uniform, but the general trend was to eliminate slave raiding and kidnapping, to abolish the slave trade, and, finally, either to emancipate slaves or to allow for the gradual demise of the institution. Nonetheless, the legacies of slavery have been profound. The attempt here is only to suggest some of the implications of the analysis presented above. The exploration of the period from 1890 to the present, which requires a complete re-examination of archival, published and oral material, is likely to reveal many new avenues of interpretation. If there are "new directions" in research, it is in this period.

Colonialism had a great levelling effect, despite some local variations. It forced people to adhere more closely to the ideal in the treatment of slaves, for now slaves had recourse through flight, with minimum chance of recapture. They could escape by moving to missions, freed-slave villages, or simply into the interior.65 Large tracts of land were vacant, stripped of people by slave raiders and colonial armies. New and expanding cities offered sanctuary for people stigmatised with the status of slave. The flight from slavery was systematically ignored by the colonial regimes reluctant to report home that now all was well in the colonies. In French West Africa, whole areas that were dotted with plantations experienced mass escapes, particularly around 1905. 66 The same was true in British Northern Nigeria, the former Sokoto Caliphate. In the Igbo area, the Aro headquarters were destroyed by British troops, and slaves flocked to the many missions that rapidly spread through the countryside. The response of the colonial regimes was to check this flight.67 They hoped for a more gradual emancipation that would not upset the economy.

In this period of transition, three trends stand out that need to be examined in light of. the above analysis that emphasises the importance of slavery. First, in some parts of Africa the colonial regimes introduced an intermediate stage in the abolition of slavery in which they relied on forced labour. Corvées were raised for public works, including railroad construction and road maintenance. European commercial firms and farmers had access to similar corvées in some places. In French West Africa, military conscription from World War I through World War II constituted a particular variation in coerced labour.68 Second, those slaves who did not flee when colonial rule was instigated often found themselves in a situation of tenancy.69 Third, the relationship between migrant labour and the rise

65McSheffrey, "Slavery on the Gold Coast"; Wright, "Women in Peril"; Oroge, "Crisis of 1859," 40-53; and "Fugitive Slave Question," 61-80; G. O. Olusanya, "The Freed Slaves' Homes - An Unknown Aspect of Northern Nigerian Social History, "Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, III, 3 (1966): 523-538. 00 Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," 195-196; and Roberts, "Maraka." Klein and Roberts are preparing a paper on the fugitive slave question in French West Africa. 67 Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," 194-195; Cooper, "Problem of Slavery"; A. E. Afigbo, "The Eclipse of the Aro Slaving Oligarchy of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1901-1927," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria VI, 1 (1971): 3-24; and F. D. Lugard, Political Memoranda (London, 1906). 68 Myron Echenberg, "Paying the Blood Tax: Military Conscription in French West Africa, 1914-1929," Canadian Journal of African Studies IX, 2 (1975): 171-192. 69 See the forthcoming study of Frederick Cooper, referred to in "Problem of Slavery."




of wage labour at very low rates must be examined for possible connections with the end of slavery.70 Certainly, in Central and Southern Africa, migrant labour on European farms and in European mines very quickly transformed the African peasantry into a working class, albeit that the characteristics of this working class were very different than in the development of working classes elsewhere in the world. Nonetheless, areas that had had a very high percentage of slaves in ca. 1900 were the homelands of migrant workers in ca. 1920, and few households in many of these areas had men who had not worked in the mines or on European farms. Migrant patterns in West Africa were similar, although it was the farms and plantations of Africans that was the usual destination of workers. To what extent were these migrants of slave origin?

The examination of the three regions in different historical periods reveals that the institution of slavery expanded until the end of the nineteenth century, and indeed in some places until the first decade of the twentieth century. This expansion and its consequences in terms of developments in the institution of slavery have been linked to the external trade in slaves and commodities dependent upon slave labour. This connection meant that there were focal points in the geographical extension of the institution; at these nodes there tended to be more slaves and the institution was more fully developed. Furthermore, in areas of more extensive slave use there tended to be a dichotomy between economic and non-economic uses for slaves. It now remains to examine some of the implications of these findings.

The first implication is that slavery in Africa was extensive in nature, rather than intensive. This distinction is meant to convey a number of points. First, it reflects the general tendency for the institution to expand into new areas, so that by the nineteenth century it was common virtually everywhere. Second, it is meant to provide a contrast with slavery in the European world, where slaves were concentrated in the Americas and were extremely marginal in Europe itself. This also contrasts with the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East in recent centuries, where slaves were found but in nowhere near the numbers that were found in sub-Saharan Africa. Third, slavery in Africa was extensive in that slaves were used in a wide variety of ways, again in contrast with the Islamic world north of the Sahara and with the European world. African slaves were used in craft production, mining, agricultural work, commerce, the military, administration, funerals, and as concubines and wives. By contrast, only the non- productive activities were common for slaves north of the Sahara, and only productive employment was typical of the Americas. Africa, therefore, combined the economic orientation of the Americas, although to a lesser degree, with the characteristics of service, both domestic and political, of the Islamic world. The more extensive nature of slavery in Africa and the weaker links to the

70 See, for example, Samir Amin, ed., Modern Migrations in Western Africa (London, 1974); Martin Klein, "From Slave Labour to Migrant Labour in Senegambia: Southern Saalem 1880-1930; (Boston: African Studies Association, 1976); and J. U. J. Asiegbu, "British Slave Emancipation and 'Free' Labour Recruitment from West Africa," Sierra Leone Studies XXVI (1970): 37-47.




European economy meant that African slavery, while it had features of slavery in the larger Islamic world and the Americas, was distinct.

The extensive nature of slavery in Africa, both in the range of occupations for slaves and in the geographical area affected by the institution, has been reflected in the debate over terminology that has characterised the discussion of servile institutions in Africa. The term 4 4 slave" presents problems for some scholars because of its association with the legacy of slavery in the Americas, particularly plantation slavery.71 Here this difficulty is dismissed because slavery is considered a condition that allows for the purchase and sale of individuals, and in this sense slaves are chattel. Every slave system has had its own peculiarities with different rights and obligations, but classical slavery, European slavery, Islamic slavery, and African slavery are still systems of slavery. There is a common dimension that allows for comparison. The distinction found in some writings on Africa, "domestic slavery", attempts to distinguish the African type but still is a term meant to counteract the identification of slavery with slavery in the Americas.72 It is confusing because it emphasises the domestic unit when slaves were used extensively in mines, on plantations, and in other situations in Africa. Hence it is no more accurate as a generic term for slavery in Africa than plantation slavery is for slavery in the Americas.

The term 4 'captive" is useful, but not as a substitute for "slave," although it commonly is a substitute in the literature in French especially.73 People were captured in wars and kidnapped, but their fate did not end with the act of capture. They could be killed, ransomed, sold, or kept as slaves and all these possibilities reflect the relative powerlessness of the slaves. To call captured individuals "captives" once they were incorporated into institutions, commercial or otherwise, confuses their status with their means of enslavement. A similar observation can be made about 4 'adopted dependency. ' '74 This term substitutes a characteristic of slavery for the institution itself. It is meant to emphasise the predomi- nance of a kinship ideology, where people are defined by their relationship to a lineage structure. The crucial test, however, is whether individuals were fully assimilated or whether they could still be sold.

Another term that confuses the problem further is "pawn".75 Clearly pawns were theoretically distinct from slaves because pawns had recognised kinship affiliations and were technically being held for debt. The debt was held and usually could be transferred, but the pawn was not chattel. Nonetheless, pawns could become slaves, and apparently many did. The distinction between pawn and slave became blurred in some places, particularly in the nineteenth century. Strictly speaking, however, the transition from pawnage to slavery was illegal

71 This problem is discussed in Cooper, "Problem of Slavery"; and Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery. ' ' For a statement on the difficulties of the term, see Kopytoff and Miers, "African 'Slavery,' " 76-78.

72Grace, Domestic Slavery, 1-20. "bee, tor example, many of the chapters in Meillassoux, L'Esclavage ; and Mason, "Captive and Client Labour."

74Isaacman and Isaacman, "Kaporo," 110-118. 7S Douglas, "Pawnship," 301-313.




and was comparable to kidnapping. It happened; it was accepted; but it was not legitimate.

"Serf" is perhaps the most confusing term used to refer to those in servile institutions in Africa.76 Its use confuses the fact that there was great variety in the practice of slavery and that some situations resembled medieval feudalism. But European feudalism had a strong connection with rights over land, with individuals tied to those rights. This did not prevail in Africa. Nor could such a system develop as long as new slaves were readily available and land was plentiful. Control over land was crucial, which depended upon military strength, to be sure. The fragmented nature of precolonial Africa, the importance of militarism, and the existence of servility suggest a similarity, but serfs were seldom sold. Slaves often were.

This debate over terms should be taken for what it is: an indication of the prevalence of servile institutions, and hence proof of the extensive nature of slavery in African society and economy. Indeed the debate assists in clarifying a basic conceptual problem. All the terms have some validity, even serfdom, as it is applied to the interlacustrine kingdoms before the middle of the nineteenth century. It may be that other terms will prove helpful, too, but the basic usefulness of "slave" will probably continue to be accepted.

The wide range of occupations and functions for slaves in Africa, which are here identified as a crucial dimension of the extensive nature of African slavery, was related to the low level of technological development in Africa. Slaves performed many functions because there were few economies of scale which permitted a more intensive use of slave labour. Essentially, slave labour was linearly cumulative. More slaves could produce more, but the total output was probably about the same as that for the same number of peasants. The advantage was in control over output and in political power derived from greater numbers of dependents. We see greater concentrations of slaves, but we do not see major breakthroughs in production as a result of these concentrations. Hence, African slavery demonstrates an important characteristic of slavery in general; the retarda- tion of technical innovation; only in Africa this tendency was more severe than in the Americas.

During the course of the Atlantic slave trade, there were only two major technological advances which affected the general pattern of slavery.77 The first was in the range of food crops, which increased as a result of the introduction of maize, cassava, potatoes, peanuts, and other crops from the Americas. This innovation had a profound effect on diet, crop management, and probably total output of the agricultural sector. Its influence on population is unclear, although it is often assumed that it contributed to some demographic expansion. The new

76Derman, Serfs, 27-30; Johnson, "Mašina," 481-496; and Uzoigwe, "Slave Trade," 205.

77 H. Gemery, and J. S. Hogendorn, "Technological Change, Slavery and the Slave Trade," in C. J. Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact. Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London, 1978) pp. 243-258; and J. E. Inikori, "The Import of Firearms Into West Africa 1750-1807: A Quantitative Analysis," Journal of African History XVIII, 3 (1977): 339-368.




crops had little, if any, effect on the technology of production. The new crops were added to the agricultural economy, but they did not give an advantage to large producers, nor did they lay the foundation for increased craft production which might have required a more efficient use of labour, either slave or free.

The other major technological innovation was in warfare, and this change had a more direct effect on slavery. As H. Gemery and J.S. Hogendorn have shown, the introduction of firearms and the organisation of armies along lines which could maximise the use of such weapons greatly increased the ability to enslave people.78 Though not in itself a productive activity, it led to greater enslavement and the transfer of manpower into centralised states and to the external slave trade. However, firearms did not shift the balance in terms of more intensive use of slaves. In fact technological change in military ability meant more slaves and reinforced the extensive nature of the institution. It kept prices down, and it increased the concentration of slaves, which were used in production because of their availability. And of course, it contributed to the involvement in the external slave trade. The shift to "legitimate' ' trade led to greater concentration of slaves, but still there was little technological change which affected production strategies. Slavery was more a function of political factors (i.e. , those best able to amass slaves could put them to work) than economies of scale.

The most significant technological change, therefore, affected the ability to enslave people and market them as slaves. Theoretically, we see the development of special institutions of enslavement and trade. These sophisticated methods included the following: 1 ) enslavement as an organized state affair; 2) distortion of customs relating to pawns; 3) manipulation of religious and legal codes; 4) arrangements for commercial credit.

First, enslavement became an organised state affair. Bazin, Meillassoux, Klein, and Roberts have explored the division between the military and commercial sectors of Islamic society in order to demonstrate that the martial spirit of the warriors enabled the institutionalisation of slave raiding.79 Hogendorn has explored the actual operation of a raiding band in the Sokoto Caliphate.80 Before the тщог jihads this organised slave raiding of the northern savanna operated within an Islamic context, but the soldiers themselves were not particularly associated with Islam. Commercial networks were so associated, however, and the general treatment of slaves was within an Islamic framework. Islamic holy war intensified this pattern, for jihad allowed enslavement and encouraged the mass socialisation of conquered people in order to expand Islamic society. In the West African coastal zone, the division between the enslavement process and slave trading also operated, although in the cases of Asante and Oyo the state organised both. Nonetheless, as Law has shown for Oyo, friction between the Oyo king ( Alafin ) and his council (Oyo Mesi) was partly related to the division between

8Gemery and Hogendorn, "Technological Change," pp. 243-258. y Bazin, "War and Servitude," 107-143; Klein, "Wolof and Sereer," 340-345; C. Meillassoux, "Correspondence," Economy and Society VII, 3 (1978): 321-331; Meil- lassoux, "Les Enfants du néant (essai sur l'esclaviagisme)," Economy and Society, forthcoming: Roberts, "Maraka."

80 Hogendorn, "Slave Acquisition."




trade and war. T healafin dominated the export trade and received a considerable income from taxes on trade, but he was not allowed on the battle field, while the nobles of th eoyo mesi organised raiding parties.81 There was a similar division in the interior of the Niger Delta. The Aro, who dominated the trade to the coast, arranged for mercenary groups to enforce decrees and raid for slaves.82 A martial spirit was characteristic of these groups that was comparable to such savanna warriors as those among the Bambara. Finally, the upsurge of enslavement and warfare in Bantu Africa, as has clearly been established above, was also characterised by the formation of military parties, including Arab, Nyamwezi, Chikunda, difiqane groups, and Cokwe, who specifically raided for slaves. Clearly there were great variations in the organisation of these various structures of enslavement, and the relationships with the commercial sector were different. Nonetheless, the pattern stands out: slave raiding was a well organised affair.

Second, existing servile institutions, particularly pawning, were seriously altered in order to permit enslavement. This is particularly evident among matrilineal societies.83 The tensions within the matrilineal structures of Bantu Africa encouraged the incorporation of women and children in order to circumvent marital and inheritence norms. One way of bypassing kinship principles was through the acquisition of pawns, who then were the dependents of the creditor and in some cases became de facto members of a temporary patrilineal descent group. It was temporary because, upon the death of the creditor, matrilineal principles again prevailed. Hence slavery and enslavement were related to the tension within matrilineal societies between, on the one hand, the desire of individuals to acquire wealth and position in ways which circumvented strictly matrilineal methods and, on the other hand, the matrilineal rules of inheritence which broke these units upon the death of the successful individual. Nonetheless, the contradiction within matrilineal societies meant that slaves were desired as much if not more than pawns. In the case of slaves, alienation was permanent, and hence dependency was, too. Here, it is likely that the influence of the trans- Atlantic slave trade was quite profound in the development of slavery as an institution. Its roots were in the contradictions of society, if not in the institution of pawnship itself. It meant that pawns were occasionally, at first, and then perhaps increasingly, converted into slaves, so that by the nineteenth century in many places there was little distinction between slave and pawn.

The third means by which enslavement was institutionalised was in the manipulation of religious and legal codes. The Aro Chukwu oracle is perhaps the most notorious example. From a cave lined with human skulls and dug in the side of a steep hill at Aro Chukwu, the oracle sentenced large numbers of people to

81 Law, Oxo Empire, pp. 65-82, 189-201, 217-236. 82Northrup, Trade without Rulers ; F. I. Ekejiuba, "The Aro Trade System in the Nineteenth Century," Ikenga I, 1(1972): 1 1-26; and I, 2 (1972): 10-21; Ekejiuba, "Igba Ndu: an Ibo Mechanism of Social Control and Adjustment," African Notes , VII, 1 (1971-72): 9-24; and N. Uka, "A Note on the 'Abam' Warriors oflgbo Land " Ikenga I, 2 (1972): 76-82. Also see Lovejoy and Hogendorn, "Slave Marketing," 228-230.

83 Douglas, "Pawnship;" Rey, "L'Esclavage lignager;" Miller, "Imangala; Miller, "Cokwe;" and N. Klein "Inequality in Asante."




export, all under the guise that the oracle demanded payment in slaves for its verdicts.84 Less spectacular but perhaps as important distortions of customary law and religious practice occurred in many places. Sale of individuals into slavery became a more and more acceptable punishment for crimes, witchcraft, and debt, and in some places the families of convicted criminals were also subject to sale. Kidnapping, often officially discouraged within states but whose victims were still legally bought and sold openly, was an equally serious breach of the law.85

Fourth, commercial arrangements were also adjusted to. encourage enslavement and trade. These have been analysed elsewhere for West Africa.86 Credit was closely associated with the slave trade. European and Muslim merchants advanced goods to middlemen, either on the African coast or in the northern savanna, and they expected payment in slaves. Often raiding parties were specifically sent out in order to secure slaves to settle these accounts, but in many places middlemen who in turn extended credit to others were an essential part of these credit facilities. Such practices required currencies that were acceptable over wide areas, and they required governments and secret societies that could enforce payment.

These patterns in the organisation of enslavement and the slave trade establish that political and economic power was centralised within specific areas. There were political elites and merchants, and these owned the greatest number of slaves. Slavery itself is an excellent indicator of the degree of social stratification within Africa during all periods. Where the institution was most fully developed and where the most slaves were located, we find the greatest social differentiation. Nonetheless, this differential access to political and economic power should not disguise one important feature of African history that was both a byproduct of slavery and the slave trade and a contribution to enslavement and the existence of the institution of slavery. That feature was the political fragmentation of the African past.

In all periods Africa was divided into small states and societies. Only a few states can qualify as relatively large, although they, too, were not as large as contemporary states elsewhere in the world, except in medieval times. After the fall of Songhay in the 1590s, the trend was for the maintenance of a fragmented Africa, whose very fragmentation was essential to the enslavement process and influenced the nature of slavery as an institution. Historians of Africa who have searched for states and documented their history have exaggerated their influence and scope. States have been found among the smallest populations, and the term "empire" has been used generously. This preoccupation of scholars with the identification of political units has distorted the dominant theme of political fragmentation, in which warfare has been endemic, with the result that enslavement was institutionalised. If we examine the boundaries of several of the largest

84Northrup, Trade Without Rulers; Ekejiuba, "Aro Trade," 13-15; and Lovejoy and Hogendorn, "Slave Marketing," 228-229.

85 See many of the chapters in Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, and in Meillassoux, L'esclavage. 86 Lovejoy and Hogendorn, "Slave Marketing," 213-235.




states, eighteenth-century Oyo and early nineteenth-century Asante, we see that Oyo only incorporated southwestern Nigeria and parts of the modern Republic of Benin (Dahomey), while Asante' s boundaries were roughly identical with modern Ghana, except that some territory in the northwest of Ghana was beyond the frontier and parts of neighbouring Ivory Coast were incorporated. The Sokoto Caliphate, probably the largest precolonial state since Songhay, was a confedera- tion of emirates which contained pockets of independent towns, hill retreats, and tributary populations which were raided at times. Even including these independent and semi-independent areas, it stretched from eastern Upper Volta to central Cameroons, a distance of approximately 1300 kilometres. From north to south, it reached about 650 kilometres. In Bantu Africa, no states reached this scale, and none of the other Islamic states of the nineteenth century were this large.

Impressed by the impact of slavery, the enslavement process, and the slave trade, some scholars have been led to consider slavery fundamental to the political economy of precolonial Africa. This debate centres on the Marxist concept of a "mode of production," a term used in analysing the economic, political, and social organisation of society. Terray, for example, has suggested that slavery was essential to the Abron "social formation," and he has advanced the idea that other modes of organisation were dependent upon slavery.87 This analysis has been accepted by Martin Klein, with whom I concur in broad outline.88 A concentration on the mode of production has a number of advan- tages, many of which should be apparent in this paper. First, the scale of the institution by the nineteenth century was considerable, with slaves constituting a majority of the population in many, if not most, areas. Second, economic and political power was closely associated with the institution of slavery. Third, the dynamic part of African society was often related to the expansion of slavery as an institution. Fourth, slavery and its expansion were connected with the export of slaves in the formative periods when political and economic consolidation occurred in the most centralised and developed parts of the continent. The result, in effect, was the creation of social formations that varied from one part of the continent to another but all of which were closely associated with slavery.

The disadvantage of this line of reasoning is that it is too easy to lose sight of the empirical base. While it draws attention to the fundamental importance of

87 Terray, "Classes and Class Consciousness," 129; and "Long-Distance Exchange," 33 1-333. My understanding of the Marxist debate has been greatly assisted by a series of seminars held in Toronto in 1977 and 1978. These discussions included Martin Klein, Richard Roberts, Russ Chace, Mark Goodman, Richard Lee, Michael Bodemann, Bernd Baldus, and Karen Anderson, among others.

ss Martin Klein, "Slavery as an Institution and Slavery as a Mode of Production: Some Reflections on African Data," paper presented at the University of Toronto, 1978. Also see Klein and Lovejoy, "West African Slavery," 207-12. For a critique of this view, see Cooper, "Problem of Slavery." It should be noted that Klein and I disagree on certain dimensions of this issue, specifically the recognition of a separate "slave-producing" mode of production. The full implications of this difference cannot be explored here. We are both in agreement that the "mode of production" concept does not emphasise the key role of slavery in economy and society.




slavery, the problems with definition and generalisation have spawned much disagreement. This can be seen with reference to some of the controversies within this school of thought. First, not all Marxist scholars (including Meillassoux, who is perhaps the most influential theorist in the debate) have recognised a separate mode of production based on slavery.89 Suret-Canale, for example, argues that the dominant social formation was similar to those found in Asia; Coquery- Vidrovitch has argued for a distinctly African mode, based on commercial exploitation; and Meillassoux, Rey, and others have identified a lineage or domestic mode, to which slavery was an adaptation.90 Second, how many types of social and economic organisation were there? Terray has suggested that hunting and foraging, lineage-based production, and slavery all operated side by side as distinct social formations, thereby diluting the usefulness of the concept.91 Third, Klein and Roberts have argued that there were two modes of production related to slavery, one based on slavery as a productive form of organisation and the other based on the 4 "production" of slaves through enslavement.92 They, in effect, extend the idea of the production of slaves from the metaphorical level to a model of social organisation. All these approaches have their problems, but in my opinion they have the advantage of emphasising the relative importance of slavery in the African context.

Whether or not the 4 4 mode of production" debate proves useful, it is hoped that the argument presented here has identified some parameters for further discussion. The recognition of four periods and three regions establishes that there was an increase in enslavement, the slave trade, and slavery from medieval times until the end of the nineteenth century. The relationship that began between Black Africa and the Islamic world and then extended to include Europe and Africa instituted changes in which both the process of enslavement and the incidence of slavery increased, first in the Islamic belt, later in the Atlantic coastal basin, and then everywhere. It is this historical process, including the extension of enslavement and the increased concentration of slaves, that reveals the structural links in the institutionalisation of slavery. Expansion over time was the historical trend. The relationship between enslavement, the slave trade and African slavery was the synchronic dimension. In short, the trend in the social, political, and economic organisation of Africa, despite regional variations, was the development of a social formation that was rooted in slavery. The transformation of this basic structure did not occur as a result of internal changes, moreover.

89 Meillassoux, "Correspondence," 321-333; "Enfants;" "Introduction," L'Esclavage, pp. 18-21; "Modalités historiques de l'exploitation et de la surexploitation du travail," (forthcoming); and Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris, 1976). 90 Jean Suret-Canale, "Les Sociétés traditionalles en Afrique tropicale et le concept de Mode de Production Asiatique," Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes, Sur le 'Mode de Production Asiatique (Paris, 1969), 101-33; C. Coquery, "Recherches sur un mode de production africain," La Pensée 144 (1969): 61-78; Meillassoux, Femmes, graniers, et capitaux; and Rey, "L'Esclavage lignager." 91 E. Terray, Marxism and 'Primitive' Societies (New York, 1972). 92 Klein, "Mode of Production," and, especially, Roberts, "Production and Reproduc- tion."




It required the imposition of colonialism, and the legacy, directly related to the long history of slavery and enslavement, was one of economic underdevelop- ment, rapid social change in the twentieth century, and political instability in the independent states of the post-colonial period. Colonialism introduced its own problems, of course, but it did so in a situation where drastic change was forthcoming anyway.




Commentary One

Igor Kopytoff University of Pennsylvania

Recently, I chanced upon two items in the Times Literary Supplement that made me wonder if, in my innocence of historiography, I had not discovered a pattern. In the August 4, 1978 issue, a review by Pulían began as follows: "Historians of Venice's religion divide quite sharply into two camps. Some see Venice as an exotic bloom, a flower in the wilderness of Counter-Reformation Italy, a last heroic defender of the sovereignty of the lay prince;" others "see Venice as a confessional state with deep roots in orthodox Catholicism." 1 Before I had time to ponder whether Venice might not possibly have been all these things, I came upon another review, by Brock, in the September 1 5 issue. It began with a by now familiar juxtaposition: "Was American Populism a vain attempt to recapture the lost world of Thomas Jefferson or the precursor of modern radicalism? Was it the last peasants' revolt or a seedbed for twentieth-century reform?"2

Clearly, there are scholars for whom a historical event, or a social movement, or a multi-faceted institution must be as a concrete object - an "it" - and "it" must be one thing or another, or at least "primarily" or "essentially" one thing or another. William James called it a tender-mindedness that cannot abide ambiguity, uncertainty, complex identity, or multiple causation. This tender- mindedness has not spared discussions of "slavery" in Africa. Again and again, the questions are posed: is "it" benign or harsh? familistic or impersonal? a kinship or an economic phenomenon? an imported or an indigenous institution?

The insistence that "it" - African "slavery' ' - must have a unitary nature is not unrelated to other concerns. To the later nineteenth-century imperialist, "its" existence gave moral justification to colonial occupation. To the mid-century Anglo-American liberal - notably including the anthropologist - "it" was also a repugnant symbol - and therefore not a subject to be dwelt upon at a time when Africans were claiming the right to independence. To many a 1960s black nationalist, "it" was best assigned to the corruption of European expansion - and if he were also a socialist, a corruption to be confined to African chiefs. Finally, to the Marxist andth tmarxisant of the 1970s, "it" was an incipient class phenomenon, a form of labour exploitation, hidden perhaps but as nasty as any other and not to be excused by the sophistries of a culturally relativistic analysis.

To many historians and anthropologists, however, the cultural perspective and the epistemological issues it raises remain a necesary though insufficient condition of understanding. This perspective permits questions that the others often by-pass: What did "it" mean to Africans? Where did "it" fit into their cultural and social systems? Was there, in fact, a unitary "it" - an African "slavery" - or was there a multiplicity of patterns, that, though different, varied

1 Brian Pulían, review of The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605, by Paul F. Grendler, in Times Literary Supplement, 4 August 1978, p. 884. 2 W. R. Brock, review of Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, by Lawrence Goodwyn, in Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1978, p. 1029.




in terms of enough common principles that a model, common to all, is possible? And if so, are Western concepts such as slavery, freedom, subordination, and property, appropriate to the sociological and cultural realities that the model is meant to represent?

These are not empty quibblings over definitions, for these terms carry semantic and therefore theoretical implications. Relatively vague, connotative definitions are useful when gathering the initial data, since they cast a wide net that captures a large number of cases for analysis. But when the goal turns analytical, denotative definitions become necessary, since everyday "commonsensical" terms usually carry with them a semantic halo that implies an analytical model of some kind. Take the English word slave. It implies in its common usage at least three components: 1) the acquisition of more or less total rights over a person; 2) the subsequent use of that person as labour; and 3) the low and overwhelmingly subordinate status of the person. These components cling together not logically but as a matter of Western experience as it is popularly perceived. I am talking here about modern Western semantics and not the actual sociology of Western slavery. We know, for example, that slaves in the New World were not all used as labour units. Nevertheless, the popular semantics seem to prevail in our percep- tions. When Western observers encounter a slave (as defined by the first component of acquisition) who is a minister of state or a military commander, they single him out for special comment - if not for themselves, then at least for their readers. Why? Because these cases startle us by a lack of fit between our concepts and a new reality. Where before we had taken for granted the connection among the three components, we now discover that the connection is neither natural nor logical.

If there is one lesson that even a cursory look at various societies teaches, it is this: acquiring a person is one thing and using him or her is another, and the two should be keep conceptually and analytically separate. The first fact simply does not determine the substance of the second. It is not illegitimate, of course, to go on from there and define slaves explicity as persons acquired and used as units of labour. But one should not, then, claim that one has demonstrated that slavery is a labour institution after one has selected one's cases of 4 'true slavery" by resorting to the labour definition.

My own preference for Africa is in line with the definition previously used elsewhere.3 The definition focuses on the single unambiguous element of "acquired person" and his or her sociological descendants - the acquired person being one who has lost his or her social identity, who is not permitted to leave his

3Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, "Introduction: African 'Slavery' as an Institution of Marginal ity," in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977), p. 18. (This anthology will hereafter be cited as Slavery in Africa.) In spite of this formal definition, which permeates our entire analysis, Robert Harms in "Slave Systems in Africa," History in Africa 5 (1978): 327-335, states that we fail to define "slavery" and quotes us to the effect that we consider such definitions "a fruitless exercise in semantics" ( Slavery in Africa , p. 7). The quotation, however, refers to our expressed scepticism about universal definitions of slavery that would be applicable throughout the world and history.




or her hosts, and the insti tutionalisation of whose new social identity is in the hands of the acquisitors (involving whatever cultural constraints this implies). The task that follows is, then, to analyse the range of institutions surrounding such acquired persons in different African societies. The approach leaves entirely open for investigation such matters as the use made of these persons, their status, their position in existing cultural categories, and the relation of all these to such factors as the economy, the external trade, the political system, exogenous or internal change, and so on.4 The further goal is to put all these facts together into a single model - facts from different African societies and from the same societies over different periods.

I have raised two intertwined issues: that of explicit definition and that of systemic analysis. The issues, are it seems to me, central to Paul Lovejoy's paper in this volume and to much of the current discussion of African slavery.

Lovejoy gives us a regional periodisation of historical African systems of slavery. The periodisation synthesises an immense amount of material and it should prove exceedingly valuable for broad overviews of African history. Since the periodisation is closely tied to external factors - Islam, the European presence, colonialism, abolition, and so on - it should integrate very well with other externally-based periodisations. Lovejoy's synthesis also reflects some current approaches to the subject in a form manageable enough to set out very clearly the terms of the argument about African slavery.

I began this paper by objecting to unitary labels for complex historical phenomena. Yet, from a certain point of view, the procedure is a necessary one. If the historian's ultimate goal is to contribute to an unfolding story, to a developing sequence of events - in short, to a plot line - then each act in the drama must have a relatively unambiguous and unitary character, with a clear impact on the plot line, be it about Venice, American radicalism, or African history. In this, most of us accept what Herbert Butterfield has said so well about the dangers of "whiggishness" (of whatever kind), when the chosen plot line guides the selection and interpretation of events. The cure lies not in the eventual discovery of the one true plot, through some final transfiguration of H. G. Wells' Outline of History, but in the extraction of many more, often competing, pfòt lines. Paul Lovejoy's is one such plot line. From the perspective of African actors, it may be summed up as: "How did they affect us?"

But there is also another way to approach the same material, more sociological than historical. Here, events and phenomena are selected not with reference to

4 This approach does not pre-determine, for example, the extent to which a system of acquired persons must be a system of labour exploitation. This clearly upsets some established images. Martin Klein in "The Study of Slavery in Africa," The Journal of African History 19 ( 1978): 599-609, sees the approach as "hostile of Marxist analysis." Claude Meillassoux, on the other hand, in his review of Slavery in Africa in African Economic History 5 (Spring, 1978), criticises it as a veiled attack on "vulgar materialism intended as an attack on Marxism. Descriptively, I suppose, Meillassoux may be right, though the approach could also be taken by others as a veiled attack on Platonism or even Calvinism. But since Meillassoux himself presumably disapproves of vulgar materialism, why the criticism?




their sequence but to their relation to one another and to their context - in brief, with an eye to a system. Where the storyteller tends to compress space (by taking a region rather than an ethnic group as his universe) and to expand over time, the system-seeker expands his several villages into a universe and compresses time by dwelling on the continuity of that universe. Only when the system itself can be said to change does he notice a possible plot line. His first impulse, when things change, is to see whether the change cannot be understood as an oscillation within the system. Frankly, he is happier with this view, just as the storyteller is happiest when he finds yet another twist in the plot. The resulting syntheses are different. The storyteller joins the various plot lines into a grand play of events leading to other events. The system- seeker integrates the various systems into a grand model of interacting elements.

As an anthropologist, I prefer to begin an investigation with such a systemic approach and to take it as far as it will go. But as one who sees cultures and societies as being above all historical products, I am especially interested in the ways in which a historical story line can be made more systemic and the outcome of systems more historically rooted. To say it less pompously, there is, it seems to me, an important and instructive relation between the history of southwestern France and Le Roy Ladurie's fourteenth-century village of Montaillou. Since my own disciplinary starting point is with the Mountaillous of Africa, my comments on Lovejoy's paper must be taken in that light.

The idea of system and systemic analysis is directly contrary to the tendency to see complex phenomena as being one ''thing" or another. A systemic approach takes phenomena as dynamic clusters of inter-related components that co- vary in (one hopes) predictable ways. A system is never a frozen thing. Rather, it is more like an algebraic equation, such as the formula s =</%ek, in which all the values are open. Let us say, in a wild fit of oversimplification, that s here stands for slavery, e for economics, and к for kinship organisation. That is, in Africa, slavery is stated to be simultaneously a function of economics and the kinship organisation in any particular society. In different circumstances, and depending on the specific state of economics and kinship relations, slavery assumes different guises or what I shall refer to as different "postures."5 A successful model would express the range of postures (some of them as yet unrealised) of which the system is capable.

Take, for example, the issue of the use of acquired persons as labour units, as opposed to their familistic use as kinsmen and quasi-kinsmen. We find that, in case after African case, when the possibility of profiting from the labour use of

5 Fred Gearing in "The Structural Poses of 18th Century Cherokee Villages," A merican Anthropologist 60 (1958): 1 148-1 157, has proposed a very useful concept in his analysis of Cherokee social organisation, that of structural pose. It refers to the periodic or transient social structures that express a common set of underlying principles. Gearing uses it to analyse variety within a cultural system. Since I am talking here about the various expressions of an underlying pan- African model, I use the term posture to avoid a terminological confusion. For an example of how common principles can yield different structural postures, see Clifford Geertz, "Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure," American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 991-1012.




acquired persons rises, such use increases. The one-thing-or-another approach would interpret this as a kind of transubstantiation of slavery from familistic and benign into economic and exploitative. A systemic approach, by contrast, sees here at work a system of allocation of acquired persons among alternative uses. At any time, the system exhibits different postures, representing different mixes of these uses and of their combinations. Thus, in the absence of important trade outlets, acquired persons may all be predominantly used as relatives. The qual- ifier "predominantly" is important. If the system is to be understood, one must examine the exceptional cases - no matter how few - that àppear in this overall posture of familism. Thus we in fact find occasional but contextually consistent cases of economic use of acquired persons as labour units and exchange units. Labour use, then, is not absent here but has simply a low value. To characterise the entire system as familistic is therefore to misrepresent it. When trade outlets expand, the response of the system is to increase labour use. The posture becomes more economic. But here too there is the danger of misperception. For the familistic use of acquired persons continues; it is only its relative weight that has declined (its absolute weight may, in fact, have risen). Excellent examples of this kind of systemic analysis (with many more variables) of the shifting uses of acquired persons are to be found in the studies of the Vai by Holsoe, the Duala by Austen, and the Imbangala by Miller.6

I shall refer to the one-thing-or-another approach as "essentialist" (one is tempted to call it Platonic idealist). While necessary in some kinds of discourse, the approach always risks interpreting changes in posture as changes of essence. Since it is a synthetic approach, it is usually unprepared to examine analytically which other postures are potentially possible within a system and it tends to ignore the implications of minor and exceptional clues from the past. In historical study, when one always reconstructs from clues, an essential ist approach precludes one from doing what archeologists sometimes refer to as "predicting the past."

By concentrating on modal patterns, essentialist approaches tend to misper- ceive the co-occurence of dominant patterns within a posture as necessary and causal. Such pseudo-causality is illustrated by Cooper's "continuum" of slave use7 - from slaves as kinsmen in small-scale societies one moves on, as social complexity increases, to slaves as dependents, as dependents-cum- workers, and finally as workers.8 The theory behind the continuum is roughly functionalist: a direct relationship is assumed to exist between benignity and smallness of scale and parochialism, and, at the other end, between exploitation and largeness of

ftSvend E. Holsoe, "Slavery and Economic Response among the Vai (Liberia and Sierra Leone)," in Sim ery in Africa, pp. 287-303; Ralph A. Austen, "Slavery among Coastal Middlemen: The Duala of Cameroon," in ibid., pp. 305-333; Joseph C. Miller, "Imban- gala Lineage Slavery (Angola)," in ibid., pp. 205-233. 7 Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977) pp. 253ff. 8 In fairness to Cooper, it may be noted that the argument for this simplistic continuum, deriving from his dissertation, is belied by the more complicated view of African slavery in his book's introduction which, unlike the dissertation, draws upon wider theoretical material and recent comparative analyses of African slavery.




scale. (There is also here the very modern Western assumption that kin-like ["social"] relations are inherently more benign rather than merely more complicated, and that "sociality" contrasts with exploitation.)

A systemic approach would reject these connections as necessary. It would stress that harshness and exploitation are not absent in small-scale societies but simply less frequent and perhaps more situational.9 Similarly, benignity is not absent in more complex societies, where it tends to occur in the familial and domestic sector - in which, incidentally, the use of slaves as kinsmen may be considerable. 10 In brief, a systemic approach attempts to construct a model of the sociology of the African use of acquired persons that would predict the various postures of the system under different sets of conditions. These postures, it should be stressed, are found in Africa in different societies and in the same society over time. The model may thus be used both in comparative and historical analyses, but is per se ahistorical.

In his paper, Lovejoy discusses historical change. But having left the definition of what he means by "slavery" in limbo, he treats it in essentialist terms, with a leaning toward an economic, labour-use, "property" meaning. He thus tends to equate development of the institution with the rise in it of labour-use. Sometimes, however, he resorts to other criteria, with inconsistent results. For example, when slavery in western Central Africa is numerically large-scale but is not preponderantly a matter of labour-use, Lovejoy still refers to it as "slavery" but points out that it was primarily a "political institution." Yet, when Lovejoy moves into the gathering dusk of the past, the implications of the political criterion are abondoned. Since he assumes that the development of slavery must be related to the external demand, he concludes that before the Islamic and European demand appears, slavery must have been a "marginal" phenomenon -

marginal in some undefined sense. The conclusion rests on the assumption that pre-Islamic and pre-European Africa had little internal economic and political dynamism - an assumption that I should like to address now.

Behind Lovejoy's historical and developmental model, there lurks the evolutionary image that things become simpler as we go back into the past and

4Kopytoff and Miers, pp. 56ff. 10The eagerness of many analysts to get on with the labour-economics of it all is striking. The moment a slave system begins to show clear sign of labour exploitation, attention turns in this direction and away from other uses. Thus, for Klein in "The Study of Slavery in Africa," exploitation in some places means that "it" - African slavery - must be exploitative in general. If this leads not to assertions but to a scrutiny of seemingly benign systems, it is fruitful. The danger is that the discovery of subtle exploitation in benign systems may lead one to treat African slavery as if it were a man who been putting up a jovial front for years and then reveals his true nature when, in an unguarded moment, he is caught snarling at the waitress. It is also necessary, if we are to understand seemingly labour-exploitative systems, to have figures on the numbers of slaves who functioned as kinsmen in the same way that they did in small-scale societies with apparently more benign systems. One especially needs such figures for complex but non-Islamic societies, in order to control separately for the factors of complexity per se and of Islamic tradition per se.




more complex as we move forward in time. But this assumption - that history expresses itself in exponential curves - is very misleading indeed when one deals with a score of centuries rather than with several millenia. For example, we know better now than to assume, because we have no written records for the West European Bronze and early Iron Ages, that the economic and political dynamism of that period must have been less impressive than it was during the Roman period. Nor is the idea tenable anymore that the later pre-history of Western Europe consists mainly of echoes of what went on in the eastern Mediterranean.

The exponential-curve view of African history sees its pre-Islamic and pre- European past as necessarily simple: dominated by small-scale societies, it could only have had minimal or marginal slavery, and developed slavery came only with the external slave-trade. There is also a corollary to this. When Lovejoy finds numerically large-scale slavery in Central Africa after the Atlantic trade had lapsed, he attributes the high figures to the lingering impact of the Atlantic trade and not to any possible internal factors. That is, small-scale and parochial societies on their own are seen to be capable only of marginal slavery. A small exercise in figures is in order here. For matrilineal Central Africa, let us assume that a matrilineage loses one out of ten of its women members every generation through sale, debt payments, fines, compensations for homicide (real or mysti- cal), tribute, and kidnapping, and that the matrilineage also acquires an outside woman every generation. This rate of replacement of blood members with slave members is predicated on social patterns that need have no relationship what- soever to external trade, Islam, or the European impact; these patterns are widespread among small-scale societies around the world (though without the specific African legal definitions and sociological consequences of these transactions). Under the above assumption, and given matrilineal inheritance of slave status, the proportion of slaves in the matrilineage will rise to about forty percent ( 1 - .95) in five generations - that is, in about 1 25 years. Even at a one-in-twenty replacement rate, the proportion will be almost twenty-five percent over the same period. This indicates that in at least some slave systems, purely internal and commonplace structural factors can result in very high proportions of slaves in the population.

There is another issue which has bedevilled discussions of African slavery and which is clarified by a systemic approach: this is whether African slavery - or a particular type of it - is an economic as opposed to a social institution. The terminology is in itself confusing. An institution is always social - it is an organisation of social relations around particular matters: kinship, power, supernatural affairs, or goods-and-labour (economics). Most often, institutions are concerned with slices of several of these matters at once. Thus, the modern Western family is simultaneously concerned with kinship and economic matters, not a few technological matters, and some religious ones. In Africa, the family is also concerned with these, but with rather more attention to the supernatural. Institutions are never really uni-functional - if for no other reason than that social life is never uni-dimensional.

There are, moreover, some serious epistemological problems here - problems worth mentioning because they haunt every analysis of non-Western




societies (as well as pre-modern Western societies). It is sometimes said that while Western institutions are specialised and primarily social or economic or political or religious, institutions in other societies are more often "multi- functional . ' ' Thus, African chieftaincy is said to be simultaneously a political and a religious institution. But this conclusion results from an ethnocentric illusion. Our very vocabulary of functions in the West - "economic," "political," etc. - necessarily reflects the particular Western institutional clusterings of structure and function. It is not so much that our political institutions are uni-functionally political as it is that the meaning we give to the term "political" in our folk usage is one that reflects what certain of our institutions do. Hence, we prefer to say that a Congressional act on taxation is a political act, though with economic consequences, and an increase in steel prices an economic act with political repercus- sions.

It is not surprising, then, that when we apply this vocabulary to other societies, things fail to fit and institutions become strikingly multi-functional. But African chieftaincy is no more multi-functional than the United States Congress is uni-functionally political. African chieftaincy is, functionally speaking, quite focussed - it is concerned with community well-being and community power, and therefore with gods, royal ancestors, crops, taxes, litigation, and so on.

In their descriptions, scholars tend to use Western terms in their folk meaning and there is little damage in it. But when the same terms are put to conceptual use, difficulties appear, analytical confusions proliferate, and arguments over definitions begin to flourish. Once we step outside modern Western society, it is not idle to debate what "political," "economic," or "religious" can be usefully made to mean. To dismiss the problem is to assume that an English institutional vocabulary was meant by Providence to fit the institutional arrangements of all the societies of the world.

What goes for functional terms also goes for the central terms in our definitions. There is a problem that continues to creep into discussions of African slavery - namely, whether African slaves were owned and whether they were property. Miers and I have dealt with this issue at some length.11 Yet, subsequent comments show that the argument needs restating.12 "Ownership" and ''property" are, cross-culturally speaking, uninformative terms, whether used for land, objects, or people. They merely hide the actual complex of social relationships in a society. Hence the often paradoxical results when African terms are rendered in English by "to own' ' : an elder brother may turn out to own his junior sibling, and the master of a dog to be the dog's chief. "Property" and "ownership" in Western folk usage imply a relationship of person to object. Analytically, however, the relationship is a social relationship between persons about the object. The features of this social relationship can vary a great deal among societies. Even in Western society, it is the analytical meaning that actually prevails. My owning my house means that I can do certain things with it - but not

11 Kopy toff and Miers, pp. 7-12. 12 See, for example, Klein, "The Study ot Slavery m Atrica, and Lovejoy m tne paper under discussion.




anything I like, since the State and my neighbours are parties to this relationship, with a say about what I can and cannot do. For an Eskimo or a Polynesian or an African anthropologist, to understand what Americans mean by own requires a fine-grained analysis of all the rights and obligations that are clustered around the house. And the same goes for the Western scholar in Africa.13

Two final points need be mentioned in connection with systemic approaches. One has to do with statements in the literature - and in Lovejoy's paper - that in African small-scale societies, slavery is a "kinship institution," or that it is "associated with kinship structures," or that this is "the theoretical norm" in these societies. There is also the attribution to Miers and me of the contention that African slavery rests on kinship and that kin-group assimilation is the African norm.14 This is an essentialist misreading of two systemic points that we did stress.15 One was that African kinship systems tend, culturally, to elaborate systems of rights-in-persons, that they involve exchanges of wealth for rights- in-persons, and that, consequently, African kinship systems and systems involving acquired persons (whom we call slaves) possess some common denominators that allow the two systems to overlap - allow, be it noted, rather than require. This is not a theory of origins nor a statement of some fundamental essence. Secondly, we said that in kin-group-structured African societies, the road to non-slave status naturally lay in the direction of incorporation into a kin-group, usually the acquisitore', and of greater sociological attachment to it. This is in contrast to Western slavery, in which the road to non-slave status lay in freedom, that is, autonomy and detachment from the acquisitors. All this does not make African slavery kinship-based. It simply means that it interacts systemically with kinship systems in a particular way, just as Western slavery interacts with them in its particular way - by repulsion rather than attraction.

The point may be more formally stated by going back to the original algebraic formula that I suggested as an example of a system: s =Уек. Here, the terms of the equation are interchangeable. The formula also says, for example, that к =yes - that is, that the posture of the kinship system at any one time is related to both the economic and the slavery postures.

The kind of structural-functional model I have been advocating is by no

13The analytical vagueness that comes from applying the term to culturally different contexts is well illustrated by Klein, "The Study of Slavery in Africa," 601 . He claims that African slaves were "owned" because his informants in Senegal referred to them as their "property." But we are concerned here with Wolof and not English semantics. Klein's argument is entirely circular: he translates the Wolof term X as "property" and then considers the case proven when X is applied to slaves. But what does X mean in Wolof? To what other relations among persons and objects is it applied? It is used, we are told, for cattle. But because X applies to cattle in Senegal and "property" applies to cattle in Montana does not make the two terms institutionally equivalent. The question must be resolved by proper semantic analysis and not by the use of the first handy English gloss that comes to mind.

l4Harms, "Slave Systems in Africa": and Klein, "The Study of Slavery in Africa," p. 601.

,5Kopytoff and Miers, pp. 22-26.




means static. Quite to the contrary. It is worth reminding those outside anthropology that far from being unable to explain change, functionalism is indeed the only way to deal with change. Unless one has determined which things are related to which, and how, one cannot trace the consequences for the system of changes in one element of it. 16 When functionalism is attacked - as it has often been of late - for failing to deal with change, the target is a particular form of it, by no means universally espoused in anthropology and least of all in American anthropology: namely, equilibrium functionalism. Non-equilibrium functionalism, on the other hand, characterises necessarily almost all dynamic social analysis, from Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx, through Boas, Durkheim, Lowie, and Benedict, to Linton or Herskovits (and even Malinowski when he wrote of complex societies).

Hence, structural-functional models are indispensable to the historical analysis of Africa. While all history is reconstruction, African history involves a rather large amount of it. Reconstruction implies some kind of projection onto the bare bones of the past of notions that the analyst has picked up somewhere, consciously or unconsciously. These notions are many and subtle: they include assumptions about human nature, African cultural patterns, the hierarchy of values and motives of historical actors, structural-functional relations among institutions, and the kind of process that human history is. The idea of a placid pre-sixteenth century Central Africa, for example, exhibiting only faint "servile institutions," is a projection of a particular notion about the harmonious nature of small-scale societies and an exponential view of the development of complexity in history. The objection to this projection is not that it is a projection but that it is one based on an essentialist rather than systemic picture of historically known small-scale societies.17

16 For a discussion of this see, for example, Francesca Cancian, "Functional Analysis of Change," American Sociological Review 25 (1960): 818-827.

17 Modern Westerners appear to prefer dramatic rather than mundane explanations of the origins of slavery, perhaps on the principle that great events require great causes and remarkable institutions require remarkable explanations. Traditional varieties of servitude are institutions of such moral enormity to us that commonplace explanations will not do: we want the product to contaminate its source. Even the early evolutionary anthropologist Edward Taylor, so adept at gradual istic developmental explanations, saw the origins of slavery in warfare (Anthropology, 1900 ed. [New York, 1881]). More recently, Meillassoux in his "Introduction," C. Meillassoux, ed., The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), stressed that a slave is "necessarily the product of an act of violent capture. * ' And Klein, 4 'The Study of Slavery in Africa," 602, approvingly echoes this view: "every [sic] slave originated in an act of violence." I am not sure whether violence brands people sociologically unto the third or unto the seventh generation, but we must find a place in all this for slaves who were born as kinsmen into the loving arms of their free and slave relatives. We also need room for those who were abandoned as babies and were picked up by the Kerebe, the Margi, the Fulani, and others. One can see violence in these origins only if one so bends the metaphor as to make most of social organisation an "organisation of violence." By contrast, if one accepts these various institutions - so widespread historically - as relatively commonplace, no more exotic than most other unpleasant human habits, then less dramatic and more placid explanations become more acceptable. Indeed, one




This also applies to warnings 18 about the danger of projecting the condition of slaves and the statements of informants about it in colonial times into the pre-colonial past. These warnings, however, do not mean - as Klein19 and Lovejoy see it - that no functionalist projections can be made. On the contrary, the warning arises precisely from a functionalist understanding of variations in informants' behaviour. Present-day informants are under certain constraints to present an attractive picture of slavery in the past; hence, a direct essentialist projection of what they say into the past is invalid. But this functionalist understanding of today's behaviour allows us to make a more sophisticated projection into a past in which these constraints did not exist. It is not as if systemic guesses about the past do not suffuse all historical writing. The question, then, is whether they are to be based on known African cultural realities or on implicit and randomly constructed social and psychological models.

I have so far dwelt on the internal systems of use of acquired persons in the African past. These internal systems, however, were connected in various ways with external systems, such as networks of trade, wider political forces, the diffusion of new weapons, the spread of new ideas, and so on. In his paper, Lovejoy make the impingement of these external forces the main criterion for his historical periodisation of African slavery. Now, no one would argue that the external system was not important to the developments in Africa. Where I find myself uncomfortable is with the suggestion, throughout the paper, that - to quote some key statements - "slavery in Africa can only [sic] be analysed within the context of world slave trade," that "slavery was institutionalised" when African systems were adapted to "external purposes," and that "African slavery was a response not only to European needs but to trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean demands as well," internal African conditions being of no apparent importance. For pre-contact Africa, Lovejoy recognises only what he calls "indigenous servile institutions" but not "slavery," for a reason left unex- plained.

The problem with the exclusive stress on the external system is that it prejudges issues that remain to be investigated. It assumes in advance a lack of internal African dynamism before the coming of Islam and the Europeans, and it leaves the initiative in subsequent periods to the outsiders . In a way reminiscent of the "old African history," Africa only responds. This is glaringly evident, for example, in the works that Lovejoy lists in his footnote ( 1 2) about the relationship between African slavery and the external trade. The focus is on the impact of the Atlantic trade on Africa, but where, one cannot help but ask, are the studies of the reverse influence, as dealt with, for example, by Curtin and Hopkins.20

wonders, given the ubiquity of these institutions, whether what requires special explana- tion is not the presence of slavery but the historical instances of its absence and its tendency in recent times to disappear as an individually-controlled institution.

,8Kopytoff and Miers, pp. 75ff. l9Klein, 'The Study of Slavery in Africa," p. 601. 20 Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975); and Anthony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973).




It is, on the face of it, unlikely that when two systems are related, the flow of influence is all one way. An example of the reverse flow, given by Curtin,21 is worth our attention: the sex ratio in the slave exports from Africa - long a puzzle to Caribbeanists - was determined by the characteristics of the internal African market, in which Africans preferred to retain women and sell the men. This, in turn, is related to the extensive African use of acquired women as mates and reproducers of kinsmen. And this extensive use, in turn, is possible only in cultural settings where unrestricted polygyny exists, where (in contrast, say, to Europe) men's marriageability is an inexhaustible and flexible social resource, one that can be used to serve many different goals, such as group expansion, political alliance, food production, sexuality, romantic infatuation, and so on.22 Now, polygyny is a cultural characteristic of the internal African system, and one of immense importance to its particular systems of slavery. We can easily gauge the implications of a system in which men's marriageability need not be hoarded, so to speak, when we try to imagine a Tudor England whose Henry VIII had similarly inexhaustible marriage resources!

In analysing the relationship between systems, the systemic approach looks at the reciprocal relations between parts of the systems and not at the essential relationship between systems taken, each, as an indivisible whole. An analogy may be useful here. In the history of the fur trade, the demand for furs in Western Europe certainly had a very important impact on Russian history, the growth of Novgorod, its competition with Moscow, the Muscovite conquest and administration of Siberia, the fate of Siberian indigenous societies, the shifts in their economies, and, finally, the ecology of Siberian fur-bearing animals. But it would be foolhardy to insist that in all these systemic links, the external factor is always the determining one and the internal is always passive - that all causalities work from West to East. Ironically, far from being general, such a scheme risks becoming extremely specific and history extremely idiosyncratic. In this chain of uni-directional causation, the farther away one gets from Siberia, the deeper one gets into Europe and into the vagaries of the European fur-market and its esthetic preferences for one fur over another. Do we have here the makings of an esthetic determinism of world systems?

In fact, much depends on the specific nature of each of the many links between two systems. For example, from the external perspective, the Suku of southwestern Zaire (among whom I did research) were "suppliers of slaves" and are so regarded in all regional surveys of the trade networks of western Central Africa. But what was the nature of the link between the historian's broadly viewed trade system and the internal Suku system of transfers of rights-in- persons? In effect, A handed a person to В , and В gave another person to C, and С to D, and so on. At the periphery, Z gave one to Y and also "traded" (as we now say) one to a passing Lunda or Chokwe. The latter fact is not negligible in its

2lCurtin, pp. 175-177. 22 See, for example, Adam Kuper, "Preferential Marriage ana polygyny among me Tswana," in Studies in African Social Anthropology; Meyer Fortes and Sheila (Patter- son, eds.) (London, 1975), pp. 121-134, on the marriage strategies of Tswana men.




implications, but it sheds little light on the use to which A and D and Z put a person that they had acquired and kept.

There is no simple relationship between being linked into the external slave- trade and the forms of internal slavery. For this reason, I find it difficult to understand Lovejoy's objections to Vaughan's description of Margi internal slavery as a "limbic institution," encompassing those whose social identity defined them as marginal to true Margi identity.23 Lovejoy mistrusts what he sees as a benign description because the Margi also supplied people to neighbouring Islamic states. But he expects a correspondence between internal and external systems which simply need not be there. Even when the two are closely linked, as were the coastal Duala with the Atlantic trade, the sociology of internal slavery is still not derivable from the facts of the external system though changes in the structural postures of the one can be related to changes in the other. As Austen points out, the sociology of Duala slavery differed from that of the Niger Delta, although both areas had very similar links to the external system.

The external perspective pre-selects for analysis certain kinds of variables over others. It focusses one's attention on certain items: slaves as coinmodities, salt, iron, palm oil, cloth, guns, and so on. This tends to create the impression that these items shaped the dynamics of African societies and dominated African decisions. This kind of archival selectivity is not unfamiliar: for medieval Europe, one can easily overestimate the role of beeswax in the economy by relying on the records that come preponderantly from monasteries. The stress on the external system is not likely to reveal that Africans were also ardently concerned with goats, baskets, masks, and palm wine, and made decisions not only about access to trade routes but also about hierarchy, political power, witchcraft, and marriage.

Moreover, the role of trade goods in the internal system need not be the same as in the external one. Pelts or persons are necessarily commodities in the fur and the slave trade; in the local system, they may be wedding gifts or wives and retainers, subject to very different principles of use, supply, and demand. Large exports need not imply large or complicated internal use. Yet Lovejoy seems to assume such a correspondence when he states that slavery must have been most fully developed in the areas that supplied the most people to the Atlantic trade. But why? We do not assume that the use of the kola nut was most developed in the areas where it grew, nor that sable was used most exuberantly by those Siberians who sold it to Russian traders.

The lack of internal-external correspondence also holds for the reverse case, when extensive internal development can co-exist with little external trade. Thus in the later nineteenth century, western Central Africa shows a great internal development of slave systems - notably among the Imbangala - without being a supplier to the nearly defunct Atlantic trade. Lovejoy sees this internal development as a kind of non-functional overflow from the times when the Atlantic trade flourished and perceives in this "an atavistic dimension." Given Lovejoy's

23James H. Vaughn, "Mafakur: A Limbic Institution of the Margi (Nigeria), inSlavery in Africa, pp. 85-102.




model of internal-external relations, there is no reason save inertia for internal slavery to continue. But why atavistic? The nineteenth century Imbangala and their neighbours were heavily engaged in the political and kinship use of acquired strangers. There is no reason to think that fierce political competition, involving use of acquired strangers, could not have existed before the coming of the Atlantic trade in the sixteenth century. The patterns of the nineteenth century would then be simply a reappearance of the structural posture of the pre-European period.

There is no justification for assuming that, before the coming of Islam and the Europeans, Africans did not engage in political and economic competition and conquests, that they had no expansionist states and no bureaucracies, that they were not linked by long-distance trade, and, finally, that in the midst of all this they did not discover what nearly every other people in human history had discovered: that extensive control over people can be useful and that this control over people, as over goods, can be acquired not only through prédation but - more efficiently - by exchange. But this period of African history is left an undifferentiated blank if Africa is seen to stir only when the first outsider sets his foot in it.

The external perspective introduces blanks not only in time but also in space. A historian necessarily focusses on what is important, and an external perspective sets up a scale of importance: things that are functionally closest to the external factors are the most important and those farthest from them the least. Thus, while focussing on the Islamic areas of the western Sudan, Lovejoy mentions the interstitial pagan areas only as an afterthought. Yet this leaves out a sizable, probably majority, population and some important cultural norms. But since these populations are indeed marginal to Lovejoy' s external perspective, their absence does not affect his analysis. What we are given, then, is something analogous to the history of a country written entirely from the perspective of its foreign relations. Once again, I must reach out for an analogy. Is Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou relevant to the religious and social dynamics of fourteenth century Occitania? Does it tell us something about the meaning of Catholicism and Catharism that the perspective from Toulouse and Albi does not? Lovejoy' s chosen perspective on Africa inevitably makes most marginal that which is most indigenously African, be it non-Islamic Margi slavery in the Sudan or the slavery of pre-sixteenth century Central Africa. Through this approach, both Lovejoy and we are inexorably led to the conclusion that "slavery therefore developed in conjuction with external influences from the Islamic world," and that, in western Africa, "the spread of slavery as an institution appears to have occurred along a broad frontier from areas of extensive involvement in the external market to areas only marginally involved."

To conclude, I should like to reiterate what to me is the main import of my comments: that we still have a long way to go before the historical and sociological analysis of Africa is "decolonised." By decolonisation I do not mean the absurdities of nationalistic historiographies or the laborious and ethnocentric sophistries of historical blame allocation. What I mean by decolonisation is something more difficult and more important - something to be done not for the sake of liberality or even Africa, but for the sake of an intellectual understanding




of Africa as part of our understanding of mankind. This decolonisation means the phasing out of conceptual colonisation, in the literal sense of the latter as the implantation, cultivation, and proliferation of alien categories amidst the cultural realities of African history. Such conceptual colonisation is not, of course, peculiar to the Western encounter with Africa. At its most familiar and commonplace, it is what every English schoolboy suffered when he was required to learn English usage through the Latin grammatical categories imposed on it by learned scholars. What concerns one here is not so much that the English schoolboy was deprived of his Anglo-Saxon grammatical heritage but that he never understood English grammar. And neither did countless foreigners.

In Africanist scholarship, decolonisation has proceeded unevenly - more in the study of African religion than of economics, more in the study of kinship than of politics. In historical analysis, the "new African history" was a decolonising step. But to the extent that historical analysis is also sociological and cultural, much remains to be done. One is therefore in sympathy with those scholars - African and non- African - who refuse outright to talk about slavery and analyse, instead, Kongo pika or Vai jonnu. It is not eccentric, after all, but sensible to talk of junkers and manda rins and samurai. And it would be odd indeed to talk of pika when analysing slavery in the Old South. Should we not grant a reciprocal privilege to the analysis of Kongo phenomena? To hold on to terms such as slave, property , and ownership can be a temporary expedient, but it should be no less temporary than was the early use of animism an à fetishes in trying to understand African religions.

This does not preclude the analysis of broad trends, regional relations, and a history writ large. After all, the use of samurai has not crippled the scholars and sociologists of Japan. I doubt that our understanding would have advanced more rapidly if we had from the beginning used the term warrior caste , refracting Japanese realities through the prism of contemporaneous Western understanding of Indian shatrya. It becomes legitimate at some point to talk of warrior castes , bureaucrats , and landed gentry - but not before we are clear about the precise contexts where these translations are enlightening rather than misleading.

The decolonisation of the analysis of African slavery goes beyond the narrow problem of its definition. It also includes all those other words out of which definitions are made, words that stake out the semantic fields in which our key terms are allowed to roam. Property, subordination, freedom - these are all words whose meaning is so self-evident precisely because they are so culturally specific. To the extent that social analysis is a semantic enterprise, the analysis of a culturally alien social universe is doubly that.

The other decolonisation - that of African history as a structured story - will be more difficult than conceptual decolonisation. I have tried to show the analytical perils of a historical periodisation, such as Lovejoy's, based on external forces. Yet I am not sure what the alternative is. Much of our knowledge, alas, arises out of and is imprinted by these very external forces. And archives, unlike concepts, cannot be revised at will. We have few internal correctives but we at least know that correctives are needed - and that is no small gain. As in similar situations elsewhere - be it insular Southeast Asia or Bronze and Iron Age




Europe - the solution will have to come in part from such disciplines as archeology, culture-historical analysis of distributions, and comparative linguistic semantics. For example, a detailed semantic and comparative analysis of the various words in Africa that dictionaries and ethnographies gloss as k 'slave" might yield quite unsuspected historical perspectives. But even if such unor- thodox historiography should not reveal an uneventful historical story, it will at least have shown for Africa what it has shown elsewhere: that historical complexity does not always develop on an exponential curve, and that before every recorded kingdom or trade network or political upheaval there was some other kingdom scarcely less complex, another tradework no less far-flung, or another upheaval equally profound. In Africa, this awareness of the unknown complex- ities of the undocumented past is indispensable to the interpretation of documented history.

Commentary Two

Frederick Cooper Harvard University

Whatever each of the three speakers on slavery in Africa has to say, our combined effect should be to dispel the aura that is likely to arise in any gathering of specialists that each 4 'expert'

' will give the other participants the last word on the area he has studied or of the discipline in which he was trained. The urge to get a picture of slavery in Africa that is both neat and bland enough to put in the introduction of books that focus on the Americas is particularly strong. The very title of this panel suggests that a particular form of slavery might be seen as uniquely African. In fact, not only is Africa a continent of great variety and change, but Africanists approach the subject of slavery with as many differences in approach and ideology as do students of the Americas, and in some ways the disagreements run parallel. If no picture of indigenous African slavery emerges from this panel, then we will have accomplished something.

Paul Lovejoy has emphasised that Africa contains distinct regions and that its history can be divided into periods when different processes were going on. The study of slavery in Africa must be an historical study. Lovejoy is all too accurate in contending that Africanists have often ignored this seemingly obvious point. To go further, we need a more precise idea of the questions that should be asked of the historical material and the different conceptual frameworks - complementary or antagonistic - from which slavery is being studied. A clearer focus on assumptions raises questions about how time and space should be divided.

Despite a stress on the particularity of Africa, the approach to slavery put forward by Igor Kopytoff, along with Suzanne Miers, recalls the work of Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins. 1 Both try to identify forms of slavery with the

1 The stress that Kopytoff and Miers place on the slave as an acquired outsider is a larger step toward a general definition of slavery than toward an analysis of Africa. Like many scholars, they allow the connotations of slavery in plantation societies to determine the




boundaries of continents. They stress the determining role of institutions - from the Catholic church to African kinship groups - and of cultural characteristics - the supposedly Iberian tendency to look on slaves as human beings, and the supposedly African desire to assimilate outsiders. By pinning their entire analysis on the absorption of slaves and their marginal status during that process and by using the artificial concept of 4 'the society" as the unit which is doing the absorption, Kopy toff and Miers are only able to list variations on their theme, without analysing the different structures in which slaves were used and controlled or the processes which shaped them.

Lovejoy is trying to combine an emphasis on the importance of markets in shaping slavery with the Marxist concept of the mode of production.2 Yet the basis of his classification of regions and periods is entirely the market, above all, the external market. He places great emphasis on the development of plantations in response to the demand for agricultural commodities, but tells us little of why the response to this demand took this particular form, the means by which slaveowners were able to develop plantations, or what difference their develop-

definition of slavery and then argue that such a concept is inappropriate to Africa. Such an approach is likely to distort the meaning of slavery in the Americas as much as in Africa, and it is far better to focus on the exact meaning of slavery- as Kopytoff and Miers ably do- than to pursue the already tedious debate among Africanists about the term "slavery." For a fuller discussion of the broader issues and controversies involved in Af- ricanist research on slavery, see Frederick Cooper, "The Problem of Slavery in African Studies," Journal of African History XX, 1 (1979). See also Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1977). 2 Lovejoy seems to equate the existence of a slave mode of production with his argument that slavery was of great economic importance. The concept of mode of production should be used more precisely. My own view of its usefulness is sceptical. The control of slaves by different groups could strengthen different and often opposed modes of production, for example the lineage or the tribute-collecting state. The question of a slave mode of production becomes one of finding a point where the existence and reproduction of slave production dominates other forms. If this was ever the case, it was rare. Most classes that had the power to amass and control vast numbers of slaves based their economic power on a variety of means and often shifted rapidly among them, continuing their dominance all the while. The trading and military mechanisms on which slave reproduction depended were not limited to the collection of slaves. To be helpful, the concept of a mode of production must also tell us something about social relations and ideology. In the case of the southern United States, the importance of slave labour to conceptions of the economic and social order is central, as Eugene Genovese and others have made clear. However, there is little evidence that the ideological framework of any African society put much emphasis on slaves as an element in production . In most cases, the role of slaves as a labour force was ignored or concealed in ideologies, and the role of the slave was subsumed under concepts of kinship or personal affiliation and subordination. On the abstract level that Althusserians enjoy, all this is to say that the social formations found in particular parts of Africa must be studied in terms of the articulation of different modes of production. What use such a statement is to the historian is not apparent. In any case, these questions must be studied within specific historical contexts, and Lovejoy' s use of the concept of a slave mode of production at a pan- African level is misleading.




ment made to social relations. He does not examine the fundamentally different ways in which labour was controlled and exploited on closely supervised plantations, in villages where a group of slaves performed labour with little daily supervision but under general social subordination, or in households to which slave members had been added. Lovejoy has failed to go from a much needed appreciation of the implications of the market to an analysis of the production process itself.3 My criticisms are similar to those that have been made of Immanuel Wallerstein' s attempt to analyse the origins of capitalism and the development of a worldwide division of labour in terms of the expansion of a Europe-centred commercial system, an approach which takes in much of the economic determinism in interpretations of the origins of slavery in the Americas.4 Markets - even lively and important markets - have existed in relation to virtually every mode of production, and there are many ways to respond to a demand for produce.

To look beyond the boundaries of societies, to see the interconnections among political and social groups, is essential. It is also necessary to look more deeply within societies. Instead of looking for the common conceptions and traditions of an organic society, or searching for predictable and self-propelled responses to markets or demographic change, one should look for the differing - and sometimes opposed - aspirations and resources of distinct groups within societies. That people who could get large numbers of slaves - often rulers or merchants - relied on such outsiders can be understood in terms of the kinds of social groups to which other potential workers belonged, and their potential resistance to increased exactions. At the same time, the ability of kinship groups to resist economic and political demands could be enhanced by acquiring slaves. The very structure of society could be shaped by the conflicting uses different groups within it made of slaves. And far from finding a universal conception of slavery within any given society, kinship groups, merchants, and rulers often developed quite distinct ideologies of slaveholding.5

The market-centred and the kinship-centred approaches have both treated slaves in a passive role, just as historians of the Americas were rather slow to realise that slaves were part of the history of slavery. The limited extent to which plantation agriculture actually developed, even where market conditions were favourable, has much to do with the difficulties of disciplining a large slave labour force, and the relationship of plantation to household production can be

3 A more extreme example of a market-centred approach is in the work of A.G. Hopkins, who insists that ''there was a long-established labour market in Africa." There may have been a market in labourers, but not in labour power, and Hopkins' analysis of the "deliberate choice" of slave labour is based on comparison with alternatives that did not exist. An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), p. 26.

4 Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique ot Neo-bmithian Marxism," New Left Review 104 (1977):25-92. As Brenner's title implies, such "radi- cal" analyses of the origins of slavery in the Americas as those of Eric Williams and André Gunder Frank have more in common with the neo-classical assumptions of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman than the authors would probably care to admit. 5 For more on these themes, see Cooper, "Problem of Slavery."




analysed in terms of the struggles of slaves and their descendants to shape their own economic lives.6 Similarly, rather than see the common (but far from universal) tendency of African societies to bring slaves into existing social groups as an inherent characteristic of African social structure, assimilation, social mobility, and manumission can be seen more clearly as efforts by slaveowners to prevent the crystallisation of a self-perpetuating, self-conscious slave class, where they did not have the technological or organisational resources that West Indian slaveowners, for example, could call on to control slaves. Sometimes, as on the coast of East Africa or in the Sokoto Caliphate, relatively tight control was in fact established, and cleavages were sharp and lasting. Elsewhere slaves were able to bend the pattern of work and interaction in the fields. Similarly, the efforts of slaves - cut off from their own cultures - to learn the ways of their owners is only half the story. In places like the Swahili coast, slaves struggled not to be absorbed, to deny the cultural superiority of coastal society and religion, and oral traditions collected from descendants of slaveowners and slaves point to con- tradictory versions of history and social values.7

Such considerations point to questions that Lovejoy leaves out, and to problems with his brave attempt to define regions and periods. Instead of analysing the mechanisms that transformed demand for slaves and a supply into an actual slave system or focussing on the specific ways that slave labour was employed and disciplined, he tells us that slavery "spread." For something as deeply rooted in the organisation of production and social structure as slavery, the concept of spreading means little.8 In the absence of such analyses of the internal dynamics of slave systems, it is not clear that trying to define historical periods on a pan- African scale is going to be very revealing. And regions must be defined more carefully. The Sudanic region and the West African coastal region make some sense in terms of ecological zones and the layout of trade routes. Still, it must be kept in mind that it is interconnections rather than similarities that are

6 Both Lovejoy and Hopkins pay too much attention to the absence of technical economies of scale in African agricultural production, and not enough attention to the economies of power: the ability of a planter class to expand production and its own wealth by both organisation and coercion of a labour force, as well as by its ability to control resource and stifle other forms of production. Both authors imply a seemingly automatic movement toward peasant production determined by the nature of the commodities demanded by Europe, while the most interesting questions facing the student of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not simply what and how much was to be produced, but how, under whose control, and for whose benefit.

7 For a case study dealing with these issues, see Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977). 8 The idea of "Islamic slavery" as a particular kind of institution reflects an artificial and antiquated view of the relationship of religion and social structure. But a recent conference on ''Islamic Africa: Slavery and Related Institutions" at Princeton University in 1977, made it clear that such views are still current among Islamicists. It is much more helpful to see Islamic texts and laws as providing the raw material which people- in particular economic and political situations- could shape into ideologies. For slaveowners, seeing slavery in terms of Islamic norms, defined their own hegemony in a way that transcended locality and self-interest.




important, and it may be more useful to take more precisely defined regions - say the zone defined by the cultivation of oil palms in nineteenth-century West Africa.9 But Lovejoy's third area, the "Bantu" region, means virtually nothing - it is a linguistic, not an historical or social definition. This region embraces quite distinct regional economic networks, although even with certain spheres defined by commercial links, the way slave labour was used in one, for example the grain plantations of Malindi, might have more in common with the way it was used in Alabama than a place fifteen miles away. 10 Finally, to say that slavery in Africa was widespread and important is less interesting than to say that in some situations, it was extremely important, while in others it was not important at all.

The most promising work that has so far been done on how slaves were used and controlled, on the importance of slaves to studying power and class formation and conflict, and on the ideologies that grew out of these processes, has been done by such Marxist anthropologists as Claude Meillassoux. Nevertheless, Lovejoy's criticism of what is still an embryonic body of work - that it gives inadequate attention to time - is fair. A similar criticism has been made of Eugene D. Genovese's far richer analysis of the opposed and intertwined worlds of slaves and slaveholders in the Southern United States - he tells us more about the worlds than about how they were made. The importance of looking beyond the nineteenth century has only recently been given clear recognition among Ameri- can historians, yet recognising the need to study the development of slave institutions in Africa may not produce the kinds of breakthroughs that have emerged from recent work on the Americas. The evidence may not be there. 1 1

9 In the Niger Delta, palms were widespread and tended by smallholders, but slaves- controlled by "houses" in the trading centres- were crucial for collection and distribution. The flexibility that such slaves needed in commerce gave some of them considerable scope for initiative and mobility, and made them subject to strong social pressure and coercion to prevent them from exercising the initiative on their own behalf. In Dahomey, the king had immense palm plantations, while leading chiefs built up their own, using slave labour, that in some ways counteracted royal domination. These differences within the palm belt create an important opportunity for comparative and regional study. 10 An extreme case of the hazards of writing about the spread of slavery- without being absolutely clear about the distinct structures that are being discussed -is the case of the difiqane in southern Africa. Captives were indeed incorporated into difiqane states, but by being placed in the same age regiments as everyone else. Instead of finding slave status becoming institutionalised, it was obliterated by common subordination to the ruler. This was a very particular kind of political structure, geared to continual expansion and to the seizure of goods rather than production, and it is misleading to see it "spreading" from other systems that used captives in totally different ways. 1 1 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). Herbert Gutman aptly remarks that Genovese's dialectics are "frozen in time," but his own work does not altogether overcome this problem. See The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976), p. 97. My own research on the Swahili coast could not draw on any body of data that allowed a continuous examination of slavery throughout the nineteenth century. There was a great deal of evidence on what the Omani Arabs who built Zanzibar's clove plantations did with their slaves before they




Curiously, the timeless approach characterises as much writing on slavery's end as on its beginning, and here lack of data is not an excuse. The leading market-man, A. G. Hopkins, and the leading kins-people, Kopytoff and Miers, agree that slavery was ended in the twentieth century with "relative ease" and with little change in the structures of African societies.12 Now that research is beginning to be done on this subject, such tentative conclusions appear to be quite wrong. Lovejoy takes the extent of change more seriously, yet the questions he asks are on such a general level that they will not get us far. Colonialism only sometimes had a levelling effect. The idea of a transition from slave labour or peasant production to migrant wage labour is vague and misleading. It is particular forms of labour in both the precolonial and colonial periods that must be examined. In Zanzibar, the control of clove trees, the major form of productive capital, by a relatively small group of ex-slaveowners, combined with the efforts of the colonial state to shape an entire social and economic system around the needs of the clove harvest - in addition to its direct intervention in the recruitment and control of plantation labour - enabled the planters to survive, although the way they obtained and used labour changed drastically. In the absence of such state intervention, a once similar form of plantation slavery on the coast of Kenya declined as ex-slaves seized the initiative to cultivate on their own, obtain land on relatively favourable terms from increasingly hapless landowners, and combine farming with casual labour in a nearby city. In parts of Northern Nigeria, the colonial state itself - as well as increased peasant production - facilitated the continued domination of a political class that had once relied on slaves. In parts of the Western Sudan, once powerful slaveowning classes collapsed utterly; elsewhere even the meagre opportunities for wage earning that the colonial state developed were enough to undermine patterns of economic dependence that had previously existed.13

That all such transitions can be subsumed under the rubric of slavery to freedom, slave to migrant labour, is not very interesting; it helps but little to see the forced labour that colonial authorities resorted to in their early years as an interlude or intermediate stage that, however iniquitous, had few lasting effects. There is a great need to understand economic and social structures - of which direct coercion was only a part - that defined the options that ex-slaves had.

The conceptual paralysis out of which Africanists approach labour in the post-abolition era is not unique to them. To an outsider dabbling in the history of the Americas, the most striking aspect of the previous two decades of scholarship is how much richer and more precise studies of forms of agricultural labour that can be called "slave" have been, compared to forms of labour that can be called "free." The most stimulating work has been done in relatively new fields, by

grew cloves, and much more on the mature plantation system, but a less complete picture of the process of change itself. The work of Peter Wood, Richard Dunn, Michael Craton, and others has extended the time depth of studies of the Americas. 12 Hopkins, p. 227; Miers and Kopytoff, p. 74. 13 See Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya , 1890-1925 (forthcoming) and several recent studies on West Africa cited by Lovejoy.




anthropologists studying the social relations of plantation and peasant production in the Caribbean, while the most disappointing field should have been the most fruitful - the history of the post-bellum Southern United States. Most scholars - including conservatives, liberals, and radicals - have been willing to see slavery as a labour system, which in turn fostered distinct patterns of social relations and ideology. But students of the post-war South have generally focussed on politics and race and regarded the subordination of black labour as but one of many aspects of discrimination. 14 The best quantitative study of the Southern economy after slavery, by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, explains why optimising behaviour in a free market produced obviously non-optimal results by invoking exogenous factors - flawed "institutions" and a legacy of racism. The problem of freedom lay in slavery. Currently, we are seeing the beginnings of an attempt to analyse labour after 1 865 in the same manner as labour before 1 860 has been examined, as an effort - not wholly successful - of planter classes to maintain their wealth, power, and control of a dependent labour force.15

Two aspects of the study of slavery are crucial and affect recent work on Africa as much as a more established tradition of scholarship on the Americas: slavery is the "peculiar institution" and slavery is the popular institution, an extraordinary magnet for scholarly talents and passions. Perhaps the two aspects are related: the distinctiveness of slavery makes the most profound questions ideologically unthreatening. There has been, of course, a scholarly reaction, a denial from such researchers as Fogel and Engerman for the Southern United States and Kopytoff and Miers for Africa that slavery is so peculiar after all.16 Such arguments would be more convincing if instead of questioning the particularity of slavery they questioned the universality of the laws that operate outside, be they self-regulating mechanism of the market or the rules of social structure. Slavery is a particular institution - or rather particular institutions - but no more peculiar than other forms of class domination, exploitation, and control. If the examination of the particular has been the most notable achievement of the past two decades, perhaps the transcendence of the peculiar category of "slave studies" should be one of the principal goals for the future.

14 See the excellent review article by Harold D. Woodman, "Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South," Journal of Southern History 43 (1977): 523-554. The perspective on labour and planter domination in such fine studies of southern states as those of Joel Williamson and Peter Kolchin is strikingly different from that found in studies of the Caribbean by Sidney Mintz and Alan Adamson.

15 See Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Conse- quences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1 977) and the critique by Woodman. The valuable tradition of empirically-oriented sociological studies of poor black farmers in the South done during the 1930s, the stimulating but questionable analysis of Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois, and the questions about class control raised by C. Vann Woodward's study in 1951, have been surprisingly neglected during two decades of obsession with slavery. Current work by Jonathan Wiener and Jay Mandle is bringing back the question of planter domination over a dependent labour force.

16 An attack on neo-abolitionists is explicit in rogel and hngerman and implicit in Kopytott and Miers' defensiveness about overly harsh views of slavery in Africa, although it is not clear who the neo-abolitionists are.



Indigenous African Slavery

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