Post-Slavery, by Baz Lecocq and Lotte Pelckmans – 22 March 2023

Summary

Post-slavery is an academic analytical concept that signifies the fragmented legacies and continuities of past slavery and slave trade in contemporary societies after its formal legal abolition, and beyond emancipation processes. Legacies can take the form of discourses based in collective memories and ideologies of past slavery, while continuities can take the shape of continued relations of social hierarchy and dependency between people of slave descent and the descendants of slaveholders and other people of free descent, to the disadvantage of the formerly enslaved and their descendants. The social mechanisms of exclusion that uphold post-slavery situations include the invisibility of such situations to outsiders; structural racism and other forms of stigmatization; struggles surrounding gender relations; the social importance of genealogy, marriage, and family formation across the historical free-unfree divide; uneven access to physical and social capital, such as land and positions of authority; and the politics of history and memory. Post-slavery legacies and continuities form points on a continuum, ranging from explicit forms of exploitation that could qualify as slavery outside the law (de facto, but not de jure slavery), via structural racism and other forms of structural exclusion in society (post-slavery continuities), to the residual histories and memories that can continue to mark differences between the descendants of slave and free today (post-slavery legacies).

Essay Defining Post-Slavery

Definition

Post-slavery is an academic analytical concept that signifies the fragmented legacies and continuities of past slavery and slave trade in contemporary societies after its formal legal abolition, and beyond emancipation processes. Post-slavery can be understood as a description of a society in reference to a period in time after the formal abolition of slavery, when power relations between former masters and former slaves and their descendants were being reconfigured, a period that demonstrates continuities with the pre-abolition period. Where emancipation stresses the dissolution of slavery and the gradual integration of the formerly enslaved into free society, post-slavery stresses the endurance of inequalities resulting from slavery. Where the concept of emancipation implies a gradual move away from unfreedom toward freedom, the concept of post-slavery stresses the legacies and continuities of slavery as a continuum.[1] Post-slavery continuities can range from explicit forms of exploitation that could qualify as legal slavery outside the law (de facto but not de jure slavery), via structural racism and other forms of structural exclusion in society (post-slavery continuities), to the residual histories and memories that can continue to mark differences between the descendants of slave and free today (post-slavery legacies). Legacies can take the form of discourses based in collective memories and ideologies of past slavery, while continuities can take the shape of continued relations of social hierarchy and dependency between people of slave descent and the descendants of slaveholders and other people of free descent, to the disadvantage of the formerly enslaved and their descendants. The social mechanisms of exclusion that uphold post-slavery situations include the invisibility of such situations to outsiders; structural racism and other forms of stigmatization; struggles surrounding gender relations; the social importance of genealogy, marriage, and family formation across the historical free-unfree divide; uneven access to physical and social capital, such as land and positions of authority; and the politics of history and memory.

Legacies

Legacies are the residual social and cultural forms that refer to a society’s past when slavery was still legal. Referring to such legacies can stigmatize the formerly enslaved or their presumed descendants on a collective and individual level, but without there being a directly traceable line between concrete individuals of unfree descent and their situation in the present, as based on their direct ancestors’ slavery in the past. Such legacies can take discursive forms based on the collective memories and histories of a society’s slavery past, that can be found in, for example, commonly known (religious) texts, names, jokes, proverbs, songs, religious and social rituals, material objects, or architectural monuments. These residual histories and memories can continue to mark differences between the descendants of slave and free today, but they can also be inactive, unconsciously buried, or even actively forgotten. Importantly, legacies of a seemingly closed past can be reopened and move up on the continuum in the direction of actual reinforcements of continuities of slavery’s past. Academics can play an active role in this shift, either consciously as scholar-activists, or inadvertently through the dissemination of their publications.

Continuities

Continuities are here understood to be those practices associated with slavery that have not ceased to exist, or that have only been reconfigured since the days that slavery was a formal and legal institution. They include symbolic and ritual forms of address between status groups; the obligation for slave descendants to seek council, permission, and assistance from free descendants for important moments in the life cycle (birth, marriage, burial); material or physical performances; particular types of work; specific cultural or religious practices and ritual observations being reserved for either free or slave descendants; and forms of outright exploitation of slave descendants by those of free descent. These practices explicitly maintain inequality and dependency through mechanisms of social and psychological control in intimate social networks of direct contact between actors whose ancestry is known, and it is precisely this intimate knowledge of respective genealogies that makes the actors uniquely traceable and irreplaceable.

Discerning Post-Slavery from Contemporary Slavery

Continuities of past slavery in contemporary settings can sometimes be qualified as de facto (but not de jure) slavery, even though it is not legally recognized as such. However, these forms of de facto enslavement that are based in historical relations should be distinguished from forms of enslavement where past slavery relations cannot be directly traced, but which are based in unprecedented relations of coerced dependency and exploitation in anonymized relations in which the enslaved are easily replaceable, which is not the case in post-slavery forms of exploitation. Contemporary antislavery activists, as well as most scholars, commonly refer to such situations as contemporary slavery, modern slavery, human bondage, or human trafficking.[2] Although modern slavery can be partly based in post-slavery relations, leading to a de facto re-enslavement of people of slave descent, this does not have to be the case. People of free descent can fall victim to such forms of exploitation analogous to slavery as well. In short: post-slavery situations are about forms of inherited status, while contemporary slavery is about fully anonymized, coerced relations of human bondage.

Terminology

In order to describe the social categories of enslaving and enslaved in post-slavery relations, most researchers working on post-slavery in Africa use such terminology as “passive slavery”; “people of slave descent” and “people of free descent”; “former masters and mistresses” and “former slaves”; “former owners” and “former slaves”; or, in order to stress the ongoing inequalities, “masters and mistresses” and “slaves.”[3] None of these predicates is entirely fitting. The use of “slave owner” or “slave master (mistress)” seems inappropriate, since the language of ownership is no longer recognized as de jure valid in most African societies, due to the growing awareness in all social strata that ownership in people is no longer recognized by constitutional and international law. Besides, the capitalist connotations of ownership are not always appropriate to describe either legal or social slavery relations in the past or present. The analytical use of the terms “slave” and “master” to stress continued inequalities denies the changes in post-slavery relations, in which forms of full dependency that used to exist are no longer present. Debates about the power inherent in terminology resulted in the contemporary academic and analytical preference for using “enslaved” and “enslavers,” a vocabulary that makes the process of submission more visible. However, antislavery activists do use the terminology of “masters” or “feudals” and “slaves” for greater effect and to simplify their language and message. Perpetuity of social status through descent is a known mechanism in most societies that generally still attach great value to descent and genealogy as defining social status, including among people of slave descent. The terms “descent-based slavery” or “people considered of free or of slave descent” are probably most accurate to reflect the post-slavery dynamics, as these terms accentuate both the historicity of slavery and its reconfigured nature after abolition.

The Invisibility of Former Slave Status

In Africa, both the moment when legal abolition occurred and the legacies and continuities of slavery and slave trading vary from one society to the next. Generally speaking, post-slavery is more publicly addressed as an issue, and subsequently more researched, in west and east Africa than it is in north and southern Africa, and it is nearly absent in studies on central Africa. How far this reflects the uneven state of research attention to the topic among scholars specialized in these different regions, rather than actuality on the ground, remains to be seen. Denise Bouche’s famous study on the villages de liberté in French Sudan, carried out at the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in 1949, can be seen as a first study in post-slavery situations in west Africa, while Bosha Bombe’s work on the legacies and continuities of slavery in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia, published in 2013, can be seen as a first open study of post-slavery situations in the Horn of Africa. The post-slavery situations Bouche described in 1949 had started to take form in the early 20th century, while Bombe makes clear that in the Gamo Highlands, post-slavery dynamics only started to take form in the 1950s.[4] The legal abolition of slave trade and slavery under colonial law and rule inaugurated conflicting and juxtaposed state policies and social processes internal to African societies that either sought to challenge or preserve internal forms of African slavery. During the phase of conquest, colonial authorities encouraged slaves to flee their masters. After colonial conquest and the legal abolition of slavery and slave trade, the colonial powers sought to counter the active enslavement and trade in humans, with relative success. The legal abolition of slavery led to a mass exodus of enslaved people either to their regions of origin if they remembered these, or to the urban centers of the colonies. With the advent of effective colonial rule, policies toward slavery changed. Abolition itself was not necessarily accompanied by emancipation policies. The general trend was that slaves were not actively liberated or even encouraged to leave their masters anymore, which allowed for the continuation of slavery as a normative structure that kept regulating social hierarchies and inequalities, especially in those rural settings that were furthest removed from colonial and postcolonial state structures. Such surviving structures of internal African slavery came to be labeled “domestic slavery” in British colonial settings, and “serviteurs” or “captifs de case” in French colonial language, and were supposed to gradually disappear without interference, because interference would upset social structures too strongly. Paradoxically, in a number of societies, the colonial authorities actively supported the continued existence of descent-based slavery, in order to avoid social upheaval or unpredictable change. In general, migration to previous homes (if these were known) or to areas where arable land was available to newcomers, but also to the slowly developing colonial cities, which provided possibilities to reconstruct one’s social position, were the main factors in the gradual disappearance of slavery after abolition over the 20th century.[5] As the continuities of slavery beyond abolition belied the success of the colonial administration’s and missionary civilizing mission, the legacies and continuities of slavery became hidden in the colonial discourse.

Post-Independence Continuities

The at best lenient and at worst supportive attitudes of colonial officers toward former enslavers or freeborn allowed for social relations based on slavery to continue well into the colonial and postcolonial period. With few exceptions, slavery was neglected or remained a taboo topic in the postcolonial successor states. This can be exemplified by Ethiopia, which managed to remain independent and hence received considerable attention to the continued existence of slavery from European powers and their academic researchers as part of their foreign policies toward that country throughout the colonial and postcolonial period. The Italian invasion of 1935 was partly justified in the alleged continued slave trade in the country.[6] In some postcolonial states, mainly in west Africa, but also in Sudan and Ethiopia, the legacies and continuities of slavery were at moments openly expressed in state and local politics. The conflict in Sudan between the successive governments in Khartoum and the peoples of the south between 1956 and 2011, for example, not only finds explanation in a long history of slave trade and slavery that shaped the country, but it also led to the reappearance of slavery and slave trade that found their expression and legitimation in that very history and the practices of the past.[7] At the same time, as over the course of the 20th century slaveholding not only became illegal but also successfully stigmatized by global abolitionist activism, people considered as former slaveholders and their descendants increasingly silence their past, which facilitates the maintenance of hierarchical relationships with people considered as slave descendants. The shame and stigma surrounding the unfinished history of slavery explain why post-slavery relations turned into a public secret.[8] The invisibility of post-slavery relations can be further explained by the fragmented dissolution of power inequalities between people of slave and free descent in ways that cannot be easily traced back to continuities of slavery. Former slaves were able to emancipate through migration, becoming absorbed in communities of marginalized groups such as the rural poor, or urban working classes. The types of inequalities (lack of land, poverty, poor health) that strongly intersect with slave (descent) status thus merge with similar types of inequality associated with the lower working class.[9]

Legal Pluralism

More often than not, in Africa, a plurality of legal and social norms coexists and contradict each other on the issue of slavery and slave descent. It is important to note that the term “abolition” implicitly refers to situations created by the decree of laws by European colonial powers or their independent successor states. These were intended to formally abolish slave trade or slavery without addressing either the local – Islamic or other – legal frameworks, or the social norms defining slavery. Most often, these state-decreed laws lacked practical application by lack of a clear definition of what exactly constituted slavery, and through the possibilities for masters to protect their vested interests in the status quo. The upholding of vernacular legal and social norms – defining locally what slavery meant – outside state structures but within society, resulted in the maintenance of structural differences to the disadvantage of former slaves or their descendants. The famous case of Hadijatou Mani vs. The Government of Niger is a clear case in point, but so are other cases of antislavery activism in a number of west African countries, such as Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) in Mauritania, Temedt in Mali, Timidria in Niger, and Initiative for the Eradication of Traditional and Cultural Stigmatisation in our Society (IFETACSIOS) in Nigeria.[10] However, the existence of vernacular laws or traditions declaring that persons can be owned as property did not and does not by itself answer the question of whether a given person could be or can be a slave. Such questions become all the more difficult to answer in settings where one set of laws declares slavery legal, and another forbids it. How, then, is (post-)slave status to be determined in everyday social life, and on what criteria can it be defined if disputed in court under plurilegal circumstances? It should be noted that the vernacular nature of different normative value systems leads to significant variations in the shape of post-slavery relations in the early 21st century. This partly explains why definitions of post-slavery in African contexts have tended to remain elusive so far.

The Politics of History and Memory

As in similar terms, the “post” in post-slavery acts as a disruptive temporal marker. It indicates that previously valid meanings and understandings marked by the signifier following “post” cannot be lifted over a marker event (here: abolition). “Post” is intended to mark a rupture, but it is simultaneously intended as a reminder that what the “post” refers to is in fact not yet over, not yet fully in a closed past, but is “the present” of that particular subject, embodied in a discursive past. Here these are the legacy and continuity of slavery over the marker event of abolition. The appreciation of this marker event as “historical” is largely created in institutionalized forms of historical thinking. Thus, “post-slavery” is a mode of historicity in the sense François Hartog gave that term: the way a society treats its past and acts upon it, and the way it treats and acts upon historical times.[11] Post-slavery is the creation of a present in reference to an active past that, by creating a particular discursive and narrative memory of that past, influences the present.[12] Post-slavery thus denotes an era or situation in which the slave past has been legally declared over but in practice lingers on in the form of indirect legacies and straightforward continuities. Both legacies and continuities should be understood as strongly influenced by vernacular memory, power constellations and interpretations of history, and genealogical imagination, and can therefore be given expression in very different forms from one locality to another. Particular identity markers, such as race, naming, genealogy, and family are essentially forms of control over the memory and history of slavery that are in turn brought about by processes of remembrance and historicization, leading to encoded patterns of group interaction between those of free and slave descent.

History and Its Absence

As the abolition of slave trade and slavery had formed one of the main discursive components of the civilizing mission that had justified colonial conquest, colonial social science and administration placed the legacies that slavery and the slave trade left in a closed past in complete rupture with the colonial present. The few researchers and administrators who pointed to the ineffectiveness and incompleteness of colonial emancipation policies, were silenced.[13] The historians producing national histories for the new nation-states after African independence had no interest in fundamentally changing this view on slavery as a situation that belonged firmly in the past, as the realities of slavery would go against the desired history of national cohesion. All that happened was that the temporal marker of disruption between slavery and freedom was replaced from colonial conquest to national independence, as the continuities between slavery and colonial rule became stressed, while national independence was presented as the sole guarantee against exploitation and oppression. African involvement in slave trades and internal African slavery became silenced topics among African historians of Africa, while the majority of European and American historians of Africa avoided the topic, in light of the European and American involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.[14] Public commemorations and official discursive “memory work” about internal African slavery has for many decades been almost nonexistent in Africa. This led to a denial of the voice of enslaved people in African historiography, as nationalist African historiographies essentially focused on the voices of precolonial elites and on a generalized colonial subalternity. These views were transmitted in African historical curricula, from primary school to university-level courses.[15] Slave trade and slavery were not dealt with, or the focus was placed on the European and American involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade. The historiography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade indeed flourished and still flourishes in the United States, South America, and Europe, commensurate with the slow political and social emancipation of slave descendants in these post-slavery societies. Historical interest in the other slave trades in and from Africa, across the Sahara, in the Indian Ocean, and within central and east Africa only came up in the early 21st century. From the 1950s to roughly 2000, collective memories and histories of slavery and slave trade were thus relegated from the public sphere to become specialized local knowledge that strongly determined social and political relations in forms of post-slavery continuities. Or they became local legacies disconnected from their original meanings, taking the shape of anachronistic proverbs or embodied practices, such as dances or religious and social ritual performances; clothes, scarification, or other body markers; or bodily comportment. References to a slavery past are not easy to decipher from such legacies (sometimes intentionally so) for either their practitioners or the observers who seek to interpret them.[16] Hence, post-slavery becomes nearly invisible to the outsider, which makes it difficult to address the forms of social exclusion such hidden practices allow.

The Importance of Local Memory

Post-slavery continuities are mostly performed within tightly woven social networks of direct contact. They are strongly influenced by local memory, history, and genealogical imagination (remembering who is of slave descent and who is of freeborn descent by mnemonic clues). This explains why post-slavery relations are best maintained and more visible in close-knit communities in which the descent of all community members can be remembered, and where the practices of dependency and inequality are hard to escape in the pursuit of other life strategies outside community control. In such settings, forms of social habitus surrounding speech, demeanor, facial expressions, and social restraint can signal post-slavery continuities at an interpersonal level. At a discursive level, the denial of a right to speech, the denial of a genealogy, a family name, and a lack of place in vernacular histories can underline slave-descent and maintain its significance and potency through continued exclusion and inequality. At a material level, limited access to land and other resources come into play. Spatial separation or exclusion mark post-slavery as well. For insiders who know what to look for, there is a clear division of spaces according to descent-based social status, with separated wards and neighborhoods, burial sites, and religious and other public and political domains, with restricted access for the former slaves and their descendants to the spaces reserved for the free. Village names and village quarters, too, can indicate the (former) status of their inhabitants.[17]

Racism and Stigmatization

Racism is without doubt the most important legacy of slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism on a global scale. In popular representation, racism is associated with slave trade and slavery in the Americas and with colonialism in Africa. This popular image denies not only the realities of African slavery and post-slavery under colonial and postcolonial rule but also the realities of inter-African racial discourse, which was at the heart of the justification of the enslavement of Africans by Africans in north, west, east, and southern Africa. Racial discourses have influenced and continue to influence and shape post-slavery relations in these societies. Two important caveats need to be made. The first is that although the term “race” can certainly be applied here to describe local African hierarchized relations of inclusion and exclusion coded in a language of color, such vernacular notions cannot and should not be equated with the notion of race as it was (re)developed in North America and Europe after the Holocaust. While in vernacular African languages references to skin color are commonplace, the actual range and meanings of color references are not directly comparable to racial terminology in American and European contexts.[18] Most early 21st-century research on post-slavery situations in Africa that pays attention to racial dimensions often departs from this Euro-American post-Holocaust reformulation of race, which focuses solely on phenotype at the neglect of other dimensions of racialization, such as genealogy, religion, and regional origins.[19] Although vernacular African forms of racialization were influenced and partly overwritten, first by European colonial notions and subsequently by American notions of race, their origins need to be traced within African societies themselves, in exchange with the Christian Atlantic and Islamic worlds. Racial discourses delimited the divide between a Muslim and “white” (bidân) North Africa and a pagan and “black” (‘azzi, sûd, kwâr, koual) Africa south of the Sahara. Locally, various other color codes could be used to denote a range of social positions on the scale between noble and slave: “blue” (zuruq, settefen) for nobility; “red” (hmar, shaggaran) could denote either freeborn but not noble, or explicitly denote manumitted status of dependency; and so could “green” (khadr). Debate is still open, but research from the 2020’s hints that the etymology of haratin, a term to denote Saharan and Sahelian oasis dwellers of various social status depending on time and place, also has a racial meaning, indicating individuals of mixed “black” and “white” descent.[20] In the Horn of Africa, racial categorizations delimited between a “red” (qey) Christian and Muslim, civilized, and beautiful realm in the Abyssinian Plateau, and a “black” (tikur, shanqalla, donqalla, or sit shwala) pagan, uncivilized, and ugly world at its central African fringes, while on Zanzibar the term “magozi” was used by people claiming Arab descent as a racial slur referring to blackness.[21] In Madagascar, a distinction is made between fotsy, “white people,” who claim a Southeast Asian origin, and mainty, “black people,” a term that lumps together slave descendants and migrants from the African continent.[22] These categories were determinant in discourses about slavery and have significant afterlives in post-slavery situations. Different vernacular racializations of slavery and social status need to be taken seriously if one wants to understand post-slavery realities in full. The second caveat is that attempts to understand vernacular notions of race in Africa should certainly not distract from the realities on a global scale in which Africans have been racialized and discriminated against in virtually all their encounters with people from other parts of the world, be they from Europe, the Middle East, or Asia, and which they still fight hard to undo.

Reformulating Former Slave Identities in Post-Slavery Situations

The relations between people claiming either “slave” or “freeborn” ancestry have been
reconfigured and endowed with new meanings over time. Emic notions that could once or still can be translated as “slave” are subject to different positionalities, opinions, and experiences. Over the course of time, some collective identities related to historical slavery have transformed into other forms of collective identity. Processes of gradual ethnicization of former slave identities have been documented for the Haratin in Mauritanian Hassaniya society, the Bellah or Buzu in Tuareg society, the Riimayɓe and Gando in Fulani societies, and the Mao and Komo in Ethiopia. In other cases, a form of caste formation out of former slave identities can be observed. A case in point is that of the Osu in Nigerian Igbo society, where the stigmatization of slave descendants led to strict endogamy and strong intermarriage taboos. These identity reconfigurations are intertwined with the reformulation of the meanings of racial categories in these societies. In Malagasy society, the presence of a large African migrant community and the racialization of slave and free descent have led to a process in which slave descendants have become stigmatized as a “black” social underclass. In Mauritania, social and political organizations representing the rights of the Haratin, such as IRA, are consciously racializing Haratin identity in an attempt to stress the commonalities between Haratin and the “black” Fulani and Soninke populations of the country, including their former slaves.[23] The Tuareg rebellions of the 1990s and 2000s led to a positive reformulation of a “black Tuareg” identity among the Bellah or Buzu, which explicitly sought to reformulate their identity as a racialized separate ethnic group, while other groups of former Tuareg slaves consciously adopted another ethnic identity, such as Fulani, Hausa, or Zerma, therewith seeking to escape their slave identity altogether.[24]

Stigmatization

As a normative practice, slavery functioned largely as a mechanism of oppression by attaching stigma and shame to the enslaved, while bestowing honor upon the free. Both the memories and histories of a personal or collective past in slavery, and the continued dependency of formerly enslaved or their descendants upon the free strata of society, retain the power to invoke shame and stigma. Within post-slavery societies, people of slave descent do not publicly divulge their status, because such knowledge is not honorable. There have always been, and continue to be, degrees of stigma and honor for different groups of slaves in different positions and locations. Slaves could, however, acquire specific forms of honor, privilege, and status in the course of their lifetimes. The degree to which different groups of enslaved have been and continue to be stigmatized thus significantly varies. Stigmatization can be dealt with by a wide range of strategies, from passive acceptance and evasion, to attempts at counter-stigmatization or counter-valorization, and outright confrontation. The wide variety of reactions to stigmatization and the decision to mobilize or not in an individual or collective way can partly be attributed to the different national juridical and institutional contexts. There is a large variety in national narratives and ways in which legacies and continuities of slavery are acknowledged, rejected, or silenced on the African continent, and therefore there exists a wide variety of reactions to stigmatization. The decision to mobilize collectively against stigma or not is not only linked to national politics but also embedded in the different systems of customary values; the weight of religion in the revindication of identities; as well as the racialization of statutory categories. Where former slaves are still discernible as collectivities within a society, such as the Haratin (Mauritania and Morocco); Bellah or Buzu, Riimayɓe, and Banniya (Mali and Niger); Osu (Nigeria); Komo and Mao (Ethiopia); or Andevo (Madagascar), they have to deal with stigmatization on the basis of that collective name. These stigmata are often expressed in forms of racialization. Their collective names obscure many differences in social positions among themselves, and some would insist on replacing their pejorative collective name by a euphemism, preferring, for example, the vernacular word for “Black Fulɓe,” or “Black Oromo” over “slave.” Others have reappropriated the pejorative term rooted in slavery and tried to valorize it as a positive and shared group identity, such as the Gando in Benin. These renaming practices reflect a transition from a perceived need to deny one’s slave origins to an actual valorization of an attributed “black” slave identity referring to historical slavery. In the late 20th and early 21st century, several emancipation movements have emerged in Africa in the form of new political parties or NGOs organizing on the basis of the slave origins of their members. On an individual level, elevation is a common strategy to counter stigmatization by publicly proving the worthiness of the self in the dominant value codes of the majority, here the descendants of the free. Those people suspected of slave descent who have made it to political positions, even those of presidents, are, however, continuously reminded of their origins and risk potential disqualification on the basis of their “impure roots.” To be sure, legacies and continuities are persisting, precisely because of the strong ideological power and psychological impact of stigma.

Genealogy, Marriage, and Family Formation across the Historical Free-Unfree Divide

One characteristic of slavery across the globe and in every time period is that slaves were denied a family, responsibility for their spouses and offspring, and inscription in a genealogy of ancestors with free status. Genealogy and the claim to honor that it confers have served as important mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion in past and present. As in other settings, the afterlives of slavery often continued pervasive social ideas that slaves’ human inferiority is inherited by their descendants. Normative ideologies of blood and origins served to “naturalize” enslavement as an inheritable human condition. While many slave descendants in post-slavery situations have the possibility to create and claim their own genealogies and family structures – an especially revolutionary development, since slaves were not supposed to have either – genealogy at the same time continues to be a paradoxical and divisive tool that makes slave descendants extra recognizable over the generations.

Naming

The renaming of captured people was an act of symbolic violence. It imposed a completely new and degrading identity that strongly confirmed subjection to the new master. Slave names were thus often a source of shame in contrast to the honorable names of the freeborn. Common examples of injurious first names for individuals in west Africa include Banja and Macca, both of which are contractions of words literally translating as “slave” in the Songhay (banniya) and Fulbe (maccuɗo) languages, respectively.[25] Due to their historical lack of ancestry and limited access to personhood, slaves had no family names—or at least no family names that denote free citizenship and an independent existence. In the post-emancipation United States, the adoption of specific family names by manumitted slaves, such as Freeman, Abrahams, and Washington, became strong legacies of slave descendance. In the French Caribbean, after the abolition of 1848, freed slaves were given specific family names by the état civil that were intended to mark and continue their servile status, such as anagrams of existing names or words (Nerovique, Café), random groups of letters, or insults (Anretard, Beaunoir).[26] In African societies too, name changes reflect shifting power relations and form part of emancipation strategies. Renegotiations over ascribed slave names are found on both individual and collective levels. In many societies not only family names but also particular first names were reserved for either slaves or free people, referring to, for example, weekdays, objects, places, or animals. In the Muslim world, names signifying a slave status toward God, usually the Arabic word for slave – ‘abd or ‘abdida – followed by one of the ninety-nine names of God (most popular being Allah, al-Karim [the generous], al-Wahid [the one]), are a prerogative of the free, while certain other names referring to a relation with God, such as Ma’th Allah (God’s wealth) or Khair Allah (God’s grace), were explicitly reserved for slaves. Since such names clearly reflected the stigma of lower social status, some slave descendants today try to make their first names publicly indistinguishable from those indicating free status and descent.[27] In both slavery and post-slavery Africa, names and name changes have so far not received enough scholarly attention.

Marriage

Marriage across the slave-free boundary is still problematic and a marker for many debates in post-slavery situations, underlining again the importance of social origins and purity of ancestry.[28] These boundaries are policed through severe social mechanisms such as social exclusion, insults, cursing, and so on. The policing of sexual and marital boundaries in African societies is commensurate with that in racist post-slavery societies elsewhere, in which miscegenation between “white” (free) women and “black” (slave) men is still strongly disapproved. There has been and continues to be one marked exception within African Islamic societies: a free man of high status can marry women of slave descent held in concubinage. Human rights and antislavery activists have framed such contemporary concubinage as integral to the “human trafficking” industry or as “prostitution.” The famous 2008 court case of
Hadijatou Mani vs. the Government of Niger demonstrated the plurilegal incommensurability between the abolition of slavery in state law versus Islamic law, which allows for slaves to be taken as concubines.[29] In short: structural continuities of slavery are strongly present in gender relations, especially in the nonacceptance of marital unions between people of free and slave descent today. Marriage and the possible transgression of marriage rules are the arena par excellence for socializing and sharing discourses on a slave past and the racial legacies of slavery across generations, with very real impacts on people’s experiences and relationalities, and the protection of honor as “pure” ancestry.

Access to Physical and Social Capital

A number of historical divisions between slave and free continue to mark contemporary African post-slavery societies: notions of honorable and dishonorable work and their ensuing labor divisions; concepts of innate intelligence and the ensuing access to education and religious practice and office; and access to political power and productive capital, notably land.

Labor and Work Ethics

Concepts of work and labor divisions are strong indicators of social status defined in historical slavery. In historical slaveholding societies, hard manual labor, services, and dirty and dishonorable work were relegated to slaves. In contemporary post-slavery societies, slave descendants inverse the stigma of such tasks in a modern working-class discourse on honor in labor, contrasting their willingness to work to the supposed laziness or idleness of the nobles, putting the latter’s social utility in a modern society into question while stressing that of their own. As the antislavery scholar-activists of the Association Timidria in Niger put it: “The slave is the motor behind Tuareg society. The nobles can be characterized by their dismissal of all manual labour. All manual labour uplifts from servility and is exclusively relegated to the black slaves.”[30] In practice, however, as anywhere else, those who can afford not to perform manual labor, regardless of origin, will do so, and, as elsewhere, education is a pathway out.

Education

In practically all slavery societies, slaves are represented as naturally unintelligent and therefore unfit to be educated or exercise religious duties, and in need of care and oversight as legal minors. In colonial times devout Muslim noble families would refrain from sending their children to colonial educational institutions, as they considered such education irrelevant and turning their children away from Islam. Where colonial authorities enforced school enrollment, slave children would be sent instead. As mission stations attracted former and fugitive slaves seeking sanctuary, or sometimes actively bought slaves free, a large number of children of slave origins received missionary education.[31] In other societies, collective obligations of military recruitment for the colonial armies were largely fulfilled by sending young slave men, a practice that in itself formed a continuity with the formation of slave armies in precolonial African states. These anticolonial strategies among African elites and emancipatory strategies of slaves opened access to administrative and military positions for colonially educated slave descendants in colonial and postcolonial states and the subsequent political power on a national level such positions can confer.

Access to Positions of Authority

In those postcolonial states where the continuities of past slavery continue to hold a grip on the political life of communities, slave descendants often continue to be seen as legal minors, having no political vote in important village councils and other bodies of political decision making. On the level of national elections, however, slave descendants are often encouraged to vote to bolster support for local candidates. Around the turn of the 21st century, slave descendants have become more active in seeking to gain local political power via local political parties and politically oriented organizations.[32] Such patterns to gain access to positions of authority can be seen in religious domains as well. As they sought to overturn local power relations embedded in local African religions, Christian missions formed a path not only to spiritual uplift for people of slave descent but to social and political power as well, as mission-educated African catechists were preferred recruits for colonial administrations and businesses. The emancipatory activities of Christian congregations to some extent managed to mitigate post-slavery continuities. Muslim educational institutions did not confer such privileged access to (post-)colonial positions of power. Within numerous African Muslim societies people of slave descent are still judged as equaling slaves in terms of the rights and values that religion attributes to them. This means they are considered unable to follow religious education, also in light of their perceived “natural” lack of intelligence. They can also be blocked from fulfilling specific religious duties, such as performing the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and often get relegated to subordinate positions in the mosque. Finally, they can be actively barred from leading religious functions, or at least from effecting such office among people of free descent.

Access to Productive Resources

In the early 21st century, rural local economic elites largely consist of descendants of the free, who usually still hold the monopoly over the most important productive resources: land and water. Where colonial administrations had no interest in altering local systems of production and sought to minimize the social upheaval active emancipation of the nominally liberated slaves would cause, conflicts between former slaves and their former owners over access to productive resources were and continue to be usually arranged to the advantage of the latter. Many former slaves who stayed in the rural areas of their origin were forced into positions as sharecroppers on land that remained in ownership of their former owners. Rights to other resources remained equally blocked. After independence, state intervention in the agricultural sector strengthened the emancipatory potential for people of slave descent. Nevertheless, the modernization drive in agricultural policies saw the transformation of traditional positions of power involved in the ownership and distributions of natural resources into such functions as secretary or president of the local agricultural cooperation or farmers association, which translates into people of free descent gaining control of access to investment and productive capital, such as agricultural machinery and fertilizers. The relative emancipation of slave descendants in rural settings was further strained by the effects of climate change and industrializing agriculture on soil fertility and harvests, declining world market prices, and the application of neoliberal reforms in the agricultural sector since the 1980s. While in the past many freed slaves turned into sharecropping peasants, in the early 21st century it seems that moving away from agriculture is the main path to emancipation for youth of slave descent. This structural inequality maintains people of slave descent in economic dependence when it comes to agricultural survival.

Discussion of the Literature

Awareness that the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the partial emancipation of former slaves, and the legacies of these incomplete processes play an important role in the history of Africa largely predates the introduction of the term “post-slavery.” The term “post-slavery” was first used in the context of the American and Caribbean histories of slavery in the 2010’s, by postcolonial literary studies scholars of African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Prior to the introduction of the term “post-slavery,” a different vocabulary was used, such as aftermath, legacy, memories, reconfigurations, shadows, afterlives, creolization, or stigma. The following literature and research overview is limited to anglophone and francophone scholarship, excluding Lusophone scholarship, since no major historical studies dealing with Lusophone African post-slavery situations have been published in the early 21^st century / at the date of publishing. Possibly the first publication to address issues of post-slavery in contemporary African societies appeared in 2000, as a special issue of the Journal des Africanistes, guest edited by Roger Botte, entitled “L’ombre portée de l’esclavage: Avatars contemporains de l’oppression sociale.”[33] All contributions in this special issue focus on the effects of past slavery and its continuities in contemporary African societies, with the explicit intention to make visible what had previously remained invisible, a “blind spot,” in African studies. The collection has a strong focus on francophone west Africa, with an especially strong focus on Mauritania. This bias toward studying post-slavery in west Africa and especially Mauritania has not been remedied. Indeed, at the start of the 21^st century, studies focusing on post-slavery in north, east, or southern Africa are far fewer in number. Possible explanations for this west African bias can be found in the dominance of studies on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, also focusing on west Africa, and in the region having been colonized by both France and Britain, leading to most historians of the region mastering both these languages, which favors exchange between francophone and anglophone scholarship. Botte’s special issue launched a wider debate in francophone academia. In 2005, the Centre Nationale pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) founded the International Research Centre on Slavery and Post-Slavery (CIRESC), which became an independent research facility in 2017. In 2019, CIRESC founded the open-access online multilingual journal Slaveries and PostSlaveries. In the anglophone context, the debate on post-slavery in west Africa started with the volume Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, edited by Benedetta Rossi. Predating the notion of post-slavery, the focus of this book is on the continued exploitation of people considered as slave descendants by those considered to be descendants of slaveholders, concluding that “after the ‘end of slavery’ there still is ‘slavery,’” which Rossi labels “reconfigured slavery.”[34] This book marks the beginning of a debate about the different uses of the terminology of slavery, and the need to differentiate between contemporary slavery and what Rossi called classificatory slavery and metaphorical slavery. This debate became more explicit in the discussions surrounding the production of the special issue “Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa” in the International Journal of African Historical Studies.[35] The introduction to this volume explicitly sought to delimit and define what post-slavery could be in an African context by sketching the legacies and continuities of slavery as post and past slavery, in which historical legacies in a closed past were set in conjunction with continuities of slavery in the present.[36] A further major contribution to the debates on post-slavery in Africa consists of the two-volume publication African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, edited by Martin Klein, Sandra Greene, and Alice Bellagamba.[37] The last section of volume one, entitled “Living with the Past,” explicitly thematizes post-slavery. Post-slavery studies in Africa can be said to be fully recognized with the start of the larger cooperative projects “Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: A Historical Anthropology,” which ran from 2013 to 2018 at Milan Bicocca University under direction of Alice Bellagamba, and the project “Freed-Slave Workers in the ‘Mountain of Iron’ (Mauritania),” directed by Anne McDougall at the University of Alberta from 2018 to 2021, which focusses strongly on (gendered) questions of work. The “SLAFNET Slavery in Africa: A Dialogue between Europe and Africa” network at CIRESC, directed by Marie-Pierre Ballarin between 2016 and 2020, sought to compare African and American post-slavery situations, explicitly including southern and eastern African cases. The “Aftermath of Slavery in East Africa” project, directed by Felicitas Becker at Ghent University and running between 2019 and 2024, focusses on the gender and family aspects of post-slavery. Finally, the “Slavery and Forced Migration” project by Marie Rodet at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) London and Lotte Pelckmans at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies of Copenhagen University, running from 2020 to 2023, looks at the historical continuities and linkages between slavery and fugitivity, and between post-slavery and displacement in Mali and its diaspora. Major publications coming out of these projects by the researchers mentioned here are listed in the Further Reading section.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Eric Allina, Samuël Coghe, and Philip Jan Havik for their advice regarding (the nonexistence of) lusophone scholarship on post-slavery in Africa, and the students in their courses on the topic for their questions that helped sharpen this article.

Primary Sources

Given the analytical rather than topical nature of the term “post-slavery,” it is hard to point to primary source material. Some suggestions for further exploration are given here, with one example each.

(Auto-)biographies written by people of slave descent focusing on their situation in post-slavery contexts would come closest to primary source material, but the authors are not aware of many of these existing.[38] Example from Kenya: Khamisi, Joe. Dash before Dusk. A Slave Descendant’’s Journey in Freedom. Nairobi: Kenway Publications, 2014. Additionally, several academics have documented life histories and narratives of people of slave descent.[39] Example from Gambia: Gaibazzi, Paolo. “Post-slavery refractions: subjectivity and slave descent in a Gambian Life Story.” Africa 86 (2016): 405-424. Testimonies, reports, and other material produced by late-20th- and early 21st-century African antislavery activist organizations could be considered as a window on primary sources of post-slavery situations, but of course they are biased.[40] Example of a report by association Timidria in Niger: Anti-Slavery: Wahaya , Example from Mali: Temedt Association. Esclavage Au Mali: Des Victimes Témoignent. Paris: Editions L”Harmattan, 2014. In general, however, antislavery movements’ archives are not collected anywhere outside the headquarters of these organizations themselves, which are not accessible to a larger public. Most of these organizations do not maintain coherent stable websites but instead are active online on social media. Finally, post-abolition court cases dealing with family, marriage, inheritance, and land rights are very often linked to the history of slavery, but only a few of them gain visibility in national media or elsewhere.[41]

Links to Digital Materials

Anti-Slavery: Descent-Based Slavery https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/descent-based-slavery/.

Slaveries and Post-Slaveries: An Open Access Multilingual Journal https://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/.

Documentaries

The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes, Mali https://vimeo.com/245704289, by Marie Rodet, 2014.

Silent Memories: The Unbroken Chains https://nairobinow.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/photo-text-exhibition-silentmemories-the-unbroken-chains-aug-19-sept-7-2014-alliance-francaise/, by Patrick Abungu et Okoko Ashikoye, NMK/ Ambassade de France/IRD, Mombasa, 2014.

Bouillagui: A Free Village http://bouillagui.soas.ac.uk/#Boucle_de_d%C3%A9part, western Mali, 2021, Directed by dr Marie Rodet.

Hadijatou https://leslan.org/hadijatou/, by Lala Goma, 2016.
Yesterday’s Slaves: Democracy and Ethnicity in Benin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW3Zr0e3pU0, by Eric Hahonou and Camilla Strandsbjerg, 2011.

Descent-based Slavery and Fugitive Displacements in 21st century West Africa, by Lotte Pelckmans. 2023 forthcoming.

Research Projects

The Aftermath of Slavery in East Africa https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/projects/aftermath-slavery-east-africa.

Esclavage et migration forcée dans la région de Kayes au Mali https://www.slaveryforcedmigration.org/.

LESLAN: Héritages de l’esclavage au Niger; Legacies of Slavery in Niger https://leslan.org/.

Notes

One of the first historians to address the question of slave emancipation in African historical contexts was Frederick Cooper, “Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa,” in Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, ed. Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 107–150.
Julia O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Clare Oxby, “Born into Bondage? Iklan Lives along the Rural-Urban Continuum (Tuareg, Sahel),” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 1–2 (2020): 128–160.
Denise Bouche, Les Villages de Liberté en Afrique Noire Française 1887–1910 (Paris: Mouton, 1968). Bouche intended to graduate with this work, but she was blocked from graduation as her study was seen as politically undesirable, and publication was postponed until 1968. See Marie-Albane de Suremain, “Esclaves et esclavage en Afrique occidentale française: Un objet embarrassant pour les sciences sociales françaises en situation coloniale (de la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale aux années 1950),” Canadian Journal of African Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 108–127; and Bosha Bombe, Slavery in Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic, 2013).
Alice Bellagamba, “Fally Kebbeh and Mamadi Kumba: Emancipation and Slave Ancestry in the Twentieth-Century Urban Gambia https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21619441.2020.1802157,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 1–2 (2020): 66–86; Florence Boyer, “Le rojet migratoire des migrants touaregs de la zone de Bankilaré: La pauvreté désavouée,” Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift für Kritische Afrikastudien 8 (2005): 47–67; Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa: c. 1844–1914 (Oxford: Currey, 2006); Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, African Studies Series 94 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Martin Klein, “Urban Slavery in West and West Central Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trade https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1802159,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no.
1–2 (2020): 46–65.
Alexander Meckelburg and Solomon Gebreyes, “Ethiopia and Great Britain: A Note on the Anti-Slavery Protocol of 1884,” Northeast African Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 61–82.
Amir Idris, Sudan’s Civil War: Slavery, Race and Formational Identities (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); and Jok Madut Jok, War and Slavery in Sudan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Eric Hahonou and Lotte Pelckmans, “West African Antislavery Movements: Citizenship Struggles and the Legacies of Slavery,” Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift für Kritische Afrikastudien 20, no. 11 (2011): 141–162.
Marco Gardini, “L’activisme politique des descendants d’esclaves à Antananarivo: Les héritages de Zoam,” Politique Africaine 140, no. 4 (2015): 23–40.
Eric Hahonou, “African Anti-Slavery Movements,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History
François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expérience du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 29.
Baz Lecocq and Eric Hahonou, “Introduction: Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2015): 181–192.
de Suremain, “Esclaves et esclavage”; and Benedetta Rossi, “Périodiser la fin de l’esclavage: Le droit colonial, la Société des Nations et la résistance des esclaves dans le Sahel nigérien, 1920–1930 ,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 72, no. 4 (2017): 983–1021.
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Roger Botte, “De l’esclavage et du daltonisme dans les sciences sociales,” Journal des Africanistes 70, no. 1–2 (2000): 7–42; Ella Keren, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghanaian Academic Historiography: History, Memory, and Power,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 975–1000; and Ibrahima Thioub, “Regard critique sur les lectures africaines de l’esclavage et de la traite atlantique,” in Les historiens africains et la mondialisation, ed. Issiaka Mande and Blandine Stefanson (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 271–291. Notable exceptions to the general avoidance of African slavery are various works by Bongfen Chem-Langhëë, Mbaye Gueye, Martin Hogendorn, Paul Lovejoy, Martin Klein, Igor Kopytoff, and Suzanne Miers.
Ella Keren, “Memories of the Atlantic Slave Trade in History Teaching in Ghana: Breaking the Silence?,” in Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa, ed. Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013), 123–147.
Nicolas Argenti, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Alessandra Brivio, “Understanding Slavery in Possession Rituals ,” in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 154–173; Francesca Declich, “Singing Songs and Performing Dances with Embedded Historical Meanings in Somalia ,” in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E.
Greene, and Martin A. Klein, Vol. 1 (2013), 121–128; and Olatunji Ojo, “Silent Testimonies, Public Memory: Slavery in Yoruba Proverbs https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022552.017,” in African Voices, ed. Bellagamba, Sandra E.
Greene, and Martin A. Klein, Vol. 1:149–163.
Felicitas Becker, “‘Looking for Life’: Traces of Slavery in the Structures and Social Lives of Southern Swahili Towns https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1804691,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 1–2 (2020): 87–109.
Chouki El Hamel, “‘Race,’ Slavery and Islam in Maghribi Mediterranean Thought: The Question of the Haratin in Morocco,” Journal of North African Studies 7, no. 3 (2002): 29–52; and Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010).
The main exceptions here are El Hamel, Gardini, Glassman, and Hall, who historicize race in the local African context. See “Further Reading” and note 9.
Catherine Taine-Cheikh, “‘Hartani’: Une enquête au Pays des Mots,” l’Ouest Saharien 10–11 (2020): 73–94, 88; and Katherine Wiley, “Being Harātīn? Being Hedriyyîn? Fluid Meanings of Ethnic Terms in Mauritania’s Assaba Region,” l’Ouest Saharien 10–11 (2020): 209–224.
Dereje Feyissa, “The Pure, the Real, and the Chosen: The Encounter between the Anywaa, the Nuer, and the Highlanders in Gambella,” in Ethiopian Images of Self and Other, ed. Felix Girke (Halle an der Saale, Germany: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2014), 171–196. Ironically, “Habesha,” the self-descriptive term for Highland Ethiopians, has become synonymous with “blackness” and slave status in the Arab-speaking world. Jonathon Glassman, “Sorting Out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars,” Journal of African History 41 (2000): 395–428.
Marco Gardini, “Fear of the Dark: Urban Insecurity and the Legacies of Slavery in Antananarivo, Madagascar https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1802158,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 1–2 (2020): 1–18.
Giuseppe Maimone, “IRA Mauritanie: Legacy and Innovation in the Anti-Slavery Fight in Mauritania,” Antropologia 7, no. 1 (2020): 67–92.
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Souleymane Diallo, The Truth about the Desert: Exile, Memory, and the Making of Communities among Malian Tuareg Refugees in Niger (Cologne: Modern Academic, 2018); Baz Lecocq, “The Bellah Question: Slave Emancipation, Race and Social Categories in Late Twentieth-Century Northern Mali,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 42–67; and Benedetta Rossi, “Beyond the Atlantic Paradigm: Slavery and Abolitionism in the Nigerien Sahel,” Journal of Global Slavery 5 (2020): 238–269.
Lotte Pelckmans, “Surnames as a Passport to Social Mobility? Renaming Practices of Fulɓe Slave Descendants in Central Mali,” in African Slaves, African Masters: Politics, Memories, Social Life, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene & Martin Klein, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017), 255–286.
Guillaume Durand, Les noms de famille de la population martiniquaise d’ascendance servile: Origine et signification des patronymes portés par les affranchis avant 1848 et par les “nouveaux libres” après 1848 en Martinique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011).
Taine-Cheikh, “Hartani,” 73–94, 81.
Alice Bellagamba, “Marriage Is the Arena: ‘Inside’ Stories of Genealogical Purity and Slave Ancestry from Southern Senegal (Kolda Region),” Antropologia (Milano) 7, no. 1 (2020): 141–164.
Helen Duffy, “Hadijatou Mani Koroua v. Niger: Slavery Unveiled by the ECOWAS Court,” Human Rights Law Review 9, no. 1 (2009): 151–170.
Kadir Abdelkader Galy and Mahaman Laouali Dandah, L’esclavage au Niger: Aspects historiques, juridiques et statistiques (Niamey, Niger: Association Timidira, 2003), 26.
Marie-Pierre Ballarin, “L’esclavage en héritage et l’émergence d’une mobilisation sociopolitique au Kenya https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.140.0041,” Politique Africaine 140 (2015): 41–59; and Lotte Pelckmans, “‘Having a Road’: Social and Spatial Mobility of Persons of Slave and Mixed Descent in Post-Independence Central Mali,” Journal of African History 53, no. 2 (2012): 235–255.
Eric Hahonou, “African Anti-Slavery Movements.”
Roger Botte, ed., “L’ombre portée de l’esclavage: Avatars contemporains de l’oppression sociale,” Journal des Africanistes 70, no. 1–2 (2000).
Benedetta Rossi, “Introduction: Rethinking Slavery in West Africa,” in Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 1–25, 19.
Lecocq and Hahonou, “Exploring Post-Slavery.”
Lecocq and Hahonou, “Exploring Post-Slavery,” 184.
Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Voices.
An example from Kenya: Joe Khamisi, Dash before Dusk: A Slave Descendant’s Journey in Freedom (Nairobi, Kenya: Kenway, 2014).
An example from Gambia: Paolo Gaibazzi, “Post-Slavery Refractions: Subjectivity and Slave Descent in a Gambian Life Story,” Africa 86 (2016): 405–424.
An example from Niger: Galy kadir Abdelkader and Moussa Zangao, “Wahaya: Domestic and Sexual Slavery in Niger – 10 Personal Stories https://www.antislavery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Wahaya-report.pdf.” (London and Niamey: Anti Slavery International and Association Timidria, 2012); and an example from Mali: Temedt Association, Esclavage Au Mali: Des Victimes Témoignent (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2014).
An example from Kenya: J. D. Kitao, P. H. Uledi, and A. J. Marafa, Republic of Kenya in the High Court of Kenya at Mombasa: Civil Suit 173 of 2006, Republic of Kenya (Mombasa, 2008)

Baz Lecocq is Professor of African History at the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies (IAAW).

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist who has been working on social mobility and status at the crossroads of (post-)slavery and migration studies, with a focus on francophone West Africa.

This article was first published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.