African History_Lecture 4 _Slavery

What were the three stages of slavery in Africa?

• First stage: 1350 - 1600

• Second stage: 1600 - 1800

• Third stage: 1800 - 1900 (slavery main part of African economy)

What is chattel?

• Salves can be bought and sold, they are commodities

What were the most developed forms of slavery?

• Slaves removed furthest from their birthplace

How have slaves become slaves usually?

• Warfare, slave raiding and kidnapping

• Judicial punishment for theft and murder

• Voluntary enslavement

• Sacrificial victims (ex: 19th century ancestors of the Igbo)

What were the common means of coercion used to subordinate slaves?

• Whipping, confinement and deprivation of food

What were other types of labour, apart from slavery?

• Serfdom (tied to the land)

• Clientage (voluntary labour without fixed rewards)

• Wage labour (voluntary labour with fixed reward)

• Pawnship (labour as collateral for debt)

• Communal work

Were slaves only confined to the most physically demanding laborious jobs?

• No

• Also positions of authority

How did slave masters control the reproductive capacities of their slaves?

• Women were treated as sexual objects and men were castrated

• Female slaves more expensive than male slaves

• Slave status was inherited

How was the American system of slavery unique?

• Manipulated concept of race to enslave people

• Economically justified exploitation of labour via slavery

• No slaves in the government, no eunuchs, no sacrificial slaves

What is the difference between slavery in society, slavery as an institution and slavery as a mode of production?

• Slavery in society: only domestic and sexual exploitation

• Slavery as an institution: Production and political power (army and administration)

• Slavery as a mode of production: Use of slavery in one or more sectors of the economy

What are the three types of slavery?

• Political: army and administration

• Social: domestic and sexual

• Economic: Agriculture, mining, commerce and finance

Why were enslavement and trade necessary for a slave mode of production?

• Slavery wasn’t self-sustaining via natural reproduction

What were the three historical situations of slavery in Africa?

• Africa providing slaves to North Africa and the Middle East

• Africa providing slaves to the Americas via the Transatlantic Slave Trade

• African slaves working in Africa after the collapse of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

What are the earliest references to kinship in Africa as a result of the development of a social structure based on ethnicity and kinship?

• Matrilineal and patrilineal distinctions by the 16th century (ex: Akan people of the Gold Coast patrilineal, central West Africa matrilineal)

• Domestic mode of production: Political power based on gerontocracy

• No slave mode of production, slavery only as a minor social entity

Why did slaves and pawns provide effective ways of controlling people in kinship societies?

• Slaves and pawns had no ties to the social structure based on ethnicity and kinship, bypassed genetic connections

How did Islam affect slavery by the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries?

• Black slaves imported into North Africa and the Swahili Coast

• Muslims not enslaveable, but non-Muslim Africans captured as POWs during Holy Wars in North Africa and around the Persian Gulf

• Slavery as religious apprenticeship for pagans makes Africa an important source of slaves (Jews and Christians only taxed as free men)

• Muslim Merchants exported few thousand slaves per year via local warfare and kidnapping

What role did slaves fill in the large Islamic states of the Mediterranean?

• Military and administrative positions (loyal because dependent on master for status)

• Eunuchs looked after harems

• Women used for domestic and sexual exploitation

• Salt mines in Arabia, Persia and North Africa

What was the difference between slavery of kin-based societies and the slavery of Islamic societies?

• Slavery in kin-based societies: marginal domestic and sexual exploitation

• Slavery in Islamic societies: institutional, slaves used in production, military and administrative roles

What was the difference between the non-African Islamic slave market and the European slave market during the Trans-Atlantic Trade? Where did European trade particularly take place?

• Islamic market: gradual spread of Islam through North Africa and the Swahili Coast

• European market: Guinea coast wasn’t influenced much by Islam, Intense short period when over 12.8 million slaves were exported from the late 15th century

What was the effect of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade on indigenous forms of slavery?

• Slavery changed from a minor domestic and sexual service in kin-based societies, “lineage slavery”, to a major part of the African economy as an institution and a mode of production

Where did the Trans-atlantic slave trade take place?

• Five ports accounted for half of the exports

• Luanda was the largest port

What are the main features usually associated with all types of slavery?

• Commodification

• Foreign identity

• Violence

• Sexual exploitation

How was the European slave trade similar to Muslim slave trade?

• Slaves used in military and administrative positions

• Slaves used in mines

• Women used as wives and concubines

How did the increased number of slaves in Africa change slavery when there was a steady supply of slaves in the 19th century?

• Slavery was heavily used in agricultural production

How can we describe the history of slavery in Africa?

• Slavery was dynamic

• Slavery became an institution, not a minor social practice

• Slavery became a mode of production: Enslavement, slave trade and exploitation of slaves

• Production, political power and trade relied on slaves

Why was Africa integrated into an international network of slavery?

• Africa had a large and cheap supply of slaves

How were Africans enslaved?

• Warfare, kidnapping and judicial punishment

• Africans enslaving their enemies (not brothers) to export rather than slave owners in the Americas and Islamic states enslaving Africans themselves

When were alternatives to slavery seriously considered in Africa and why?

• Late 19th century

• Sources of slaves and means of distributing them diminished

Why was colonial slavery abolished in late 19th century?

• Capitalist world economy and industrialization made slavery difficult

• Slaves pushed to their limits during the economic depressions of the 1880s and 1890s

• Slaves began to escape and form fugitive communities

• Became difficult to replenish slave supplies

What was the major obstacle against the emancipation of slaves?

• Colonialism

What were the 3 Cs meant to develop Africa and lead to progress?

• Civilization

• Christianity

• Commerce

How did the abolition of slavery take place on the Western Coast of Africa?

• Policy of emancipating slaves: 160,000 thousand slaves set free between 1810 and 1864

• Anti-slave-trading treaties with African govs: Abolished slave export but maintained domestic slave trade and slavery

• Establishment of freed-slave settlements: Freetown in Sierra Leone for slaves from European ships coming from the Americas, Liberia founded in 1821 as a colony of freed slaves from the US

When was slavery abolished in Sierra Leone?

• Slave dealing abolished in 1896

• Slavery abolished in 1926

When was slavery abolished on the Gold Coast?

• 1874, Asante Kingdom defeated

Why was abolishing slavery in Africa difficult?

• Colonial system couldn’t rely on slavery due to capitalist world economy and industrialization

• Slavery was a systemic institution in indigenous social formations

How were escaped slaves used by the British?

• Recruited into the colonial army and the Hausa Armed Police Force

How did the collapse of the Ashanti Kingdom affect slavery?

• Escaped slaves founded a dozen villages in Accra in 1893

How did missionaries affect slavery?

• Against slavery

• Offered sanctuary to fugitive slaves and condemned slavery in public

How diverse and mobile were slaves in the Niger delta?

• Former Igbo slave Jaja achieved commercial success and political power

How was the relationship between converted slaves and traditional authorities in the Niger delta?

• It was difficult to punish slaves if they were Christian

Did slavery end with colonial rule?

• Legacy of colonialism influenced economic and social developments for several decades

• Freedom not an option, switch from slavery to other forms of abolition

How was slavery abolished in Central and East Africa?

• Missionary opposition to slave trading by buying slaves and offering refuge to fugitive slaves in 1890s, domestic slavery largely ignored (ex: White Fathers)

• Slaves escaped Swahili plantations to form fugitive communities

• British intervention in Tanzanian Zanzibar archipelago, South Africa

• Productive slavery shifting to different forms of servility, lineage slavery becoming marginal (ex: forced labour in the Congo Free State in the 1890s and the Boer system of apprenticeship in South Africa)

What were the different colonial approaches to the abolition of slavery?

• British: interested due to practical reasons

• Portuguese and Belgian: Promoted slavery until early 20th century, still interested in extracting profit from the Congo basin

How was slavery abolished in North Africa?

• No impact of missionaries, abolition campaigns led exclusively by governments (ex: French in Western Sudan, British in Nigeria and the Nile Valley)

• Slavery adapted to colonial ambitions, not fully abolished (ex: French villages de liberte and engages a temps, British murgu (fixed payments) in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan)

• Fugitive slaves in the 1890s encouraged by the French and the British

• Slavery collapses in Western Sudan in 1905-06, one of the most significant slave revolts in history

When did slavery cease to exist and almost became extinct?

• 1930s