Paper short abstract:

Several anti-slavery organisations are active in West Africa and they all increasingly face the challenge and task to include visuals in their campaigns. I analyse the visuals used by three anti-slavery movements (Mali-Niger) to explore political imaginations of the anti-slavery cause.

Paper long abstract:

The legacies of internal African slavery have a long history in West Africa and are only quite recently making their way out of the sphere of strong taboos, moving into more public realms of representation, recognition and mobilisation.

Several anti-slavery organisations are active in West Africa and they all increasingly face the challenge and task to include visuals (symbols, 'proof', logos, membership cards) of present day 'slaves' and 'slavery' in their logos, websites, reports and so on.

Reasons for this increased need for visuals can range from the internationalization of their advocacy work over the visual demands of social media as well as the need to unite around symbolic values, not least vis-a vis the anti-slavery movements' national members, many of which are poor and illiterate.

In this paper, I focus on the visuals used by three anti-slavery movements -Timidria-(Niger), TEMEDT (Mali), and Gambannaxu fedde- RFMP (Mali)- to explore political imaginations of the anti-slavery cause. An important observation is that the visual tropes of chains and despair seem to be largely left out in favor of more context- specific visuals that tend to break away from, rather than establish connections to those used by other abolitionist, anti-slavery and human trafficking movements in other parts of the world. I will analyse the paradoxes of these visual 'subtleties' of the West-African anti-slavery imagination and mobilization by connecting histories of taboo with the expectations of consensus (cfr. Siméant), social cohesion and conformity in a morally fragmented post-slavery context.