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- Convenors:
-
Benedetta Rossi
(University College London)
Bosha Bombe Reta (Arba Minch University, Ethiopia)
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- Chair:
-
Alexander Meckelburg
(UCL)
- Discussant:
-
Benedetta Rossi
(University College London)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- History (x) Inequality (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 24
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
The spread of abolitionist ideas in Africa turned slavery into a problem that had to be addressed. Some African groups aspired to a future without slavery, others favoured ameliorationist approaches. This panel explores African attitudes toward slavery from the 19th century to the present.
Long Abstract:
Like in other parts of the world, Africans started questioning the legitimacy of slavery at least since the Eighteenth Century. Ideas about what ought to be done about slavery and the slave trade were not politically neutral. Different groups and individuals, including slaveowners and enslaved persons, had conflicting interests and views about the future of slavery. In different places and at different moments, some wished to eradicate slavery, others to ameliorate it; some encouraged slaveowners to manumit their slaves but did not aspire to change the hierarchies in which masters and slaves had been integrated; others entertained egalitarian visions of the future in which all citizens would be treated equally irrespective of the alleged status of their ancestors. Local attitudes toward slavery have been interacting with global humanitarian movements and official government policies committed to a future without slavery. They have also been confronted with the circumscribed resilience of pro-slavery ideas. In some African regions, struggles around slavery and its legacies are still intense today. Papers in this panel explore the ideas and strategies of different African actors, from rulers to enslaved persons, from religious authorities to grassroots activists. They analyse the normative concepts and moral values mobilised in debates around slavery and abolition and examine the strategies developed by those fighting to suppress, or alternatively protect, slavery and its afterlives in African societies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Michelle Liebst (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Although Zanzibar's sultans of the C19 had divergent and competing visions for the future of their territories, they broadly shared in their resistance to abolition. Even so, abolition was not the only way to end slavery, this paper examines the practices and rationales of manumission.
Paper long abstract:
Zanzibar’s sultans, of which there were seven in the nineteenth century, had divergent and competing visions for the future of their territories. Slavery – its curtailment, and its management – loomed large as the British, as well as other European and American powers, increasingly applied pressure. With their limited sovereignty, each sultan fought to balance the interests of foreign powers and 'leading Arabs' in the region. But politics and diplomacy were not the only forces driving the sultans’ strategies and policies with regards to slavery. The sultans were Ibadi Muslims, and thus held ideologies that shaped the way they envisioned the future of the Sultanate, the slave owners, and the enslaved. Abolition was, it seems, a foreign and unpopular concept, but manumission was a comparable – though entirely distinct – strategy for ending slavery. Manumission was by its very nature a forward-looking practice because the benefits of manumission were not to be found in this world, but the next. When sultans and other elites manumitted hundreds of enslaved persons rather than let them be emancipated by abolitionist laws, they were taking a different path to the Euro-American vision of abolition. This paper addresses a need to understand the perspectives and ideologies of Zanzibar’s sultans with regards to policies on slavery and abolition. by interrogating the sultans’ visions and strategies and seeks to establish whether they saw the end of slavery as inevitable.
Bosha Bombe Reta (Arba Minch University, Ethiopia)
Paper short abstract:
Former slaves and their descendants reacted to past hierarchies and inequalities in different ways in Wolaita and Gamo of southern Ethiopia. This paper explores success and failures of different approaches of former slaves and their descendants in combating the stigma and marginalization they faced
Paper long abstract:
Slavery has long been practiced in the Omotic societies of southern Ethiopia. The 1942 legal abolition of slavery in Ethiopia did not end the social, economic and political marginalization of the former slaves and their descendants. Against the past hierarchical inequalities and injustices the former slaves and their descendants reacted in different ways in Wolaita and in Gamo. While in Gamo many of the former slave descendants underwent ritual purification to be integrated into the mainstream society in Wolaita, they opposed the former masters and landlords especially during two years of Girmame Neways regime (1958-1959) and during the 1974 Great Ethiopian Revolution. In the post 1975 some engaged in studying their family genealogy, others married persons of free descent (often resultings in clans conflict). Many also adopted the clan of their former masters to be considered as real “citizens”. The paper will explore the success and failures of the different approaches of the former slave descendants in combating the stigma and marginalization they faced after the legal abolition of slavery in two adjacent Omotic communities of southern Ethiopia. It will end with some reflections on these group’s aspirations and objectives for the future
Alexander Meckelburg (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores abolitionist approaches in Ethiopia since the 1940s. It focuses on the generations of civil and church activists, philanthropists, politicians, policymakers, and intellectuals who fought, and are still fighting, against slavery.
Paper long abstract:
Slavery died a slow death in Ethiopia. After 1942 most enslaved people ‘disappeared’ into a quasi-feudal agricultural sector, joined the informal workforces that fed the rising urban developments or vanished in their former master homesteads. Abolition in Ethiopia in the 1940s was a state-driven project with little to offer for slaves who sought to emancipate themselves from former ties of dependence. Following the criminalization of slavery, the land reform of 1975 marked a turning point in the history of emancipation. But although land became accessible to formerly enslaved persons and their descendants, and although their incorporation into Peasant Associations was supposed to dissolve social boundaries of class, slavery’s legacies were resilient. Today, NGOs and governments estimate that there are up to 400 000 ‘modern slaves’ in Ethiopia, which is also regarded as one of the biggest hubs for migrants vulnerable to extreme exploitation, possibly meeting the threshold of slavery. In this context, many Ethiopian actors have been mobilizing against enduring inequalities, some rooted in historical slavery, others in new forms of ‘modern slavery’. This paper explores their abolitionist approaches. It focuses on the generations of civil and church activists, philanthropists, politicians, policymakers, and intellectuals who fought, and are still fighting, against slavery. What are the main changes and continuities in this fight since Ethiopia’s legal abolition in 1942?
Michael Odijie (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Through the activities and networks of the Initiative for the Eradication of Traditional and Cultural Stigmatisation in our Society (IFETACSIOS), this article studies the modern networks and strategies of anti-slavery campaign in Igboland.
Paper long abstract:
Although slavery had been legally abolished in Igboland, the article points out some of the failures of legal approach to deal with forms of slavery that emanates from, and are regulated by, traditional practices. Efforts to abolish domestic slavery in Igboland started with the Aro Expedition in 1901 and advanced with the creation of anti-slavery laws. While anti-slavery laws are highly effective in combating some forms of slavery, they are equally highly ineffective (and sometimes counterproductive) in combating other forms of slavery. This article will critically situate the new abolition movement in Igboland in the failure of legal approach.
Mariana Dias Paes (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how the Ovimbundo of Benguela´s hinterlands (nowadays Angola) regulated slavery and compulsory labor and how their legal framework clashed with the Portuguese one. It draws on court cases involving enslaved people in West Central Africa stored in Angolan and Portuguese archives.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes how the Ovimbundo of Benguela´s hinterlands (nowadays Angola) regulated slavery and compulsory labor and how their legal framework clashed with the Portuguese one. Among the Ovimbundo, compensation was the cornerstone of law. When someone did something prohibited or that damaged another person´s body, status, kinship, or property, the culprit did not suffer punishment but had to materially compensate the victim or the victim´s kin. In this system of compensation, it became common practice to assign value to people, either free or enslaved. Because people had measurable value, their bodies and services could be used for compensation when their kin did not have other means to pay for an offense or a debt. Since slavery and compulsory labor were linked to compensation, once people had other material means to pay for the damage, they could redeem someone from slavery or compulsory labor. Thus, slavery was perceived as a temporary institution. On the other hand, from the point of view of Portuguese law, if someone had been for a long time perceived and treated as an enslaved person, he was legally a slave. These legal ideas clashed with Ovimbundo law and very often Portuguese and Ovimbundo litigated over status operating with different conceptions about what was legal or illegal enslavement. This paper draws on court cases involving enslaved people in West Central Africa stored in Angolan and Portuguese archives.
Maysa Espindola Souza (Max-Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory)
Paper short abstract:
This research analyzes the administrative cases of the "Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs" of Portuguese Guinea with the aim of analyzing the expectations of indigenous minors submitted to colonial labor between the 1920s and 1930s.
Paper long abstract:
This research analyzes the cases of guardianship, complaint, administrative/judicial cases, and other documents from the "Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs" (Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas) of Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea Bissau). The objective is to understand the labor exploitation of minors considered to be indigenous between the 1920s and 1930s. The cases of the secretariat show that the labor of minors was highly disputed among local elites for both domestic and commercial services. The minors were exploited in relations where the boundaries between care and exploitation were quite blurred. In Portuguese Guinea, the analysis of the cases exposes the agency and strategies of these subjects in using the secretariat to (re)define their living and working conditions. It was more difficult for the minors to sue their patrons because of the labor conditions or the control to which they were subjected. However, on the opportunities that they were in front of the secretary and other authorities, many presented their complaints denouncing mistreatment and threats. Others chose to run away to their families or to new employers as a way to put an end to situations they considered unfavorable. Despite the constant presence of minors in the labor force in the colonial territories, this topic is still little studied. This research highlights the importance of judicial and administrative cases as sources for studying the expectations of minors, women, and men submitted to European colonialism.