Paper short abstract:

Negotiating freedom and belonging to families and society varied across time and space in Unyamwezi. This paper explores the diverse experiences of former slave women to show how culture and missions shaped struggles for social recognition and integration into the post-abolition Nyamwezi society.

Paper long abstract:

Most slaves in Unyamwezi were women and girls working as both domestic and field slaves. Because of the increasing demand for agricultural produce, most slave women lived in rural Unyamwezi as agricultural laborers. By 1890, about two-thirds of the Tabora district's population (233,000 out of 350,000 residents) were slaves, and women constituted the majority. Slave owners preferred slave women to male slaves because they were “docile” and “easier to control and were valued as agricultural laborers, sexual partners and potential mothers.” As such, they were “higher priced” than male slaves because they could be absorbed into “kinship groups” and “patronage networks”, becoming “children” or “relatives” or “part of their owner’s family.”

Although slave women could be integrated into the owner’s family, becoming free and belonging to families and society varied across time and space in Unyamwezi. The majority of slave women, despite their assimilation into the owner’s family through marriage and sexual partnership, remained marginal in the hierarchies of families and religious circles and binaries between bonafide members and ‘former slaves’ who dominated social and religious life in Unyamwezi. Despite certification of freedom, others were excluded from the Nyamwezi ritual, the right to own land, and decision-making and participation. Eventually, slave women lived in Nyamwezi patriarchal societies with limited legal positions, social rights and economic opportunities such as self-employment and social mobility. They were also deprived of access to resources, freedom of choice and the development of personal skills.

This paper, relying on church records deposited in the archives of western Tanzania and oral interviews collected in Unyamwezi, weaves through the post-slavery experiences of former slave women living in missions and villages. Because the effects of slavery on formerly enslaved women and their descendants varied depending on the culture and society they were brought into contact in post-abolition Unyamwezi, they shaped struggles for social recognition and integration into the Nyamwezi society. While some former slave women “attached themselves to people” and, in due course, sought autonomy within the households, others, instead, relocated to distant villages where they were unknown in search of opportunities, including marriage, access to resources, and ritual. In the end, the paper seeks to show that an understanding of freedom, marginality and integration of slave women should consider context, culture and varied responses of former slave women in space-time.