Short Abstract

How did the end of slavery reshape marriage in Africa? This panel explores how emancipation transformed intimacy, labour, gender and dependency, asking whether marriage offered new forms of freedom or reproduced and reconfigured older relations of power and unfreedom.

Long Abstract

The abolition of slavery transformed the legal and social landscape of African societies, but freedom did not necessarily mean the end of relationships of dependency, coercion, or unequal labour. This panel asks how the decline of slavery reshaped marriage and intimate relationships across twentieth-century Africa. It considers marriage not simply as an institution transformed by emancipation, but as one of the arenas in which the meanings and boundaries of freedom were subsequently negotiated.

How did formerly enslaved women and men use marriage to establish new claims to respectability, kinship, property, or belonging? To what extent did marriage offer routes away from relationships associated with slavery, and to what extent did it absorb or reconfigure older forms of dependency? How did changing practices of bridewealth, concubinage, domestic labour, divorce, inheritance and sexuality intersect with the decline of slavery? And what roles did colonial states, religious institutions and African political and intellectual movements play in redefining legitimate marriage? We will encourage contributions that engage with methodological questions, such as utilizing legal archives, native court records, oral histories, and mission registries to uncover the quiet strategies of everyday life.

We particularly welcome work attentive to gender and women’s experiences, and to African understandings of marriage, freedom and dependence. By examining emancipation through intimate and domestic relationships, the panel asks us to reconsider what the ‘end’ of slavery meant in everyday life and how its social relationships were dismantled, transformed, or reproduced across generations.

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