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University of Birmingham Migration and emancipation in West Africa's labour history : the missing links Rossi, Benedetta DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2013.796108 License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (Harvard): Rossi, B 2014, 'Migration and emancipation in West Africa's labour history : the missing links', Slavery and Abolition, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 23-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.796108 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: Eligibility for repository : checked 31/03/2014 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Sep. 2021 This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham] On: 31 March 2014, At: 08:22 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20 Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links Benedetta Rossi Published online: 13 May 2013. To cite this article: Benedetta Rossi (2014) Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 35:1, 23-46, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2013.796108 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.796108 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. 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Authors also have the option of publishing an Open Select article under the Creative Commons Attribution License http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. It is essential that you check the license status of any given Open and Open Select article to confirm conditions of access and use. Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 08:22 31 March 2014 Slavery & Abolition, 2014 Vol. 35, No. 1, 23–46, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.796108 Migration and Emancipation in West Africa’s Labour History: The Missing Links Benedetta Rossi Strategies of emancipation included projects of migration conceived and unfolded by migrants of slave descent. This article suggests that looking at how these migrants chose to move when they could control their mobility, and at the obstacles they faced, reveals aspects of the experience of enslavement and emancipation that have not yet been fully explored in the relevant historiography. While historians of African slavery have described the large-scale movements of ex-slaves that followed legal status abolition in the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, only few studies provide detailed analyses of these trajec- tories from the perspective of the enslaved. Outside the field of slavery studies, both West African labour history and migration studies have been emphasising ethnicity over status, thereby underestimating how slave descent shaped the practices and aspirations of a large proportion of labour migrants. The autobiographic testimonies of migrants of slave descent provide insights into their strategies and expose differences across gender, age and location. Through an analysis of these sources, this article highlights the missing links in our recon- structions of the history of West African workers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, legal emancipation in the narrow Euro- pean colonial possessions on the coast of West Africa gave rise to substantial displace- Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 08:22 31 March 2014 ments of slaves moving to regions under European rule.1 In the twentieth century, following colonial occupation of West Africa and the gradual application of emanci- pation decrees, ex-slaves migrated within European territories. They left in order to regain their original home, when they knew where they came from, or to move to regions where they could find new opportunities. Slave agency manifested itself through massive flights.2 Martin Klein thinks that slaves who fled to earlier homes in French West Africa between 1906 and 1911 could have been over a million.3 Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn suggest that between 1897 and 1907, as many as 200,000 slaves escaped following the British conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate.4 Benedetta Rossi is Lecturer in African Studies, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, Arts Building, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email: [email protected] # 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. 24 Benedetta Rossi European administrators strove to contain the emancipation movement they had pro- voked, but ‘none understood how the slaves themselves would take the issue into their own hands or, perhaps better, their own feet.’5 Throughout the whole of the twentieth century, geographic mobility played a major role in the slow process of emancipation in West Africa.6 Through travels arranged on their own account, former slaves distanced themselves from slave status both physically and ideologically. Their migrations reveal projects aimed at moving away from sites where they had been enslaved and at reaching places where it would be possible to reap the benefits of their own labour. Emancipa- tion induced a slow but steady transformation of social hierarchies visible in the rene- gotiation of the interlocked mobilities of slaves and masters. How far was the mobility of different categories of slaves controlled by their owners before legal status abolition? What were the consequences of legal emancipation for the capacity of former slaves to control their movements and labour? When, where and how did slaves, freed slaves and their descendants begin to move on their own account? What did they try to achieve? What obstacles did they face? How, if at all, did experiences differ across gender, age and status? Did slave descent influence attitudes towards travel, labour and property – in other words, were ex-slaves a particular type of migrant? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the overlapping area between migration studies and the historiography of emancipation. In the 1960s and 1970s, a large number of studies of labour migration in West Africa focused on the ethnicity of migrants, but dismissed the potential influence of slave descent on the strategies of labour migrants.