Abolitionism in West Africa

Slavery & Abolition A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20 Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa Sandra E. Greene To cite this article: Sandra E. Greene (2015): Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa, Slavery & Abolition, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2015.1008213 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2015.1008213 Published online: 23 Feb 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 33 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fsla20 Download by: [Al Akhawayn University - Mohammed VI Library] Date: 14 September 2015, At: 15:24 Slavery & Abolition, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2015.1008213 Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa Sandra E. Greene The impetus for the legal abolition of the slave trade and slavery within Africa came largely from outside the continent. This article will review briefly this literature, but focuses more broadly on abolitionist thought within Africa itself. What did Africans think about the slave trade and slavery? How did they respond to the human suffering they witnessed? What motivated those Africans who were prepared to take public stances against the slave trade and slavery to do so? This article argues that their own experiences and their western education explain in part their stance on slavery and the slave trade, but that local African views about these institutions were also influential in shaping their antislavery and anti-slave trade stances. The vast majority of studies on abolition in Africa agree to the following: (a) Abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which involved African traders selling men, women and children to European buyers on the African coast) ended as a result of first British then other European antislave trade efforts. (b) The abolition of the slave trade and slavery within Africa came with the imposition of colonial rule. (c) The death of both was painfully slow. (d) Emancipation of the enslaved in Africa was less the result of the colonial enact- ment and prosecution of antislavery laws and much more the result of the enslaved taking actions on their own to obtain their freedom.1 Downloaded by [Al Akhawayn University - Mohammed VI Library] at 15:24 14 September 2015 This article will review briefly this literature, but will focus more broadly on abolitionist thought within Africa itself. What did Africans think about the slave trade and slavery? How did they respond to the human suffering they witnessed? Given the fact that the imposition of laws outlawing the slave trade and slavery came largely Sandra E. Greene is Professor in the Department of History, Cornell University, 303 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4601, USA. Email: [email protected] # 2015 Taylor & Francis 2 Sandra E. Greene from outside the continent, what motivated those Africans who were prepared to take public stances against the slave trade and slavery to do so? To answer these questions, this article examines oral texts produced during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and in the period thereafter when slavery (which continued unabated well into the twentieth century) was ubiquitous. It reviews the various views that Africans are known to have expressed about the Atlantic slave trade and then focuses on the issue of African domestic slavery. More specifically, this article explores the lives of a small group of Africans who received western education and worked mightily against the slave trade and slavery. I explain the circumstances that led them to voice opposition to the slave trade, and to take an even more unpopular and distinctly minority approach to the question of slavery. In histories of the antislave trade and antislavery activities in West Africa, the efforts of those individuals have been either largely forgotten or caricaturized as overly enthu- siastic, unrealistic, too strident or motivated by more personal, ulterior motives. They have also been portrayed as simply ciphers for European abolitionists and imperialists. In focusing on the lives of several of these individuals, it is argued here that their efforts embodied the impulses and ethical considerations that already existed within their own communities even if their actions ultimately failed to generate local movements to end either the slave trade or slavery. Incorporating the oral histories and traditions of Africa as well as the efforts of these individuals into the history of abolitionism in Africa highlights an all too often forgotten fact that some Africans did indeed question or seriously consider the ethics of both the slave trade and slavery as it affected not only their own individual family members, neighbors and citizens but also the peoples of West Africa as a whole.2 The abolition of the slave trade In 1802, Denmark was the first country to officially prohibit its citizens from partici- pating in the trade that took enslaved Africans to the Americas. More significantly, because of its then dominant role in the trade, Britain followed suit in 1807. In making these decisions, first about the activities of their own businesspeople, Africans were not consulted. Instead, all debates and legislative actions took place in western Europe and the Americas. The USA abolished the importation of slaves in 1808; France abolished the slave trade in 1817 only to reinstate it and then abolish it again in 1844.3 As indicated by these dates, abolition of the slave trade was quite a slow process. Economic and political concerns delayed the passage of legislation and limited the reach of those nations which deployed ships on the African coast to inter- Downloaded by [Al Akhawayn University - Mohammed VI Library] at 15:24 14 September 2015 dict slave ships. Only in1866/67, the year when the last recorded slave ship reached Cuba, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade end, more than 60 years after the first success- ful abolition effort in 1802. Abolition of the slave trade within Africa took even longer. This too was the result of European colonial expansion. The efforts deployed by the various European powers varied tremendously, despite the fact that the continued existence of the slave trade in Africa was often used to justify colonial expansion. As noted by Suzanne Miers: Slavery & Abolition 3 Between 1892 and 1914 all the colonial powers took steps to end large scale slave raiding and trading, as well as the export of slaves from Africa – measures clearly in the interests of orderly government. They enforced these laws, however, in a highly variable fashion, depending on their political and economic interests. In Angola, for instance, in the first decade of the twentieth century, even Portuguese officials participated in the slave trade in order to supply workers to the cocoa pro- ducing islands of Principe and Sao Tome. The French in Dar al-Kuti did not stop slave raiding, but diverted it away from their own trading posts. The Germans allowed raiding and trading to continue in northern Cameroon throughout their rule and neither the French nor the British, who succeeded them, had ended it by 1920. Slave raiding in the Sahara continued to the end of colonial rule. Slave trading on a large scale soon disappeared everywhere, but an underground traffic continued even in areas under close control.4 The abolition of slavery The abolition of slavery in West Africa was equally fraught. In 1896, British forces occupied the independent state of Asante (located in today’s Ghana), but did not officially prohibit slavery until June 1908. France, which controlled much of West Africa, prohibited all its courts and tribunals from recognizing slavery in 1903, but concerns to limit a massive movement of former slaves that could disrupt agri- cultural production meant that this policy was enforced in a very erratic manner.5 In south eastern Nigeria, Don Ohadike has noted that suppression of internal slavery in that area (Igboland) began in 1900 but in 1901, fear that the freeing of the enslaved would lead to social unrest led British colonial administrators to forbid slaves from leaving their masters. The law was changed again in 1903 to redefine slaves as apprentices and to insist on contracts between former masters and former slaves. This was done with the hope that this approach would not be too disruptive and allow slavery to die a natural death. It was a slow death indeed. Colonial officials acknowledged that slavery continued to exist in the area up to at least 1924.6 Accepted by virtually all historians of slavery is the fact that the end of slavery in Africa came not as a result of official actions on the part of European colonizers or the efforts of African abolitionists, but rather through the actions of the enslaved themselves. Kristin Mann noted in her study of slavery in Lagos that ‘slaves themselves initially pushed the question of emancipation to the fore by taking advantage of the British presence to flee their owners’. Gareth Austin observed with regard to the history of slavery in Ghana that ‘emancipation owed much to the initiative of slaves Downloaded by [Al Akhawayn University - Mohammed VI Library] at 15:24 14 September 2015 themselves and their kin’. Martin Klein has estimated that with the end of slavery in French West Africa, upwards of a million people took the opportunity to move from their former homes, some of whom were the enslaved. Of the enslaved in northern Nigeria, Paul Lovejoy has estimated that ‘tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands left their owners’. It was ‘slave initiative’, as noted by Andrew Clark, that ‘was the primary motivating force behind the transformations in domestic slavery in the early years of the twentieth century’.7 4 Sandra E.

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