Memory, Oral History and the End of Slavery in Tanzania: Some Methodological Considerations

This chapter explores how the end of slavery is remembered in Tanzania. While the subject of ‘The end of slavery in Africa’ has attracted a substantial number of outstanding scholars, few researchers have conducted oral interviews, especially in East Africa. The author undertook field research, collecting contemporary memories of the end of slavery over a period of three months in the mid-1990s in various parts of Tanzania. The interviews were meant to complement archival research. The chapter shows that the memory of the end of slavery and the archival record fail to correspond with each other, and offers an explanation of why this is the case.

Slaves without Shackles: An Archaeology of Everyday Life on Gorée Island, Senegal

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between the different communities on the island, including indigenous slaves.

Enslavement and Everyday Life: Living with Slave Raiding in the North-Eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon

The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon have been a focus of slave raiding for the past five centuries, according to historical sources. Some captives from the area were enslaved locally, primarily in Wandala and Fulbe communities, while others were exported to Sahelian polities or further abroad. This chapter examines ethnohistorical and archaeological data on nineteenth- and twentieth-century slave raiding, derived from research in montagnard communities along the north-eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Enslavement and slave raiding existed within larger structures of day-to-day practice in the region, and were closely tied to ideas about sociality, social proximity and violence. Through the mid-1980s at least, enslavement in the region was understood as a still-relevant political and economic process, with its chief material consequence the intensely domesticated Mandara landscape.

Segou: Warfare and the Origins of a State of Slavery

The Bamana state of Segou (c.1700–1861) has been used as an exemplar of the slave system of economic production amongst Sahelian states by anthropologists and historians such as Bazin (1974), Roberts (1987), and Meillassoux (1991). However, little is known about the nature of Segou's connection to broader slave-trading networks of the time or, from an archaeological perspective, how such slave systems of production may be viewed in terms of settlement types or patterns. This chapter addresses aspects of these two puzzles through the field research of Project Segou, a collaboration between University College London and the Malian Institut des Sciences Humaines. It concentrates on results from the 2006 season directed by the authors — fieldwork which focused on the nature and history of Segou's slave economy. The chapter summarizes findings on the functioning of the Segovian slave system of production, and then briefly considers two case studies: one concerning Segou's first major war of enslavement, and a second examining two of Segou's enigmatic Sifinso (or ‘schools of the black hair’), places which may have played an important role in the mental conditioning of select groups of new captives.

A Place of History: Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde

Early depictions of Cidade Velha's sear-frontage show a thriving, well-appointed and heavily fortified town with architectural aspirations: ships ride at anchor, the cathedral and Bishop's Palace can be seen below the plateau-top fort on the east side of the valley, the harbour is ringed with batteries, behind which poke a number of two-storey residences and church towers. The crucial point is that, as the early capital of the Cape Verde Islands, located some 350 nautical miles off the West African coast and being Portugal's main transshipment centre for the trans-Atlantic trade, all this was carried on a slavery-based infrastructure. This chapter consists of three parts. First it outlines the history of slavery from a Cape Verdean perspective. Second, it discusses interviews conducted with the local residents as they indicate how the past of slavery may affect contemporary attitudes and the values associated with the historical remains. Third, it provides a brief summary of the archaeological work started in Cidade Velha.

Constructing and Contesting Histories of Slavery at the Cape, South Africa

This chapter discusses slavery in South Africa. Chattel slavery existed in early colonial South Africa from the inception of the Dutch permanent settlement in 1658 until formal emancipation of slaves in the British empire in the 1830s. More than 80,000 slaves were imported from throughout the Indian Ocean world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although in the time of apartheid this slave heritage was buried in the public consciousness, since the 1990s museums, historians, and archaeologists have unearthed and published a considerable historical record, endorsed by new heritage legislation which gives special value to sites of slavery. Slave history is taught in universities and schools. However, especially for those descended from slaves in the Western Cape region, the evocation of a slave past has been a vexed process, with slave heritage serving as both a resource and a weapon in contemporary identity struggles.

Introduction: Slavery, Social Revolutions and Enduring Memories

Slavery played an important role in the economies of most historically documented African states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This introductory chapter considers the regionality and relative antiquity of various forms of enslavement on the African continent, as well as a range of emergent archaeological studies on the subject. Further, the lingering impacts of slave economies and the memories of enslavement are critically assessed, including consideration of recent efforts to document and ‘memorialise’ both the tangible and intangible heritage of slavery on the continent. The contributions to the present volume are situated within these issues with the aim of drawing out commonalities between chapters and emphasising the value of an inter-regional comparative approach.

Recovering and Remembering a Slave Route in Central Tanzania

Tanzania's central caravan route, joining Lake Tanganyika to the East African coast, was an important artery of trade, with traffic peaking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and associated particularly with ivory, but also with the export of slaves. The central caravan route has recently been chosen as a focus for the memorialisation of the slave trade in eastern Africa, as part of a project headed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency in collaboration with the Antiquities Division of Tanzania, and in response to a wider UNESCO-sponsored agenda. Yet the attempt to memorialise slavery along this route brings substantial challenges, both of a practical nature and in the ways that we think about material remains. This chapter explores some of these challenges in the context of existing heritage infrastructure, archaeologies of slavery, and the development of the region for tourism. It highlights the need for a more nuanced archaeology of this route's slave heritage.

Slavery and Slave Trading in Eastern Africa: Exploring the Intersections of Historical Sources and Archaeological Evidence

This chapter reviews the historical evidence concerning the development of slavery in eastern Africa, the various forms found in societies on the coast and in the interior, the social and cultural consequences of enslavement, and its ultimate abolition. It then looks at the known and potential archaeological traces of the trajectories of these different systems of slavery, with particular reference to the area along the middle and lower Pangani River, Tanzania. The chapter concludes with a consideration of whether or not it would be possible to discern slavery from the surviving archaeological remains alone, and the implications of this answer for future archaeological investigations of slavery elsewhere in the region.

Monuments of Predation: Turco-Egyptian Forts in Western Ethiopia

The Turco‐Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1820–1 was a tragic turning point in the history of the peripheral regions of the Ethiopian and Sudanese states. With the commencement of Turco‐Egyptian overrule, the indigenous peoples of Benishangul, Gambela, Bahr al-Jabal, and Bahr al-Ghazal became integrated into a wider political-economic order in which they had much to lose and little to win. The panorama of social disruption that followed this integration is similar to that of other African regions, which were treated as mere reservoirs of raw materials and forced labour by neighbouring states. This chapter presents an archaeological site that is most likely related to the Turco‐Egyptian control of Benishangul (western Ethiopia). It describes the structures, proposes a chronology based on historical inferences, and interprets them in the context of the economic exploitation of the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, it addresses the issue of monumentality and its implications in a traditional African landscape.