Overview

An exploration of the resilient lives and legacies of enslaved Africans in Africa Unlike narratives focused on enslaved people in the Americas, Europe, or the Middle East, this edited collection highlights the lives of African slaves and their descendants who remained in Africa. The contributors chronicle lives spanning the continent, from Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon to Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa. The collection explores various forms of slavery and diverse personal trajectories, with many stories beginning in childhood enslavement and evolving into adulthood with limited chances for education or personal advancement. Notably, the accounts include figures who managed to achieve prominent roles, such as a slave who became a general and administrator, a female slave who rose to be a village chief, and a woman who became a successful obstetrician in Muslim Africa. The narratives underscore the resilience and agency of the enslaved individuals, many of whom created meaningful lives despite the constraints and stigma of both slavery and post-slavery. Some, like a medical missionary in Tanganyika and a slave convert who helped grow the Catholic Church in Burkina Faso, contributed significantly to their communities and religious institutions. Accessing these stories required rigorous research due to limited documentation, social silence surrounding slavery, and stigma associated with slave ancestry. The contributors’ extensive research brings together fragmented knowledge and oral histories to provide an invaluable perspective and insight into the complex identities, struggles, and achievements of African slaves and their descendants. Contributors: Richard Anderson Dadda Astabarka Abdourahman Halirou Martin A. Klein George Michael La Rue Adam Mahamat Ricardo Marquez Garcia Stephen J. Rockel Ute Röschenthaler Mohammed Bashir Salau Moris Samen Sandra Rowoldt Shell Joseph Jules Sinang

Full Product Details

9780821426500

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Edited by Martin Klein and Stephen Rockel and with chapters by an impressive lineup of researchers, Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants in Africa: Life Histories is a seminal contribution not only to the study of slavery and its legacies in Africa, but also to the broader field of African social and political history. Focusing on individual biographies, the book reveals the full complexity of enslavement in African societies. The authors place the enslaved at the centre of Africa's recent history, acknowledging the diversity of their circumstances and their substantial contributions to shaping relations and events despite the violence and oppression they had to endure. This ground-breaking collection adopts a methodological approach that humanizes the enslaved by depicting them not as anonymous and passive victims, but as individuals who were fully integrated into their societies. It is essential reading for students of African history and for anyone wishing to understand the specificities of slavery across African regions and cultures."" - Benedetta Rossi, University College London ""This rich collection of life trajectories provides unique insight into the history of slavery, the slave trade, and their legacies from the standpoint of ordinary men and women across Africa. Through this methodologically inspiring and historically challenging effort, Martin A. Klein and Steven J. Rockel lead us towards an in-depth understanding of the lived realities of enslavement, and of people’s efforts to imbue with meaning their disrupted existential paths."" - Alice Bellagamba, University of Milan-Bicocca

Author Information

Martin A. Klein is a professor emeritus from the University of Toronto. He has written or edited a dozen books, mostly on slavery and the slave trade in Francophone West Africa. He is the author of Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, the editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia and coeditor (with Claire C. Robertson) of Women and Slavery in Africa. He has served as president of the African Studies Association and the Canadian Association of African Studies. Stephen J. Rockel is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Specializing in East Africa, he is interested in labor, slavery, urbanization, and environmental history, as well as empires and conflict. He authored Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa and coedited (with Rick Halpern) Inventing Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties, War, and Empire. His current projects include histories of slavery in Tanzania and caravan workers across Africa.

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