Forthcoming in T. Falola, D. Porter-Sanchez & J. Parrott (eds), African Islands: Leading Edges of Empire and Globalization. Rochester University Press.
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
As Igor Kopytoff has well shown, historians were the first to document the specificities of African and Asian systems of slavery in the mid of the 20th century.
Anthropologists at that time were reluctant to tackle this subject since they were preoccupied with rehabilitating the much-maligned reputation of the people they studied.
As their unease with the topic faded away, a number of pioneering studies appeared that dealt frontally with slavery.
Their authors were primarily concerned with the question of a universal definition of slavery, i.e. one that would be applicable to non-Western societies, as well as with the local definitions of slave status and the reconstruction of past indigenous systems of slavery; they also discussed issues such as the Marxian approach to slavery as a mode of production and the cultural variations in systems of slavery.
In the mid nineties, however, the research agenda on slavery was significantly impacted and reshaped by a major UNESCO project, launched in 1994 and called ‘The Slave Route’, which supported the worldwide organization of academic conferences and exhibitions on slavery and the slave trade, and the publication of books on the subject.
The interests of anthropologists and historians shifted during this period from questions of slavery as an aspect of indigenous social organization and a mode of production to questions about the cultural implications of enslavement and the trade, especially in the construction of social memory and identity.
Indeed, during this period ethnographies and historical accounts dealing with slavery increasingly focused on its remembrance.
These global trends have also been followed in Malagasy and Indian Ocean scholarship.
In Madagascar, two major conferences were organized as a direct consequence of the UNESCO project: the first, held in Antananarivo in 1996, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the colonial abolition and was mostly concerned with documenting past slavery and its legacy in the present; the second, held in Toamasina in 1999, addressed the topic of slavery and the slave trade on the East Coast.
During these meetings it became apparent that the scientific study of slavery and post-slavery raised specific concerns in Madagascar because of the concomitance of the colonial conquest (1895) and the abolition (1896), which means that both events are often closely associated, not least because Malagasy slavery provided a convenient moral justification for the French takeover.
In 2004, Sudel Fuma, then holder of a UNESCO chair at the Université de La Réunion, launched a regional project called ‘La route del’esclave et de l’engagé dans l’océan Indien’, which focused on collecting oral memories.
Another important aim of the project was to foster the development of a ‘roots and heritage’ tourism around significant sites of memory in the islands of the southwestern Indian Ocean.
Many African countries, on both western and eastern coasts, have tried to develop the potential for tourism of slave trade’s sites, the most famous case being probably that of the Island of Gorée in Senegal.
Yet despite the geographic proximity of Reunion and Mauritius, which are home to a large number of slaves descendants tracing their origins to Madagascar, the efforts deployed by the UNESCO project – especially in the South-east of Madagascar, near Tôlañaro (Fort-Dauphin) – have not yet materialized in noticeable slavery-related touristic developments.
Although this question would require further investigation, we believe that the relative failure of these attempts at establishing memorial sites in Madagascar is linked to the widespread ‘silence’ on slavery, a topic to which we will come back.
Our main goal in this chapter is to place post-slavery issues in Madagascar into a historical and comparative framework.
We do so by first highlighting the particular significance of slavery and the slave trade in the history of Madagascar, especially during the late 18th and 19th centuries, and the importance of the distinction between the two abolitions of 1877 and 1896.
We then draw from a number of ethnographic studies to frame comparative questions on Malagasy post-slavery, in particular questions about the condition of slave descendants and the persistence of their discrimination in present-day Madagascar.
The overview we provide does not aim at being exhaustive; rather, we seek to identify a set of questions that are core issues in the study of Malagasy post-slavery, and to indicate questions that remain controversial, unanswered or understudied.
Slavery, Slave Trading and the Two Abolitions
Slaves have been traded in the maritime networks of the western Indian Ocean for at least 2000 years.
In Madagascar, the existence of slavery may date back to the first Southeast Asian settlements, which probably occurred between the 4th and 6th century.
Scholars seeking to reconstruct the early occupation of the island find it plausible that slaves were among the South-East Asian settlers, since ship crews from Indonesia were probably made of people with different social statuses and may have included slaves who were left behind in the semi-permanent settlements of this remote colony.
If not earlier, slaves probably made an important part of the population of Madagascar as early as in the 10th century.
By that date, two main commercial systems existed in the western Indian Ocean.
One was in the hands of Muslim merchants from the Persian Gulf, southern Arabia and the Swahili coast who traded along the shores of East Africa and in the northern Indian Ocean, and the other was in the hands of the Southeast Asians who sailed to the Comoros and Madagascar.
It is likely that slaves circulated in both systems, since during this period Muslim merchants sent East African slaves to southern Arabia and the Gulf, while the South-East Asians probably used slave labor in the iron industry of their settlements.
The arrival of Portuguese vessels in the Indian Ocean in 1488 marked the beginning of a new era of slave trading, one that was going to supersede, in intensity and extension, the ancient Indian Ocean trade.
As far as Madagascar is concerned, one of the most important events in this era of European slave trading is the transformation that occurred in the second half of the 18th century, when a new regional network started to export slaves from Madagascar to the Mascarene Islands.
According to Pier Larson, between 1770 and 1820 highland Madagascar supplied about 70,000 slaves to the French colonies of Ile de France (Mauritius) and Ile Bourbon (Reunion).
Even though the average population loss to export slavery may seem rather low compared with that of other African countries in the Atlantic, this export slave trade provoked nonetheless “profound, economic, and cultural dislocations that flowed from practices of enslavement and highland Madagascar’s links to a global economy of mercantile capitalism.”
The demand from the Mascarene Islands also affected the coasts, not only the West Coast ruled by Sakalava kings (allied with Muslim merchants) that dominated the slave trade in the late 17th and early 18th century, but also the East coast ports that had provided slaves for the Mascarenes long before the Merina expansion in the second half of the 18th century.
In the South East, around Fort-Dauphin, Frenchmen established slave trading posts before being forced out by the Merina army in 1825.
The North and North East coast remained nonetheless the most active competitors of Merina slave suppliers.
Between 1785 and 1820, Sakalava and Betsimisaraka launched slaving raids in northern Madagascar, the Comoros and the coast of Mozambique.
In 1820, a treaty signed between the British and the Merina king Radama I made the export slave trade illegal.
This led to the development of an illegal trade network through which slaves continued to be shipped from East Africa.
A number of these slaves were disembarked on the western coast of Madagascar, from where they were further shipped to the Mascarenes.
Following the abolition of slavery in Mauritius (1835) and Reunion (1848), slaves were replaced in these islands’ plantations by indentured laborers from the North-West of Madagascar.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, continued ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
In the island, internal slavery grew in significance, especially in the highlands, as Merina rulers launched wars to expand or defend their kingdom.
During these wars, Merina soldiers brought captives back to Imerina, which they could not sent to the Mascarenes any more.
At the same time, the importation of African slaves continued and peaked in the second half of the 19th, due to an increased demand for labor in Imerina because free men were mobilized in the wars.
Throughout the 19th century, slavery kept playing an important role in Madagascar, especially for the economic development of the Merina kingdom, and a market for slaves continued to flourish until the abolition of 1896.
In most Malagasy societies a number of servile statuses existed, which intersected with strikingly different living conditions.
In most Malagasy kingdoms, royal servants and slaves existed alongside commoners’ slaves, although in most cases the latter seem to have been the privilege of the wealthy only.
Interestingly, a few kingdoms seem to have not allowed slavery.
The different servile statuses defined unequal rights to marriage, property, inheritance, etc.
The condition of slaves seems to have varied greatly; while some slaves and servants have been known to achieve fame, glory and wealth, for most of them the terms of endearment and kinship used by their masters served only to mask the harsh conditions and abject poverty in which they found themselves.
It must be noted on this matter that European observers often stressed the ‘mild’ character of slavery in Madagascar, as they compared it with the other forms of slavery they were familiar with, namely Ancient (i.e., Greek and Roman) and plantation slavery in the New World.
Their judgment, however, was never corroborated by former slaves’ narratives.
To the contrary, contemporary anthropological accounts often insist on the abjection, humiliation and terror inherent to slavery.
The differences between categories of slaves were reflected in rich terminologies.
In Imerina, for example, commoners’ slaves were called andevo and distinguished from the royal slaves called Tandapa mainty (Tsiarondahy) and from the royal servants (Manisotra, Manendy, Antehiroka).
In Anôsy, where only members of the royal family were allowed to own slaves (ondevo) and to have servants, the servile population, called tandonaky, was divided into three categories: royal slaves (tôva) and royal servants (mpitako and tsariky).
Everywhere in Madagascar such past distinctions are being forgotten and increasingly replaced by a single category that refers to all slave descendants, for example ‘blacks’ (mainty) in Imerina and ‘unclean people’ (olo tsy madio) among the Betsileo.
These categories have their binary counterparts – i.e., ‘whites’ (fotsy) and ‘clean people’ (olo madio) – that are used to refer to all non-slave descendants.
In continuity with Radama’s decision, under external pressure, to forbid the export slave trade, two abolitions of slavery took place by the end of the 19th century.
The Merina Queen Ranavalona II decided the first abolition in 1877.
It was a partial emancipation insofar it concerned exclusively the Masombika, also called Makoa, a category that comprised all the slaves that had been imported from East Africa and their descendants.
The Queen gave them land and the status of free subjects in the Merina kingdom.
The French colonial government decided the second abolition: a decree freed all the slaves without exception in 1896.
These two abolitions were very different with respect to why and how they freed the slaves.
They also had very different consequences.
In our view, it is important to keep these differences in mind in order to understand the historical trajectories of former slaves and the current conditions of slave descendants in Madagascar.
Another important point to keep in mind is the specificity of the Malagasy islanders’ attitudes towards slavery and slave descendants, in comparison with those present on the African continent.
Although a number of similarities and regularities exist, such as the tendency to avoid marrying slave descendants or to silence personal histories of slavery, there are also specific features that, to our knowledge, are hardly found in continental Africa.
This seems to be the case of the view, widespread in the island but seemingly absent on the continent, that slaves and their descendants are deeply polluted and polluting persons, a point to which we will come back.
It has been suggested that such a way of conceptualizing slavery might be a legacy of the Southeast Asian settlers of Madagascar, who had come from Indianized regions of insular Southeast Asia and had presumably brought with them a strong sensitivity to the ritual pollution caused by enslavement.
True or not, this hypothesis points to the fact that Madagascar is an Afro-Asian island with a complex history of cultural influences.
When dealing with slavery and post-slavery issues we therefore need to take into account the full range of possible influences, and compare the Malagasy views with those found in both continental Africa and insular Southeast Asia.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
In the island, internal slavery grew in significance, especially in the highlands, as Merina rulers launched wars to expand or defend their kingdom.
During these wars, Merina soldiers brought captives back to Imerina, which they could not sent to the Mascarenes any more.
At the same time, the importation of African slaves continued and peaked in the second half of the 19th, due to an increased demand for labor in Imerina because free men were mobilized in the wars.
Throughout the 19th century, slavery kept playing an important role in Madagascar, especially for the economic development of the Merina kingdom, and a market for slaves continued to flourish until the abolition of 1896.
In most Malagasy societies a number of servile statuses existed, which intersected with strikingly different living conditions.
In most Malagasy kingdoms, royal servants and slaves existed alongside commoners’ slaves, although in most cases the latter seem to have been the privilege of the wealthy only.
Interestingly, a few kingdoms seem to have not allowed slavery.
The different servile statuses defined unequal rights to marriage, property, inheritance, etc.
The condition of slaves seems to have varied greatly; while some slaves and servants have been known to achieve fame, glory and wealth, for most of them the terms of endearment and kinship used by their masters served only to mask the harsh conditions and abject poverty in which they found themselves.
It must be noted on this matter that European observers often stressed the ‘mild’ character of slavery in Madagascar, as they compared it with the other forms of slavery they were familiar with, namely Ancient (i.e., Greek and Roman) and plantation slavery in the New World.
Their judgment, however, was never corroborated by former slaves’ narratives.
To the contrary, contemporary anthropological accounts often insist on the abjection, humiliation and terror inherent to slavery.
The differences between categories of slaves were reflected in rich terminologies.
In Imerina, for example, commoners’ slaves were called andevo and distinguished from the royal slaves called Tandapa mainty (Tsiarondahy) and from the royal servants (Manisotra, Manendy, Antehiroka).
In Anôsy, where only members of the royal family were allowed to own slaves (ondevo) and to have servants, the servile population, called tandonaky, was divided into three categories: royal slaves (tôva) and royal servants (mpitako and tsariky).
Everywhere in Madagascar such past distinctions are being forgotten and increasingly replaced by a single category that refers to all slave descendants, for example ‘blacks’ (mainty) in Imerina and ‘unclean people’ (olo tsy madio) among the Betsileo.
These categories have their binary counterparts – i.e., ‘whites’ (fotsy) and ‘clean people’ (olo madio) – that are used to refer to all non-slave descendants.
In continuity with Radama’s decision, under external pressure, to forbid the export slave trade, two abolitions of slavery took place by the end of the 19th century.
The Merina Queen Ranavalona II decided the first abolition in 1877.
It was a partial emancipation insofar it concerned exclusively the Masombika, also called Makoa, a category that comprised all the slaves that had been imported from East Africa and their descendants.
The Queen gave them land and the status of free subjects in the Merina kingdom.
The French colonial government decided the second abolition: a decree freed all the slaves without exception in 1896.
These two abolitions were very different with respect to why and how they freed the slaves.
They also had very different consequences.
In our view, it is important to keep these differences in mind in order to understand the historical trajectories of former slaves and the current conditions of slave descendants in Madagascar.
Another important point to keep in mind is the specificity of the Malagasy islanders’ attitudes towards slavery and slave descendants, in comparison with those present on the African continent.
Although a number of similarities and regularities exist, such as the tendency to avoid marrying slave descendants or to silence personal histories of slavery, there are also specific features that, to our knowledge, are hardly found in continental Africa.
This seems to be the case of the view, widespread in the island but seemingly absent on the continent, that slaves and their descendants are deeply polluted and polluting persons, a point to which we will come back.
It has been suggested that such a way of conceptualizing slavery might be a legacy of the Southeast Asian settlers of Madagascar, who had come from Indianized regions of insular Southeast Asia and had presumably brought with them a strong sensitivity to the ritual pollution caused by enslavement.
True or not, this hypothesis points to the fact that Madagascar is an Afro-Asian island with a complex history of cultural influences.
When dealing with slavery and post-slavery issues we therefore need to take into account the full range of possible influences, and compare the Malagasy views with those found in both continental Africa and insular Southeast Asia.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, continued ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Comparing the Trajectories of Former Slaves and their Descendants
In this article we are not primarily concerned with the history of Malagasy slavery but with post-slavery issues: our focus is on the legacies of slavery and abolition in contemporary Madagascar.
These legacies must be understood in the light of the transformation, outlined above, that took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The commoditization of slaves, the increase of the number of slaves in the Malagasy population (especially in the highlands), the perpetual risk of enslavement and the role played by slavery in the political history of the 19th century have been accompanied, almost paradoxically, by an apparent effacement of explicit memories relating to these traumatic histories, as if it were a case of collective amnesia.
Yet these “painful memories” are present, albeit “somewhat veiled and indirect,” both among free and slave descendants, and are often implicit in ritual symbolism as well as in historical narratives.
It is interesting to note on that matter that, compared to other countries with a comparable traumatic history of slavery and in spite of a steady scholarly interest, academic conferences on slavery took place only very late on the island, as a consequence of the UNESCO project
mentioned above.
It is also noteworthy that, according to some who attended these first meetings, they were emotionally charged events: even though they were scholars, many Malagasy found it difficult to talk about these issues.
If anything, these academic meetings showed clearly that slavery was still a very sensitive topic, more than a century after abolition.
It is no surprise that the legacies of slavery and abolition have been investigated first and foremost in Imerina, despite the fact that slavery was also extremely important in other regions, most notably in the development of the Sakalava kingdom on the western coast and the Betsimisaraka kingdom in the East.
An obvious reason for this concentration of academic attention is that Imerina, as explained above, once heavily relied on slaves for its economy and in consequence it had the largest number of slaves in its population on the eve of abolition.
In comparison to what has already been done for the Merina case, the study of post-slavery in the rest of Madagascar has remained largely overlooked until recently.
Yet ethnographic accounts indicate that in all the other Malagasy societies the condition of slave descendants would also be worthy of close attention, irrespective of whether these societies are small-scale and never developed into large kingdoms like those of the Merina and the Sakalava.
Even among the Malagasy societies that are reputedly the most ‘egalitarian’, such as the foraging Vezo and Mikea in western Madagascar, issues of slave ancestry are far from being benign, since people usually avoid marrying those they identify as slave descendants.
Yet in these groups such issues have never been investigated.
It is striking that, until a recent date, the andevo (i.e., the ‘slaves’, a term that also refers to slave descendants) in Madagascar have often been studied only in passing.
Few anthropologists have sought to put themselves in their shoes and see society from their perspective.
Many of them have described the condition of the andevo from the point of view of free descendants, indicating what they lacked or how they differed from free descendants – as if they were a residual category – instead of focusing on their specific historical experience and its consequences.
These implicit biases are still present in much of the anthropological scholarship on Madagascar.
While a focus on what slaves lacked during the pre-abolition era is certainly, it seems to us that anthropologists’ tendency to approach present-day slave descendants with the same conceptual grid (as ‘people who lack X’, where X can be land, tombs, history, ancestors, ancestral blessings and so on) has somewhat hindered the detailed and intimate study of how slave descendants experience their condition in the various societies of the island.
The fact that free descent informants often express prejudice inherited from the past, for example, when they say that “andevo have no tombs” or “andevo have no ancestors,” is no excuse for confusing these views with the actual condition of those who are called andevo.
In Maurice Bloch’s seminal study Placing the Dead, little is said about slave descendants even though, as Bloch commented, “if the difference between andriana [‘nobles’] and hova [‘commoners’] was never great [in traditional Merina society], the difference between these two groups and the andevo (slaves) was fundamental.”
This quasi-absence of slave descendants in the monograph that arguably set a standard for modern anthropological work on Madagascar is particularly striking because Bloch made clear at the same time that slave descendants formed a very large part of the Merina population.
We write with the privilege of hindsight, of course, but some of Bloch’s early reviewers noticed the paradox and exhorted the author to focus on slave descendants in the future.
A few years later, Bloch addressed the issue in two essays.
In the first, he compared the social implications of freedom for the slaves who were held by the Merina and for those who were held by the Zafimaniry.
The second essay made use of the same comparative material but framed the question somewhat differently, in terms of modes of production and ideology.
Much later Bloch came back again to the topic of slavery in yet another essay on slave descendants in Antananarivo’s slums who are possessed by royal spirits.
In this last essay he argued that the crucial problem of slaves (and former slaves) was “the interruption in blessing” that occurred during enslavement: “When people are taken as slaves, their ties to their ancestors are broken, because they no longer receive blessing from their ancestors at the various familial rituals.”
According to Bloch, the position of slaves in traditional Merina society was that of junior members of families who could never become full members of society because they had no ancestral territory and their children were condemned to the same fate: slaves “were outside the social system in its ideological representation.”
After abolition, ex-slaves had mainly three options: (1) to return back to the areas from which they had been taken (if this was possible); (2) to stay in the villages where they were slaves and to keep working on their former masters’ estates (often on a sharecropping contract); or (3) to find empty land where they could start a new life by building terraces and cultivating rice.
While the consequences of the first option are difficult to evaluate, the most important consequence of the second option was the continuation of a type of obligation between former masters and former slaves in ancient Merina villages.
The slave descendants played the role of caretakers for the free descendants’ land and tombs (known as valala miandry fasana, i.e. ‘the grasshoppers who guard the tombs’), and sometimes provided servants, often children, for their houses in Antananarivo or elsewhere.
This was because, as documented by Bloch, many free descent Merina left peasantry to take up opportunities in education, in the administration or in business, and only kept their ancestral land for ideological reasons.
Even though they accepted this situation of dependency, the descendants of slaves resented it bitterly.
Those among the freed slaves who chose the third option and went to new empty lands found themselves in the company of the free Merina who could not live on their ancestral land because of the increase of the population and a resulting land shortage.
Although they started off on an equal footing, ex-slaves and free Merina usually lived in separate villages.
What happened was that, because of their endogamous marriage rules, the free Merina were at first less able to form local kinship networks than the former slaves, who could marry whoever they wanted provided it was not close kin.
So while the free Merina remained somewhat isolated in the new lands, former slaves were able to organize agricultural and political cooperation more easily.
This advantage turned to a disadvantage because the free descent Merina, through their endogamous marriages, kept kinship links with administrators, teachers or businessmen who lived in town, and through these links they had access to new sources of power and wealth, whereas slave descent rural peasants did not.
It is interesting to note here that Bloch’s views on Merina slave descendants have been recently challenged by David Graeber, who argued that the slave descendants he observed in the region of Arivonimamo (west of Antananarivo) were actually more successful than the free descendants because they had managed to buy land to those free descendants who did not care much about keeping it, precisely because they lived in the capital.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Comparing the Trajectories of Former Slaves and their Descendants
In this article we are not primarily concerned with the history of Malagasy slavery but with post-slavery issues: our focus is on the legacies of slavery and abolition in contemporary Madagascar.
These legacies must be understood in the light of the transformation, outlined above, that took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The commoditization of slaves, the increase of the number of slaves in the Malagasy population (especially in the highlands), the perpetual risk of enslavement and the role played by slavery in the political history of the 19th century have been accompanied, almost paradoxically, by an apparent effacement of explicit memories relating to these traumatic histories, as if it were a case of collective amnesia.
Yet these “painful memories” are present, albeit “somewhat veiled and indirect,” both among free and slave descendants, and are often implicit in ritual symbolism as well as in historical narratives.
It is interesting to note on that matter that, compared to other countries with a comparable traumatic history of slavery and in spite of a steady scholarly interest, academic conferences on slavery took place only very late on the island, as a consequence of the UNESCO project
mentioned above.
It is also noteworthy that, according to some who attended these first meetings, they were emotionally charged events: even though they were scholars, many Malagasy found it difficult to talk about these issues.
If anything, these academic meetings showed clearly that slavery was still a very sensitive topic, more than a century after abolition.
It is no surprise that the legacies of slavery and abolition have been investigated first and foremost in Imerina, despite the fact that slavery was also extremely important in other regions, most notably in the development of the Sakalava kingdom on the western coast and the Betsimisaraka kingdom in the East.
An obvious reason for this concentration of academic attention is that Imerina, as explained above, once heavily relied on slaves for its economy and in consequence it had the largest number of slaves in its population on the eve of abolition.
In comparison to what has already been done for the Merina case, the study of post-slavery in the rest of Madagascar has remained largely overlooked until recently.
Yet ethnographic accounts indicate that in all the other Malagasy societies the condition of slave descendants would also be worthy of close attention, irrespective of whether these societies are small-scale and never developed into large kingdoms like those of the Merina and the Sakalava.
Even among the Malagasy societies that are reputedly the most ‘egalitarian’, such as the foraging Vezo and Mikea in western Madagascar, issues of slave ancestry are far from being benign, since people usually avoid marrying those they identify as slave descendants.
Yet in these groups such issues have never been investigated.
It is striking that, until a recent date, the andevo (i.e., the ‘slaves’, a term that also refers to slave descendants) in Madagascar have often been studied only in passing.
Few anthropologists have sought to put themselves in their shoes and see society from their perspective.
Many of them have described the condition of the andevo from the point of view of free descendants, indicating what they lacked or how they differed from free descendants – as if they were a residual category – instead of focusing on their specific historical experience and its consequences.
These implicit biases are still present in much of the anthropological scholarship on Madagascar.
While a focus on what slaves lacked during the pre-abolition era is certainly, it seems to us that anthropologists’ tendency to approach present-day slave descendants with the same conceptual grid (as ‘people who lack X’, where X can be land, tombs, history, ancestors, ancestral blessings and so on) has somewhat hindered the detailed and intimate study of how slave descendants experience their condition in the various societies of the island.
The fact that free descent informants often express prejudice inherited from the past, for example, when they say that “andevo have no tombs” or “andevo have no ancestors,” is no excuse for confusing these views with the actual condition of those who are called andevo.
In Maurice Bloch’s seminal study Placing the Dead, little is said about slave descendants even though, as Bloch commented, “if the difference between andriana [‘nobles’] and hova [‘commoners’] was never great [in traditional Merina society], the difference between these two groups and the andevo (slaves) was fundamental.”
This quasi-absence of slave descendants in the monograph that arguably set a standard for modern anthropological work on Madagascar is particularly striking because Bloch made clear at the same time that slave descendants formed a very large part of the Merina population.
We write with the privilege of hindsight, of course, but some of Bloch’s early reviewers noticed the paradox and exhorted the author to focus on slave descendants in the future.
A few years later, Bloch addressed the issue in two essays.
In the first, he compared the social implications of freedom for the slaves who were held by the Merina and for those who were held by the Zafimaniry.
The second essay made use of the same comparative material but framed the question somewhat differently, in terms of modes of production and ideology.
Much later Bloch came back again to the topic of slavery in yet another essay on slave descendants in Antananarivo’s slums who are possessed by royal spirits.
In this last essay he argued that the crucial problem of slaves (and former slaves) was “the interruption in blessing” that occurred during enslavement: “When people are taken as slaves, their ties to their ancestors are broken, because they no longer receive blessing from their ancestors at the various familial rituals.”
According to Bloch, the position of slaves in traditional Merina society was that of junior members of families who could never become full members of society because they had no ancestral territory and their children were condemned to the same fate: slaves “were outside the social system in its ideological representation.”
After abolition, ex-slaves had mainly three options: (1) to return back to the areas from which they had been taken (if this was possible); (2) to stay in the villages where they were slaves and to keep working on their former masters’ estates (often on a sharecropping contract); or (3) to find empty land where they could start a new life by building terraces and cultivating rice.
While the consequences of the first option are difficult to evaluate, the most important consequence of the second option was the continuation of a type of obligation between former masters and former slaves in ancient Merina villages.
The slave descendants played the role of caretakers for the free descendants’ land and tombs (known as valala miandry fasana, i.e. ‘the grasshoppers who guard the tombs’), and sometimes provided servants, often children, for their houses in Antananarivo or elsewhere.
This was because, as documented by Bloch, many free descent Merina left peasantry to take up opportunities in education, in the administration or in business, and only kept their ancestral land for ideological reasons.
Even though they accepted this situation of dependency, the descendants of slaves resented it bitterly.
Those among the freed slaves who chose the third option and went to new empty lands found themselves in the company of the free Merina who could not live on their ancestral land because of the increase of the population and a resulting land shortage.
Although they started off on an equal footing, ex-slaves and free Merina usually lived in separate villages.
What happened was that, because of their endogamous marriage rules, the free Merina were at first less able to form local kinship networks than the former slaves, who could marry whoever they wanted provided it was not close kin.
So while the free Merina remained somewhat isolated in the new lands, former slaves were able to organize agricultural and political cooperation more easily.
This advantage turned to a disadvantage because the free descent Merina, through their endogamous marriages, kept kinship links with administrators, teachers or businessmen who lived in town, and through these links they had access to new sources of power and wealth, whereas slave descent rural peasants did not.
It is interesting to note here that Bloch’s views on Merina slave descendants have been recently challenged by David Graeber, who argued that the slave descendants he observed in the region of Arivonimamo (west of Antananarivo) were actually more successful than the free descendants because they had managed to buy land to those free descendants who did not care much about keeping it, precisely because they lived in the capital.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, continued ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
According to Bloch, the slaves held by the Zafimaniry had, unlike Merina slaves, access to land.
But the Zafimaniry are shifting cultivators and free Zafimaniry tended to give their slaves the already semi-exhausted lands.
Since they had land, however, most of them stayed in their villages after being freed.
Later the ex-slave villages were the first to turn to rice-irrigation and they benefited most from education through Catholicism, from the trade of woodcarvings and from tourism.
In consequence, present-day Zafimaniry slave descendants are generally better off than the free descendants.
Since the ex-slaves have no positive marriage rules, they can marry outside Zafimaniry country and have therefore kinship links outside the rather cramped territory where the free descendants must marry.
Bloch concludes that, unlike in the Merina case, slave descendants among the Zafimaniry have been more successful than the free descendants.
The comparative framework in terms of socio-economic success proposed by Bloch seems to us extremely useful for the study of post-slavery in Madagascar, and much remains to be done to have a better idea of whether former slaves and their descendants have managed to achieve equality in economic terms.
Yet this perspective is clearly not sufficient because the economic success of slave descendants has not necessarily been accompanied by equality in terms of social status: prejudice against slave descendants remains deep in some regions of the island, where even wealthy slave descendants can still be viewed as subalterns.
A prime example of this situation is found among the southern Betsileo, where slave descendants are commonly called ‘unclean’ or ‘dirty’ people.
These derogatory labels still stick to groups of slave descendants that have otherwise achieved some kind of economic and political equality, for example because their ancestors were among the first settlers and thus among the ‘founding fathers’ of a local community.
Yet this achievement remains ambiguous and fragile since in spite of their efforts slave descendants have not managed to shed the inferior status that was once ascribed to them: commoner descendants continue to view them as unclean and strictly refuse to marry them.
In Anôsy, slaves descendants endure a fate that is in many ways similar and yet different.
Like in southern Betsileo, they are also described as dirty people and cannot marry commoner descendants.
They live in separate neighborhoods.
Their economic and political empowerment, while not completely inaccessible, remains difficult.
Former slaves, after abolition, often stayed on their former masters’ estates, which were in most cases royal residences.
Their continuing presence in these places, more than any known genealogy or history, is an indication of their slave ancestry.
Such an ascription of slave status on the basis of geographic cues feeds widespread suspicion.
This suspicion extends to the descendants of commoners who choose to reside, for various reasons, in the incriminated areas.
Yet a reputation of slave descent brings the most definitive shame, even though the economic and political aspects of slavery and slave origins are commonly deemphasized.
Instead, the Tanôsy insist on the moral and ritual devaluation of slaves and their descendants.
Thus they are generally oblivious of the complex circumstances of past enslavement.
However, they often justify enslavement by saying that the slaves became slaves because in the past they behaved sinfully.
Their wrongdoing included bestiality and gluttony, especially at funerals.
The various roles and categories that slaves and servants had in the past are similarly overlooked by the Tanôsy, yet they are often able to recall a single servile duty that epitomize the abject condition of slaves and their degraded status: slaves were forced to clean royal corpses and some slaves used to be slaughtered to lie under their masters in their graves.
Today, members of the royal family continue to summon slaves descendants when their highest-ranking relatives die.
The ritual cleansing of corpses is viewed as a polluting act – among commoners, it falls to the less honorable kinsmen – and the slave descendants’ impurity is explicitly connected to this function.
Tanôsy slaves descendants are still considered as slaves, because slavery is believed to be an ingrained, transmissible moral defect rather than a legal status that can be abolished.
In an attempt at comparing the situation of slave descendants across different societies of the island, Margaret Brown stressed the relative ease with which slave ancestry is acknowledged in an ethnically mixed (Makoa/Betsimisaraka) community of the Masoala peninsula, in the North East of Madagascar.
Such ease surprised Brown because much Malagasy scholarship had shown that slave ancestry is not easily acknowledged and that the topic is difficult to discuss openly.
Eva Keller’s recent observations also confirm Brown’s: she stresses that in Masoala slave descent has become “invisible” and slave descendants engage “in the same daily activities and the same ritual practices as those of free descent.”
But what factors, asked Brown, would explain the social acceptability of slave ancestry in some Malagasy societies and its concurrent stigmatization in others?
She argued that the common ideology of ancestral power – according to which people’s lives depend heavily from their ancestors’ power – and the fact that slaves had been wrenched from their own ancestors, is not sufficient to explain why stigmatization occurs, because the slave descendants she observed shared the same reverence for the ancestors as other Malagasy and yet readily discussed slave ancestry and intermarried with people of free descent.
Brown suggested that acceptability and stigmatization vary according to three factors: (1) social structure (absence or presence of rank; nature of the kinship system; marriage rules); (2) resource availability; (3) historical patterns of migration and ethnic mixing.
On the whole, we agree with Brown’s suggestion that these three factors are crucial to account for the different levels of acceptability and stigmatization of slave descent found in the various societies of Madagascar.
Yet we also think that she missed a highly important point.
As her own example in Masoala shows, acceptability and stigmatization also depend on whether people perceive slave identity as being ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to their own group.
In Masoala, the Betsimisaraka consider that the Makoa are another ‘ethnic group’ (foko) that had client relationships with them in the past.
By comparison, in other Malagasy contexts where discrimination against slave descendants is strong, such as among the Betsileo or the Tanôsy, slave descendants are usually considered to be ‘internal’: they are perceived as people who have fallen down from a higher status within the Betsileo or the Tanôsy groups.
We would therefore suggest that one of the main reasons for the acceptability of slave status in Masoala is the fact that the Betsimisaraka tend to view the Makoa as a different ethnic group rather than as subalterns among the Betsimisaraka.
In our opinion, it is precisely this kind of ethnicization of Makoa identity, partly encouraged by their liberation by the Merina Queen in 1877 and by the memorial practices of the Makoa themselves, which renders intermarriage possible and makes public acknowledgement of slave ancestry unproblematic.
It is important to note, on that regard, that the Makoa remember their own history as a forced displacement from continental Africa rather than as a downfall that would have occurred within Madagascar.
They also try to keep their own specific cultural identity.
In consequence, despite facing problems of social integration, they do not necessarily feel ashamed and obliged to keep silent about their history, unlike what happens in the case of slave descendants that are perceived (and perceive themselves) as ‘internal’, that is, as slave descendants who have Malagasy (and not African) origins.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
According to Bloch, the slaves held by the Zafimaniry had, unlike Merina slaves, access to land.
But the Zafimaniry are shifting cultivators and free Zafimaniry tended to give their slaves the already semi-exhausted lands.
Since they had land, however, most of them stayed in their villages after being freed.
Later the ex-slave villages were the first to turn to rice-irrigation and they benefited most from education through Catholicism, from the trade of woodcarvings and from tourism.
In consequence, present-day Zafimaniry slave descendants are generally better off than the free descendants.
Since the ex-slaves have no positive marriage rules, they can marry outside Zafimaniry country and have therefore kinship links outside the rather cramped territory where the free descendants must marry.
Bloch concludes that, unlike in the Merina case, slave descendants among the Zafimaniry have been more successful than the free descendants.
The comparative framework in terms of socio-economic success proposed by Bloch seems to us extremely useful for the study of post-slavery in Madagascar, and much remains to be done to have a better idea of whether former slaves and their descendants have managed to achieve equality in economic terms.
Yet this perspective is clearly not sufficient because the economic success of slave descendants has not necessarily been accompanied by equality in terms of social status: prejudice against slave descendants remains deep in some regions of the island, where even wealthy slave descendants can still be viewed as subalterns.
A prime example of this situation is found among the southern Betsileo, where slave descendants are commonly called ‘unclean’ or ‘dirty’ people.
These derogatory labels still stick to groups of slave descendants that have otherwise achieved some kind of economic and political equality, for example because their ancestors were among the first settlers and thus among the ‘founding fathers’ of a local community.
Yet this achievement remains ambiguous and fragile since in spite of their efforts slave descendants have not managed to shed the inferior status that was once ascribed to them: commoner descendants continue to view them as unclean and strictly refuse to marry them.
In Anôsy, slaves descendants endure a fate that is in many ways similar and yet different.
Like in southern Betsileo, they are also described as dirty people and cannot marry commoner descendants.
They live in separate neighborhoods.
Their economic and political empowerment, while not completely inaccessible, remains difficult.
Former slaves, after abolition, often stayed on their former masters’ estates, which were in most cases royal residences.
Their continuing presence in these places, more than any known genealogy or history, is an indication of their slave ancestry.
Such an ascription of slave status on the basis of geographic cues feeds widespread suspicion.
This suspicion extends to the descendants of commoners who choose to reside, for various reasons, in the incriminated areas.
Yet a reputation of slave descent brings the most definitive shame, even though the economic and political aspects of slavery and slave origins are commonly deemphasized.
Instead, the Tanôsy insist on the moral and ritual devaluation of slaves and their descendants.
Thus they are generally oblivious of the complex circumstances of past enslavement.
However, they often justify enslavement by saying that the slaves became slaves because in the past they behaved sinfully.
Their wrongdoing included bestiality and gluttony, especially at funerals.
The various roles and categories that slaves and servants had in the past are similarly overlooked by the Tanôsy, yet they are often able to recall a single servile duty that epitomize the abject condition of slaves and their degraded status: slaves were forced to clean royal corpses and some slaves used to be slaughtered to lie under their masters in their graves.
Today, members of the royal family continue to summon slaves descendants when their highest-ranking relatives die.
The ritual cleansing of corpses is viewed as a polluting act – among commoners, it falls to the less honorable kinsmen – and the slave descendants’ impurity is explicitly connected to this function.
Tanôsy slaves descendants are still considered as slaves, because slavery is believed to be an ingrained, transmissible moral defect rather than a legal status that can be abolished.
In an attempt at comparing the situation of slave descendants across different societies of the island, Margaret Brown stressed the relative ease with which slave ancestry is acknowledged in an ethnically mixed (Makoa/Betsimisaraka) community of the Masoala peninsula, in the North East of Madagascar.
Such ease surprised Brown because much Malagasy scholarship had shown that slave ancestry is not easily acknowledged and that the topic is difficult to discuss openly.
Eva Keller’s recent observations also confirm Brown’s: she stresses that in Masoala slave descent has become “invisible” and slave descendants engage “in the same daily activities and the same ritual practices as those of free descent.”
But what factors, asked Brown, would explain the social acceptability of slave ancestry in some Malagasy societies and its concurrent stigmatization in others?
She argued that the common ideology of ancestral power – according to which people’s lives depend heavily from their ancestors’ power – and the fact that slaves had been wrenched from their own ancestors, is not sufficient to explain why stigmatization occurs, because the slave descendants she observed shared the same reverence for the ancestors as other Malagasy and yet readily discussed slave ancestry and intermarried with people of free descent.
Brown suggested that acceptability and stigmatization vary according to three factors: (1) social structure (absence or presence of rank; nature of the kinship system; marriage rules); (2) resource availability; (3) historical patterns of migration and ethnic mixing.
On the whole, we agree with Brown’s suggestion that these three factors are crucial to account for the different levels of acceptability and stigmatization of slave descent found in the various societies of Madagascar.
Yet we also think that she missed a highly important point.
As her own example in Masoala shows, acceptability and stigmatization also depend on whether people perceive slave identity as being ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to their own group.
In Masoala, the Betsimisaraka consider that the Makoa are another ‘ethnic group’ (foko) that had client relationships with them in the past.
By comparison, in other Malagasy contexts where discrimination against slave descendants is strong, such as among the Betsileo or the Tanôsy, slave descendants are usually considered to be ‘internal’: they are perceived as people who have fallen down from a higher status within the Betsileo or the Tanôsy groups.
We would therefore suggest that one of the main reasons for the acceptability of slave status in Masoala is the fact that the Betsimisaraka tend to view the Makoa as a different ethnic group rather than as subalterns among the Betsimisaraka.
In our opinion, it is precisely this kind of ethnicization of Makoa identity, partly encouraged by their liberation by the Merina Queen in 1877 and by the memorial practices of the Makoa themselves, which renders intermarriage possible and makes public acknowledgement of slave ancestry unproblematic.
It is important to note, on that regard, that the Makoa remember their own history as a forced displacement from continental Africa rather than as a downfall that would have occurred within Madagascar.
They also try to keep their own specific cultural identity.
In consequence, despite facing problems of social integration, they do not necessarily feel ashamed and obliged to keep silent about their history, unlike what happens in the case of slave descendants that are perceived (and perceive themselves) as ‘internal’, that is, as slave descendants who have Malagasy (and not African) origins.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, continued ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Accounting for the Discrimination and its Regional Variation
Indeed, it does seem that the strongest discriminatory practices against slave descendants mostly take place in situations where andevo (‘slaves’) are perceived as internal in the sense outlined above.
The distinction between these two ways of conceptualizing ‘slaves’ (internally and externally) in Madagascar seems to us more relevant than, say, making a distinction between coastal and highland Malagasy with respect to the level of stigmatization of slave descent.
At first sight there seems to be a correlation, insofar people in the highlands are perhaps more likely to view slave descendants as internal while on the coast they are more likely to view them as external, i.e. as people whose ancestors have been forcefully brought from continental Africa to Madagascar.
However things are not that simple.
In Antananarivo and Imerina, for example, where the issue of slave descent is increasingly racialized, the mainty (‘blacks’) are seen as both internal (as a group that has been integrated into the Merina ranking system after the royal abolition of 1877) and external (as people with African origins).
In some contexts, former slaves and their descendants have sometimes continued to dwell, after abolition, in the southwestern parts of villages, as prescribed by the astrological system that is used in many Malagasy societies and attributes the South-West direction to slave status.
When they did so, they often accepted sharecropping arrangements with their former masters and until today those who chose this option have remained stuck in relations of dependency.
Yet after the 1896 abolition many freed slaves chose to leave their former masters and looked for new land to cultivate for their own benefit.
In these endeavors, they sometimes joined groups of landless free descendants and together they founded new villages where the old spatial distinctions were not relevant anymore.
In consequence, distinctions between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ village parts are still visible today but this is only true of the ‘ancient’ villages that were founded before 1896.
In towns, the old spatial distinctions have become increasingly difficult to read because of the changes brought about by rapid demographic expansion and urban migration.
In Malagasy popular imagination, however, some neighborhoods of the capital Antananarivo are still strongly associated with slave descent because slaves lived massively in these areas in pre-abolition times.
The extent to which this popular perception still corresponds to a sociological reality remains an open question.
Another question that would require further investigation is whether access to land has ever posed a serious problem to the estimated 500,000 slaves who were freed in 1896.
As James Sibree, a fine observer of 19th century Madagascar, noted in 1870 “the country is so sparsely populated that the land is, comparatively [compared to Europe], of little value, so that almost everyone possesses some piece of ground which he can cultivate; even the slaves have their rice-patch."
"There is very little of that abject grinding poverty so common in the crowded populations of European cities."
"Except in the near vicinity of Malagasy towns, a good deal of the land appears open to anyone living in the neighborhood to cultivate and enclose at pleasure, so that no one need want at least the bare necessaries of life.”
Sibree’s account thus suggests that access to land may not have been an issue for freed slaves after 1896.
Provided they moved away from the towns and started cultivating free land in less populated areas they were probably able to do so with little obstacles.
A recent account, however, goes against this idea and characterizes slave descendants in the southern Betsileo highlands as people who are inherently landless, because their slave ancestors did not have the right to possess land and their descendants did not manage to have access to land after abolition.
In consequence of this ‘landlessness’, the argument goes on, slave descendants in the Betsileo southern highlands do not have ancestral tombs, and so “they are defined as people without history, without ancestors and without descent groups.”
This account attracted criticism for overgeneralizing a very local situation and for overinterpreting the data.
A particularly salient issue here is that of ancestral tombs, which are of utmost importance in Madagascar since they are central markers of group identity and are built on one’s tanindrazana (ancestral land).
Slave descendants’ tombs are particularly important for the study of post-slavery issues in Madagascar because their existence shows that most slave descendants have managed to ‘re-ancestralize’ themselves, meaning that they have built tombs that now contain several generations of dead/ancestors (razana).
Although their genealogies remain shallow, they can fully engage in ritual activity directed at these ancestors.
Unlike land, the issue of tombs must have been a difficult one for freed slaves upon abolition because during enslavement their dead were not buried in kin-based collective tombs, so that after abolition freed slaves were hardly able to take out their dead and place them in the new tombs they built on the lands they started to cultivate.
Over the last century the dead/ancestors have nonetheless accumulated in the tombs of former slaves and their descendants, so that they have been increasingly able to ‘normalize’ tomb-centered ritual activity and to become proud of their tombs, which are sometimes more lavish and better maintained than those of noble descendants.
To account for the persistence of the discrimination against slave descendants, the argument has been put forward that in some Malagasy contexts free descendants essentialize the andevo.
Essentialization here refers to ‘psychological essentialism,’ a way of thinking that has been well studied by cognitive and social psychologists.
Among the southern Betsileo, commoner descendants seem indeed to think about slave descendants as people who have an unclean ‘essence’.
They view the uncleanliness of slave descendants as impossible to cleanse and necessarily transmitted from parents to children.
Such an essentialist construal, however, does not seem to be a relic of pre-colonial ways of thinking about slaves.
It is more likely an unexpected but wide-ranging outcome of the 1896 colonial abolition of slavery.
The circumstances of abolition made it impossible for freed slaves to be ritually cleansed, as it was the custom among the southern Betsileo, and therefore commoners systematically avoided marrying former slaves.
This avoidance in turn reinforced their prejudice against them.
The circular process of marriage avoidance and prejudice reinforcement must have been going on since the aftermath of slavery and played a leading role in the essentialization of slave descendants.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Accounting for the Discrimination and its Regional Variation
Indeed, it does seem that the strongest discriminatory practices against slave descendants mostly take place in situations where andevo (‘slaves’) are perceived as internal in the sense outlined above.
The distinction between these two ways of conceptualizing ‘slaves’ (internally and externally) in Madagascar seems to us more relevant than, say, making a distinction between coastal and highland Malagasy with respect to the level of stigmatization of slave descent.
At first sight there seems to be a correlation, insofar people in the highlands are perhaps more likely to view slave descendants as internal while on the coast they are more likely to view them as external, i.e. as people whose ancestors have been forcefully brought from continental Africa to Madagascar.
However things are not that simple.
In Antananarivo and Imerina, for example, where the issue of slave descent is increasingly racialized, the mainty (‘blacks’) are seen as both internal (as a group that has been integrated into the Merina ranking system after the royal abolition of 1877) and external (as people with African origins).
In some contexts, former slaves and their descendants have sometimes continued to dwell, after abolition, in the southwestern parts of villages, as prescribed by the astrological system that is used in many Malagasy societies and attributes the South-West direction to slave status.
When they did so, they often accepted sharecropping arrangements with their former masters and until today those who chose this option have remained stuck in relations of dependency.
Yet after the 1896 abolition many freed slaves chose to leave their former masters and looked for new land to cultivate for their own benefit.
In these endeavors, they sometimes joined groups of landless free descendants and together they founded new villages where the old spatial distinctions were not relevant anymore.
In consequence, distinctions between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ village parts are still visible today but this is only true of the ‘ancient’ villages that were founded before 1896.
In towns, the old spatial distinctions have become increasingly difficult to read because of the changes brought about by rapid demographic expansion and urban migration.
In Malagasy popular imagination, however, some neighborhoods of the capital Antananarivo are still strongly associated with slave descent because slaves lived massively in these areas in pre-abolition times.
The extent to which this popular perception still corresponds to a sociological reality remains an open question.
Another question that would require further investigation is whether access to land has ever posed a serious problem to the estimated 500,000 slaves who were freed in 1896.
As James Sibree, a fine observer of 19th century Madagascar, noted in 1870 “the country is so sparsely populated that the land is, comparatively [compared to Europe], of little value, so that almost everyone possesses some piece of ground which he can cultivate; even the slaves have their rice-patch."
"There is very little of that abject grinding poverty so common in the crowded populations of European cities."
"Except in the near vicinity of Malagasy towns, a good deal of the land appears open to anyone living in the neighborhood to cultivate and enclose at pleasure, so that no one need want at least the bare necessaries of life.”
Sibree’s account thus suggests that access to land may not have been an issue for freed slaves after 1896.
Provided they moved away from the towns and started cultivating free land in less populated areas they were probably able to do so with little obstacles.
A recent account, however, goes against this idea and characterizes slave descendants in the southern Betsileo highlands as people who are inherently landless, because their slave ancestors did not have the right to possess land and their descendants did not manage to have access to land after abolition.
In consequence of this ‘landlessness’, the argument goes on, slave descendants in the Betsileo southern highlands do not have ancestral tombs, and so “they are defined as people without history, without ancestors and without descent groups.”
This account attracted criticism for overgeneralizing a very local situation and for overinterpreting the data.
A particularly salient issue here is that of ancestral tombs, which are of utmost importance in Madagascar since they are central markers of group identity and are built on one’s tanindrazana (ancestral land).
Slave descendants’ tombs are particularly important for the study of post-slavery issues in Madagascar because their existence shows that most slave descendants have managed to ‘re-ancestralize’ themselves, meaning that they have built tombs that now contain several generations of dead/ancestors (razana).
Although their genealogies remain shallow, they can fully engage in ritual activity directed at these ancestors.
Unlike land, the issue of tombs must have been a difficult one for freed slaves upon abolition because during enslavement their dead were not buried in kin-based collective tombs, so that after abolition freed slaves were hardly able to take out their dead and place them in the new tombs they built on the lands they started to cultivate.
Over the last century the dead/ancestors have nonetheless accumulated in the tombs of former slaves and their descendants, so that they have been increasingly able to ‘normalize’ tomb-centered ritual activity and to become proud of their tombs, which are sometimes more lavish and better maintained than those of noble descendants.
To account for the persistence of the discrimination against slave descendants, the argument has been put forward that in some Malagasy contexts free descendants essentialize the andevo.
Essentialization here refers to ‘psychological essentialism,’ a way of thinking that has been well studied by cognitive and social psychologists.
Among the southern Betsileo, commoner descendants seem indeed to think about slave descendants as people who have an unclean ‘essence’.
They view the uncleanliness of slave descendants as impossible to cleanse and necessarily transmitted from parents to children.
Such an essentialist construal, however, does not seem to be a relic of pre-colonial ways of thinking about slaves.
It is more likely an unexpected but wide-ranging outcome of the 1896 colonial abolition of slavery.
The circumstances of abolition made it impossible for freed slaves to be ritually cleansed, as it was the custom among the southern Betsileo, and therefore commoners systematically avoided marrying former slaves.
This avoidance in turn reinforced their prejudice against them.
The circular process of marriage avoidance and prejudice reinforcement must have been going on since the aftermath of slavery and played a leading role in the essentialization of slave descendants.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, continued ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
In Madagascar the legacy of slavery has rarely brought the slave descendants together in defense of their rights.
Notable exceptions originated from Antananarivo.
Jean-Roland Randriamaro has described the emergence of social movements and political parties that made a significant impact on national politics from the late 40s to the mid-70s.68
The PADESM, Parti des Déshérités de Madagascar (Party of the Disinherited of Madagascar), which rallied slaves descendants against their former masters, was founded in June 1946.
Ambitiously aiming at serving the disenfranchised population of the nation, it claimed to unite the Mainty, a heterogeneous category lumping together – mostly in Antananarivo and Imerina – slaves descendants, descendants of royal slaves and servants, and Côtiers(a category regrouping people who moved from various coastal areas).
The PADESM’s first national secretary was a slave descendant.
A major anti-colonial uprising took place between March 1947 and December 1948, and their political opponents steadily accused the PADESM of collaborationism.
It was suspected of being manipulated by the French colonial rule to counter the rise of the nationalist Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache(MDRM).
Another movement, the MFM, was created in 1972.
It recruited the ZOAM (or ZWAM), the underprivileged, undereducated and ‘transgressive’ youth inhabiting Antananarivo’s impoverished neighborhoods – although the leadership and core of the party was comprised of students and teachers.
The ZOAM played a critical role in the unfolding events.
That year, the political unrest brought to power forces overtly hostile to the traditional hierarchy.
The appointment of radical and social reformist colonel Ratsimandrava was a response to the mainty youth’s demands.
Ratsimandrava however was assassinated only six days after his access to power.
PADESM and MFM disappeared during the second republic.
After Ratsiraka’s takeover and the formation of the Democratic Republic of Madagascar in 1976, the ZOAM became de facto a government institution.
During the second republic, the mainty youth of Antananarivo were described as a manipulable and suggestible mass rather than a militant and empowered force.
Jennifer Jackson describes this as a case of “reification of class categories.”
She also observes that in developing the zomaka argot, which became a “covert instrument of political struggle” and an “object symbolic of an ideology of class struggle,” the ZOAM normalized the Mainty as a category of speakers.
The political crisis of 2002, she explains, contributed to the reinvigoration of this argot and it has not only become a slang spoken by urban speakers across class lines but it was also “reengaged in the genres of political cartoons and mass media arts as a mode of political allegiance in identity resistance to politics.”
Yet the limited presence of parties and social movements protesting against stigmatization and marginalization, and committed to the empowerment of slave descendants in contemporary Malagasy politics, sharply contrasts with the increasing politicization of slaves and slave descendants in West African contexts.
In Madagascar, where the majority of slave descendants are still trying to achieve a more equal status through ‘re-ancestralization’ and intermarriages with free descendants, such mobilizations are not observed.
It might not come as a surprise that one of the latest incarnations of a political and cultural affirmation by slave descendants is found amongst the Makoa youth participating in the budding Malagasy hip-hop movement modeled after the American gangsta rap.
The lyrics of the Makoa emcees celebrate their African origins through favorable stylistic and thematic associations with a globalized, thriving blackness.
On the contrary, where slaves descendants continue to reside amongst the descendants of those who once enslaved their ancestors, slavery has remained a difficult subject matter to discuss, both publicly and privately.
The reserve regarding slavery is often justified by two opposite arguments: slavery is either no longer relevant or too serious an issue to be evoked at all.
Claims of equality (achieved or yet to come) hide the persistence of the stigma, but secrecy does not eliminate prejudice.
Luke Freeman has recently analyzed the silence on slavery observed among Betsileo free and slave descendants.
He notes that “the effect of this silence is cumulative: the more the stigma of slavery is avoided, the more ‘unspeakable’ it becomes”.
It is indeed difficult to fight what cannot be named.
The use of euphemisms to allude to former servile status is widespread in Madagascar.
These euphemisms generate ambiguities.
Those used in rituals, for example, can become opaque to a number of people, both among free and slave descendants.
In Anôsy, royal slaves and slaves descendants are frequently described as panopo (‘servants’), a term also used for commoners, i.e. people who were subjected only to the authority of the kings.
Slaves descendants are also known as olo ratsy (‘bad people’) and olo tambany (‘people of the bottom’); but these terms carry little specificity and may also describe people that are marginalized because of their indigence.
Finally, as in other regions of Madagascar, kinship terms are commonly used in Anôsy to address and refer to slaves descendants.
Noble descendants address them contemptuously as zanak’ampela (‘children of the women’, i.e. uterine parents).
These equivocal designations entwine the identities of commoners and slave descendants, and such entwinement often prevents any definitive, unanimous identification of the latter.
Doubts are further augmented by the Tanôsy restriction of open communication about historical knowledge beyond one’s own descent group.
This contrasts with other Malagasy contexts, for example the southern Betsileo, where genealogical speeches are publicly given at funerals and serve as means of keeping a social memory of ‘origins’.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
In Madagascar the legacy of slavery has rarely brought the slave descendants together in defense of their rights.
Notable exceptions originated from Antananarivo.
Jean-Roland Randriamaro has described the emergence of social movements and political parties that made a significant impact on national politics from the late 40s to the mid-70s.68
The PADESM, Parti des Déshérités de Madagascar (Party of the Disinherited of Madagascar), which rallied slaves descendants against their former masters, was founded in June 1946.
Ambitiously aiming at serving the disenfranchised population of the nation, it claimed to unite the Mainty, a heterogeneous category lumping together – mostly in Antananarivo and Imerina – slaves descendants, descendants of royal slaves and servants, and Côtiers(a category regrouping people who moved from various coastal areas).
The PADESM’s first national secretary was a slave descendant.
A major anti-colonial uprising took place between March 1947 and December 1948, and their political opponents steadily accused the PADESM of collaborationism.
It was suspected of being manipulated by the French colonial rule to counter the rise of the nationalist Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache(MDRM).
Another movement, the MFM, was created in 1972.
It recruited the ZOAM (or ZWAM), the underprivileged, undereducated and ‘transgressive’ youth inhabiting Antananarivo’s impoverished neighborhoods – although the leadership and core of the party was comprised of students and teachers.
The ZOAM played a critical role in the unfolding events.
That year, the political unrest brought to power forces overtly hostile to the traditional hierarchy.
The appointment of radical and social reformist colonel Ratsimandrava was a response to the mainty youth’s demands.
Ratsimandrava however was assassinated only six days after his access to power.
PADESM and MFM disappeared during the second republic.
After Ratsiraka’s takeover and the formation of the Democratic Republic of Madagascar in 1976, the ZOAM became de facto a government institution.
During the second republic, the mainty youth of Antananarivo were described as a manipulable and suggestible mass rather than a militant and empowered force.
Jennifer Jackson describes this as a case of “reification of class categories.”
She also observes that in developing the zomaka argot, which became a “covert instrument of political struggle” and an “object symbolic of an ideology of class struggle,” the ZOAM normalized the Mainty as a category of speakers.
The political crisis of 2002, she explains, contributed to the reinvigoration of this argot and it has not only become a slang spoken by urban speakers across class lines but it was also “reengaged in the genres of political cartoons and mass media arts as a mode of political allegiance in identity resistance to politics.”
Yet the limited presence of parties and social movements protesting against stigmatization and marginalization, and committed to the empowerment of slave descendants in contemporary Malagasy politics, sharply contrasts with the increasing politicization of slaves and slave descendants in West African contexts.
In Madagascar, where the majority of slave descendants are still trying to achieve a more equal status through ‘re-ancestralization’ and intermarriages with free descendants, such mobilizations are not observed.
It might not come as a surprise that one of the latest incarnations of a political and cultural affirmation by slave descendants is found amongst the Makoa youth participating in the budding Malagasy hip-hop movement modeled after the American gangsta rap.
The lyrics of the Makoa emcees celebrate their African origins through favorable stylistic and thematic associations with a globalized, thriving blackness.
On the contrary, where slaves descendants continue to reside amongst the descendants of those who once enslaved their ancestors, slavery has remained a difficult subject matter to discuss, both publicly and privately.
The reserve regarding slavery is often justified by two opposite arguments: slavery is either no longer relevant or too serious an issue to be evoked at all.
Claims of equality (achieved or yet to come) hide the persistence of the stigma, but secrecy does not eliminate prejudice.
Luke Freeman has recently analyzed the silence on slavery observed among Betsileo free and slave descendants.
He notes that “the effect of this silence is cumulative: the more the stigma of slavery is avoided, the more ‘unspeakable’ it becomes”.
It is indeed difficult to fight what cannot be named.
The use of euphemisms to allude to former servile status is widespread in Madagascar.
These euphemisms generate ambiguities.
Those used in rituals, for example, can become opaque to a number of people, both among free and slave descendants.
In Anôsy, royal slaves and slaves descendants are frequently described as panopo (‘servants’), a term also used for commoners, i.e. people who were subjected only to the authority of the kings.
Slaves descendants are also known as olo ratsy (‘bad people’) and olo tambany (‘people of the bottom’); but these terms carry little specificity and may also describe people that are marginalized because of their indigence.
Finally, as in other regions of Madagascar, kinship terms are commonly used in Anôsy to address and refer to slaves descendants.
Noble descendants address them contemptuously as zanak’ampela (‘children of the women’, i.e. uterine parents).
These equivocal designations entwine the identities of commoners and slave descendants, and such entwinement often prevents any definitive, unanimous identification of the latter.
Doubts are further augmented by the Tanôsy restriction of open communication about historical knowledge beyond one’s own descent group.
This contrasts with other Malagasy contexts, for example the southern Betsileo, where genealogical speeches are publicly given at funerals and serve as means of keeping a social memory of ‘origins’.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
Slavery and Post-Slavery in Madagascar: An Overview, concluded ..
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Conclusion
In this chapter we have attempted to give a broad overview of slavery and post-slavery issues in Madagascar.
We hope to have shown that, despite an increasing amount of studies, many of these issues require further investigation and discussion.
We believe that this scholarship is extremely important in the case of Madagascar because oversimplifications about slave descendants and the ensuing prejudice are widespread in the island and beyond.
A particularly telling but highly regrettable example of such oversimplifications can be found in a recent report on contemporary forms of slavery in Madagascar written for the United Nations.
In its short section on the island’s history of slavery, one can read, for example, that “The nobles and commoners [among the Merina] are generally light-skinned, whereas those in the latter two castes [i.e., the mainty and the andevo] are dark-skinned,” that “The Andevo live in slums located in the low villages, below the villages on the hill where the nobles and commoners settled” and that “most Andevo and Mosambika are illiterate.”
Oversimplifications of this kind are not just benign misrepresentations.
They can provide ‘official’ justifications for stigmatizing people on the basis of racial traits, places of residence or illiteracy.
Scholars should avoid relaying such simplistic statements and strive to make clear, instead, that popular perceptions of slave descendants’ identity have been historically constructed and therefore do not reflect the present situation.
As we have explained, ideas of slave descendants as ‘ancestorless people’, for example, no longer correspond to a lived reality because, as far as we know, slave descendants now have tombs and dead/ancestors (razana) in these tombs.
The study of post-slavery appears to be a particularly complex and sometimes slippery area of inquiry within Malagasy studies.
Therefore, an extremely careful attention should be paid to local contexts in order to understand the full picture and avoid privileging one perspective – for example the Merina case – over others.
The construal of slave descendants among the Merina, the Betsileo, the Zafimaniry, the Betsimisaraka and the Tanôsy – to go back to the few examples we have given here – is far from being identical because it is the outcome of different local (although interrelated) histories. In urban, multiethnic and more ‘politically conscious’ Antananarivo, as in the Malagasy diaspora and the media, the representation of slave descendants is also different.
To make sense of these differences we have tried to provide some analytical tools.
We have highlighted, in particular, three processes that account for the ways slave descendants are viewed in different Malagasy contexts.
While the Makoa who were freed in 1877 by the Merina Queen seem always to be ethnicized as a slave descent group with ‘external’ origins, southern Betsileo and Tanôsy slave descendants tend to be essentialized as people whose origins are Malagasy and whose servile history is therefore ‘internal’.
In Antananarivo, one of the most salient aspects of the problem is an increasing racialization – arguably a specific case of essentialization – of the differences between ‘slaves’ and ‘non-slaves’.
We do not claim, however, that the processes of ethnicization, essentialization and racialization we have highlighted are sufficient to define how slave descendants are conceived across the Malagasy social spectrum.
Sociocultural phenomena such as the discrimination against slave descendants in Madagascar need sophisticated and empirically grounded accounts rather than simplistic generalizations.
We have only begun to scratch the surface.
Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda
Conclusion
In this chapter we have attempted to give a broad overview of slavery and post-slavery issues in Madagascar.
We hope to have shown that, despite an increasing amount of studies, many of these issues require further investigation and discussion.
We believe that this scholarship is extremely important in the case of Madagascar because oversimplifications about slave descendants and the ensuing prejudice are widespread in the island and beyond.
A particularly telling but highly regrettable example of such oversimplifications can be found in a recent report on contemporary forms of slavery in Madagascar written for the United Nations.
In its short section on the island’s history of slavery, one can read, for example, that “The nobles and commoners [among the Merina] are generally light-skinned, whereas those in the latter two castes [i.e., the mainty and the andevo] are dark-skinned,” that “The Andevo live in slums located in the low villages, below the villages on the hill where the nobles and commoners settled” and that “most Andevo and Mosambika are illiterate.”
Oversimplifications of this kind are not just benign misrepresentations.
They can provide ‘official’ justifications for stigmatizing people on the basis of racial traits, places of residence or illiteracy.
Scholars should avoid relaying such simplistic statements and strive to make clear, instead, that popular perceptions of slave descendants’ identity have been historically constructed and therefore do not reflect the present situation.
As we have explained, ideas of slave descendants as ‘ancestorless people’, for example, no longer correspond to a lived reality because, as far as we know, slave descendants now have tombs and dead/ancestors (razana) in these tombs.
The study of post-slavery appears to be a particularly complex and sometimes slippery area of inquiry within Malagasy studies.
Therefore, an extremely careful attention should be paid to local contexts in order to understand the full picture and avoid privileging one perspective – for example the Merina case – over others.
The construal of slave descendants among the Merina, the Betsileo, the Zafimaniry, the Betsimisaraka and the Tanôsy – to go back to the few examples we have given here – is far from being identical because it is the outcome of different local (although interrelated) histories. In urban, multiethnic and more ‘politically conscious’ Antananarivo, as in the Malagasy diaspora and the media, the representation of slave descendants is also different.
To make sense of these differences we have tried to provide some analytical tools.
We have highlighted, in particular, three processes that account for the ways slave descendants are viewed in different Malagasy contexts.
While the Makoa who were freed in 1877 by the Merina Queen seem always to be ethnicized as a slave descent group with ‘external’ origins, southern Betsileo and Tanôsy slave descendants tend to be essentialized as people whose origins are Malagasy and whose servile history is therefore ‘internal’.
In Antananarivo, one of the most salient aspects of the problem is an increasing racialization – arguably a specific case of essentialization – of the differences between ‘slaves’ and ‘non-slaves’.
We do not claim, however, that the processes of ethnicization, essentialization and racialization we have highlighted are sufficient to define how slave descendants are conceived across the Malagasy social spectrum.
Sociocultural phenomena such as the discrimination against slave descendants in Madagascar need sophisticated and empirically grounded accounts rather than simplistic generalizations.
We have only begun to scratch the surface.
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
DW
East Africa's forgotten slave trade
Over several centuries countless East Africans were sold as slaves by Muslim Arabs to the Middle East and other places via the Sahara desert and Indian Ocean.
Experts say it is time for this to be discussed more openly.
The island of Zanzibar is today considered one of East Africa's best destinations: white sandy beaches, crystal clear waters and hotels offer tourists from all over the world a holiday to remember.
Long forgotten is the dark past that overshadowed this sunny paradise 200 years ago.
The archipelago, which today is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, was then regarded as the center of the East African slave trade.
In addition to valuable raw materials such as ivory and the coveted cloves, one thing stood out above all others in the colorful markets: hundreds of slaves.
From Eastern Europe to North Africa
The sale of African slaves can be traced back to antiquity.
It became popular in the seventh century when Islam was gaining strength in North Africa.
This was seven centuries before Europeans explored the continent and ten centuries before West Africans were sold across the Atlantic to America.
Back then, Arab Muslims in North and East Africa sold captured Africans to the Middle East.
There, they worked as field workers, teachers or harem guards, which is why the castration of male slaves was common practice.
Muslims, on the other hand, including African Muslims, were not allowed to be enslaved, according to Islamic legal views.
"Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia," Senegalese author Tidiane N'Diaye told DW in an interview.
"But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa."
Roots of slavery in Africa
According to N'Diaye, slavery has existed in practically all civilizations.
This was also the case in Africa before settlers came.
In central East Africa, ethnic groups such as the Yao, Makua and Marava were fighting against each other and entire peoples within the continent traded with people they had captured through wars.
"Thus Arab Muslims encountered already existing structures, which facilitated the purchase of slaves for their purposes."
For Abdulazizi Lodhi, Emeritus Professor of Swahili and African Linguistics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, slavery was part of different African cultures.
"When it came to exports, tribal Africans themselves were the main actors."
"In many African societies there were no prisons, so people who were captured were sold."
Zanzibar as East Africa's slave hub
The slave trade in East Africa really took off from the 17th century.
More and more merchants from Oman settled in Zanzibar.
The island took on an even more important role in the international trade of goods due to the large trade at the Swahili coast and consequently also in the slave trade.
This is how the largest slave market in East Africa was created.
Only estimates, some of which vary widely, exist as to how many Africans were sold from East to North Africa.
This is also due to the fact that many of the slaves perished.
Scientific research concludes that about three out of four slaves died before they reached the market where they were to be sold.
The causes were hunger, illness or exhaustion after long journeys.
Author N'Diaye estimates that 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery: "Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic [slave] trade by Europeans into the New World in mind."
"But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater," N'diaye said.
"Eight million Africans were brought from East Africa via the Trans-Saharan route to Morocco or Egypt."
"A further nine million were deported to regions on the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean."
TO BE CONTINUED ...
East Africa's forgotten slave trade
Over several centuries countless East Africans were sold as slaves by Muslim Arabs to the Middle East and other places via the Sahara desert and Indian Ocean.
Experts say it is time for this to be discussed more openly.
The island of Zanzibar is today considered one of East Africa's best destinations: white sandy beaches, crystal clear waters and hotels offer tourists from all over the world a holiday to remember.
Long forgotten is the dark past that overshadowed this sunny paradise 200 years ago.
The archipelago, which today is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, was then regarded as the center of the East African slave trade.
In addition to valuable raw materials such as ivory and the coveted cloves, one thing stood out above all others in the colorful markets: hundreds of slaves.
From Eastern Europe to North Africa
The sale of African slaves can be traced back to antiquity.
It became popular in the seventh century when Islam was gaining strength in North Africa.
This was seven centuries before Europeans explored the continent and ten centuries before West Africans were sold across the Atlantic to America.
Back then, Arab Muslims in North and East Africa sold captured Africans to the Middle East.
There, they worked as field workers, teachers or harem guards, which is why the castration of male slaves was common practice.
Muslims, on the other hand, including African Muslims, were not allowed to be enslaved, according to Islamic legal views.
"Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia," Senegalese author Tidiane N'Diaye told DW in an interview.
"But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa."
Roots of slavery in Africa
According to N'Diaye, slavery has existed in practically all civilizations.
This was also the case in Africa before settlers came.
In central East Africa, ethnic groups such as the Yao, Makua and Marava were fighting against each other and entire peoples within the continent traded with people they had captured through wars.
"Thus Arab Muslims encountered already existing structures, which facilitated the purchase of slaves for their purposes."
For Abdulazizi Lodhi, Emeritus Professor of Swahili and African Linguistics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, slavery was part of different African cultures.
"When it came to exports, tribal Africans themselves were the main actors."
"In many African societies there were no prisons, so people who were captured were sold."
Zanzibar as East Africa's slave hub
The slave trade in East Africa really took off from the 17th century.
More and more merchants from Oman settled in Zanzibar.
The island took on an even more important role in the international trade of goods due to the large trade at the Swahili coast and consequently also in the slave trade.
This is how the largest slave market in East Africa was created.
Only estimates, some of which vary widely, exist as to how many Africans were sold from East to North Africa.
This is also due to the fact that many of the slaves perished.
Scientific research concludes that about three out of four slaves died before they reached the market where they were to be sold.
The causes were hunger, illness or exhaustion after long journeys.
Author N'Diaye estimates that 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery: "Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic [slave] trade by Europeans into the New World in mind."
"But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater," N'diaye said.
"Eight million Africans were brought from East Africa via the Trans-Saharan route to Morocco or Egypt."
"A further nine million were deported to regions on the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean."
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
DW
East Africa's forgotten slave trade, concluded ...
'The spice of slavery'
Historian Lodhi disagrees with N'Diaye's figure.
"17 million?"
"How is that possible if the total population of Africa at that time might not even have been 40 million?"
"These statistics did not exist back then."
Old reports were also methodically doubtful.
For example, David Livingston, a Scottish missionary and explorer, estimated that 50,000 slaves were being sold annually in the markets of Zanzibar.
"Even today, the number of people living in Zanzibar is not close to 50,000."
"The numbers have neither hand nor foot," Lodhi said.
Not all slaves were taken to Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
From 1820, Omani settlers began cultivating cloves in Zanzibar to meet the growing demand on the world market.
Large plantations quickly developed and slaves could be bought cheaply at the nearby slave market.
Cape Coast Castle – now a World Heritage Site – is one of about forty forts in Ghana where slaves from as far away as Burkina Faso and Niger were imprisoned.
This former slave fortress could hold about 1,500 slaves at a time before they were loaded onto ships and sold into slavery in the New World in the Americas and the Caribbean.
From 1839 to 1860, the quantity of exported cloves increased from 565 (1,246 pounds) to 12,600 kilograms, according to American historian Frederick Cooper.
Zanzibar's reputation changed from being the center of the slave trade to a center of slave keeping which produced notorious figures such as the legendary slave trader Tippu-Tip.
The end of slavery?
At the end of August 1791, a slave revolt began in today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
These two uprisings significantly promoted the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism in Africa.
However, it was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal.
That decree was not enforced effectively either.
It was not until 1909 that slavery was finally abolished in East Africa.
According to author N'Diaye, slavery still exists, albeit in a different form.
It is estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide still live in slavery.
In Africa there are hundreds of thousands.
"In Mauritania they say they have abolished slavery, but in reality the situation in North Africa has not changed much."
"Young people are enslaved against their will, forced to work and sexually exploited."
There have been reports from Libya about organized slave markets and a few years ago, a case of slavery was uncovered in Tanzania, according to Lodhi.
"A mine was found in a remote area where 50 to 60 boys were forced to work."
"They were not paid and lived in a camp guarded by armed men."
The effects of slavery in East Africa are not as severe as the economic consequences of Western colonization of Africa, says N'Diaye.
"The economy of many of these countries is still dominated by the West; it's a topic being discussed by many intellectuals."
But N'Diaye says that what happened in East Africa over the centuries should also be openly discussed.
"Most of the African authors have not yet published a book on the Arab-Muslim slave trade out of religious solidarity."
"There are 500 million Muslims in Africa, and it is better to blame the West than talk about the past crimes of Arab Muslims."
https://www.dw.com/en/east-africas-forg ... a-50126759
East Africa's forgotten slave trade, concluded ...
'The spice of slavery'
Historian Lodhi disagrees with N'Diaye's figure.
"17 million?"
"How is that possible if the total population of Africa at that time might not even have been 40 million?"
"These statistics did not exist back then."
Old reports were also methodically doubtful.
For example, David Livingston, a Scottish missionary and explorer, estimated that 50,000 slaves were being sold annually in the markets of Zanzibar.
"Even today, the number of people living in Zanzibar is not close to 50,000."
"The numbers have neither hand nor foot," Lodhi said.
Not all slaves were taken to Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
From 1820, Omani settlers began cultivating cloves in Zanzibar to meet the growing demand on the world market.
Large plantations quickly developed and slaves could be bought cheaply at the nearby slave market.
Cape Coast Castle – now a World Heritage Site – is one of about forty forts in Ghana where slaves from as far away as Burkina Faso and Niger were imprisoned.
This former slave fortress could hold about 1,500 slaves at a time before they were loaded onto ships and sold into slavery in the New World in the Americas and the Caribbean.
From 1839 to 1860, the quantity of exported cloves increased from 565 (1,246 pounds) to 12,600 kilograms, according to American historian Frederick Cooper.
Zanzibar's reputation changed from being the center of the slave trade to a center of slave keeping which produced notorious figures such as the legendary slave trader Tippu-Tip.
The end of slavery?
At the end of August 1791, a slave revolt began in today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
These two uprisings significantly promoted the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism in Africa.
However, it was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal.
That decree was not enforced effectively either.
It was not until 1909 that slavery was finally abolished in East Africa.
According to author N'Diaye, slavery still exists, albeit in a different form.
It is estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide still live in slavery.
In Africa there are hundreds of thousands.
"In Mauritania they say they have abolished slavery, but in reality the situation in North Africa has not changed much."
"Young people are enslaved against their will, forced to work and sexually exploited."
There have been reports from Libya about organized slave markets and a few years ago, a case of slavery was uncovered in Tanzania, according to Lodhi.
"A mine was found in a remote area where 50 to 60 boys were forced to work."
"They were not paid and lived in a camp guarded by armed men."
The effects of slavery in East Africa are not as severe as the economic consequences of Western colonization of Africa, says N'Diaye.
"The economy of many of these countries is still dominated by the West; it's a topic being discussed by many intellectuals."
But N'Diaye says that what happened in East Africa over the centuries should also be openly discussed.
"Most of the African authors have not yet published a book on the Arab-Muslim slave trade out of religious solidarity."
"There are 500 million Muslims in Africa, and it is better to blame the West than talk about the past crimes of Arab Muslims."
https://www.dw.com/en/east-africas-forg ... a-50126759
Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY
WIKIPEDIA
Tippu Tip
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tippu Tip, or Tippu Tib (1832 – June 14, 1905), real name Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, was an Afro-Arab slave trader, ivory trader, explorer, plantation owner and governor.
He worked for a succession of the sultans of Zanzibar.
Tippu Tip traded in slaves for Zanzibar's clove plantations.
As part of the large and lucrative ivory trade, he led many trading expeditions into Central Africa, constructing profitable trading posts deep into the region.
He bought the ivory from local suppliers and resold it for a profit at coastal ports.
Early life
It is believed that Tippu Tip was born around 1832 on Zanzibar, based on descriptions of his age at points in his life.
Tippu Tip's mother, Bint Habib bin Bushir, was a Muscat Arab of the ruling class.
His father and paternal grandfather were coastal Arabs of the Swahili Coast who had taken part in the earliest trading expeditions to the interior.
His paternal great-grandmother, wife of Rajab bin Mohammed bin Said el Murgebi, was the daughter of Juma bin Mohammed el Nebhani, a member of a respected Muscat (Oman) family, and a Bantu woman from the village of Mbwa Maji, a small village south of what would later become the German capital of Dar es Salaam.
Throughout his lifetime Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi was more commonly known as Tippu Tib, which translates to "the gatherer together of wealth".
According to him, he was given the nickname Tippu Tip after the "tiptip" sound that his guns gave off during expeditions in Chungu territory.
At a relatively young age, Tippu Tip led a group of about 100 men into Central Africa seeking slaves and ivory.
After plundering several large swathes of land he returned to Zanzibar to consolidate his resources and recruit for his forces.
Following this he returned to mainland Africa.
Later life
Tippu Tip built a trading empire, using the proceeds to establish clove plantations on Zanzibar.
Abdul Sheriff reported that when he left for his twelve years of "empire building" on the mainland, he had no plantations of his own.
By 1895, he had acquired "seven 'shambas' [plantations] and 10,000 slaves".
He met and helped several famous western explorers of the African continent, including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.
Between 1884 and 1887 he claimed the Eastern Congo for himself and for the Sultan of Zanzibar, Bargash bin Said el Busaidi.
In spite of his position as protector of Zanzibar's interests in Congo, he managed to maintain good relations with the Europeans.
When, in August 1886, fighting broke out between the Swahili and the representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium at Stanley Falls, al-Murjabī went to the Belgian consul at Zanzibar to assure him of his "good intentions".
Although he was still a force in Central African politics, he could see by 1886 that power in the region was shifting.
Governor of the Stanley Falls District
In early 1887, Stanley arrived in Zanzibar and proposed that Tippu Tip be made governor of the Stanley Falls District in the Congo Free State.
Both Leopold and Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar agreed and on February 24, 1887, Tippu Tip accepted.
At the same time, he agreed to man the expedition which Stanley had been commissioned to organize for the purpose of rescuing Emin Pasha (E. Schnitzer), the German governor of Equatoria (a region of Ottoman Egypt, today in South Sudan) who had been stranded in the Bahr el Ghazal area as a result of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan.
Tippu Tip travelled back to the Upper Congo in the company of Stanley, but this time by way of the Atlantic coast and up the Congo River.
Aside from its doubtful usefulness, the relief expedition was marred by the near annihilation of its rearguard, a disaster for which Stanley attempted to place the blame on Tippu Tip.
Congo–Arab War
After his tenure as governor, the Congo–Arab War broke out.
Both sides fought with armies consisting mostly of local African soldiers fighting under the command of either Arab or European leaders.
When Tippu Tip left the Congo, the authority of King Leopold's Free State was still very weak in the Eastern parts of the territory and the power lay largely with local Arabic or Swahili strongmen.
Amongst these were Tippu Tip's son Sefu bin Hamid and a trader known as Rumaliza in the area close to Lake Tanganyika.
In 1892, Sefu bin Hamed attacked Belgian ivory traders, who were seen as a threat to the Arab-Swahili trade.
The Free State government sent a force under commander Francis Dhanis to the East.
Dhanis had an early success when the African warlord Ngongo Lutete changed sides from Sefu's to his.
The better armed and organised Belgian force defeated their opponents in several fights until the death of Sefu on 20 October 1893, and finally forcing also Rumaliza to flee to German territory in 1895.
Death
After returning to Zanzibar around 1890/91, Tippu Tip retired.
He set out to write an account of his life, which is the first example of the literary genre of autobiography in the Bantu Swahili language.
Dr. Heinrich Brode, who knew him in Zanzibar, transcribed the manuscript into Roman script and translated it into German.
It was subsequently translated into English and published in Britain in 1907.
Tippu Tip died June 13, 1905, of malaria (according to Brode) in his home in Stone Town, the main town on the island of Zanzibar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tippu_Tip
Tippu Tip
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tippu Tip, or Tippu Tib (1832 – June 14, 1905), real name Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, was an Afro-Arab slave trader, ivory trader, explorer, plantation owner and governor.
He worked for a succession of the sultans of Zanzibar.
Tippu Tip traded in slaves for Zanzibar's clove plantations.
As part of the large and lucrative ivory trade, he led many trading expeditions into Central Africa, constructing profitable trading posts deep into the region.
He bought the ivory from local suppliers and resold it for a profit at coastal ports.
Early life
It is believed that Tippu Tip was born around 1832 on Zanzibar, based on descriptions of his age at points in his life.
Tippu Tip's mother, Bint Habib bin Bushir, was a Muscat Arab of the ruling class.
His father and paternal grandfather were coastal Arabs of the Swahili Coast who had taken part in the earliest trading expeditions to the interior.
His paternal great-grandmother, wife of Rajab bin Mohammed bin Said el Murgebi, was the daughter of Juma bin Mohammed el Nebhani, a member of a respected Muscat (Oman) family, and a Bantu woman from the village of Mbwa Maji, a small village south of what would later become the German capital of Dar es Salaam.
Throughout his lifetime Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi was more commonly known as Tippu Tib, which translates to "the gatherer together of wealth".
According to him, he was given the nickname Tippu Tip after the "tiptip" sound that his guns gave off during expeditions in Chungu territory.
At a relatively young age, Tippu Tip led a group of about 100 men into Central Africa seeking slaves and ivory.
After plundering several large swathes of land he returned to Zanzibar to consolidate his resources and recruit for his forces.
Following this he returned to mainland Africa.
Later life
Tippu Tip built a trading empire, using the proceeds to establish clove plantations on Zanzibar.
Abdul Sheriff reported that when he left for his twelve years of "empire building" on the mainland, he had no plantations of his own.
By 1895, he had acquired "seven 'shambas' [plantations] and 10,000 slaves".
He met and helped several famous western explorers of the African continent, including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.
Between 1884 and 1887 he claimed the Eastern Congo for himself and for the Sultan of Zanzibar, Bargash bin Said el Busaidi.
In spite of his position as protector of Zanzibar's interests in Congo, he managed to maintain good relations with the Europeans.
When, in August 1886, fighting broke out between the Swahili and the representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium at Stanley Falls, al-Murjabī went to the Belgian consul at Zanzibar to assure him of his "good intentions".
Although he was still a force in Central African politics, he could see by 1886 that power in the region was shifting.
Governor of the Stanley Falls District
In early 1887, Stanley arrived in Zanzibar and proposed that Tippu Tip be made governor of the Stanley Falls District in the Congo Free State.
Both Leopold and Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar agreed and on February 24, 1887, Tippu Tip accepted.
At the same time, he agreed to man the expedition which Stanley had been commissioned to organize for the purpose of rescuing Emin Pasha (E. Schnitzer), the German governor of Equatoria (a region of Ottoman Egypt, today in South Sudan) who had been stranded in the Bahr el Ghazal area as a result of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan.
Tippu Tip travelled back to the Upper Congo in the company of Stanley, but this time by way of the Atlantic coast and up the Congo River.
Aside from its doubtful usefulness, the relief expedition was marred by the near annihilation of its rearguard, a disaster for which Stanley attempted to place the blame on Tippu Tip.
Congo–Arab War
After his tenure as governor, the Congo–Arab War broke out.
Both sides fought with armies consisting mostly of local African soldiers fighting under the command of either Arab or European leaders.
When Tippu Tip left the Congo, the authority of King Leopold's Free State was still very weak in the Eastern parts of the territory and the power lay largely with local Arabic or Swahili strongmen.
Amongst these were Tippu Tip's son Sefu bin Hamid and a trader known as Rumaliza in the area close to Lake Tanganyika.
In 1892, Sefu bin Hamed attacked Belgian ivory traders, who were seen as a threat to the Arab-Swahili trade.
The Free State government sent a force under commander Francis Dhanis to the East.
Dhanis had an early success when the African warlord Ngongo Lutete changed sides from Sefu's to his.
The better armed and organised Belgian force defeated their opponents in several fights until the death of Sefu on 20 October 1893, and finally forcing also Rumaliza to flee to German territory in 1895.
Death
After returning to Zanzibar around 1890/91, Tippu Tip retired.
He set out to write an account of his life, which is the first example of the literary genre of autobiography in the Bantu Swahili language.
Dr. Heinrich Brode, who knew him in Zanzibar, transcribed the manuscript into Roman script and translated it into German.
It was subsequently translated into English and published in Britain in 1907.
Tippu Tip died June 13, 1905, of malaria (according to Brode) in his home in Stone Town, the main town on the island of Zanzibar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tippu_Tip