Transformations in Slavery (African Studies) by Lovejoy

Author:Lovejoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139126113
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-23T21:00:00+00:00

These slaves had their own huts, where the older women prepared food for the field hands. Behind these huts were small gardens that belonged to the slaves and from which they were expected to feed themselves. The slaves were allowed two days per week to work in their own gardens. The only major distinction between Ibrahim’s plantation and many others in Futa Jallon was that he was a private merchant, not associated with the Fulbe aristocracy who owned the vast majority of slaves in the country.

Demographic data collected in Futa Jallon after slavery had been abolished and many slaves had fled provide a sufficiently large sample of plantations to give some idea of the size and number of slave holdings. Of the 34,600 people in the province of Labe in the 1940s, there were 11,300 people who still lived in villages that had once been plantations.13 In the language of the colonial period, these inhabitants were no longer called slaves, but “serfs.” These 11,300 “serfs” were settled on 121 “roundes,” or plantations, an average of 93 people per plantation. In the past, the percentage of slaves in the total population had been much higher, perhaps reaching two-thirds. Furthermore, the size of individual plantations had certainly been greater. When these data are put together with earlier accounts, they confirm the existence of a highly developed plantation economy. The plantation slaves, moreover, were not assimilated in the full sense of that term. Otherwise, they would not have been recognizable in distinct communities as late as the 1940s.

The Maraka and Juula towns of the middle Niger valley were also centers of plantation agriculture, with slave populations sometimes as high as 70 to 80 percent of the total population in the immediate vicinity of the towns. Their prosperity depended on the ecologically based trade that stretched from the Sahara Desert to the forests. Salt, livestock, and imports from North Africa came from the north, while kola nuts, gold, and European imports came from the south. Grain and textiles, produced locally by slaves, entered this regional commercial network. Another route westward to the Senegal and Gambia valleys was an alternative avenue to the coast and became particularly important in the nineteenth century as a result of, firstly, the jihad of al-Hajj ‘Umar and secondly, the military expansion of the French. These towns served as staging points for caravans to the south and west, and they were the wholesale centers for imports from the north.14

In the first half of the nineteenth century, before al-Hajj ‘Umar conquered Segu Bambara and transformed this pagan state into the reformed Muslim state of Segu Tukulor, Sinsani was the most important of several Maraka and Juula towns. The integration of its plantation sector and regional trade was typical of the commercial life of the region as a whole. Slave-produced grain was sold to visiting merchants from the sahel, who brought salt from Ijil, while cotton fed the local textile industry. Sinsani was destroyed in 1861, and its trade shifted to the new center at Banamba.

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