Resistance to Slavery in Africa Past and Present

Introduction: Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present

Marie Rodet, Lotte Pelckmans, Wayne Dooling and Esteban Salas

Spatial Mobilities

1. Trade, Enslaved Workers and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Mozambique

Eugénia Rodrigues

2. Fleeing from the Caravan Trade: Porters’ Resistance in Central Angola During the Transition to Legitimate Commerce in the Mid- Nineteenth Century

Ivan Sicca Gonçalves

3. Every Step of the Way: Collective and Individual Resistance to Slavery in Sudan, ca. 1820–1850

George Michael La Rue

4. Kijiji cha Watoro: Resistance, Identity, and Social Life of Nyamwezi Runaway Slaves along the Central Caravan Route in Tanzania

Salvatory S. Nyanto and Felicitas M. Becker

Legal Strategies in the Context of Abolition

5. Recaptured Africans at the Cape Colony: Resistance and Freedom, 1823–1827

Benjamin Crous

6. Resistance to Enslavement? Ransoming Discourses and Practices in the Sokoto Caliphate and Umarian States

Jennifer Lofkrantz

7. Straddling the Worlds of Slavery and Abolition in the Hijaz from the 1850s-1910s

Özgül Özdemir

8. The Abolition of the Legal Status of Slavery on the Coast of Kenya: The Cases of Sadiki and Kiroboto

Feisal Farah

Post-Abolition Resistance to Continuous Enslavement

9. Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers, Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 1857–1903

Becca Aponte, Mamadou Yéro Baldé, Christina Cheng, Joshua Goodwin, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Richard Roberts, Aliou Sène, Mamoudou Sy and Wallace Teska

10. Arbitrating Abolition: Women’s Resistance and the Worodugu Slave Exodus of 1907

Wallace Teska

11. ‘Mum Told Me All About Her Ancestors’: Milonga, Ancestry, and Women’s Legal Resistance to Slavery, Belgian Congo, 1908–1960

Robson Pedrosa Costa

12. Transnational Digital Resistance? Collective On- and Offline Anti-Slavery Mobilisations by the Soninke Movement Ganbanaaxun Fedde in Mali, Mauritania and the Diaspora, 2016–2024

Lotte Pelckmans

Biography

Marie Rodet is Reader in the History of Africa at SOAS. Her research focuses on modern African history, gender history, slavery and emancipation, public history, gamification and digital humanities. Her publications include Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900-1946 (2009), Essai d’histoire locale by Djiguiba Camara (with Elara Bertho, 2020). She has also developed public-facing digital projects such as the documentary film The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes – Mali (2014), the web documentary Bouillagui: A Free Village (with Cosmo Maximin, 2020), the animation film Tous Égaux!/All Equal! (2023) and the digital mobile game USAWA (2023).

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist based at University of Copenhagen, working on the intersection between (post-)slavery and migration in (francophone) West Africa and its diasporas. Her projects and documentary films have explored anti-slavery activism and fugitive displacements in contemporary post-slavery contexts where Africa's internal slave past reverberates. More generally she analyses the haunting of narratives of slavery in contemporary moral regimes of (legal) representation, citizenship, and resistance.

Wayne Dooling is a Senior Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His publications include Law and Community in a Slave Society (1992) and Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (2007). 

Esteban Salas is a Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His research centers on West Central African precolonial and colonial societies and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. His publications include contributions on the volumes African Women in the Atlantic World, Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660-1880; Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History; and the journals African Economic History and Slavery & Abolition.