The US story of slavery seems to colonise all the other slavery stories. But slavery in Africa existed both before and after it did in the US. It is impossible to say when exactly slavery began in Africa, or for that matter, in any of the ancient societies where men often controlled the bodies and labour of other men – from ancient Babylon to the Tang Dynasty in China to the Roman and Aztec Empires. The French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux wrote in The Anthropology of Slavery (1991) that African slavery cannot be understood in isolation: ‘Slavery is a period in universal history which has affected all continents, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes successively.’ Most societies found ways to make use of their subjugated neighbours and were, eventually, subjugated in turn.

In West Africa, the sale of slaves across the Sahara was well-established by as early as the ninth century. Along the Senegal River, in the Kingdom of Tekrur, the early penetration of Islam and trade with the Maghreb guaranteed a steady commerce in gold and slaves from the south, according to the 12th-century Moroccan geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, a commerce that continued for centuries.

In the 1400s, the Portuguese learned to master the tempestuous currents of the Atlantic Ocean and piloted their caravels south, looking to cut the North African middlemen out of the trade in gold, ivory and spices. They found an additional lucrative trade, too – the transport of slaves – first to Europe and then across the Atlantic to the New World. Other Europeans would soon follow their lead in a commercial shift that would change the world.

According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at Emory University in Georgia, more than 12 million Africans were spirited away to the New World between 1501 and 1866. But not all slaves were destined for export across the Atlantic or the Sahara. Many stayed in Africa. Some were sold and resold. Others were sold once and integrated into new societies and cultures.

The French abolished slavery in their colonies in 1848, yet for many years that edict did not apply to most of what would become West Africa, but only to a few specific places that had long been held by the French. An additional decree abolishing slavery that would apply to all of French West Africa was passed in 1905. But enforcement was uneven at best, as we can see from the story of Ndianka Youssoupha. Some people did not claim their freedom, a freedom that already belonged to them, until decades after the abolition.

At the turn of the 1900s, slaves made up a third of the population of the Sine-Saloum, according to estimates by Klein. He noted that after abolition in 1905, many slaves left, moving to other regions, joining the French military or trying to return to their native lands, some as far away as modern-day Mali, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone. Going home was the riskiest endeavour. ‘The exodus involved a long walk home. Slaves often owned nothing but what they could carry with them and in most cases that was very little,’ wrote Klein in his seminal work Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (1998). And even if they were brave enough to do that, there were still a lot of unknowns. ‘They had no idea what they would find when they got home.’ Many communities had simply ceased to exist.

But many more former slaves remained in the places where they had been enslaved. ‘Some people stayed and those are the people who are still submissive,’ said Marie Rodet, a lecturer in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who has been studying slave migration in Mali and Senegal. ‘If you stayed, you accepted your lot.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that former slaves were still expected to work for free, but their relationships with former masters were still of social, if not economic, dependence.

a cow herder traded one of his prized cows for a young boy in that village. The boy took on the cow’s name

‘This history is very micro,’ said Rodet of this tumultuous period after the 1905 abolition. ‘Each slave family had their own history and own renegotiations, and there were many patterns of emancipation.’ If you left your village and went to another village or a city, you could remake your identity, to some extent. You wouldn’t have the day-to-day preoccupations with roles and hierarchy. Rodet said many families did not transmit their history to their children, preferring instead to forget.

But even if they forgot, many of the people around them did not.

Omar Ba is a folk historian from Sine-Saloum, but he cannot say when many of his stories, maybe even most of them, happened. Was it 50 years ago? A hundred years? Five hundred? His history of slavery is full of tales that have been passed down from his elders. He told me of a village that held slave markets, even after the French controlled the region, which might place the story in the second half of the 19th century. Omar Ba said that during this period, slave markets were illegal so villagers kept their trees overgrown to hide their business. Omar Ba, who is almost 60 years old, said that his grandfather had a neighbour, a cow herder, who traded one of his prized cows for a young boy in that village. The boy took on the cow’s name.

But the story that stays with me is the one Omar Ba swears he saw with his own eyes. There was a man of slave descent, who left the village where his former masters lived and started another. In his new village, he became prosperous and wealthy; he had several wives and lots of children. When one of the man’s sons wanted to marry the daughter of a noble, her family would not accept him because, despite his wealth, he was of slave origin. The man decided he would go to his former master to buy his freedom. Slavery no longer existed, so he was free by any measure, but, to break the link, he would pay the former master for his freedom.

The man put on his best boubou robe and rode out on a beautiful horse. He assembled the whole family of the former master and said: ‘Your grandfather bought my grandfather and, today, I want to reimburse you.’ He said he was ready to give them seven cows for his freedom. The family went to see a village elder for advice. The elder said they could take his payment, with one proviso. The former slave would ‘always be a slave, because that is the way it is’.

In February 2015, Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade caused a major stir when, during a press conference, he called his successor Macky Sall a descendant of slaves. He also said that Sall came from a family of cannibals, but it was the ‘descendant of slaves’ comment that drew the most ire in the press. It was an allegation that Sall had responded to before, during the lead up to the 2012 presidential elections. It was such an insult that Sall’s team had a griot (a traditional West African storyteller) articulate Sall’s lineage to prove that he came from an honorable, non-slave family from the warrior category of Halpulaar society.

Politics will be politics, of course, and the slave accusation could be the Senegalese equivalent of those who won’t believe that President Barack Obama was born in the US. But the fact that they gain traction reflects something deeper. After all, isn’t the tacit implication that people of slave descent should not hold power? What would happen if a politician said: ‘Yes, my ancestors were slaves. So what?’

The search for a past is a key preoccupation for many with slave origins, both in the US and in Africa. As one man told me, a slave here might have been a noble somewhere else.

‘When you don’t have a history, you are cut off from a part of yourself,’ said Amadou Moussa Ba, a middle-aged government bureaucrat who also happens to come from a family with slave origins. He said in his culture, the Halpulaar, there are griots that sing the praises of noble families. ‘But no one sings about us. It’s like we came from nothing.’

So he searched for his history. He went to faraway villages looking for the rupture in his family’s timeline, the moment where history skipped a beat. He said he found the traces of two brothers from a village in Mali who were captured and sold to Senegal. He keeps his genealogy written out longhand in a notebook – names, clans, families.

‘I have written my history. I did it all to restore my family’s dignity,’ said Ba.

Ba belongs to a federation made up of several associations that organise people of slave origin in the Halpulaar communities across Northern Senegal. Often, they call their associations Endam Bilaali, which means the ‘descendants of Bilal’. Bilal Ibn Rabah was a companion of the prophet Muhammad and was born a slave. When he first embraced Islam, Bilal’s master persecuted him in increasingly ostentatious ways in order to break his faith, but Bilal remained faithful. When Muhammad heard of Bilal’s suffering, he sent his father-in-law Abu Bakr to buy Bilal and, then, to free him from slavery. Bilal later became the first muezzin.

‘People say that we should just be nothing, just slaves and that we should just stay in the service of others’

Endam Bilaali are doing rhetorical genealogy, and repositioning themselves inside the culture. ‘By creating a line of descent with Bilal, they are creating a kind of legitimacy,’ said Mamoudou Sy, a history lecturer at Cheikh Anta Diop University. Sy said he started by focusing on the history of kings and nobles from the Halpulaar community in Northern Senegal until he realised that they were slaveholders. He couldn’t tell the whole history if he didn’t tell that part, too.

Endam Bilaali advocates for access to land, education and jobs, but also for more political power. It is a shift that many have referred to as a ‘revolution’.

‘People say that we should just be nothing, just slaves and that we should just stay in the service of others – to stay behind and run,’ said Racky Baba Ndiaye, president of the women’s chapter of the Peeral Fadjiri federation that regroups all the Endam Bilaali associations. ‘But we have said no.’

In some of the region’s villages, where the descendants of slaves are more numerous, they have leveraged their demographic weight to take key political offices. That’s true in Ndiaye’s village of Mboumba, for example, where she said the mayor is of slave origin. She should know; she is related to him. But other people in the village have been reluctant to work with him. ‘There are even some people that were ready to leave the village because he is the mayor,’ said Ndiaye.

In Diomandou, a fishing village that backs up to the Senegal River, I found another model for revolution. On a cool winter afternoon, I met members of the village Endam Bilaali association underneath a neem tree. The particularity of this village and their association becomes clear as soon as they start introducing themselves; there are descendants of slaves and descendants of nobles co‑operating in the same group. ‘We are all united,’ said Hamady Wade, the village chief, a noble and a member of the association. Another slave descendant, Thierno Demba Sakho, is vice imam of the village. ‘People often say people like me should not be an imam,’ he said. ‘But I was named despite my social status.’ It is only through this kind of co‑operation, said Sakho, that they can confront the real problems in their community: drought that comes too often, a river with dwindling fish, and too few jobs to keep the younger generation from leaving.

I found the stories of the Endam Bilaali groups seductive. Of course, our histories and trajectories are not the same. But it seemed, somehow, familiar – a hand held across the aisle of time from one descendant of slaves to another. Here were people saying you could call them descendants of slaves, but they still deserved their rights as citizens and a piece of the pie. Here were people looking for and sometimes finding their pasts. Here were people rising up, not in spite of their history, but because of it.

Still, I asked Sakho why some people remained reticent to claim their heritage as descendants of slaves, and even saw it as an insult. ‘Maybe they do not understand their history,’ he said. ‘If they had understood it, they would not consider it an insult. They would be proud to be descendants of slaves.’ They would be proud to be like Bilal, to have struggled and had challenges and come through the other side.

18 May 2015

http://aeon.co/magazine