The slave trade has been a major theme of historical writing on Africa for many years, but it is only recently that scholars have begun to look seriously at slavery within African societies themselves. With the recent publication of three books the trickle of studies on this subject has now become a flood. The first of these, L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, edited by Claude Meillassoux, contains seventeen studies of slavery, mostly from francophone West Africa. Slavery in Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, includes sixteen studies, eleven of which focus on west Africa. Frederick Cooper's book, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, presents a regionally comparative study of east African plantations. Each of these volumes opens with a general introduction to the subject of African slavery, and these will form the primary focus of this essay.

A salient impression that emerges from reading the three books is that African slave systems showed enormous diversity; plantation slaves in Zanzibar had little in common with the elite military tyeddo in Senegambia, or for that matter with Sena slaves in Mozambique, who were integrated into the acquiring lineages. Often, a single society would embrace several co-existing slave systems, and the picture is further complicated by the fact that slave systems changed over time. Miers and Kopytoff underline this diversity by suggesting no fewer than seventeen different (though sometimes overlapping) terms to describe different types of slavery (p. 77).