Linking Human Rights and Antislavery

Among the defining historical moments that have shaped the course of human rights, antislavery had the most significant direct impact and affected the greatest number of people. Nineteenth-century abolitionism broadened the scope of individual rights and provided new international legal frameworks for their protection. Several histories of human rights present the antislavery movement as a story of human rights struggle led by transnational activists who took on the powerful interests of state, church and big commerce. With organization, enthusiasm and imaginative campaigning that foreshadowed the work of present-day human rights activists, abolitionists mobilized public opinion in opposition to slavery and forced governments to uphold the rights and humanity of enslaved people. This wave of global antislavery activism marked a defining moment in the development of the modern human rights idea. It was, as one writer argues, “the first time in history that a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years over someone else’s rights.”Footnote ⁴ Like the modern human rights movement, the antislavery campaigns of the nineteenth century were broad-based social movements founded on public support. Abolitionist leaders set up transnational coalitions and organized public campaigns appealing to the empathy in their audiences in ways that mirror modern human rights NGO advocacy techniques.Footnote ⁵

Nonetheless, the historical links between antislavery and human rights remain contested. Essentialist human rights scholars reject any connection between antislavery and modern human rights, and insist that antislavery campaigns were not framed as rights issues. While they acknowledge the possible merit of viewing the transnational cooperation of antislavery movements as a bridge toward later human rights activism, they reject claims of continuity between notions of rights and human dignity expressed within antislavery and modern human rights. Rights claims, they argue, figured only marginally in antislavery. This makes nineteenth-century antislavery and twentieth-century human rights two distinct stories of empowerment struggle. For this reason, essentialist human rights scholars argue that nineteenth-century abolitionism is not the proper place to understand rights.Footnote ⁶ A related argument against reading antislavery into the human rights story is the view that antislavery did not extend to what historian Samuel Moyn describes as the “scaled space of global politics” that the human rights movement assumed in the mid- to late twentieth century.Footnote ⁷ In other words, nineteenth-century antislavery lacked the distinctly universalist legal and political character of twentieth-century human rights.

Other scholars have made similar distinctions between human rights and the humanitarian impulse of antislavery. While human rights rely on a discourse of rights, humanitarianism is predicated on a discourse of needs. Human rights are thus based on a legal code, while humanitarianism is based on a moral code.Footnote ⁸ Those who subscribe to these hard distinctions locate the emergence of abolitionism in the eighteenth century as the origins of the history of humanitarianism, but not necessarily of human rights.Footnote ⁹ Antislavery, they insist, was not a human rights movement and abolitionists were humanitarians, rather than rights activists. Indeed, abolitionists who passionately fought against the transatlantic slave trade and demanded military intervention against this violation of common sense humanity did, at the same time, endorse the paternalistic colonial rationality of a mission to civilize Africans without granting them equal rights. Campaigns for a “common humanity” within antislavery movements did not necessarily extend to the granting of equality or the full spectrum of civil and political rights associated with the rights of man.Footnote ¹⁰

At their core, these arguments for delinking antislavery from human rights hinge on the notion that the conceptual architecture of human rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth century differs fundamentally from the one in the late twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹ It is one with which I disagree. True, antislavery was not primarily predicated on a discourse of rights. However, the claim that rights discourses featured only marginally within antislavery remains open to debate. The declared objective of the British and Foreign Antislavery Society, a key organization in the antislavery movement, was the universal abolition of slavery and commitment to “watching over the rights of all persons captured as slaves.”Footnote ¹² Abolitionists were pioneers in developing the modern concept of human rights. From 1835 to 1839 the American Anti-Slavery Society published a monthly journal entitled Human Rights. This marked the first time that the term “human rights” was used extensively in public discourse. “Slavery,” the journal announced in its inaugural issue, is “the greatest possible violation of human rights.”Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the complex interconnections between the long history of transnational humanitarianism within antislavery and twentieth-century human rights defy rigid dichotomies. For instance, nineteenth-century antislavery treaties influenced the Antislavery Convention enacted under the League of Nations, which in turn shaped the prohibition of slavery within the framework of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In addition, the strategies of petitioning and economic boycotts used by nineteenth-century antislavery campaigners have influenced the activist work of contemporary neo-abolitionists and human rights activists.

To be sure, nineteenth-century antislavery differs from twentieth-century human rights in certain important respects. For one, antislavery campaigns were predominately framed in terms of religious and moral imperatives that did not necessarily challenge ascribed status or entrenched social hierarchies and inequities. There are also the more obvious distinctions of scope and scale. Antislavery centered on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and the emancipation of the enslaved. Modern human rights encompasses a broader agenda of political, economic and social inclusion. However, if we think about the history of human rights as a story of the tensions between rights inclusion and exclusion, it is easier to see the normative link between antislavery and human rights. The human rights story then consists not only of accounts of struggles to expand rights and enhance inclusion, but also of accounts of counter-movements to restrict rights and maintain exclusion.

With specific regard to African history, it is unfeasible to completely separate antislavery from the human rights story given the intersections between antislavery, colonialism and anti-colonialism. The discussion in this chapter proceeds from the premise that it is both possible and necessary to map normative and historical connections between antislavery and human rights. It is also useful to explore the similarities and contrasts between the philosophical impulses of nineteenth-century antislavery campaigns and those that have animated twentieth-century human rights movements. The notion of a shared humanity provided broad moral foundation for the antislavery campaigns and the later human rights movement. Both movements represented grassroots efforts at broadening social inclusivity and expanding the boundaries of rights. They further aimed to change the past by reasserting inherent human dignity and to create new liberal futures. Just as modern day human rights activists declare “war” on state atrocities and impunity, coalitions of antislavery organizations created a humanitarian emergency and declared “war on slavery.”Footnote ¹⁴

Beyond their normative parallels, historical antislavery resonates in contemporary campaigns against “modern day slavery” and human trafficking. Present day human rights campaigners frame as slavery the trafficking of vulnerable people through violence, coercion and deceit. They make explicit connections between “historical” and “modern” slavery. One organization at the forefront of the modern “antislavery” campaign claims that “slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century” and that the practice continues in one form or another in every country in the world.Footnote ¹⁵ By studying slavery in its historical forms, we can better understand and address such claims about its twenty-first-century manifestations. In addition, examining the normative impulses of antislavery can help us better understand the moral and ideological foundations of human rights.

Abolitionism and Emancipation

In making the connection between antislavery and human rights, it is also necessary to make the distinction between abolition – the immediate process of ending slavery – and emancipation – the longer process by which those enslaved become formally free. While the act of abolition was largely state-sponsored, often through legislative enactments arising from activist campaigns and public pressure, the process of emancipation involved a combination of social, political, economic and cultural forces. Africans in the continent and abroad were involved in both processes.

Attempts to locate antislavery within a broader human rights story have centered on mapping a genealogy that links nineteenth-century international antislavery legislation with contemporary international human rights law. Spurred by religious beliefs and Enlightenment conceptions of natural rights, abolitionists in Europe pushed their governments to make the suppression of the slave trade a focus of diplomacy and treaty making. The result, in the early nineteenth century, was the emergence of a novel network of international treaties prohibiting the slave trade and mandating slave emancipation. These treaties resulted in the establishment of the world’s first international “human rights” courts – the Admiralty Tribunals and the Courts of Mixed Commission – empowered to confiscate ships engaged in the illegal slave trade and liberate Africans found onboard.

Legal scholar Jenny Martinez portrays the Mixed Commission Courts as “the first international human rights courts.”Footnote ¹⁶ She traces the origins of international human rights law back to nineteenth-century antislavery campaigns, arguing that the slave trade provided the first instance in which international law protected non-citizens abroad. The conceptualization of the slave trade as a crime against humanity and of slave traders as hostis humani generis (enemies of humankind) helped lay the foundation for twentieth-century international human rights law. Legal action against the slave trade introduced into modern international legal discourse the idea that violations of human rights were offenses of concern to humankind generally, not just between people and their sovereign. This, Martinez argues, is the key conceptual step that separates the contemporary world of international human rights law from the idea of natural rights that arose during the Enlightenment and took national legal form in documents such as the US Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.Footnote ¹⁷

Other scholars have gone beyond law to make broader normative connections between antislavery and human rights. The role of antislavery in shaping transnational debates on ethics and morality in the nineteenth century was far-reaching. With the emergence of the antislavery campaign, something new and permanent developed that represented a significant break with the old political morality. Antislavery did not guarantee freedom for everyone, and sometimes even created new orthodoxies that took on elements of older oppressive structures. However, the success of antislavery as “anti-structure” is that it provided new opportunities to former slaves and captives, or those most at risk, to escape from old structural constraints. It was the ethics of a second chance for such former slaves and the simultaneous emphasis on individual responsibility and a common humanity that gave antislavery its anti-structural force and transformative power.Footnote ¹⁸ This radically anti-structural impulse is what the antislavery movement shares with human rights.

Secular humanitarians and evangelicals at the forefront of the transnational antislavery movement promoted universal humanism in both thought and activism. Within this humanist framework, antislavery became a universal movement of rights, representing a new social radicalism that challenged the structure of profit, domination and advantage that sustained slavery. Abolitionists in Europe and across the Atlantic employed a language of ethics and rights to articulate their opposition to slavery, which is most evident in missionary literature. For example, in its journal, The Anti-Slavery Examiner, the American Antislavery Society challenged slavery, not only in terms of Christian ethics but also as an affront to human rights and dignity.Footnote ¹⁹ An 1839 issue of the journal titled “The Bible against Slavery: An Inquiry into the Patriarchal and Mosaic Systems on the Subjugation of Human Rights,” has been described as one of the strongest contemporary intellectual statements that we possess on the human rights character of antislavery.Footnote ²⁰

Although the antislavery campaigns were not always explicitly framed in terms of rights, notions of human dignity, common humanity and individual liberties featured prominently in antislavery discourse. Abolitionists articulated antislavery through the language of Christian morality and the inherent rights and dignity of the enslaved. In his autobiographical narrative published in furtherance of the cause of antislavery, Olaudah Equiano recalled the brutality of slaveholders responsible for his capture and enslavement, characterizing them as “sable destroyers of human rights.”Footnote ²¹ Writing in 1850, Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the architects of the American abolitionist movement, criticized the hypocrisy of so-called benevolent slaveholders by drawing a distinction between the moral and rights-based rationales of antislavery. “Slaveholders talk of treating men well,” he wrote, “and yet not only rob them of all they get, and as fast as they get it, but rob them of themselves also … their bodies and minds, their time and liberty and earnings, their free speech and rights of conscience, their right to acquire knowledge, and property, and reputation – and yet they, who plunder them of all these, would fain, make us believe that their soft hearts ooze out so lovingly toward their slaves.”Footnote ²²

We cannot fully comprehend the transformative influence of antislavery without considering the established forces and structural orthodoxies that resisted the accomplishment of its aim. The story of antislavery, considered as part of the longue durée history of human rights, was certainly not a steady process of progressive rights expansion. Rather, it was a complex and uneven course of rights inclusion and exclusion, defined by tentative shifts toward extending freedom to those enslaved, amid counter-movements committed to maintaining a repressive status quo. Abolitionists had to respond constantly to forthright defenders of slavery who upheld the institution on the grounds of economic efficiency, social convention, custom and race. Opposition to abolition came from slaveholders and from political and mercantile elites concerned about economic losses and disruptions to the existing social and political order. Contradictions between the interests of individuals, families, social orders and communities also played a part in prolonging the trade even as people fought against it.Footnote ²³ Yet, by the early twentieth century, slavery had been formally abolished in most parts of the African continent and the struggle for emancipation was well under way. The process of abolition and the struggles for emancipation would be complex, prolonged and contested. My account centers on the discourse of rights and liberty within antislavery from four related perspectives: slave resistance, the ethics of enslavement, legal abolitionism and emancipation struggles.

Slave Resistance

All slave systems dehumanize enslaved victims and deny them of the rights and liberties enjoyed by other members of society. From Greco-Roman slavery to indigenous forms of slavery in Africa, all slave systems are sustained by alienation and exclusion. However, the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas was exceptional in terms of the extent of brutalization and dehumanization to which captives were subjected.Footnote ²⁴ The torturous conditions that African captives endured during their journey through the middle passage and upon arrival in the New World provided the impetus for antislavery. Apart from the psychological trauma inflicted during the process of capture and sale, many captives died because of the conditions in overcrowded slave ships through diseases, physical injuries and suicides. In the famous Zong slave massacre of 1781, British slave traders threw 133 enslaved Africans overboard from a stranded ship for the purpose of claiming insurance money against their loss. Upon arrival in the Americas, enslaved Africans were subject to a life of servitude and “social death.” The uniquely racialized character of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas imposed strict barriers on social integration, making race an inflexible marker of status, exclusion and inequality. In short, every stage of the slave trade process was characterized by what today would be termed gross and systematic violations of human rights.Footnote ²⁵

Scholars have explained the end of slavery in Africa in terms of three main social and economic transformations. First was the structural changes in the political economy that affected slave capture and holding. The second was the abolitionist policies of colonial governments. The third was the changes in regional and international commodity markets as well as changes in local economic and demographic conditions that affected the demand for labor and opened new options to free slaves.Footnote ²⁶ Alongside the political and economic impetus for abolition, we must add the humanist and egalitarian impulse within indigenous ethics, Christian morality and modernist liberalism that sustained the work of African and transnational abolitionists. Abolitionism legitimized its existence on a form of faith-based humanitarianism and evangelical social activism. It also drew on the radical philosophies of the eighteenth-century “age of reason” and Enlightenment, the natural rights of man and the inherent values of liberty in society. Other related themes converged in the antislavery movement, such as the belief in the power of law to change the character of man, slave agitation and self-understanding, the undoing of customs and other established social structures and the moral transformation of African society. Where does the discourse of rights and liberties fit in with these themes?

The historiography on antislavery has until recently concentrated on European and New World abolitionism, highlighting the role of middle-class men and women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America who, driven by religious and moral considerations, challenged their governments to abolish the slave trade and emancipate slaves worldwide.Footnote ²⁷ Recent studies have offered more balanced accounts of antislavery by exploring the various strategies devised by African populations against the slave trade.Footnote ²⁸ We now recognize that the story of antislavery must begin with the struggles of those enslaved. It is only natural that those who experienced firsthand the brutality and indignities of slavery would be most invested in ending it. Long before European humanitarians and abolitionists took up the cause of antislavery, enslaved Africans, acting individually and collectively, opposed and resisted their enslavement. Resistance to capture and deportation was an integral part of indigenous antislavery. Resistance mechanisms took the form of slave flight and rebellion, to attacks on slave ships and sabotage of slave-holding forts. Such resistance to enslavement and exploitation in Africa and the Americas challenged the institutional foundation of slavery and was crucial to the system’s demise.

Although surviving records are sparse and filtered, we know that Africans organized and participated in militias and secret societies to protect and defend their communities from slave raiders. Contemporary observers noted the instinctive and reflexive resistance of African captives to their sudden loss of freedom. One account tells of a 1798 revolt led by a captive African chief on board a slave ship bound for the Americas. Upon suppressing the captives’ revolt, the ship’s captain inquired about the ringleader. According to contemporary records, “the Chief came out boldly and avowed that he was the man; that he wished to give liberty to all slaves on board; that he regretted his defeat on their account – but that he was [satisfied] with the prospects of immediately obtaining what he termed his own liberty.” He was hanged soon afterward.Footnote ²⁹

Resistance was not limited to the middle passage. In the Upper Guinea Coast, enslaved Africans defended their freedom by outright rejection and opposition to servitude. From the mid- to late eighteenth century, many revolts broke out in this region as enslaved Africans fought against African and European slave traders and holders. In 1756, the enslaved population of Futa Jallon rose against the slave-owning class, declared themselves free, and migrated northward where they founded new communities. Two other well-studied rebellions in the region – the Mandingo Rebellion in the eighteenth century and the Bilali Rebellion in the nineteenth century – attest to the tenacity of the enslaved in resisting slavery and in struggling for their freedom.Footnote ³⁰

It is difficult to ascertain precisely the ideas and forms of social consciousness that motivated slave resistance, especially since most of the historical evidence is refracted through the lens of European travelers, abolitionists and colonial administrators with their own agendas. We cannot be sure about the extent to which these acts of resistance were driven by a natural instinct toward self-preservation or deeper philosophical rejection of slavery and the slave trade. However, the testimonies of lettered African and European interlocutors give us some insights into the African antislavery consciousness. From these limited records, we can infer that Africans who opposed and resisted slavery were driven by multiple motivations and considerations. These records point to the opposition to enslavement by Africans that manifested in rebellious actions, the existence of free communities and, in some cases, the appropriations and creative (re)interpretations of hegemonic ideas.Footnote ³¹

Africans who resisted slavery in the continent and the New World justified resistance by making political and social claims to dignity, freedom and rights, which other people recognized. These rights-based claims provided nodes for cooperation and alliance. The rise of transnational abolitionism gave African captives new opportunities to articulate longstanding struggles for freedom and social inclusion. Rights rhetoric underpinned the legitimacy of slaves’ resistance, whether in the forms of collective military action, individual flight or sabotage. The rebellions and the free communities created by those who resisted slavery became focal points for combating servile oppression and for nurturing the normative and legal impulses of antislavery.

The Ethics of Enslavement

Even before the age of abolition, Africans leaders and elites were involved in debates about ethical limits on enslavement and the slave trade. As John Thornton has argued, the fact that African leaders participated in the slave trade does not mean that they did so without recognizing the ethical problems that the trade presented. This is evident in the written records of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century African rulers such as King Afonso I and Garcia II of Kongo and Queen Njinga Mbande of Matamba. These records show that these monarchs led societies that accepted the legal possibility that an individual could have a bundle of rights over another person that surpassed those of any other in the community or the sovereign. This provided the social and legal framework for indigenous slavery but also set the boundaries of enslavement. Recognizing that slavery was legally permissible did not mean that the slave trade did not pose ethical problems for these African leaders.Footnote ³² These African leaders expressed strongly that there were legal limits to who could be enslaved, when and under which conditions. In some cases, they felt that European slave traders violated these ethical and legal limits of enslavement.

As the Atlantic slave trade decimated his kingdom in the sixteenth century, the growth of the trade became a matter of personal concern for King Afonso. In 1526, he appointed a commission of three chiefs to ascertain whether the slaves bought were really captives of war or his own subjects, and appealed to the Portuguese king to impose some restraint on Portuguese subjects involved in the trade.Footnote ³³ Writing to King João III to stop the slave trade, he stated, “Each day the traders are kidnapping our people – children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family.” He added that the “corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated … It is our wish that this kingdom is not to be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.”Footnote ³⁴ He proposed to King João that he send no more merchants or merchandise to Kongo, but only priests to support the Church, emphasizing, “Our will is that there be no trade in slaves in our kingdoms.”Footnote ³⁵

Writing to the Rector of the Jesuit Order in 1643, Afonso’s successor, King Garcia II made similar denunciations of the slave trade. He stated that “there can never be peace with this Kingdom [Angola] … because in place of gold, silver and other things which serve as money in other places, the trade and money are pieces [slaves], which are not gold nor cloth, but creatures.”Footnote ³⁶ He demanded in a proposed treaty with Portugal the appointment of impartial judges to examine those captured for export to determine if they were “free or stolen or are truly slaves.” Queen Njinga’s correspondence with the king of Portugal in the seventeenth century also suggests that although slavery and slave capturing were licit under her country’s laws, there were definite legal limits and rules about who could and could not be enslaved. She asked that the Portuguese return her subjects who had been captured and enslaved illegally. Queen Njinga may not have had a philosophical difficulty with holding slaves or selling them, but she clearly had a desire to regulate the market and set limits to the exploitation of these forms of labor.Footnote ³⁷

Recent studies on the ethics of slavery in the Yoruba societies of West Africa suggest that that they too developed ethical rules that limited opportunities for enslavement. A series of laws demarcated the “other” and defined the legal boundaries of the enslavable social outsiders or non-kin and protected kin or insiders. The enslavement of a social insider was considered illegal, a crime and an abomination that attracted stiff sanctions. Those who could be justifiably enslaved differed from their enslavers through cultural and physiological symbols such as tattoos, names, faith and ethno-political idiosyncrasies. Yoruba laws also regulated the treatment of captives by prescribing the rights and obligations of captors and their victims.Footnote ³⁸

Under the stress of overseas demands, indigenous African slavery changed from a system with social and legal boundaries to a more exploitative one aimed at foreign commerce. The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the transformation of indigenous slavery narrowed the scope of social and political protection against enslavement. In Kongo, for example, the protection from enslavement enjoyed by women and freeborn Kongos dissipated during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as internal strife led competing factions to enslave partisans or rivals. The distinctions between foreign-born slaves and freeborn Kongos quickly disappeared, making every Kongo a potential slave.Footnote ³⁹ This breakdown in the ethics of slaving reduced the scope of protection from enslavement hitherto enjoyed by large sections of Kongo’s population. If we interpret the longue durée history of human rights in Africa in terms of rights expansion and contraction at different historical moments, rather than a saga of unrelenting progress, the rise of the Atlantic slave trade clearly marked an era of rights contraction in Kongo.

It would be misleading, however, to characterize the opposition of rulers such as King Afonso and Queen Njinga as antislavery in the abolitionist sense of the word. Rather, their positions on the ethics of enslavement fit better into a tradition of legal, moral and conscientious objections that we can find throughout the history of slavery. Such objections were sometimes premised on the fair and humane treatment of slaves, or on opposition to the enslavement of the “wrong” types of people.Footnote ⁴⁰ King Afonso and Queen Njinga’s objections were not against the institution of slavery itself, but against violations of the established proper order of enslavement. Specifically, they objected to the expansion of the slave trade to untarnished social insiders within their communities who were hitherto free from enslavement. In contemporary parlance, these social insiders enjoyed exclusive rights to the freedom from enslavement. However, to the extent that this “right” to freedom from enslavement did not extend to all members of the community, they were not human rights in the modern sense of the term. Nonetheless, the anxieties expressed by these African rulers suggest that the freedom from enslavement constituted a right in the limited sense of a legal and ethical principle of freedom owed to certain members of their communities. African anxieties concerning the legal limits of enslavement also point to indigenous systems of ethics that foregrounded abolitionism and later emancipation struggles.

Transnational Abolitionism

A more coherent discourse of rights by Africans within antislavery is evident in the works of lettered Africans in the diaspora, especially Afro-British abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. Drawing on their personal experiences of enslavement, these African abolitionists allied with British antislavery campaigners such as Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce to convey crucial information about slavery and the slave trade to public audiences. They built coalitions to raise political and public awareness about the indignities of slavery and the imperative of legal abolition. In the nineteenth century, much of this work was undertaken under the auspices of humanitarian organizations such as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BF-ASS), which merged with the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) in 1909 to form the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (AS-APS). The organization’s publications, the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, were effective instruments for promoting the antislavery cause. The Anti-Slavery Society framed its opposition to slavery in terms of a common humanity invoking empathy, public morality and Christian ethics. The central premise of its campaigns was the notion that slavery is morally abhorrent and that those enslaved were entitled to certain fundamental rights and liberties. The seal of the Anti-Slavery Society, which symbolized the humanistic framing of antislavery, was an image of a supplicant slave in chains along with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Antislavery groups deployed advocacy techniques such as petition campaigns, economic boycotts and lobbying political leaders for change. They also built networks around advocacy forums such as the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, which provided the legal and activist framework for abolitionism.

By recounting their experiences of capture and enslavement in their writings and public speeches, Cugoano and Equiano became symbols of the transnational abolitionist movement. Cugoano’s book, published in 1787, was the first published African critique of the transatlantic slave trade. In this and other works, he demanded the total abolition of the slave trade and the freeing of enslaved Africans. Invoking Enlightenment notions of natural rights, he argued that Africans had the moral right to resist slavery. He condemned the taking away of their “natural rights and liberties” and called for the restoration to black people of “the common rights of nature.”Footnote ⁴¹ The first-hand accounts of African abolitionists brought credibility and legitimacy to the antislavery movement at a time when some in Europe were wary of passive abolitionists who offered only rhetorical support for the antislavery cause. Within their black solidarity, Cugoano and Equiano drew a distinction between passive sympathizing and active abolitionism in which trust and alliance were of key importance.Footnote ⁴²

As antislavery ideals and activism took hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Africans in the continent became more directly involved in local and transnational antislavery campaigns with the establishment of local branches of antislavery organizations. The Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) was founded in the Cape Coast (Ghana) in 1897, and in 1911 the Lagos (Nigeria) Auxiliary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society was formed with the support of the parent body in Britain. The Cape Coast ARPS and Lagos AS-APS were composed mainly of Western-educated African elites who were active in the antislavery movement and sought to stamp out practices of slavery that persisted in the continent after formal abolition.

African Christian missionary converts also played important roles in the antislavery campaign. Like their counterparts in the diaspora, they engaged public sympathies by bringing firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery and their condemnations of the slave trade to African and global audiences. The Yoruba Anglican Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowder and the Egba clergyman Joseph Wright were former slaves who became prominent missionary educators and passionate advocates for emancipation in West Africa. Contemporary accounts of Crowder’s missionary activities in the 1860s describe him as a dogged fighter against the slave trade and a passionate advocate for the freedom of African slaves.Footnote ⁴³ Captured in 1821 and sold to Portuguese slave traders, Crowder and other enslaved Africans were rescued on the high seas by British naval squadron vessels and taken to Sierra Leone. He joined the British Church Missionary Society (CMS), rising through its ranks to become the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa in 1864. Spurred by his experience of the brutality of the slave trade, Crowder became a persistent advocate against slavery and the slave trade. He also condemned other forms of servitude such as debt-bondage and pawnship, urging local kings and chiefs to abandon these practices.Footnote ⁴⁴

Crowder anchored his condemnation of slavery and slavery-like practices on Christian morality and the idea of “God-given rights.” He wrote, for example, that women imprisoned and enslaved in harems deserved better treatment because “they are reasonable beings in whom God has planted certain rights and feelings in common with other people.” He criticized “selfish oppressors” who took these rights away from them and cruelly suppressed their God-given liberties.Footnote ⁴⁵ Crowther’s moral commitment to antislavery has been described as a demonstration of the fact that Africans were no exception to “the rule of righteousness” that opposed any compromise with slavery and its supporting structures.Footnote ⁴⁶

In the Gold Coast, African missionaries such as Reverend David Asante and Theophilus Opoku of the Basel mission were prime proponents of emancipation. Asante was particularly uncompromising in his condemnation of slavery and insisted on the reform of indigenous institutions and practices that he believed condoned and perpetuated servitude. This brought him and other missionaries into conflict with the influential Okyenhene (king) of Akyem Abuakwa, who forbade Christian proselytization in his domain. In their commitment to emancipation, Asante and his supporters defied the Okyenhene’s authority and continued their antislavery activities. When 200 royal slaves threw off the king’s authority and proclaimed their freedom in 1877 based on emancipation laws, the king blamed the undermining of his power on the work of Reverend Asante and his mission.Footnote ⁴⁷

The work of African antislavery campaigners such as Crowder and Asante underscores the links between legal abolition and emancipation. The mid-nineteenth-century abolition of slavery and the slave trade did not immediately translate into the emancipation of those enslaved. For many African captives, freedom remained elusive until the early twentieth century. Before antislavery manifested in law and official policies, it manifested as political discourse and in social struggles. After legal abolition, slave emancipation also took the form of activist social and political struggles. These activist struggles were critical to actualizing legal abolitionism.

Legal Abolitionism

The legal abolition of slavery represented a break with thousands of years of historical precedent. In the nineteenth century, slavery, long considered a morally acceptable and often highly profitable institution, was formally abolished across the globe.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet abolition also represented a broader historical continuity. The global movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade drew from a long tradition of moral and legal objections to slavery. We have seen, for example, the attempts by African rulers such as King Afonso of Kongo to place normative limits on enslavement. Such legal and conscientious objections to enslavement were evident elsewhere. In his famous judgment in the Somerset case in 1772, Lord Mansfield held that chattel slavery was unsupported by the common law in England even though the position elsewhere in the British Empire remained ambiguous. The Somerset case affirmed the premise that certain legal rights are available to all, even enslaved Africans. By setting free Somerset, the runaway slave, Lord Mansfield affirmed Somerset’s identity as a human being and not chattel to be owned and moved without his consent.

We can point to other important legal continuities between abolitionism and the emergence of international human rights in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the early nineteenth century, a network of bilateral and multilateral agreements and treaties laid the legal groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery and the suppression of the slave trade. At the Vienna Congress of 1814–1815, eight European powers signed a Declaration on the “Universal Abolition of the Slave Trade.” The Declaration proclaimed the slave trade to be “repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality” and pledged the signatories to work toward its abolition. This was the first of several major multinational treaties aimed at eliminating the slave trade. Others include the Treaty of London of 1841, which committed a number of European powers to the suppression of the slave trade. Later twentieth-century international agreements, such as the League of Nations Antislavery Convention of 1926, make explicit reference to these nineteenth-century antislavery treaties. The Antislavery Convention, which became the international legal foundation for the prevention and suppression of the slave trade, provided an enduring definition of slavery, servitude and forced labor. Later international human rights laws prohibiting slavery, such as the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, were founded on the 1926 Antislavery Convention. Thus, the nineteenth-century antislavery movement provided the ongoing momentum for establishing antislavery within modern international human rights law.

A key factor that facilitated legal abolition was the easing in the defense of state sovereignty in international law, particularly with regard to the law of the sea. The Westphalian concept of state sovereignty, and the rights associated with it, hitherto ensured that during peacetime no state had the right to intercept and search the ship of another state without an explicit agreement. This legal position posed a major hindrance to the eradication of the transatlantic slave trade. However, by the late nineteenth century, notions of state sovereignty in relation to maritime commerce had eased, allowing for extraterritorial jurisdiction in the enforcement of antislavery legislation.Footnote ⁴⁹ Here, we see one of the most direct links between nineteenth-century legal abolitionism and modern human rights. Legal abolition was premised on a new multilateral internationalism and the weakening notion of state sovereignty for the purpose of bringing liberty to those enslaved. Similarly, the need to limit state power over individual liberties and to assert the protective obligations of the international community was a driving consideration in the emergence of universal human rights in the mid-twentieth century.

The historical connection between legal abolitionism and modern human rights is also evident in the nature of the judicial institutions that emerged to enforce abolition and suppress the slave trade. Britain’s abolition of the West African slave trade in 1807 provided a legal mechanism for searching and seizing slave ships in territorial waters and on the high seas. It also provided the legal authority to prosecute apprehended slave dealers in the Vice-Admiralty Courts established to adjudicate cases involving slave ship seizures. Empowered by domestic and bilateral treaties, British naval authorities policed the high seas and disrupted slave routes by seizing vessels involved in slave trading, emancipating their cargo of captives and bringing the slave traders to the Mixed Commission Courts. By 1820, the Mixed Commission Courts established under various treaties operated in a number of locations, including Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Havana in Cuba, Surinam and Freetown in Sierra Leone. These courts were, in many respects, the precursors of present-day international human rights tribunals.

As European colonial influence in Africa grew in the mid- to late nineteenth century, legal abolition was proclaimed across Africa, initially in areas of British influence and later extended to areas of French and Portuguese influence. Anxieties about the loss of political authority and socioeconomic disruptions led some African kings and chiefs to resist European incursions and the extension of antislavery laws to their domains. In such cases, legal abolition was often forcefully imposed. Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 ostensibly to end slavery there and in 1873 pressured Zanzibar to ban the slave trade. Antislavery also provided the justification for French wars against Samory Touré and Amadou Bamba in West Africa in the 1880s.

In Liberia and Sierra Leone, colonies created as settlements for freed slaves established by British and American antislavery organizations, discourses on antislavery, political rights and liberties were all interlinked. Both settlements played crucial roles in the development of antislavery ideology in metropolitan and African contexts. The African repatriates who settled these colonies were inspired by ideas of civilizing Africa via the end of the slave trade, the spread of Christianity and the introduction of “legitimate commerce.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In Liberia, antislavery featured prominently in discussions of political and civil rights. The American antislavery movement, which provided the impetus for the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865 under the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, also influenced antislavery in Liberia after the country formally severed itself from the American Colonization Society. The Liberian Declaration of Independence of 1847 draws much of its rhetoric about individual rights and liberties from the US Declaration of Independence. It affirms that “all men” are entitled to “certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property.” The Declaration also specifically repudiates the slave trade in words that echo the Christian and humanist impulse of antislavery. It states: “The native African bowing down with us before the altar of the living God, declares that from us, feeble as we are, the light of Christianity has gone forth, while upon that curse of curses, the slave trade, a deadly blight has fallen, as far as our influence extends.”Footnote ⁵¹

Emancipation

Across Africa, legal abolitionism was a tentative process that unfolded as European powers extended their influence in the continent. Despite the rhetoric of antislavery, it sometimes suited the interests of the early colonial authorities to tolerate slavery. Although most colonial states including self-governing Ethiopia and Liberia passed laws against slavery, enthusiasm for complete abolition waned in the face of responses to freedom of both former slaves and slave owners. European colonial officials generally favored a cautious approach to the enforcement of antislavery laws and emancipation policies. Some officials were reluctant to interfere with African customs of servitude and “traditional” forms of unfree labor that they felt bound to respect in principle. Others feared that abrupt and blanket abolition would provoke backlash, disrupt local economies and trigger social upheavals. This was indeed the case in the British Cape Colony where Afrikaner slave owners opposed the Emancipation Act and resisted emancipation policies. This became one of the grievances that led many Afrikaners to leave the colony in the Great Trek into the South African hinterland to establish their own homeland, independent of British rule.

Colonial officials defended their ambivalence toward the persistence of slavery by arguing that it was enough to limit abolition to ending enslavement rather than mandating immediate emancipation of those enslaved. Even metropolitan abolitionists accepted the idea that some indigenous forms of slavery were more benign and were willing to see the attack on slavery concentrated on the elimination of what they considered the cruelest forms of chattel slavery.Footnote ⁵² The British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard prohibited enslavement and the trade in slaves in northern Nigeria but worried that full emancipation would lead to social and economic chaos. He was cautious not to alienate influential slave-holding emirs on whom Britain’s indirect rule system relied. One compromise was to require slaves to purchase their freedom. In other British colonies such as the Sudan, colonial officials did little beyond the official proclamation of legal abolition to stop enslavement and even tolerated a clandestine slave trade.Footnote ⁵³ The French also adopted a gradual approach toward abolition, enacting a series of laws prohibiting slavery that were not always well enforced. The situation was no different in independent Ethiopia where slavery persisted even after Emperor Haile Selassie (then Ras Teferi) issued a proclamation in 1923 outlawing the slave trade on pain of death and granted freedom to those enslaved. Despite the weak enforcement of abolition and emancipation laws, however, legal changes had a salutary effect on slavery across Africa. By withholding state support for slavery and outlawing new enslavement and slave dealing, abolition created the conditions that enabled the slaves to seize the initiative to free themselves.Footnote ⁵⁴ Many of these acts of slave self-emancipation have been well documented and studied. In the early twentieth century, slave revolts broke out in Senegambia, for example, interrupting the slave trade in that region of West Africa for several years.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is important to stress, however, that self-emancipation was not always premised on legal suppression. Slave struggles for emancipation sometimes occurred without legal abolition. In German East Africa, for example, colonial officials pursued a deliberate policy of non-abolition. German colonial authorities believed that abolition should be avoided at all costs since it would undermine the power and prosperity of the local slave-owning elite, whose effective collaboration was thought to be indispensable to the functioning of colonial rule. Although ostensibly committed to the antislavery course, the government allowed slavery to persist under official supervision. In the end, the slaves themselves ended the dehumanizing institution. As Jan-Georg Deutsch has argued, the decline of slavery in German East Africa is not a history of European knights in shining armor eradicating the evils of slavery, as claimed by the government and missionaries. On the contrary, the decline of slavery in Tanganyika came about as a result of the prolonged struggle between owners and slaves, in which slaves tried to make the best of the limited choices and opportunities available to them.Footnote ⁵⁶ Self-emancipation was not always achieved through heroic struggles, however. Sometimes they took the form of flight and indirect subversion against servile relationships.

One of the great paradoxes of antislavery is that the lexicon of rights deployed within abolitionism was also often simultaneously used as justification for maintaining slavery. This is to be expected because at the heart of all institutions of slavery and servitude is the notion of “rights-in-persons as property” – the rights that one person or group exercises over another as possession.Footnote ⁵⁷ The defense of transatlantic slavery rested partly on property rights and the view that emancipation without adequate compensation infringed on the ownership rights of slave owners. Abolitionists countered these claims by arguing the primacy of the dignity and liberties of those enslaved over the property rights of the slaveholding elites. Writing in 1830, one British abolitionist pondered this question thus: “When the right to property is pleaded, is the property of the Slaveholder alone to be considered? The Slaves too are men, and have they no right to the free enjoyment of the property in their person?”Footnote ⁵⁸

This tension between the rights of captives to personal liberty and the property rights of slaveholders was evident throughout the abolitionist movement. In early nineteenth-century discussions about abolition in the Cape Colony, for example, British officials and Dutch elites stressed the need to respect the ownership rights of slaveholders and to ensure that the “property rights in the slave were left undisturbed.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In French West Africa, colonial officials worried that the 1848 Emancipation Decree, which abolished slavery in all French colonies, did not adequately protect the property interests of slaveholders. Seeking to placate disaffected slaveholding elites who opposed the Emancipation Decree, Auguste Baudin, the French colonial governor in Senegal, stated: “I agree that the principle which declares all slaves who touch French soil are free is just, but in certain local conditions and needs, like those found in place in Senegal, the rigorous application is difficult and appears contrary to human rights.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In these debates over African labor, colonial administrators invoked rights more in terms of property claims than the personal liberties of those enslaved.

The tension between emancipation and property rights continued well into the post-abolition period as colonial officials sought to balance what they saw as conflicting rights claims. To prevent slaves from abruptly withholding their labor and endangering the economy, the abolition decree enacted by the British in Zanzibar in 1897 made emancipated slaves liable to tax, corvée labor and vagrancy laws. Those who wished to leave their masters had to go to court where they were pressured into remaining on the plantations as contract laborers.Footnote ⁶¹ The situation was similar in French Sudan where officials reclassified many slaves as “domestic servants” and required them to buy their freedom and receive a “certificate of liberty.”Footnote ⁶² French officials would later abandon this practice, mainly due to pressure from abolitionist groups.

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In Ottoman North Africa, legal abolition and resistance took a slightly different turn. The suppression and eventual abolition of the slave trade from Africa into the Ottoman Empire was not predicated upon popularized antislavery ideological currents. Unlike European leaders, Ottoman viziers and provincial governors who ruled in North Africa did not face mobilized public opinion and pressure to end the slave trade. In general, elite public opinion rejected Western abolitionist rhetoric and the notion that Ottoman enslavement was wrong, inhuman or immoral. In addition to religious and legal justifications put forward by Ottoman leaders, the resistance to abolition by political elites in Ottoman North African societies may be explained in terms of their vested socioeconomic interests.Footnote ⁶³ Conservative Muslim thinkers of the period defended enslavement in their societies by contrasting the institution of slavery in Islamic societies with Atlantic slavery. They emphasized domestic household slavery and practices of slave concubinage, which they depicted as a more benign mode of servitude. This portrayal was effective in initially deflecting foreign abolitionist pressures on Muslim North African societies. It stifled antislavery discourses and initially prevented the emergence of a homegrown abolitionist movement in Ottoman North Africa. There were, of course, notable exceptions. Ahmed Bey, the Ottoman Bey of Constantine, abolished slavery in 1846, several years before abolition under French protectorate rule in Algeria and Tunisia. Generally, however, the traffic in slaves was sustained in many parts of North Africa throughout the nineteenth century.

Although organized antislavery movements did not take hold in North Africa as they did elsewhere in the continent, it would be wrong to assume that antislavery ideas were completely absent in North Africa. Recent studies have highlighted the role of key antislavery reformers in North Africa and antislavery discourses among North African Muslim thinkers and theologians. These thinkers drew on Islamic texts to make their arguments against slavery, even if their efforts ultimately failed to affect prevailing social attitudes in these societies.Footnote ⁶⁴ The ethics of slavery was a topic of vigorous debates between North African Muslim modernists and the traditionalist conservative thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Modernists and reformers such as the Egyptian thinkers Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida tried to change social attitudes on slavery and servitude through innovative reinterpretation of Islamic law and scripture.Footnote ⁶⁵ For example, the prominent nineteenth-century Muslim reformist in Egypt, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, condemned the Ottoman government for its noncommittal approach to the suppression of the slave trade and urged European powers to increase pressure on the Ottomans to stop what remained of the traffic.Footnote ⁶⁶

The push for the formal abolition of slavery that began with individuals and organized group campaigns eventually involved bilateral government negotiations, diplomatic pressures and the rise of antislavery in foreign policy. Beginning from the 1840s, the British government engaged in wide-ranging consultations with Ottoman leaders to set up treaties to prohibit the slave trade from Africa and the Caucasus. In this task, British consuls were aided by an active international abolitionist community that consisted of organizations such as the British and Foreign Antislavery Society that reported on violations of the prohibition by Ottoman subjects. Abolitionist campaigners documented cases in their diaries and published stories in British and other European newspapers.Footnote ⁶⁷ These efforts did not always end slavery or bring freedom for those already enslaved. The trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean continued well into the late nineteenth century, while struggles for emancipation and the suppression of practices of slavery and unfree labor within Africa continued into the early twentieth century. In most cases, abolition meant only the emancipation of particular classes of enslaved Africans. Many other forms of slavery and unfree labor practices such as indentured servitude and pawnage continued to be tolerated. Legal abolition also did not mandate the social integration of former slaves, many of whom continued to live on the margins of society with limited rights and opportunities.

Antislavery and Colonialism

Antislavery intersects in several ways with the imposition of colonial rule in Africa. Antislavery provided an important legitimizing rationale for colonialism and became part of the “inter-imperial repertoire of idiom and imaginaries of colonial rule.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Eradicating the slave trade and granting freedom to those enslaved was a declared motivation of many early European adventurers, missionaries and colonists. Atlantic slavery and the movement to abolish it marked the beginning of Europe’s conquest and colonization of Africa, provoking what became known as the scramble for Africa and one of the most pernicious land grabs in human history. Here we confront another paradox of rights discourse within antislavery. Nineteenth-century missionary and humanitarian activism that rallied public support against slavery also provided moral justification for colonization, which ultimately denied millions of Africans their right to self-determination. Abolition featured prominently in the rhetoric of European colonial powers during the partitioning of the continent. The clearest expression of this is the antislavery resolution contained in the General Act signed by European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. At the conference, which formalized the scramble for Africa, European states committed themselves to ending slavery and to the international prohibition of the slave trade throughout their respective spheres. European powers reiterated the antislavery commitments at the Brussels Conference of 1889–1890, resulting in the Brussels Act, which was the first far-reaching international agreement against the slave trade on land and sea. The Act bound the contracting states to suppressing slave trading and repatriating freed slaves.

The Berlin and Brussels Acts provided an international legal foundation for humanitarian action to suppress the slave trade. Although the primary goal of these treaties was to promote the political and economic interests of the contracting European powers, they also outlined the humanitarian obligations of colonizing states under international law. In this sense, antislavery went hand in hand with the notion of the “civilizing mission” in providing the legitimizing foundation for colonial rule. This connection between antislavery and the civilizing mission of Empires is also evident in the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which bound the contracting European powers to the suppression of slavery while simultaneously “instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The suppression of slavery provided the main justification for King Leopold’s claim to the territory of the Congo, over which he gained unfettered personal control with the creation of the Congo Free State in 1884. King Leopold positioned himself as both an agent for the abolition of the slave trade and the harbinger of civilization to the Congo. By presenting himself as a philanthropist striving to abolish the “Arab slave trade in Africa,” Leopold successfully campaigned to get other world powers to recognize his territorial claim to the Congo. Leopold’s rule turned out to be one of the most brutal colonial regimes in Africa. His rule instituted a coercive labor scheme that contemporary critics widely denounced as slavery. In the quest to maximize economic benefits accruing from rubber production, Leopold’s agents perpetrated grave atrocities against the people of the Congo. His regime ruthlessly enforced a quota system for rubber production that involved widespread killing, torture and mutilations. Eyewitness reports tell of massacres and accounts of soldiers ordered to collect human body parts to serve as proof of disciplinary punishment and executions. Leopold held the view that his humanitarian desire excused the conduct of his agents, describing Belgians who had lost their loved ones colonizing the Congo as martyrs.

As with the earlier Atlantic antislavery campaigns, the accounts of missionaries and conscientious individuals eventually brought the atrocities of Leopold’s rule to world attention. Visitors to the Congo such as the African American historian and journalist George Washington Williams exposed the violence and exploitation of Leopold’s rule in the Congo.Footnote ⁷⁰ The most prominent figure in the efforts to bring global attention to the atrocities of King Leopold’s rule in the Congo was E. D. Morel, a British journalist who co-founded the Congo Reform Association (CRA) in 1904. Morel’s declared goal was to stir the conscience of the world to confront the atrocities of Leopold’s rule in the Congo. Along with his colleagues in the CRA, he mounted a global campaign against Leopold’s regime by drawing attention to its exceptional brutality. Morel publicized these atrocities through newspaper articles, books and pamphlets that included graphic photographs of mutilated African bodies.

Morel deployed the language of rights quite extensively in his campaign against the atrocities in the Congo. One of his campaign publications was titled A Memorial on Native Rights in the Land and Its Fruits in the Congo Territories Annexed by Belgium. In it, Morel asserted that the “rights of the natives to their land and produce of their own soil has been taken away from them and vested in aliens living thousands of miles away.”Footnote ⁷¹ Sustained campaigns, combined with the resulting public outrage, ultimately pressured governments in Europe and the United States to intervene to end King Leopold’s unfettered rule in the Congo. In some respect, Morel and the CRA pioneered the advocacy techniques of “naming and shaming” oppressive regimes and mobilizing global public opinion against them – a technique that later human rights activists would adopt.

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The use of antislavery as an alibi for the imposition of colonial rule and exploitation at the turn of the nineteenth century was not unique to the Congo. The suppression of the slave trade in Africa was central to legitimizing British, French and German colonial conquest and expansion. In German East Africa, rhetoric against the slave trade brought various interest groups together, forging a powerful pro-expansionist collaboration between the government, commercial interests and Christian churches.Footnote ⁷² The abolition of slavery also set the stage for the imposition of colonial rule in Algeria and much of West Africa where French abolitionism became linked with Republican colonialism and assimilationist policies. In Algeria, the 1848 French law that prescribed financial compensation for slave owners as an incentive for abolition was quickly followed by another law integrating Algeria into a wider imperial community of French departments. In British East Africa, antislavery went hand in hand with a colonizing agenda, starting with Zanzibar where the sultan came under British pressure to stop the slave trade. This followed an 1822 treaty that abolished the Omani slave trade and gave British antislavery naval squadrons the right to patrol the Indian Ocean and secure trade. This treaty provided Britain with a military and political foothold for colonial expansionism into East Africa. Stopping the slave trade was also central to missionary and colonial incursion into Buganda.

The discourse of antislavery persisted well into the colonial period. Humanitarians, activists and emancipated slaves used abolitionist language to draw attention to the continued social exclusion of former slaves and the enduring stigma of slave origins. Africans also invoked abolitionist language to tackle the starkly unequal power relations of colonial governments and to transform partisan political interests into a moral problem that demanded attention.Footnote ⁷³ This prompted renewed post-abolition international antislavery campaigns. Following reports of slave raiding along the Ethiopian borderlands, antislavery campaigners under the auspices of the Antislavery Society pressed for the League of Nations to investigate the allegations. The League subsequently established a Slavery Commission in 1924.

Antislavery within the League of Nations and post–World War I internationalism is analogous to what human rights became within the UN and the post–World War II international order. When the League’s Slavery Commission commenced its work, countries made strenuous efforts to deny the existence of slavery in their territories and publicly denounced the existence of slavery elsewhere. Like human rights in the post–World War II era, antislavery in the 1920s was a measure of national respectability and the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. All the members of the Slavery Commission played the “antislavery card” to further their national geopolitical interests. The French and the Italians demanded that the Commission endorse their military campaigns against the Tuaregs in the Sahara on the grounds that they were attacking slave raiders, while Britain demanded recognition of its efforts to repatriate fugitive slaves.Footnote ⁷⁴ The work of the Slavery Commission led to the adoption of the Slavery Convention of 1926, which bound signatory states to the suppression of slavery in all its forms.

Apart from international antislavery pressures, colonial officials also faced domestic agitation demanding the full social inclusion of former slaves. Although legal abolition provided opportunities for those enslaved to escape servitude, it did not protect them from discrimination or mandate their equal treatment. In many communities, former slaves and their descendants continued to be treated as social outcasts and second-class citizens. Under such circumstances, former slaves took it upon themselves to mount concerted campaigns to redress the prejudice and social stigmatization that they continued to suffer in spite of legal abolition. In 1922, settlements of former slaves in eastern Nigeria, locally called Ohu, launched an insurrection to force the freeborn community to permit them to participate in the social and political life of the community.Footnote ⁷⁵ These struggles continued over several decades. In court cases and petitions to the colonial officials, activist campaigners demanded that the government go beyond the legal abolition of slavery to enforce non-discrimination and equal rights for former slaves and their descendants. Between 1935 and 1945, a group of Igbo former slaves organized themselves under the name Idumuashaba Family Union to demand full social integration. In protracted court cases, petitions and public protests, they drew public attention to the prejudices and discrimination against them within the larger community. They demanded the government’s intervention to restore their “rights of full citizenship.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In one petition, they stated: “We are treated most disdainfully as outcasts, and even that condition is aggravated by our exclusion from the exercise of civic rights as well as the enjoyment of our native privileges and social equality.” They pressured the government to secure and establish their “freedom and rights as free people unencumbered by limitations.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The standard response of colonial governments to these demands for equal rights was that, having already abolished slavery, the state could not go further to decree social equality. As historian Don Ohadike has noted, the post–World War II problem of slavery in this part of Africa was not one of emancipation but of incomplete assimilation. The government’s position was that there was nothing it could do for those who were legally free to leave the communities that kept them in social bondage but who, in practice, could not or would not do so. No law or state policy could free them from their social marginalization or make them enjoy all the rights and privileges of other sections of society.Footnote ⁷⁸ In some parts of Africa the struggle to achieve full social inclusion of citizens with slave ancestry would continue well into the era of independence, constitutional democracy and universal human rights.

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The political and socioeconomic transformations ushered in by antislavery and colonial conquest in late nineteenth-century Africa marked a period of simultaneous expansion and contraction of individual and collective rights and liberties. Abolition and emancipation allowed for more inclusive societies, extending in principle, if not always in practice, certain basic rights and personal liberties to those enslaved. With antislavery, the freedom from enslavement, a right previously restricted to rulers, powerful elites and untarnished insiders, expanded to include millions of enslaved and vulnerable people. In this sense, antislavery was a defining movement toward rights inclusion in Africa. However, as we have seen, antislavery also marked a period of transition defined by the loss of African autonomy following colonial conquest and expansion. In many African communities, this meant the erosion of the collective right to self-determination as European authorities ousted or marginalized indigenous ruling elites through conquest, intimidation or deception. In the name of antislavery, many African leaders were killed, deposed or exiled. Using present-day human rights standards, such political usurpations may be justified as acts of humanitarian intervention to restrain sovereign powers in defense of individual rights. However, in some cases, as in King Leopold’s Congo, antislavery was merely an excuse for colonial subjugation and economic exploitation.

The history of antislavery in Africa thus illustrates the complexities and paradoxes of the human rights story. As a rights movement, antislavery had the greatest impact on expanding individual liberties and extending personal freedoms to the greatest number of people. However, it also provided a powerful and compelling alibi for conquest, repression and subjugation. This restricted collective rights and liberties. As I show in the next chapter, colonialism and the loss of indigenous autonomy had wide-ranging implications for the political, social and economic rights of most Africans in the twentieth century.