While there is an extensive literature on the history and anthropology of the Great Lakes or interlacustrine region of East Africa (see Map 1), there are few works which focus on slavery. This constitutes a striking contrast with the historiography of the rest of the African continent in which slavery and the slave trade are some of the most prominent themes. Until recently authors working on the Great Lakes region considered that the institution was never a feature of Great Lakes societies or that it existed for only a very short time during the late nineteenth century and even then was of marginal significance, so they did not write about it. In the late 1980s Michael Twaddle re-opened the debate by demonstrating the importance and longevity of slavery in Buganda, but little new work was done in response to this. Indeed, the idea for this book came when Michael Twaddle examined Henri Médard's 2001 dissertation on the nineteenth-century history of Buganda and commented on how little attention had been paid to slavery in it. This led in turn to a conference held in Paris on 16–17 December 2002, hosted by the Centre de Recherches Africaines (University of Paris I/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) at which most of the contributors to this book were present.

The starting point of the project, then, was the need to answer very basic questions. Did slavery exist in that region? How old was it? Was the institution marginal or central to these societies? The aim of this book is to demonstrate the diversity of slave institutions across the region and to open up the subject to future and more specific research.

The debate originally concerned Buganda and Bunyoro, two kingdoms in present-day Uganda with intertwined histories. Why enlarge the subject to the Great Lakes region of East Africa? Why not a wider area, say Africa or East Africa? The primary reason is that the Great Lakes region has a distinctive cultural unity.