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6 - ‘History Must be Re-Written!’: Revisionist Ambitions among West African Slave Descendants
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- By Eric Hahonou, Liverpool University, Lotte Pelckmans, University of Nijmegen
- Edited by Douglas Hamilton, Kate Hodgson, Joel Quirk
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- Book:
- Slavery, Memory and Identity
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 91-104
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- Chapter
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Summary
This chapter addresses the silence that characterizes African domestic slavery in West Africa. Whereas the transatlantic slave trade is remembered and commemorated, domestic slavery has long remained a taboo topic. This chapter sheds light on recent attempts by African people of slave origin to reconsider the contribution of slaves to the construction of African former kingdoms and contemporary nation states. This implies a revision of both popular and official accounts of African history in relation to slavery.
Slavery related to the African continent has several faces: the transatlantic Trade; the trans-Saharan slave trade and Mediterranean slavery; the Indian Ocean slave trade; East African slavery and its Arabian connections; and various forms of domestic slavery inside the African continent. Some are remembered and voiced, others are disregarded and silenced. In 1993, the General Conference of UNESCO approved the Slave Route project proposed by Haiti, Benin and other African countries. This project intended to re-examine the reasons for the historical silence in which the slave trade had for so long been swathed, to establish the historical truth concerning a wilfully masked tragedy and to illuminate the intercultural dialogues born of this trade. In 1994, UNESCO launched the Slave Route project in Ouidah (Benin), underlining the sufferings of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. The Slave Route project visualizes and materializes the past of the transatlantic slave trade in the form of sites, landscapes, museums and art exhibitions related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa, the Americas and the West Indies. Each year many descendants of slaves from the Americas and Europe visit Ouidah (Benin), Gorée Island (Senegal), Cape Coast (Ghana) and other commemorative sites along coastal West Africa where trained local tour guides teach them about the heritage of the transatlantic slave trade. Tourists hear a lot about the trade in slaves towards other continents, maybe a little about the involvement of African kingdoms in providing slaves for the trade, but hardly anything about how lavery used to be practised in Africa before the arrival of Western traders and how this still affects the contemporary livelihoods of millions of people.
8 - Slavery and Politics: Stigma, Decentralisation and Political Representation in Niger and Benin
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- By Eric Komlavi Hahonou, University of Roskilde
- Edited by Benedetta Rossi
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- Book:
- Reconfiguring Slavery
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 28 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2009, pp 152-181
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Summary
In pre-colonial African societies, access to village spaces and ‘spaces of sovereignty’ was determined by sex (men rather than women), age (older rather than younger) and social status (free men rather than slaves), and not by egalitarian principles (Olivier de Sardan, 1994). Colonialism profoundly altered pre-existing forms of governance. However, it did not call into question considerations relative to ‘political adulthood’ (Olivier de Sardan, 1994, 120), which continued to set the rules of competition in local political arenas even after independence and successive waves of democratisation. In spite of numerous regime changes, women, young men and descendants of slaves remained politically marginal.
From the beginning of the 1990s, donor-led decentralisation appeared to both scholars and activists as the best way to promote democratisation ‘from the bottom’ (Wunsch and Olowu, 1990). Democratisation was presented as a cure to all the ills suffered by centralised African states. It was supposed to increase respect for human rights, to promote ‘good governance’, transparency and accountability (and thus stimulate the efficient management of public resources), to stimulate popular participation in development and to empower the most destitute and marginalised groups. Decentralisation, initiated from the exterior and taken up by internal forces (e.g. the case of Tuareg revolts in Niger and Mali), was eventually implemented by African governments. In the case of Benin and Niger, the reforms announced at national conferences from the beginning of the 1990s were not implemented until 2002–2003 and 2004, respectively. In both countries, groups of former slaves, until then politically marginalised and stigmatised, took advantage of the opportunities created by decentralisation to access political power at the local level.
Based on fieldwork conducted in Benin and Niger between 2002 and 2007, this essay compares the processes of political emancipation followed by different groups of slave descent. In all of the three groups discussed in this chapter, slave descendants outnumber the descendants of old elites. While in the Songhay context the aristocracy has maintained its privileges and political power locally, former Tuareg and Peul slaves were able to take over municipal councils. However, this renewal of leadership did not lead to major transformations in the management of local affairs.