We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Slavery was more important in the Great Lakes region than often has been assumed and Africans from the interior played a more complex role than was previously recognised. These ten 10 studies by the most prominent historians of the region. They reveal the connections between the peoples of the region as well as their encounters with conquering Europeans. Slavery was not a uniform phenomenon and the line between enslaved and non-slave labour was fine. This book challenges the assertion that domestic slavery increased in Africa as the result of the international trade.
HENRI MEDARD is a Lecturer in History at the University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and Cemaj; SHANE DOYLE is a Lecturer in History at Leeds University Contributors include: DAVID SCHOENBRUN, JAN-GEORG DEUTSCH, MARK LEOPOLD, RICHARD REID, HOLLY HANSON, EDWARD I. STEINHART, JEAN-PIERRE CHRETIEN & SHANE DOYLE
North America: Ohio U Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Kenya: EAEP
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.