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REVIEW ARTICLE
DEPENDENCE, UNFREEDOM AND SLAVERY IN
AFRICA: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED ANALYSIS
Benedetta Rossi
JAME S FERGUSON,Give a Man a Fish: reflections on the new politics of
distribution. Durham NC: Duke University Press (hb US$89.95 –978
0 8223 5895 4; pb US$24.95 –978 0 8223 5886 2). 2015, 280 pp.
SEAN STILWELL,Slavery and Slaving in African History. New York NY:
Cambridge University Press (pb £18.99 –978 0 521 17188 5). 2014,
223 pp.
BENJAMIN LAWRANCE and RICHARD ROBERTS, editors, Trafficking in
Slavery’s Wake: law and the experience of women and children. Athens
OH: Ohio University Press (pb US$32.95 –978 0 8214 2002 7). 2012,
264 pp.
The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of
dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach
different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear
on the circumstances they examine; and –when they are concerned with
policy questions –propose different remedies. A comparison of these
books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfree-
dom, but also for rethinking critically the approaches of some of the main
contemporary strands of research on these phenomena.
THE RISE OF CASH TRANSFERS
James Ferguson’s new book, Give a Man a Fish, is an original contribution
by a scholar who distinguishes himself by his ability to think outside the
box. Give a Man a Fish explores recent reconfigurations in policy
approaches aimed at poverty alleviation. It urges readers to acknowledge
the significance of the ‘cash transfer revolution’(p. 12) and develop ‘new
ways of reasoning about matters of poverty and distribution’(p. 10).
BENEDETTA ROSSI is a lecturer in African Studies in the Department of African Studies and
Anthropology at the School of History of Cultures, University of Birmingham. She is the
author of From Slavery to Aid: politics, labour and ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000,
editor of Reconfiguring Slavery: West African trajectories, and, with Anne Haour, co-editor of
Being and Becoming Hausa: interdisciplinary perspectives. Email: b.rossi@bham.ac.uk
Africa 86 (3) 2016: 571–90 doi:10.1017/S0001972016000504
© International African Institute 2016
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Ferguson starts with a plea for reconsideration: those who still decry the
decline of welfare approaches as a consequence of unfettered free-market
capitalism should rethink their views. Recent decades have witnessed the
rising popularity of public programmes that ‘directly transfer small
amounts of cash to large numbers of low-income people’(p. 1). In
South Africa, the years since 1994 have seen continuous growth in the
numbers of recipients of social assistance programmes (as well as in the
quantity of funds transferred).
Ferguson gives South African government figures showing that social
assistance programmes at the time of his writing were paying grants to
nearly 15 million South Africans, or about 30 per cent of the population.
Of these, 9 million received child support grants, while most of the rest
received old age pensions and disability grants. In 2010–11, the govern-
ment spent 3.5 per cent of the gross national product on such grants,
with nearly 60 per cent of all households in some of South Africa’s
poorest provinces, such as Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, receiving one
or more grants of this kind (p. 77). Other Southern African countries –
Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho –have begun to introduce
similar programmes (pp. 6–7).
Recent assessments suggest that these programmes ‘work’. Studies cited
by Ferguson document a reduction in the experience of hunger, and posi-
tive nutritional, educational and health outcomes in areas targeted by
social payments (pp. 7–8). Based upon these preliminary evaluations, in
recent years some campaigners in South Africa and Namibia have
become promoters of a more ambitious initiative, the ‘basic income
grant’(BIG), which –if implemented –would provide a small monthly
cash payment to every individual citizen (p. 17). At the time of the
initial proposal, the amount proposed was about $16 per month. BIG
would be non-contributory –that is, grants would not be based on the reci-
pients’contributions in the form of recurrent payments or deductions from
their incomes. They would be issued to all citizens, with the better-off
having their $16 recouped through progressive taxation.
Ferguson takes the rise of cash transfers as an alternative to older forms
of aid and increasing support for BIG as an opportunity to rethink issues
of unemployment, poverty and inequality in contemporary African soci-
eties, with a particular focus on Southern Africa. In spite of repeated
expressions of caution (for example, p. 32, 188), he appears to be support-
ing cash transfers, BIG, and the philosophy that he attributes to them. He
welcomes what he sees as their alleged potential to bypass logics rooted in
gender and racial stereotypes. Universal cash payments of the sort foreseen
by the advocates of BIG break away from prejudices underpinning what
Ferguson calls the ‘ideology of familism’(p. 71).
‘Familism’emphasizes the centrality of a ‘male breadwinner’for whom
joblessness or dependence on social payments is supposedly much more
shameful than for women, children and the elderly. By contrast, depend-
ence is what defines the nature of the relation of these latter groups to
adult men or –in the absence of a ‘male breadwinner’–to the state.
But with a large proportion of young men permanently jobless and
women and elderly persons receiving cash transfers, the idea of these
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groups’dependence on the male breadwinner is rendered obsolete by its
lack of correspondence with people’s lived experience (pp. 17–18, 81).
Basic income grants would avoid biasing poverty alleviation with implicit
assumptions about the gender or status of recipients. They also appeal to a
new political philosophy holding that ‘wealth, being the product of social
labour, social suffering, and social innovation, should be in some way
shared by society as a whole’(p. 55 and Chapter 6).
Furthermore, cash transfers appear to provide practical solutions to
seemingly unsolvable problems, in particular society’s apparent inability
to ‘create jobs’due to the ‘massive contemporary oversupply of manual
labour’(p. 80). In earlier periods, when land was plentiful and labour
was scarce in Africa, colonial capitalists exploited regions that were con-
sidered ‘labour reserves’by employing low-wage migrant labour (for
example in mining; see p. 10). Exploitation extended beyond migrant
workers themselves, and also targeted their communities of origin; these
communities supported the costs of the social reproduction of labour,
for example by raising children and caring for the sick and aged
(pp. 10–11). But today the poor in South African rural peripheries are
the potential recipients of grants that supposedly could reach them even
in the most remote regions. By contrast, labour migrants now often
migrate to depend, rather than to work.
Today …a restructured capitalism has ever less need for the ready supply of low-wage,
low-skilled laborers that the migrant labor system generated …This point was made
to me most dramatically in the comment of a South African social researcher with
long experience working with poor rural communities. ‘I wish it weren’t true,’he said,
‘but the fact is that there are at least ten million people out there who could drop dead
tomorrow and the JSE [Johannesburg Stock Exchange] wouldn’t register so much as a
ripple.’(p. 11)
But it is one thing to acknowledge that labour-saving innovations reduced
demand for labour and increased forms of precarious employment
(Benanav 2010: 5). It is quite another to suggest that workers deemed re-
dundant should just accept their condition rather than struggle to obtain
ever more elusive jobs. At some points, Ferguson seems to suggest that
cash transfers should make it easier for marginalized groups to develop
secure occupations. But as one reads on, it is often suggested that the nor-
mative expectation of near-universal employment should simply be aban-
doned; that having a job should not be perceived as the only way to achieve
a viable livelihood; and that the centrality of ‘productive work’should be
discarded for an emphasis on ‘distributive work’. These ideas have recently
gained currency in studies of labour in Africa and elsewhere (Weeks 2011;
Barchiesi 2011), but here I will restrict my comments to Ferguson’s book.
DEPENDENCE AND DISTRIBUTION
Ferguson’s solution to the alleged unemployability of large sections of
Africans is to redefine dependence and unemployment in more appealing
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ways. This solution is controversial, and not always convincing. He
denounces Western stereotypes and the idea that ‘economic dependence
is a threat to the integrity of the adult male citizen’as ‘an idea with a
long pedigree in Western thought’(p. 44). He condemns Marx’s supposed
overemphasis on production, or productive labour, and his dismissal of
distributive processes (pp. 44–5, 91–3). By contrast, he encourages
readers to revalue what he calls ‘distributive labor’:
Even the unproductive are both engaged in labor and entitled to social membership. The
woman begging on the street may not be producing a good or selling a service, but she
works all day. To say that she is not productive is not to denigrate her labor. It is,
instead, to underline the importance and value of distribution. (p. 100)
Ferguson provides four examples of ‘survivalist improvisatory labor’:a
windshield washer, a panhandler, a pickpocket, and a mother making a
family visit. What these apparently different activities have in common,
he argues, is that they ‘involve people engaged in a form of labor, one
that seeks to secure a transfer of resources from those who have them to
those who don’t’(p. 101). Ferguson thinks that South Africa is a good
place to study ‘distributive livelihood strategies’, because such strategies
are deeply rooted in its political economy. Southern African rural-to-
urban migrants used to redistribute in the countryside some of the
benefits of their wages. Today, the prospects of finding waged jobs are sub-
stantially reduced (p. 104). People continue to migrate, but they often strive
not to find a job that will enable them to share their wages with relatives in
the countryside, but rather to move in with relatives in cities, who can be
persuaded to share their income with visiting migrants (p. 108).
The growth of social assistance programmes introduced new forms of
mobility. Ferguson quotes Jeremy Seekings’study of the strategic decisions
of households when choosing how to make members move: children may
be moved between households ‘to care for an elderly grandparent at the
same time as benefiting from the grandparent’s access to a pension
income’(Seekings 2008: 43, cited in Ferguson, p. 109). One wonders
how these strategic ‘distributive’movements are experienced by those
involved in them: the migrant who cannot ‘move to work’anymore and
now ‘moves to depend’; the child who is moved to care for elderly grand-
parents and thereby facilitates income distribution. But rather than attend-
ing to the experiences of people, Ferguson builds a culturalist argument
about Africa’s‘deep social logic’:‘distributive livelihood strategies are
not simply a product of poverty and deprivation, but instead rest upon a
deep social logic that finds application at all social levels’(p. 115).
Relabelled ‘distributive livelihood strategies’, joblessness and precarious
employment can be reimagined as good for Africans, or South Africans,
whose social institutions supposedly have an atavistic propensity towards
distribution and dependence. The risk is that exalting the positive values
of ‘distribution’conceals realities where people simply have no alternatives
to begging, stealing, having sex with ‘sugar daddies’, or depending upon
more fortunate relatives or patrons. Relabelling these activities ‘distribu-
tive labour’is a rhetorical device that makes them sound more acceptable.
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But are the subjects of Ferguson’s research happy to beg to live just
because such activity can be reimagined as ‘pressing a distributive
claim’(p. 101)?
Ferguson knows that the argument that Africans are different, that they
somehow ‘like’distribution and dependence, is essentialist. Therefore, he
tries to present distribution as valuable in general –and not only as cultur-
ally attuned to South African institutions. While he concedes that not all
distributive labour is commendable, he concludes that –broadly speaking –
‘distribution (especially in a spectacularly unequal society) is a necessary
and valuable social function, and it should be recognized, named, and
valued as such’(p. 101).
As I understand it, Ferguson’s argument can be summarized as follows:
‘spectacularly unequal societies’should embrace distributive livelihoods
that entail a re-evaluation of social dependence, because dependence
makes possible resource transfers that do not follow productive criteria,
but rather inhere in relations of a patron–client type. These relations can
be seen as desirable because they appear to solve the intractable problem
of ‘creating jobs’that are ‘not needed’. When dependence and distribution
are revalued as institutions that contribute to the public good, the state can
support them with small cash transfers and a citizen’s income (the BIG
option). Such grants would enable the unemployed to go on living and
pressing ‘distributive claims’on those who are employed or otherwise
better off than them.
But who decides which jobs are ‘needed’and which ones aren’t? This is a
fundamental question. Perhaps capitalist enterprises do not need to
employ ‘surplus labour’and can achieve profits without it. But travelling
in most African countries reveals inadequate public infrastructure. In
urban and rural contexts alike, there is an enormous unmet need for
public works that would contribute to environmental rehabilitation,
improved hygiene and sanitation, and the maintenance of roads and build-
ings. The density of physicians (per 1,000 people) is exceedingly low in
most African countries. There are many sectors and services that would
benefit if more workers were employed in them. These sectors could
absorb large cohorts of supposedly ‘unemployable’Africans and have im-
portant impacts on the quality of life.
Perhaps these ideas will remind some readers of old, mostly flawed,
recipes for Africa’s‘modernization’and ‘development’. This is not what
I am suggesting. Colonial efforts to develop labour-intensive public
works schemes rarely provided wages –let alone decent wages –for the
workers involved. Until the mid-1940s, the colonial administration fre-
quently employed forced and unfree labour in the construction and main-
tenance of colonial infrastructure (Cooper 1996; Fall 1993). In many
independent African nations, postcolonial governments reproduced
colonial labour practices. Developmentalist discourses legitimized the mo-
bilization of African labour under headings such as ‘human investment’,
‘participation’,‘community development’and ‘ownership building’.
These concepts, introduced under colonialism and re-proposed with
recurrent cosmetic shifts until the present day, conceal the continuing ex-
ploitation of their so-called ‘beneficiaries’. The point is not to replicate
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policies that never created wage labour opportunities because they never
intended to. The point is that in many African countries there might be
potential for actual employment creation. Whether this potential can be
realized is a political question.
Ferguson’s view that capitalism has ‘ever less need’for an ‘oversupply’
of labour suggests that the demand and supply of labour are determined by
overarching forces, independent of capital, that Give a Man a Fish leaves
unspecified and unexplored. But the fact is that capital can and does
influence the supply of labour. Capitalist businesses are sensitive to the
same incentives: rises in competition requiring cost reductions if a loss
of profits is to be avoided. As shown by Tom Brass (2013), one of capital’s
strategies to maximize profit (or avoid losses or failure) consists in employ-
ing cheaper and easily controllable workers. It does this by influencing the
relative proportion of free and unfree workers. The closure of underper-
forming businesses results in a mass of unemployed workers who may at
some point accept unfree labour conditions or force relatives to accept
them. Alternatively, they may migrate to countries where more opportun-
ities are available, but where their migrant status exposes them to the extor-
tions of local employers and a corrupt police. In turn, a large supply of
workers prepared to accept unfavourable conditions limits the capacity
of free workers to bargain with employers and resist exploitation.
A well-documented example of this type of process is the implantation
of liberalization and structural adjustment policies in Africa, which
resulted in privatization and rises in unemployment. International policy
organizations support the logic of capital; the notion of the ‘informal
economy’, introduced by researchers and mobilized by international
policy organizations, depoliticized this process by labelling it ‘informality’
(Rossi 2014). But ‘informality’conceals the connection between job losses,
deproletarianization, and the growth of a large pool of easily exploitable
workers.
The idea that the unemployability of large numbers of people is simply
inevitable implies that precarious or unfree workers should accept their
destiny. But unemployability is not destiny. Specific politico-economic dy-
namics regulate the proportions of employable and so-called ‘unemploy-
able’people. Such dynamics work to the advantage of employers, who
can increase profits, or cut costs, by replacing free workers with unfree
ones: that is, by replacing workers who retain the capacity to sell, with-
draw, and resell their labour power with workers who are declared ‘un-
employable’, have lost such capacity, and have no choice but to accept
conditions imposed by employers or ‘patrons’(Brass 2013:44–5). A
patron can be a gangmaster or a wealthy host for workers who ‘migrate
to depend’. Exploitative conditions (whether experienced as coercion or
euphemized through patronizing idioms such as loyalty, obligation or
respect) are accepted by people who lack better opportunities. We need
to ask questions about who extracts labour from whom, about the
nature of production and employment relations, how property relations
are maintained, and who profits from existing circumstances.
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IS DEPENDENCE GOOD FOR AFRICANS?
In Chapter 5, the reader is encouraged to discard yet another bias of the
‘emancipatory liberal mind’(p. 145): the tendency to feel uncomfortable
before the ‘spectacle of people openly pursuing a subordinate and depend-
ent status’(p. 143). Two examples are provided. The first is the apparent
paradox of people from neighbouring chiefdoms who, in the 1820s, volun-
tarily surrendered to the expansive Ngoni polity and came ‘of their own
volition from great distances specifically with the goal of being taken
captive by the Ngoni’(p. 142). The other example is a contemporary an-
ecdote based on the experience of an American friend of Ferguson, who,
having recently arrived in Johannesburg, found troubling the constant
storm of young men trying to be employed by him: ‘the message sent by
poor black South Africans to this white, foreign, would-be egalitarian
seemed to be “Let me serve you! Be my boss! Exploit me!”’ (pp. 141–2).
Yet, we are told, these circumstances will appear less puzzling when one
tries to understand their underlying ‘social logic’(p. 144).
The reward for being incorporated as dependants is that dependence is a
necessary aspect of belonging, and in Africa ‘belonging’is allegedly the
main avenue to full personhood. While Ngoni captives entered a society
‘at the bottom of the pecking order …with new captives constantly enter-
ing the system, they could quickly end up founding new segments of their
own and acquiring social and political influence’(p. 144). In recent
decades, rising unemployment could be seen to have introduced a break
in the notion of ‘wealth in people’characteristic of contexts where
labour is in scarce supply. But instead Ferguson suggests that:
those rendered ‘independent’of the wage labour system do not remain happily independ-
ent but rather seek (with more or less success) to build up new dependencies. This, of
course, was what my American acquaintance was observing. (p. 153)
Ferguson provides many historical, ethnographic and anecdotal examples,
which create the appearance of an empirically grounded analysis. But his
discussion of ‘dependence’is too abstract (cf. Bolt 2013). A plethora of
mini-sketches from different contexts and periods does not provide suffi-
cient information to assess whether the situations being compared are
indeed comparable beyond the minimal condition that the term ‘depend-
ence’appears in all of them. At such an abstract level, dependence means
everything and nothing.
‘Dependence’means different things in different contexts: in some cases
it means horrific dehumanization, as when slaves are worked to death to
fulfil their owners’desires. In other contexts, dependent relations can
and do provide security, protection and opportunities. Which contexts
make different degrees of dependence acceptable? To whom is dependence
acceptable? And to whom is it not? The idea advanced in the passage
quoted above –that those who lost their jobs (or never got one) could
remain ‘happily independent’–says nothing about what such ‘happy inde-
pendence’entails: hunger, disease and the threat of death are conditions
that make ‘dependence’–however defined –a palatable option. This
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does not mean that if better opportunities were accessible ‘dependence’
would retain its appeal.
Captives enslaving themselves in precolonial wars, young unemployed
men trying to earn money by offering their services to tourists, beggars,
and mothers or grandmothers receiving child support grants from the
state all partake in different relations. A critical assessment of these rela-
tions would require an in-depth analysis of the conditions in which
people with different opportunities entered these forms of dependence,
which supposedly improved their initial circumstances. Ferguson asks:
‘does this mean dependence is actually a good thing?’(p. 155).
Ferguson’s answer that ‘such a claim makes us uneasy’(ibid.) leads him
into the trap of blaming ethnocentricity (beware the emancipatory
liberal mind!) when in fact the only possible answer to this question is
‘It depends’. It depends on what forms of dependence and what types of
relations.
After revaluing dependence as a source of both protection and social
membership, the fear of some critics that BIG might promote dependence
on the state will appear trivial. It is not only, we are told, that the poor
would be dependent anyway (p. 157); it is also that, if we are prepared
to shed the ‘moralizing attitudes that stigmatize those excluded from the
labor market’(p. 163), we can think of BIG not as a humiliating
handout but as a ‘citizen’s income’that recognizes ‘various forms of de-
pendence (including care giving and care receiving) as necessary building
blocks of a healthy society’(p. 163). The conclusion, then, is that –especially
in (Southern) African contexts –one should hope that new approaches in
social policy may open up ‘new ways of approaching the question of de-
pendence in a more rewarding way, a way that would be able to credit
and respect the vernacular aspirations to social relationality that is so puz-
zling to an emancipatory liberalism’(p. 164, my italics).
Seeing dependence as the fruit of ‘vernacular aspirations to social rela-
tionality’is a rhetorical artifice that does not clarify the actual (experien-
tial) causes of a resilient attachment to dependence among certain (but not
all) African subjects, and that fails to explain the many circumstances in
which dependence is in fact rejected by real-life individuals who are in a
position to do so.
Ferguson mentions the introduction by Kopytoff and Miers to their
edited volume Slavery in Africa (1977), but only cursorily in relation to
the concept of ‘wealth in people’(p. 145). It is surprising that Ferguson
does not engage their elaborate discussion of dependence and belonging
in African societies, for it would be helpful to see him explain where he
agrees, and where he disagrees, with these authors’influential ideas.
Kopytoff and Miers famously contrasted a supposedly ‘Western’valoriza-
tion of freedom and independence and a supposedly African valorization
of dependence qua belonging. This recalls Ferguson’s opposition of a
Western ‘emancipatory liberal mind’and African ‘vernacular aspirations
to social relationality’.
[T]he insider in most traditional societies in Africa was not an autonomous individual.
His full citizenship derived from belonging to a kin group, usually corporate, which
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was the fundamental social, legal, political, and ritual protective unit. This contrasts with
the modern Western ideology of ‘freedom’(though not exactly with Western sociological
reality). For in the Western conception, the antithesis of ‘slavery’is ‘freedom’, and
‘freedom’means autonomy and a lack of social bonds. However …[i]n most African so-
cieties, ‘freedom’lay not in a withdrawal into a meaningless and dangerous autonomy
but in attachment to a kin group, to a patron –an attachment that occurred within a
well-defined hierarchical framework …Here, the antithesis of ‘slavery’is not
‘freedom’qua autonomy but rather ‘belonging’. (Kopytoff and Miers 1977: 17)
This particular argument in their introduction has stimulated substantial
discussion over the last forty years in the historiography of slavery in
Africa. The view that Africans do not desire freedom ‘in the Western
sense of the term’has been harshly criticized. Frederick Cooper argued
convincingly that ‘absorptionist’interpretations of African slavery are cul-
turalist and ahistorical: by making absorption –and its corollaries, rights
in people and dependence –the ultimate aim of ‘African’societies,
Kopytoff and Miers built a functionalist argument that fails to account
for the specific aims and strategies of individual slaves and slave owners
(Cooper 1979). Whenever the cutting of ties of dependence was possible
and led to a foreseeable improvement in the slaves’conditions, enslaved
Africans deserted their owners, resulting in massive exoduses (see, for
example, Klein and Roberts 1980).
In Africa, we are told, independence is a ‘terrifying predicament given
the importance …of relationality for personhood’(Ferguson, p. 152).
But just as independence is only terrifying under specific circumstances
(to Africans and non-Africans alike), so, too, not all forms of ‘relational-
ity’are equally desirable. An administrator commenting on demands for
liberation by slaves in Mellacorée on the Guinea Coast and cited by
Martin Klein reported: ‘They say that they are tired of working for their
master, that they have worked long enough for others, and that the
liberty they seek is so that they can work for themselves and reap the
fruits of their own labor’(cited in Klein 1988: 209). Klein concludes
the chapter on the Banamba exodus in his monograph on slavery and co-
lonial rule in French West Africa by noting laconically that: ‘the exodus
took place because slaves were willing to risk intimidation, hunger and
hardship to return home or seek freedom elsewhere’(Klein 1998: 177).
In the conclusion of his classic manual on the history of African slavery,
Paul Lovejoy sums up: ‘Many slaves knew exactly what they wanted,
and it was not to “belong”to their master …The aim of slaves was
freedom, not the modification of the conditions of slavery’(Lovejoy
2000 [1983]: 253).
THEORIZING AFRICAN SLAVERY
Sean Stilwell’s book, Slavery and Slaving in African History, reassesses
some of the main debates in the historiography of African slavery. It
starts and ends with ‘freedom’. Chapter 1 revisits Kopytoff and Miers
and presents some of the main objections that were advanced against
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their argument by Claude Meillassoux and Paul Lovejoy (pp. 7–10). It pro-
vides a helpful overview of the main debates. In essence, Stilwell reiterates
the Kopytoff–Miers position with the ‘slave’distinguished slightly more
markedly from the ‘free’than in their model of the slavery-to-kinship con-
tinuum (p. 14). He shows that in many African societies the slaves’kinless-
ness and total marginality as outsiders did not last long (p. 19ff.). As slaves
were progressively integrated into their masters’families and networks,
they started belonging in corporate units of society and thereby acquiring
some rights.
One problem with this argument is the claim that the emphasis on
belonging as an avenue to full personhood (to the point that dependence
appears attractive) is a peculiarly ‘African’idea. Stilwell states repeatedly
that ‘in most African social systems, belonging mattered. Africans could
belong to numerous institutions or corporate groups’(p. 8). This approach
to African slavery is culturalist. In Africa, as elsewhere, belonging to cor-
porate institutions (primarily the family, but also other institutions such as
religious groups, clubs or political parties) provides protection, but at the
same time imposes demands on members. Hierarchical institutions impose
a degree of subordination upon more powerful persons whose support is
fundamental if membership –with the benefits that derive from it –is to
be retained. Are slaves in continuum with kin ‘in Africa’? This is not a his-
torical question, and conceptually it is a non-question: they are or they
aren’t, depending on the kinds of ‘continuities’one wishes to bring into
focus. That both slaves and kin experience ‘dependence’to various
degrees is an unfalsifiable statement, but its heuristic potential is close to
zero.
The claim that this becomes an interesting statement for comparative
purposes, because ‘African personhood’(whatever this is) is based on
belonging, ‘social relationality’and the dependence that follows, is an un-
tenable essentialization. Stilwell knows this, and indeed his book carefully
avoids overgeneralizations. Slavery and Slaving begins with examples of
different African enslaved individuals whose experiences are completely
different. Stilwell explains that ‘these different experiences illustrate just
how difficult it is to discuss slavery across a continent as large and
complex as Africa. Slavery in Africa was diverse’(p. 4). So why force it
into an axiomatic definition that reduces ‘African slavery’across time
and space to the opposite of belonging, because of supposedly ‘African’
aspirations to social relationality? Due to its conceptual elegance, the
Kopytoff–Miers argument is seductive. But the historiography of slavery
in Africa has moved on: careful regional studies have shown that it is a
reductionist essentialization of African slavery. Ferguson would have
benefited from examining this literature. Stilwell, who knows the literature,
is too kind to Kopytoff and Miers, even when his own approach –and that
of other historians of slavery whom he cites –has the potential to overcome
some of the weaknesses of their classic work.
Slavery and Slaving emphasizes the individual experience of enslave-
ment in different African contexts. This is clear from the outset: the
book’s introduction and all following chapters begin with case studies
that focus on individual biography. This level of detail has become possible
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in recent decades thanks to efforts by researchers to recover the voices of
individual African slaves and to provide analyses of their experiences
(Curtin 1967; Olivier de Sardan 1975; Romero 1988; Wright 1993;
Lovejoy and Law 2003; Getz and Clarke 2011; Greene 2011; Hahonou
and Strandsbjerg 2011; McDougall 1998; Rasmussen 1999; Bellagamba
et al. 2013;2016). This literature provides new and important insights
into the experience of dependence, slavery and freedom.
By opening each chapter of his book with snapshots of individual
experiences taken from recent studies of African slavery, Stilwell’s text-
book shares this literature’s emphasis on the historical experience of
enslaved persons as fully fledged individuals, not generic victims,
numbers in a ship or caravan, or anonymous automata following the dic-
tates of an ‘African’culture of belonging. Analysis of these primary
sources suggests that those who ‘chose dependence’(with its distributive
potential) did so only because they failed to access viable alternatives
and become producers, traders or otherwise independent workers within
specific labour relations and systems of production.
THE PRIMACY OF PRODUCTION
Gareth Austin has shown that the transition from slavery to freedom was
facilitated by the development of cash crops (2009). Those who owned
profitable land grew crops that earned them relatively high profits. Such
profits were an incentive to hire workers and thereby increase the output
of crops that had high market value: ‘In those parts of West Africa
where the hiring of wage labour …became widespread in agriculture,
notably in cocoa growing, this was made possible precisely by the profit-
ability of export crops’(Austin 2009: 36). By the same token, the dis-
appearance of the conditions that had facilitated growth in particular
cash-crop economies would potentially result in the return of unfree
labour practices.
Falling prices or increased competition would require cost reductions on
the part of employers unable to offer the same level of wages or hire the
same number of workers. The same circumstances would also undermine
the labourers’ability to bargain for higher wages. The most impoverished
workers would accept lower pay and worsened employment conditions.
Ultima ratio, people unable to own productive resources or find jobs at
home or abroad would make a virtue of necessity and exalt the benefits
of subservience. This suggests that distribution by dependence arises
from dynamics located firmly in production. And production is shaped
by politics: the presence or absence of a centralized state influences the
structure of dependent relations in society.
Stilwell distinguishes African systems of slavery according to the relative
demographic importance of slaves. In ‘high-density’systems, slaves made
up an important proportion of the population and played a central role in
production, with many slaves living in separate agricultural estates. In
‘low-density’systems, they often worked alongside their masters and
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shared living spaces with them. Stilwell suggests that this distinction is
linked to the potential absorption of slaves in the society of the free: that
is, to slaves’potential social mobility. In his view, high-density slavery
tended to be more ‘closed’, and low-density slavery more ‘open’,
because in the former slaves had fewer opportunities for becoming progres-
sively integrated within their masters’families (p. 21). High-density closed-
system slavery was more frequently found in conjunction with powerful
states that had the military power to control large concentrations of
slaves. Low-density open-system slavery was more often associated with
decentralized societies, where slavery permitted the attachment of people
who could not –at least temporarily –make the same claims as free kin
(p. 67).
In the book’sfifth chapter on ‘Slavery and African economies’, Stilwell
discusses land–labour ratios in Africa (especially pp. 128–32). He avoids
the deterministic fallacies of approaches that emphasize relative factor-
endowment ratios as determinants of labour coercion by arguing that, in
places where populations were large and land was relatively scarce, ‘the ab-
solute density of population mattered less than the social organization of
production and reproduction’(p. 129). In other words, even when
‘Nieboer conditions’(Austin 2008) ceased to obtain, retaining unfree
labour was expedient for those actors who sought to maximize profitby
exploiting the labour of vulnerable others.
Chapter 6 focuses on ‘the end of slavery’in the twentieth century. It
illustrates vividly the slaves’struggle for independence, which was primar-
ily a struggle to gain access to productive resources and to move freely to
areas where ex-slaves could access productive land and achieve higher
returns for their work. For some persons and groups, access to property
and paid employment was mediated through the renegotiation of depend-
ence on masters-turned-patrons. Even in such contexts, dependence was
not sought as an end in itself, but as an avenue to achieving greater
control over one’s life.
Stilwell reasserts what is by now one of the most consolidated findings of
African slavery studies: that colonial abolitionism was conservative at best.
Until the 1930s and 1940s, all European colonial administrations sought
to limit the emancipatory impacts of legal abolition and introduced new
forms of unfree labour that were sometimes considered harsher than pre-
colonial slavery (p. 191). But slaves realized that the colonial legal and in-
stitutional framework undermined the power of the slave-owning classes
and unfolded strategies of self-emancipation. Flight and migration were
perhaps the most obvious rejections of dependence. As documented for
Sierra Leone, Italian Somalia, Sudan, Niger, Northern Nigeria,
Tanganyka, Kenya and Zanzibar (pp. 193–8), slave flights exemplified
the slaves’refusal of their former subjection. Most of the slaves who left
looked for land that they could clear and make their own. Slaves in pastor-
al societies struggled to control herds and areas of transhumance
(Mauxion 2012).
Slaves ‘who stayed did so not because African slavery was automatically
assimilative and benign, but because this specific historical period pro-
vided slaves with many more opportunities to expand their rights and to
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force their masters to ameliorate slavery’(pp. 193–4). The most impover-
ished slaves remained in marginal social and economic positions until the
present day, unable to access land or capital or to obtain secure jobs. When
slaves continued to serve former masters, steep power inequalities were
grounded in necessity: there were no better alternatives. Some slaves
shifted hierarchies: they joined the army and Christian or Muslim religious
orders, where their status was measured in terms of military valour or
piety. Others used their relationships with former masters to gain access
to land, brides and hospitality in their former owners’urban residences
(Pelckmans 2012a;2012b). They used what was now a patron–client rela-
tion to facilitate their transition to economic independence.
In South Africa, many of these dynamics took place at an earlier stage,
in the first half of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century historio-
graphy of South African emancipation, some of which is cited by Stilwell
(pp. 185–7), tells a story of successive transitions from slavery to a variety
of similarly exploitative labour systems redefined in racialized terms that
continue to shape present-day labour relations. Discrimination based on
gender, as well as race, continues to affect the opportunities of women
(pp. 205–7). Emancipation from slavery was a slower process for African
women than for men, and pawning and trafficking in women and children
survives today, as discussed in the next section.
As Stilwell shows, understanding these dynamics requires an analysis of
production and reproduction: how is labour controlled, and who can
extract profit from existing arrangements? A focus on ‘distribution’
cannot simply replace an analysis of production on the grounds that the
primacy of production is ‘a stubborn idea’of the productivist left
(Ferguson, pp. 44–5). If Ferguson wishes to challenge Marx, to whom
he attributes the view that ‘distribution …was explicitly secondary and de-
rivative’(p. 45), he has to show that production relations are not primary.
WHO BENEFITS FROM DEPENDENCE?
Belonging –and the dependence that belonging entails –matters in Africa.
Or so we are told. But from the perspective of vulnerable youths perceived
as expendable and pawnable, ‘belonging’in their family did not avert an
even worse form of ‘belonging’as pawns. In the colonial and postcolonial
periods, those who bought women and children tried to make slaves or
pawns pass as wives and relatives (Lawrance and Roberts, p. 10). They
hoped that authorities would automatically defer to ‘African tradition’
and would not challenge women’s and children’s subordination –or the
profits that those who controlled their labour derived from that subordin-
ation. They probably hoped that colonial administrators would assume
that ‘dependence is after all a good thing’for (certain) Africans. This sim-
plistic assumption has been, and continues to be, central to external inter-
pretations of African society and labour. Perhaps interpreters such as
Ferguson should be less worried about their supposedly ethnocentric pro-
pensity to feel ‘uneasy’about the dependence of Africans, and should
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rather worry about their propensity to naturalize African dependence, and
to accept it as a deep-seated African ‘social logic’.
The inclusivist tendencies discussed above influenced the historically
attested African preference for female slaves over male slaves, which was
reflected in the higher demand for, and higher prices of, female slaves
(see Robertson and Klein 1997). The question of whether dependent
women (and slave women in particular) were valued primarily for their
sexual and reproductive functions, or if they were valued mainly as
workers, generated substantial debate among historians of African
slavery without reaching closure (see Klein 2014 for a recent reassessment).
This question remains relevant in the light of the ‘persistence of demand’
for trafficked women and children in African societies today (Lawrance
and Roberts, p. 9).
Contemporary African wars have resulted in widespread abductions
and sexual enslavement of girls and women by African militias. At least
in some cases, such as the case of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, the
abduction of women was aimed at enabling the reproduction of the move-
ment through the control of women’s sexual and reproductive capabilities
(Baines 2014; Apio 2016). Does this count as evidence of the continued
relevance of ‘wealth in people’in circumstances where the offspring of
abducted women can be controlled more effectively than those of other
women? How do women perceive their dependence?
The volume edited by Lawrance and Roberts shows that contemporary
trafficking and enslavement are not ‘new’phenomena, but the latest
reconfigurations of forms of enforced dependence that have deep historical
roots in African societies. They show, too, that the harshest forms of social
dependence today (comparable to pre-abolition slavery) primarily affect
African women and children. One section of the introduction is entitled
‘Traffic in dependents’(pp. 8–10). It shows that those trafficked into
slavery were often pawns, and sometimes the kin of those initiating their
trafficking. Belonging, after all, did not always afford security to
African dependants: different persons can turn ‘belonging’into a means
of protection (of family members, for example, or dependants whose
loyalty one wishes to win) or, alternatively, of exploitation (of family
members or dependants who are seen as expendable and/or ‘pawnable’).
What matters is the specificity of the circumstances under which depen-
dants are protected or exposed. Such circumstances are historically and so-
cially shaped: when is it possible, profitable or necessary to use dependent
and exploitable labour? Roberts emphasizes the issue of demand:
At the core of the problem of trafficking lies the issue of demand. Those at the end of the
chain of acquisition of dependent and exploitable labor are interested in acquiring labor
for a whole host of reasons, including enhancing patriarchy, power, and financial reward.
(p. 12)
But ‘the issue of demand’is not generically African: where there is a
demand for profit, there is also a demand for exploitable labour. Such
demand will be couched in a variety of cultural idioms, as those seeking
dependants attempt to legitimize their acts as forms of patronage.
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The question, therefore, is not whether we can prove that dependence is a
vital coping mechanism ‘in Africa’, but under which conditions –in
specific social contexts –certain individuals can exploit the labour of depen-
dants, and what mechanisms make dependants accept these circumstances.
Elisabeth McMahon’s chapter explores the social vulnerability of
women and children in nineteenth-century East Africa by looking at
three cases taken from the 1880s and 1890s. She shows that women and
children were the most vulnerable to being kidnapped and enslaved,
often repeatedly (p. 32). This suggests that kidnappers targeted persons
without reliable ‘male “protectors”(husbands, fathers, adult sons,
owners)’(p. 33). The slave’s or the enslaveable’s fear of being isolated
(p. 34) demonstrates that belonging sometimes can indeed be essential if
one is to escape the dangers inherent in isolation.
The case of Mia is telling. Mia had been captured on the mainland and
put in an Arab dhow with other enslaved persons to be sold on Pemba
Island, a part of the Zanzibar archipelago. A British navy vessel
engaged the dhow and, following a skirmish, killed the slavers. Making
it to shore, Mia and the other captives scattered and sought the help of
local communities. Mia reached the town of Chake Chake and sought
the help of the liwali, who gave her freedom but ‘committed her to the
care’of Ibrahim bin Madini (p. 38). Mia lived on the shamba (small
farm) of Ibrahim for ten years, but eventually moved out on her own in
1893, when she rented a small plot of land from a woman called Binti
Hamadi. Mia supported herself by making pots and growing vegetables.
After three years, Amur bin Suleiman, Binti Hamadi’s husband, surprised
her in her hut, tied her up, and brought her to the shamba of a man named
Masood bin Abdullah. After ten days in captivity, Mia escaped and went
to the vice consul. Questioned by this official, Masood stated that he
believed Mia to be one of his runaway slaves and had paid Amur to retrieve
her. Amur denied kidnapping her. According to Mia, Amur knew she was a
free woman, because he had made inquiries with Ibrahim when she tried to
rent land from his wife. This inquiry had given him knowledge of Mia’sstory
and potential vulnerability in Pemba, and he had taken advantage of it.
Mia had tried to live autonomously and support herself through the
fruits of her small-scale business. But as an independent woman she was
peculiarly vulnerable. It was not only that the sexual division of labour
did not offer the same horizon of opportunities to men and women,
making women less likely to employ dependent workers and achieve eco-
nomic mobility. It was also that African and European gender ideologies
on Pemba saw women’s autonomy as an aberration. Given the economic
risks implicit in autonomy and the ideological consistency of discourses
that stigmatized autonomous women, the majority of women had few
alternatives but to embrace dependence and concentrate their efforts on
finding a benign patron.
The view that family or marriage relations were intrinsically benign and
necessary for women’s‘protection’meant that official representatives
avoided adjudicating in ‘family affairs’. As shown by Marie Rodet in
her chapter on Kayes in the French Soudan (today’s Mali), ‘the adminis-
tration, on the pretext that they did not wish to interfere in local customs,
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limited whenever possible their intervention in pawnship cases’(p. 95). In
what was perceived as ‘local custom’, the distinction between wife and
slave was often blurred, as was that between slaves and pawns and fostered
children (p. 94). These attitudes resulted in a lack of institutional support
for the emancipation of many enslaved women, whose situations were
deemed ‘indigenous marriage’rather than lingering cases of slavery.
Their dependence did not strike administrators as undesirable.
Rodet examines a large number of cases, most of which are based on
court records from the period 1900–39. The picture that emerges is one
of marginal young women and children enmeshed in layers of dependence.
A case in point is that of a four-year-old girl who was entrusted to a trades-
woman from Nioro by her impoverished father. In a 1936 investigation,
the tradeswoman showed the authorities a paper signed by the District
Officer (Commandant de cercle) that was a declaration of marriage
between the four-year-old girl and the woman’s nephew, who was about
fifty:
The inquiry concluded that the commandant had probably signed the paper without veri-
fying the age of the ‘spouses.’The administration entrusted the young girl, whose parents
had died in the meantime, to a local notable, where she probably continued to work as a
maid. (p. 95)
Part II of the volume includes contributions that focus on contemporary
trafficking and anti-trafficking. Some of these chapters expose continuities
with the historical case studies, in spite of differences in the legal frame-
work. Susan Kreston’s chapter tells the story of Elsie, a South African
girl sold when she was about ten years old to a German man who exploited
her sexually until she ran away. She soon entered a chain of relationships in
which she was prostituted and abused by seven subsequent sex traffickers.
Some may argue that at the origin of Elsie’s sufferings is a deficit of
‘belonging’, as her mother did not want her and left her with her grand-
mother, upon whose death she went to live with her uncle and aunt who
sold her to the German. To me this case demonstrates that ‘belonging’
per se does not do anything. Belonging is as belonging does.
One of the strengths of Lawrance and Roberts’volume is that it does not
focus only on the ‘victim–perpetrator’dyad, but also examines critically
the position of self-fashioned ‘saviours’and ‘freedom fighters’. In his
probing analysis of the tropes of neo-abolitionist NGOs, Benjamin
Lawrance discusses the deployment of parental testimony in a way that
does not challenge the central assumption of NGOs that ‘African’local
communities and families collectively need rescuing (p. 174).
Professionals who collect testimonies on behalf of human rights NGOs
must represent African testimonies in ways that justify their mandate to
salvage generic African ‘victims’(p. 173). These discourses gloss over
structural inequalities of opportunity between different categories of
Africans, some of whom are more vulnerable than others to harsh forms
of dependence and unfreedom. Instead of blaming ‘economic crisis’for
a generic ‘African poverty’, studies should focus on how particular institu-
tions make certain categories of people more vulnerable than others.
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Arguing that parents, children, spouses, masters, employers, employees,
prostitutes or pimps take part in culturally shaped ‘aspirations to social
relationality’is a functionalist argument that does little to explain who
benefits from certain types of relationships and institutions, who does
not, and why. A person can be dependent in multiple fields: Mia, the an-
onymous four-year-old girl in colonial Kayes and Elsie were all margina-
lized by virtue of their age, gender and status. Dependence was not what
they aspired to. It was their only option. Struggling for freedom would
have been too dangerous for them; too many actors would have interpreted
their struggle as the fault of a ‘rebellious’temper unsuited to women of
their status. Experience made them aware of the scarce support that any
effort to seek autonomy on their part would elicit. The uncritical assump-
tion that ‘perhaps dependence is a good thing’in Africa risks undermining
the potential of research to scrutinize critically different forms of depend-
ence upon fathers/parents, husbands/partners, guardians, employers,
patrons or state officials, as the case may be.
CONCLUSION
De facto if not de jure, unfree labour relations in Africa (and elsewhere)
continue to be reproduced by several economic institutions –such as
a lively regional, continental and global market in African women and
children; and global labour regimes that benefit from the employment
of workers (often migrants) who do not possess the protection of the
law and are therefore hyper-exploitable and unfree, if not enslaved.
Alternatives in the form of decent employment opportunities are
narrow, and are likely to remain so if the ‘unemployability’of Africans
becomes an accepted mantra in academic and policy writings on this
subject.
The idea that dependence ‘works’for Africans is based on a misinter-
pretation of circumstances in which the most vulnerable actors have a
limited range of realistic opportunities to avoid extreme destitution and ex-
ploitation. In these circumstances, patronage and dependence are desir-
able, and would be equally desirable to any representative of the human
species. Neoliberal multinationals and other employers trying to maximize
their profits at the cost of human dignity take advantage of the willingness
of vulnerable people in order to obtain labour at the cheapest rates. Far
from being more ‘humane’, so-called traditional institutions similarly
take advantage of the vulnerability of women and children who are
(often, but not always) denied alternatives due to sex or gender ideologies
that define them as incapable of doing ‘aman’s job’or that give control
over their sexual and reproductive potential to someone other than
themselves.
Conditions of safety from extreme destitution and the threat of violence
must exist if marginalized persons are to come forward and claim auton-
omy. If such persons do not, it is not because they have an intrinsic pref-
erence for dependence. It is because the institutional and cultural
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landscape in which they live has in-built barriers to their emancipation.
There is a risk that cash transfers and BIG would facilitate the structural
reproduction of exploitation and unfreedom by enabling the reproduction
of a large reserve of exploitable labour declared ‘unemployable’and forced
to accept exploitative relations to secure mere survival. But it is also pos-
sible that such policies, decoupled from the ‘unemployability’axiom,
would afford protection to vulnerable groups and provide them with incen-
tives to negotiate better working and living conditions. Assessing whether
the latter scenario is at all realistic would require an inquiry into the eco-
nomic and political feasibility of an expansion of social welfare in different
African countries. The lesson from the historiography of African slavery
and emancipation is that optimism is unwarranted. Abolitionist govern-
ments, be they colonial or independent, refrained from supporting margin-
al ex-slaves whenever facilitating their emancipation through redistributive
policies would have been detrimental to the interests of political and eco-
nomic elites.
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