Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa

Henri Médard, Shane Doyle

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445747
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa is a collection of ten studies by the most prominent historians of the region. Slavery was more important in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa than often has been assumed, and Africans from the interior played a more complex role than was previously recognized. The essays in this collection reveal the connections between the peoples of the region as well as their encounters with the conquering Europeans. The contributors challenge the assertion that domestic slavery increased in Africa as a result of the international trade. Slavery in this region was not a uniform phenomenon and the line between enslaved and non-slave labor was fine. Kinship ties could mark the difference between free and unfree labor. Social categories were not always clear-cut and the status of a slave could change within a lifetime.

Contents:
- Introduction by Henri Médard
- Language Evidence of Slavery to the Eighteenth Century by David Schoenbrun
- The Rise of Slavery & Social Change in Unyamwezi 1860–1900 by Jan-Georg Deutsch
- Slavery & Forced Labour in the Eastern Congo 1850–1910 by David Northrup
- Legacies of Slavery in North West Uganda 'The One-Elevens' by Mark Leopold
- Human Booty in Buganda: The Seizure of People in War, c.1700–c.1900 by Richard Reid
- Stolen People & Autonomous Chiefs in Nineteenth-Century Buganda by Holly Hanson
- Women's Experiences of Slavery in Late Nineteenth- & Early Twentieth-Century Uganda by Michael W. Tuck
- Slavery & Social Oppression in Ankole 1890–1940 by Edward I. Steinhart
- The Slave Trade in Burundi & Rwanda at the Beginning of German Colonisation 1890–1906 by Jean-Pierre Chretien
- Bunyoro & the Demography of Slavery Debate by Shane Doyle

One

Violence, Marginality, Scorn & Honour

Language evidence of slavery to the eighteenth century

DAVID SCHOENBRUN*

Introduction

How did words for slaves, captives, dependants, and enslavement used by Bantu-speaking communities in the Great Lakes region of East Africa change and endure in the centuries before 1800? Which of the earlier kinds of violence and ideologies of hierarchy underpinned enslavement and commercial slavery in the nineteenth century? This essay will explore these questions by focusing on two types of language evidence: new words with relatively new meanings for forms of slavery, and new meanings related to slavery that Great Lakes Bantu-speakers attached to words whose earlier meanings had no clear connection to the commercialised forms of marginality that were so prominent in the nineteenth century (see Appendix).¹ The shifts in meanings revealed in the analysis of these words’ semantic variability open up ideas about honour, scorn and hierarchy that distinguish the elite from the common people, the insider from the outsider, and shed light on notions of authority and legal practices that enforced those divides. The shifts in meaning also touch on theories of gender and generation that assigned significant weight to types of work as defining features of individuals and appropriately distinct capacities of different generations. Approaching a history of slaveries in Africa in this manner sidesteps stubborn, recent and highly politicised dichotomies between malignant and benign, open and closed, forms of slavery because it analyses the inventions and extensions of meaning in specific historical contexts. The antiquity of thinking about forms of social marginalisation and experiences of violence must first be assessed as significant historical conclusions in their own right, before exploring how they might have shaped more recent meanings of slavery and enslavement.²

The slaveries mentioned in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century documentary records have very different historical depths, with the great majority reaching no further than the eighteenth century. They emphasised degrees of immobility and social marginalisation in a commercial context. The common concern with fixing slaves inside or outside a particular social nexus, an exclusionist impulse in Great Lakes and coastal East African cultural habits, is much older than the eighteenth century and is linked to broader historical processes than a study of terms for slavery alone can reveal.³ Not every form of social violence with deep historical roots turned into the forms and conditions of ‘enslavement’ familiar from the long nineteenth century. Their histories unfolded in other, sometimes older, contexts. However, within the narrow compass of the slaveries described in the recent, documentary record, the master’s concern to define the nature of the ‘social death’ imposed on slaves comes across clearly. The language evidence in these sources speaks to these claims of the dominant far more than it reveals a slave’s concern to define the nature of her humanity inside and against a master’s social responsibility.⁴ The etymologies of words for slavery and enslavement in the Great Lakes region reveal a consistent obsession with claiming a slave’s marginality, but they also reveal much about the differing historical contexts that generated slaves and the contexts in which the enslaved could work against the sometimes greatly exaggerated rumours of their social deaths.

Those contexts included an agricultural intensification in the region which unfolded around bananas in wetter zones nearer to Lake Victoria, and around cattle and grain in the drier zones to the west of the lake. Larger-scale environmental and climatic shifts, well under way by the opening of the second millennium CE, conditioned these agricultural changes.⁵ Intensified farming and herding created new pressures on land and labour, pressures that supported the growth of centralised political cultures after the sixteenth century, strong militarisms from the seventeenth century, and eventually the growth of commodification, late in the eighteenth century. These more recent developments shaped the social histories of slavery and enslavement outlined in this essay. Widespread social and political hierarchies, especially after the sixteenth century, knitted together by various forms of reciprocity and coercion, constituted the specific contexts for socially marginal persons to think about and pursue their aspirations.⁶ The outlines of agrarian change and the development of centralised political cultures have been developed elsewhere and will only be alluded to in this essay. Other threads – like the social and technological study of violence – have yet to receive careful historical treatment for early periods and have received virtually no study for the eras before the sixteenth century C.E.⁷ The outlines of these stories can only be touched on here. Still, the genealogies of the regional and local meanings given to words for what we might gloss as ‘slavery’ and enslavement, presented in this essay, constitute a first step in that larger project on the social and intellectual history of violence, vulnerability, and authority in Greater Eastern Africa.⁸

We can know rather more about the nature and sources of slavery, enslavement and inequality in the Great Lakes region than one might surmise, given the slight volume of work focused solely on this complex topic.⁹ Studies of the nineteenth century consistently touch on what Europeans perceived as slavery – and some take considerable pains to translate local vocabulary related to these perceptions – but we have very little sustained scholarly inquiry into the intellectual, social, and military genealogies of domination and dependence in the region before the eighteenth century.¹⁰ We know very little about how Africans between the Great Lakes understood commercial slavery and enslavement, and how they managed the combined mercantile and military transformations for which the nineteenth century is infamous. Scholars – including African intellectuals writing throughout the colonial period – often claim that eighteenth-century militarism and its associated dislocations made enslavement common. But this insistence only serves as the baseline against which to measure the gradual commodification of economic life, including the buying and selling of persons and firearms, which engulfed the region after the 1840s. It does little to disentangle the many different sources of slavehood, most pressingly, the older from the newer. This state of affairs is perfectly understandable, given the other attractions the region and its histories have offered to intellectuals, local or otherwise. It is also understandable, given the fact that historical sources on the topic are notoriously recalcitrant for eras before the eighteenth century.

People between the Great Lakes shared a common discourse on the nature of hierarchy and dependence that sustained arguments about who could and could not belong to the different categories in the hierarchies. For much of the time period this essay covers, I cannot hope to reconstruct even a single instance of such arguing, but some of the semantic results of the arguments emerge as different shades of meaning attached to the words people commonly used to name different parts of the hierarchies. Tracing differences in meaning and examining the conditions under which they emerged suggest some of the contents of the arguments and struggles people had over what it meant to belong in the categories they valued and over how to move between them or how to avoid such movement.¹¹ Against these temporally deep and spatially broad currents of still recognisably distinct and, sometimes, frankly disjointed social and intellectual histories, we can begin to make greater sense of the more familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of equality and inequality. These are the questions that guide this essay even though I cannot hope to take up each one in wholly satisfying detail.

An earlier work argued that a host of social, intellectual, economic, agricultural and environmental changes informed the development of ideologies of patriarchal descent and inheritance, ideologies which could be used to exclude certain persons.¹² Changing ideologies of kinship between the Great Lakes shaped the contours of slavery, dependence and vulnerability before the eighteenth century because Great Lakes Bantu-speakers used kinship ideologies to promote some aspects of marginality and set others aside.¹³ This approach to kinship highlights the insight of Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers that a continuum of social integration was central to the nature of ‘slavery’ in Africa, though neither insists on a single static form for that continuum nor downplays issues of struggle and power.¹⁴ The marginality that made dependants vulnerable – and the vulnerability that marginalised people – were created in a variety of ways between the Great Lakes. People could be taken as war prisoners, kidnapped, sold (by relatives, patrons, to pay fines and debts), bought, inherited, and ejected from their communities by legal decision, as a gift to a chief or king or other social superior, or due to illness.¹⁵ The sexually transmitted diseases that afflicted men and women in the region, with the advent of caravanning in the 1840s, may have disproportionately driven women into isolated, vulnerable positions.¹⁶ The prevalence of one or another of these means to create slaves ‘from within’ changed dramatically over time.

Comparative linguistic evidence is well suited to tracing continuities and ruptures in a social formulation like ‘slavery’. This is because the spatial distribution of words and the shapes of the semantic fields they mark reflect both inherited forms whose meaning had force and value across many generations and the innovation of new words or meanings with the emergence of novel conditions for masters and the enslaved. Moreover, studying sequences of change in the densities of terminologies for modes of marginalisation and dependence takes us into the realm of semantic history. When combined with what we know about other aspects of the social history of the Great Lakes region, historical linguistic evidence thus offers a compelling picture of violence and vulnerability which enables their impact on commercial slavery and enslavement in the region to begin to emerge. This history’s most distinctive features include (i) the great antiquity of plunder and pillage; (ii) the emergence before the eighteenth century of generic and gendered social categories for ‘the slave’; (iii) the florescence of different words for new and more commodified sorts of slaves, after the eighteenth century; (iv) the centrality of fear to the performance of honour; and (v) the entanglement of fear and honour with notions of scorn and struggles over the capacity to speak that lie at the heart of owners’ efforts to define ‘the slave’.

Linguistic Evidence and a Poetic of Labelling¹⁷

‘There are always more meanings than words’, the linguist Raimo Anttila has said, but language surprises us with ‘its ability to adapt to such a semantic challenge’.¹⁸ With the radical changes in the conditions of hierarchy and service that unfolded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Great Lakes Bantu languages were put to the test of their semantic c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps & Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Violence, Marginality, Scorn & Honour; Language evidence of slavery to the eighteenth century
• 2. Notes on the Rise of Slavery & Social Change in Unyamwezi; c. 1860–1900
• 3. Slavery & Forced Labour in the Eastern Congo; 1850–1910
• 4. Legacies of Slavery in North West Uganda; The story of the ‘One-Elevens’
• 5. Human Booty in Buganda; Some observations on the seizure of people in war c.1700–1890
• 6. Stolen People & Autonomous Chiefs in Nineteenth-Century Buganda; The social consequences of non-free followers
• 7. Women’s Experiences of Enslavement & Slavery in Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth-Century Uganda
• 8. Slavery & Other Forms of Social Oppression in Ankole; 1890–1940
• 9. The Slave Trade in Burundi & Rwanda at the Beginning of German Colonisation; 1890–1906
• 10. Bunyoro & the Demography of Slavery Debate; Fertility, kinship & assimilation
• References
• Index