Claire C. Robertson
Consideration of women and slavery in Africa has overturned many inaccurate stereotypes about slavery and women. In 1983 Robertson and Klein challenged the dominance of stereotypes established in the slavery literature by scholars of male plantation slavery in the United States and the Caribbean, chattel slavery practiced by Europeans, with the publication of Women and Slavery in Africa. African historians such as Lovejoy (2007) and Nwokeji (2001) established that the sex ratios predominating in the Atlantic slave trade, in which normally two‐thirds of those exported from Africa were male, were determined primarily by socioeconomic conditions in Africa, which prioritized the demand for female slaves. Europeans’ higher demand for male labor reflected assumptions about men’s higher capacity for agricultural labor, and made for a symbiotic relationship expressed in the usual sex ratio, which varied depending on local conditions in Africa (Nwokeji 2001).
Moreover, historians of African slavery have now generally assimilated the concept, pioneered by Kopytoff and Miers (1977), of slavery as a continuum of statuses rather than one thing, abandoning the dominance of chattel slavery as definitional of all slavery. Chattel slaves can be defined as having no property rights but being property themselves (i.e., they can be sold), as having no personhood before the law, and as having been removed from natal kin relations. However, even studies of chattel slavery have for some time questioned aspects of this definition, given evidence of slaves reconstituting kin relationships fictively or biologically and securing limited property rights, for instance. In Africa, however, more slavery systems can be termed lineage, or assimilative. Highly varied economic structures meant that in a few areas – the Sahel, Zanzibar clove plantations, southern Nigerian palm oil plantations – and mainly in the nineteenth century, varieties of chattel slavery were practiced (in South Africa from the seventeenth century on whites practiced chattel slavery of Africans and others). More common and less onerous forms of lineage or assimilative slavery reflected a general African practice of increasing the free members of a society through biological reproduction and of assimilating members acquired first by enslavement, unlike chattel systems aimed at creating a permanent underclass supplying cheap labor. The characteristics of lineage slavery were fundamental to the high valuation of women as slaves in much of Africa.
The process of enslavement for those captured or sold into slavery was usually brutal. The treatment of those subsequently assimilated into their owners’ societies generally reflected their degree of assimilation, the limits of assimilation within a society, and its progress over their lifetime. Many African societies practicing slavery (most did not) had no second‐generation slavery. The continuum of disadvantaged statuses within African societies included pawnship at the lesser end, whereby junior members of debtor lineages, usually female, were lent to a creditor’s household, where their labor secured the loan by paying the interest on it. With repayment they were supposed to return to their own lineage, but in practice they often married their creditor or a member of his or her lineage, with forgiveness of the debt serving as the customary bridewealth payment to her lineage. Also at the less oppressive end of the continuum were (usually male) clients who were technically unfree before customary law but who had complete freedom of movement, to marry, and to own property (even slaves) themselves, in exchange for a form of sharecropping or a monthly or yearly payment to the owner.
Precolonial slavery in Africa, then, often did not conform to a typical chattel slavery model but was highly varied, especially for women. In many societies “free” women did not have full rights; gradations of servitude existed such that the statuses of free, freed, pawned, indentured, junior wife, concubine, maidservant, “free” worker, dependent, and slave shaded into each other and/or represented different stages in a woman’s life or of assimilation into a new society. Often the status of a nominally “free” but junior female was in practice indistinguishable from that of a female slave, at least in terms of the work that they did. Given that even during early colonialism, when slavery was still commonly practiced (Cooper 1997), age was still more important than gender in determining authority and privileges (Robertson 1984), the assertions of those enslaved as children that they were treated like free persons make sense.
Gradations in status are clear in the synthesis of the structural and socioeconomic implications for women of slavery made by Robertson and Klein (1983), who concluded that there were more female slaves held in Africa than male because of (1) primarily, their high reproductive (defined as domestic work) and productive (for commodity production) labor value and, secondarily, for their biological reproductive function; (2) their value in relation to replacing the extensive labor expected of freewomen, who consequently often were the primary users, supervisors, and owners of women slaves; (3) their value in expanding the numbers of lineage members, especially in a situation of low population exacerbated by the Atlantic slave trade and within patrilineal systems, where assimilation as junior wives or concubines was easier than in matrilineal ones; (4) women’s higher vulnerability to enslavement than men because of liabilities within socioeconomic structures; and (5) colonial emancipation favoring men since women were more likely to have been assimilated within lineages, their status as slaves masked as relatives. Women had more difficulty getting money to achieve self‐emancipation, were reluctant to leave their children, and did more of the labor‐intensive unskilled work, while men secured more skilled wage labor. Most subsequent case studies have supported these generalizations which demonstrate the higher utility of women than men slaves.1
If, historically, African forms of slavery were highly varied, those variations manifested themselves for women and girls particularly in the work that bondwomen did, in the gendered division of labor, in the forms and degrees of assimilation in various societies, in the rights of slave women, especially regarding property ownership, in the varied cultural influences of women slaves, and in the differing treatment of chattel and lineage slaves. These aspects are considered in the discussion that follows.
The work of female slaves, both domestic and in commodity production, has usually been underestimated. Domestic work often has not been considered to be work. Some have assumed that all women’s work was/is domestic, with no economic value. Therefore, women’s slavery has not been seen as a labor system but rather as a method of recruiting concubines or of increasing the population and influence of lineages. However, the understanding of the economics of African social systems has been substantially furthered by the study of women and slavery, and has in turn influenced the breaking of stereotypes in the study of slavery elsewhere. There was high variation in the types of work done by women slaves, from mining gold in the Gold Coast and Madagascar (Campbell 2007), to many routinized labor‐intensive horticultural tasks, to processing cloves on Zanzibar, to trading independently or helping women traders, to making thread for male weavers, to highly diversified household tasks involved in processing and cooking food, doing laundry (Jordan 2007), house cleaning, cultivating gardens and fields, taking care of children and the elderly, and often compulsory sexual relations, which for many women was sex work. Some owners farmed out slaves as prostitutes, gave them away as booty to loyal soldiers, profited from their involvement in trade, and/or used them as bridewealth to secure wives. Along with their function as pawns, all of these were economic uses, although female slaves were also valued socially to a greater or lesser extent depending on the society. The high value of women’s work not only meant that prices for women slaves in African markets usually were higher than for male slaves, but also that their emancipation was fiercely opposed in many cases, as documented by Burrill and Roberts (2010) and Austin (1994), and could be accompanied by a fair amount of domestic violence against women when men tried to coerce free female labor.
Wealth in precolonial Africa usually depended on how much labor a person or lineage controlled, and therefore was counted in people: family, dependents, clients, slaves, wives, children. Landownership was not usually private (Ethiopia’s feudal system was an exception) but depended on the capacity to use it, that is, the amount of labor available to work it, which in turn determined the amount of disposable surplus available to reward supporters or to sell, key elements of power. Most precolonial labor‐intensive horticultural labor was done by women, as well as most household tasks (Law 1995; Martin 1995). Slave women’s labor replaced and/or supplemented the labor of freewomen, which was considerable and essential to societal survival. A sex‐segregated division of labor made women slaves primarily the helpers of women owners or supervisors.
Slavery is a labor system above all, and is not mitigated by the sexual uses of slaves but exacerbated by them. For women, slavery often involved sex work, not only as prostitutes, although that was relatively common in urban chattel slavery. It is widely recognized that compulsory sexual relations were characteristic of most forms of slavery for women. Enslaved women and girls were frequently raped or otherwise subjected to compulsory sexual relations, especially in the slave trade. Forced or asymmetrically consensual, the sexual relations of women slaves could be a route to advancement, as when they bore children to the owner or a member of his lineage and were assimilated by becoming a junior wife or concubine.
Paradoxically, given the usual sexualized Euro‐American stereotype that slave women, especially in harems, were primarily valued for sex and biological reproduction, one situation where a slave woman’s sexuality might not have been valued was in harems. From North African harems to the multitudes of rulers’ wives in places like Dahomey or Kano, it seems that secluded slave women were more likely to be household drudges than sex slaves (Nast 2005; Ennaji 1999; Klein 2007), protected along with their free cohorts from random sexual impositions by their seclusion and the authority of the ruler. The North African Barbary Coast pirate slave trade, which largely coincided with the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved perhaps a million Europeans over its history and provided a few concubines to royal harems (Davis 2003), but slave narratives from women suggest that most of these women performed domestic rather than sex work (Baepler 1999). In general, slavery in Muslim nations involved a wide range of statuses for male slaves, ranging from royal adviser to galley slave, but these were less varied for females.
Differing social structures were largely determinant of assimilative processes in lineage slavery. West African empires such as Asante, Dahomey, and the Sokoto Caliphate practiced slavery on a large scale as a core element of their society, and exported many slaves. They often established slave villages, meaning that many slaves were effectively segregated from freed persons. However, many coastal and decentralized societies had small‐scale lineage slavery primarily with the intention of incorporating more people into their society. Both matrilineal and patrilineal societies often found women slaves to be more easily assimilable, structurally and socially. Girls’ socialization to be obedient to their elders, especially men, made them easier to control. In patrilineal societies slave women became junior wives, who were usually free once they had borne a child to the owner or a member of his family. That child was free, since most slavery was only for one generation, and freed slaves and/or their children expanded the numbers of free people. In some societies those with slave ancestry bore a permanent stigma but just as often they did not. In Kano and Dahomey some slave women bore heirs to the throne and achieved freedom, eminence, and power in so doing (Nast 2005; Bay 1998; Mack 1990). In matrilineal societies freewomen determined descent and lineal affiliation, but male dominance was often still a factor and men might opportunistically take slave wives to create de facto patrilineages to their own advantage, since slave women usually lost their own lineage affiliation with their enslavement. This successful strategy could give a man control over not only his sisters’ sons but also his slave wives’ children. Therefore, the malleability of kin connections in Africa could maximize the desirability of owning women slaves.
One of the more astonishing aspects of women and slavery in Africa for those wedded to stereotypical Western notions of chattel slavery is that in many African lineage systems slaves, including women, could own property. This was more common for women in West Africa than elsewhere. Eastern and southern African precolonial kinship systems were more likely than central and western African systems to treat women as male property, but in West Africa freewomen had property rights for the most part; some freewomen not only owned slaves but traded them, and occasionally slave women owned slaves, as in coastal Senegal, the Gold Coast, Bissau, and southern Nigeria (Robertson and Klein 1983; Brooks 1976, 1983; Havik 2007). Some North African privileged slave concubines owned slaves (Trout Powell 2012). Although slave men were more likely to have the resources to own slaves, some women of slave origin achieved this status, especially those who rose to royal status in Dahomey (Bay 1998). Sometimes it was a more successful strategy to better oneself through buying slaves than it was to purchase one’s own freedom in systems where slavery resembled clientage and slaves had a fair degree of autonomy. Before and after the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast (1874) some women actually expanded their slave ownership, buying young girls used for domestic and trade purposes, according to Adu‐Boahen (2009, 2010, 2011). Elsewhere, as in Mozambique, elite women could own slaves (Rodrigues 2008); in dominantly Muslim countries Muslim law allowed women to own property including slaves. Candido (2012) delineated class differences between women slaves in Benguela, where elite concubines commanded the labor of poor domestic slaves, who were more likely to be subjected to sexual violence.
The institution of woman‐to‐woman marriage, which is widespread in Africa, allowed some prosperous women to become “husbands” and to take junior women as wives by paying the bridewealth or buying a female slave, thereby creating a de facto matrilineage within a patrilineal system, or by raising children who belonged to their deceased husband’s lineage. Clearly, African kinship and legal variations, especially with regard to women and slavery, do not follow the chattel slave model, both in the types of work women did and in their mutable status. That could vary over their lifetimes from enslavement in youth to childbearing and freedom in maturity, and occasionally to wealth when trading brought the ownership of slaves.
If most African women slaves were ultimately assimilated into their owners’ societies, one might expect them to have had a substantial cultural influence. That influence, as well as their capacity to develop an autonomous slave culture, depended on such factors as their housing, numbers, and positions within a society; the nature of their work activities; cultural attitudes; and their degree of assimilation and autonomy of action. In general, chattel slaves were less able to influence wider society. For instance, chattel slavery as practiced in South Africa by white settlers against local peoples varied from place to place depending on whether or not, for instance, slaves were involved primarily in domestic tasks or in agricultural labor. Their cultural impact on white society was severely limited by racism. Woodward (2002) emphasized the high limitations on slave autonomy posed for women chattel slaves at the Cape, who mostly did domestic work and consequently had no opportunity based on separate space to organize collective resistance or to develop or maintain a specific material culture.
Assimilative slavery could diminish the possibility of forming a separate slave culture, and/or increase slave women’s cultural influence depending on the situation. For example, Brooks (1976, 1983), Mouser (1983), Greene (1997), MacCormack (1983), and Candido (2012) describe how in coastal West and west Central Africa women who were or had been slaves, some of whom achieved business success and therefore owned slaves themselves, often founded new lineages with stranger men, which ultimately became influential as cultural intermediaries with the outside world. Bay (1998) and Obichere (1978) described women slaves who rose in the Dahomean royal palace to become concubines and sometimes queen mothers, when their sons became rulers. Large cultural diversity within the palace arose from the presence of women slaves of many different ethnicities, while cross‐ethnic marriages could also have a strong political impact for alliances.
At a less exalted level, Eastman (1987) described how inland slave women who were exported to East African coastal households influenced their Arabized owners culturally, while Strobel (1979) elaborated on a slave women’s culture in Mombasa as embodied in women’s dance groups, but also noted that slave women tried to transcend their status through assimilative behavior and hypergamy. Kenyon (2009) described how important slave women and their descendants were culturally and politically to efforts by the Condominium government to establish colonies in underpopulated areas of Sudan, while Diawara (1989) pointed to the often ignored essential contributions of slave women to preserving oral traditions and to cultural production as griottes in Mali.
If assimilated slaves could have a positive influence, realistic assessment of slavery’s processes and consequences for women in Africa, as well as its changes over time, including the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in particular, are still necessary. While moving to their final destinations in Africa, slaves most often experienced much brutal oppression. The harrowing account by Toledano (1981) of the rape, pregnancy, and forced abortion of a Circassian slave girl taken to Cairo by slave dealers in the mid‐nineteenth century is not unique. Missionary accounts and court records provide documentation for South Africa, in particular, of the extreme maltreatment of female chattel slaves (Woodward 2002; Scully 1997). Abrahams (1996) amply illustrated the perils of European captivity for Sara Bartman, a woman whose body was exhibited in Britain and France while she was alive and, against her wishes, after she died at a relatively young age.
While it is customary to assume that women slaves in assimilative systems were better treated – and some did achieve power and wealth – some sources critique that formulation. Shields (2009) described the particularly high vulnerability of women traders in Yorubaland to being kidnapped into slavery, the competition posed by importing many male Hausa slaves who entered into trade and industry, and the increase in child labor as the nineteenth century progressed. She noted the violent treatment of both free and enslaved women, including their sexual exploitation. Consequently, many women fled to missions or to Lagos when the cost of redemption increased; they were also vulnerable to re‐enslavement if they managed to achieve manumission. McMahon (2012) also emphasized the many perils for women and children, in particular in nineteenth‐century East Africa, that often eventuated in re‐enslavement, which is confirmed by Swema’s experiences, as analyzed by Alpers (1983). The liminality induced by slave ancestry (lack of protection by a free lineage), famine, and economic crisis made some women and children especially likely to be enslaved and re‐enslaved (see also Wright 1993). The youth of many female slaves, even in systems most advantageous to them, could factor into maltreatment from a contemporary perspective now, given that beating children was routine in some societies and that age brought authority for both free and enslaved women.
Then we need to consider the gendered impact of African slave exports. There were several substantial export slave trades affecting Africa, which had differing sex ratios for the enslaved, with more women exported than men across the Sahara, to the Middle East, and possibly into the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trades, while more men were exported in the transatlantic trade. Bush (2008) had perhaps the most optimistic reading of slave women’s experiences of the Middle Passage when she stressed their abilities to form new social networks and to transmit culture. Any societal practice involving the systematic subjugation of individuals who were deprived of rights, even temporarily, is liable to corruption by systems that are more oppressive and that may enslave them permanently. The transatlantic slave trade could affect local societies such that some began slaving that had not had slavery before, that women had to do more of men’s work, that polygyny intensified with the absence of more men (Manning 1981; Thornton 1983), and that local slavery became more like chattel slavery, for instance, as described by Miller (1988) in Angola. Ritualized “slavery,” which Achebe (2010) questions as having originally been a form of slavery, could become more oppressive and did in Igboland. Under the pressure of the Atlantic slave trade, the Igbo Aro oracle condemned more persons to slavery for minor infractions and profit (Ekejiuba 1972). Curto (2003) documented the life of Nbena, an Angolan free woman enslaved through a woman slave’s trickery, sold by an African owner, but paradoxically freed under the Portuguese concept of “original freedom.” More generally, females who were supposed to be pawns sometimes ended up, contrary to legal custom, as trade slaves who were exiled permanently from their own people. Nonetheless, in Sudan, as shown by Sikainga (1996), noblewomen could own slaves according to sharia law, and therefore could, and in at least one case did, get involved in slave trading. It is therefore dangerous to try to generalize about women and slavery, even regionally, in Africa, for external and internal factors could influence changes in forms of slavery practiced within a society.
Slavery is based on violence against persons, which of course has an impact on the self‐image and other aspects of identity of those enslaved. Mandala (1990) considered the impact of enslavement on women slaves’ sense of identity in looking at the shattering effects of being kidnapped by foreign traders in the lower Tchiri Valley. Ogbomo (1997) also factored in considerations of identity while examining the impact on gender relations of slave raiding on the Owan of Nigeria. Robertson (2003) argued that African women, enslaved or not, based a strong part of their identity on their capacity for work, which was also valued when men chose wives. This aspect of identity went with them to the Americas, and found expression in slave narratives.
Aspects of slave women’s identity involving seeking freedom and marital respectability can be seen in many African slave narratives. Robertson (1983), Wright (1983), and Strobel (1979) described the aspirations of African slave women in West and East Africa to achieve respectability by making a legal marriage in which bridewealth was paid. The problem was that slave women had no natal lineage members to receive it. Full assimilation would have meant that the owner’s lineage would receive it but, since a bondwoman’s partner normally belonged to the owner’s lineage, that lineage could not accept bridewealth, given issues of incest. Strobel (1979) stressed Mombasa slave women’s efforts to assert freedom and respectability through arranging their own marriages. Wright (1983) questioned the effectiveness of assimilation, given that Bwanikwa, a slave whose history she analyzed, felt that only emancipation would bring full assimilation. McDougall (1998) used oral history to reconstruct the story of Fatma Barka, a twentieth‐century Moroccan slave woman who, despite a highly varied life characterized by the vicissitudes of both slavery and freedom, developed and valued a sense of self. Scully (1997) claimed that slave emancipation in the Western Cape of South Africa was connected to both culture and identity and imbricated with notions of family relations. More scholarly attention to slave women’s dress and music, as in Strobel (1979), might bring to light more information about identity.2
While there have been valiant and successful efforts to demonstrate change over time in precolonial slavery systems in Africa, such as those documented by Greene (1996), Deutsch (2007), Achebe (2010), and Chanock (1982), these efforts are made difficult by a scarcity of written sources; they work best where there is a rich oral history. The later days of precolonial forms of slavery in Africa are most fully documented. With the imposition of colonial rule, established in most of Africa in the late nineteenth century, written and oral sources became more abundant. They facilitated a boom in studies of the impact of emancipation. One of the primary British justifications for the imposition of colonial rule was to end slavery. The British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1834 and used their navy to interdict slave shipments from West Africa, in particular.3 Racism inflected their abolition movement (Robertson 2013), and therefore slaves freed from the ships they impounded were normally not allowed to return home but were sent to be converted by missionaries in Sierra Leone, hence Freetown’s name.
Often the first ordinance the British promulgated with the establishment of colonial rule outlawed slavery. However, their efforts regarding female slaves fell far short of their goal, vitiated both by local resistance in the form of claims that women slaves were relatives like junior wives or concubines when these tried to achieve freedom by complaining to colonial courts, and by colonial officers’ reluctance to interfere in “domestic arrangements,” which they normally left to the local courts in indirect rule. Thus, Sikainga (1995) documented the tendency in Sudan for the sharia courts to deny slave women’s manumission efforts, given the valuable productive and reproductive roles of women slaves, while McDougall (2007) found similarities between Mauretania and Sudan in this regard, which have allowed women’s slavery to continue, as has Ruf (1999). Getz and Clarke (2011) used graphic history illustrations, or cartoons, to convey the history recovered from court records of Abina, a Gold Coast slave who was enslaved after the imposition of colonial rule and who then sought and achieved her freedom through the court. Deutsch (2007) tracked women slaves through court records from German East Africa (now Tanzania), who in the late nineteenth century fled to missions or used the courts to claim their freedom. Lovejoy (1988) demonstrated how, despite a supposed commitment to the abolition of slavery, British officials in northern Nigeria collaborated with local influential men to continue slave concubinage into at least the 1920s, probably in exchange for male cooperation in indirect rule.
Women slaves also encountered problems with emancipation precisely because of assimilative tendencies within many societies and/or male dominant customary social arrangements. Women were reluctant to leave their free children, who usually belonged to their free fathers, often their owners. While in some areas, as in the French West African Sahel, thousands of male slaves abandoned their owners for urban migration or to return home after emancipation, females usually stayed where they were. In late colonial slavery mostly young girls were enslaved, who often did not remember their homes or have the means to return. Many freed women, who were successfully integrated into their owners’ societies, did not return to their natal societies. Cases were common where slave owners claimed ownership of “freed” women’s children as a mechanism to keep the women and to expand their lineages, an explanation that was more often than not accepted by the courts and was even applicable in chattel slavery areas. Scully (1997) stated that in the Western Cape in South Africa both slaves and owners saw slavery through the lens of gender relations, which shaped slaves’ access to freedom. Strobel (1979) demonstrated that the main area of contestation between slave owners and women slaves was the right to arrange their own marriages; the courts did not recognize that right for at least 20 years after the 1907 British proclamation abolishing slavery. Nonetheless, some women fled with their children to Christian mission stations, where their stories were sometimes recorded. In Eweland in the Gold Coast, Greene (2011) documented the emancipation of a couple connected to Christian conversion at a mission station, which resulted not only in the husband freeing the wife but also his other slaves. However, in East Africa the mid‐ to late nineteenth‐century state of widespread insecurity meant that it was sometimes better to belong to an owner capable of defending the household rather than to be a free person without a patron for protection. Escaped slaves were routinely captured and re‐enslaved by others. Whereas in West Africa some slave women, like the Dahomean “Amazons,” could even be soldiers (Bay 1998), nineteenth‐century East African women’s vulnerability to enslavement and re‐enslavement under conditions of widespread raiding and warfare demonstrates that emancipation could worsen the situation of both high‐ and low‐status freewomen.
The colonialists refused to recognize the authority of female rulers, weakening the status of all women in some societies, while imposing Victorian laws that made women male property. That some women slaves were freed through appeals to colonial courts was exceptional. Colonial furthering of cash crop production increased the demand for women’s agricultural labor. Cooper (1997) and Roberts (1984) showed that, in the absence of forced labor by women slaves in southern Niger, men pressured their wives to do more horticultural work and looked for mechanisms to increase and enforce their labor obligations to their husbands. Indeed the emancipation of slaves did not work as it should have in Africa, and could even worsen freewomen’s status. Moreover, colonialism played a strong role in perpetuating contemporary slavery, especially for women.
That said, older forms of servitude in Africa have now generally disappeared, with occasional holdovers like the shrine slaves, trokosi, in Ghana, young girls who serve the priests of local gods. Given by their families to the shrine priests in hopes of securing benefits like helping members escape punishment for crimes, they provide sex and domestic work. This institution violates Ghana’s constitution and signing of various international conventions outlawing slavery, but it is widely condoned (Aird 1999). In the modern world trokosi slavery is seen primarily as a human rights issue, as shown by Boateng (2001) and Gbedemah (2005). Such ritualized forms of servitude have a long history in West Africa and are uncommon now.
Beswick and Spaulding (2010) maintain that modern forms of slavery in Africa have ancient roots. Mack (1990) situated Kano slave concubinage in the context of modern household workers. However, women’s systemic social and economic liabilities were worsened by colonialism and are furthered by neocolonialism (Lawrance and Roberts 2012). Thus, such liabilities have been exacerbated in many cases, making women more likely to be enslaved in new ways, especially through the global trafficking in women (Adepoju 2005; Gramegra 1999; Bales 1999; Lawrance and Roberts 2012). Modern slavery for African women and others usually entails employment in sex, factory, or domestic work around the world. The physical mobility of African women improved with colonial rule (within new borders) as a result of the suppression of raiding and local warfare, enabling some women to become long‐distance traders, for instance. Currently that also means that women frequently leave home in search of better economic opportunities, as men do. Women from West Africa have been enslaved after crossing the Sahara to go to Europe, kidnapped from Senegal into Mauretania, or enslaved from East Africa as servants in societies surrounding the Indian Ocean. Some have found themselves in the United States without passports or recourse when employers abuse them.
The main cause of slavery that links the precolonial status of African women to the contemporary situation is women’s systematic lack of access to key resources and their lower status and lack of opportunities in their societies, as documented in Lawrance and Roberts (2012). Like the economies of most African countries, women’s vulnerabilities make them targets for the downside of the world market economy, unable to protect themselves in the face of the depredations of multinational corporations and their local clients. They do not have to be quiet, however. In the Niger Delta women have led the charge to demand that the oil economy share its profits by helping to develop the region (Turner and Brownhill 2004). In New York some escape in the hope that the authorities will help them, despite their illegal immigrant status (strict immigration laws enable the continuation of slavery). Women resist new forms of enslavement however they can.
How can contemporary slavery be defined? Inflected strongly by male dominance, enabled by illegality and rapid transport, and created by increasingly impoverished neocolonial economies in a context of multinational corporate dominance, slaves are disposable people, as described by Bales (1999) – without rights, removed from kin links, and mostly female. Employers have no investment in their survival, given that they have not been bought and that replacing them is easy when the poor working conditions wear them out. Unlike most past forms of slavery, victims are often lured into precarious situations, although sometimes impoverished families will sell their daughters. Male dominance is key in supporting all forms of contemporary slavery. The typical slave now is female, including in new forms of wage slavery where mainly female factory workers, often immigrants, are paid nominal wages and forced to meet quotas. Unlike free workers, they are locked down at work and in dormitories like US prison workers, and farmed out to businesses at substandard wages.
The literature on modern slavery, whose victims are even more disproportionately female, often fails to consider the gendered implications of this fact. There are millions of slaves in the contemporary world; slavery is condoned in many ways and in many places. Slavery has changed, and most slaves are women. Slavery is now gendered female worldwide, including in Africa.