Statuette (Baoulé).

Ivory Coast. Wood, iron, 57 x 13 cm.

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

 

 

Slavery

 

Slavery has undoubtedly existed at all times among the Negroes, although it has been especially developed at the instigation of foreigners: formerly by the inhabitants of North Africa and nearer Asia, and at a more recent epoch by European and American slave traders. Today it has been abolished by the colonising nations, who have ended by destroying that which they worshipped; it is still more effectively abolished by the fact of the disappearance of slave-hunting conquerors and by the cessation of inter-tribal wars: because, outside of a few miserable groups among whom parents sometimes sold their own children in order to procure food for themselves, there have never been other slaves in Negro Africa than the persons captured in war. These became the property of their captors, who could keep them for themselves or sell them.

 

In law, slaves were indeed but cattle. In fact, with the exception of those who were destined for the slave traders and who constituted a veritable merchandise, they were treated by their master as almost on the same footing as the members of his family, often becoming his trusted associates and sometimes being freed by him on his own initiative. As for the children born of slaves, they could not be sold and they made up an integral and inalienable part of the family property, and it was the same with their descendants in perpetuity. These descendants of slaves have become similar to agrarian serfs who, often much more numerous than their lords, constitute, today, what one might call the lower classes, while the persons in a position to prove that their ancestors have always been free are for the most part a minority and form the nobility.