6 - “He Who Is without Family Will Be the Subject of Many Exactions”

Summary

This chapter presents a case, which involves a relationship between two men, one a former slave, the other a former master. It includes sections of the interviews with Al Haj Biraan Ture, the man of slave descent, and with a descendant of his masters, Al Haj Abdu Siise. Of the people of slave descent the author interviewed, BiraanTure was the only one to openly speak of himself as a slave. There were a number of institutional practices that maintained social boundaries, the most important of which were probably the code of honor and the control exercised by the descendants of the freeborn over Muslim institutions. Both Ture and Siise were prosperous, but in other cases, both slave and master were poor, or the slave had, through hard work, become more prosperous than his former master.