Book contents
- African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
- African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword Beyond the Printed Word
- Introduction Finding the African Voice
- Part One Remembering Slavery and the Slave Trade
- Part Two The Verbal Arts and Everyday Objects
- Part Three Documenting Our Own Histories and Cultural Practices
- Part Four Slavery Observed: European Travelers’ Accounts
- 19 Introduction:
- 20 The Story of Saaba
- 21 Zenneb and Saint-André’s Cruise Up the Nile to Dongola
- 22 The Ordeals of Slaves’ Flight in Tunisia
- 23 African Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Manuscript of Jean Godot
- Part Five Administrative Records
- Part Six Legal Records
- Part Seven Recorded Encounters with the Enslaved: Christian Workers in Africa
- Part Eight Documents from Muslim Africa
- Part Nine Living with the Past
- Index
23 - African Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Manuscript of Jean Godot
from Part Four - Slavery Observed: European Travelers’ Accounts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Book contents
- African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
- African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword Beyond the Printed Word
- Introduction Finding the African Voice
- Part One Remembering Slavery and the Slave Trade
- Part Two The Verbal Arts and Everyday Objects
- Part Three Documenting Our Own Histories and Cultural Practices
- Part Four Slavery Observed: European Travelers’ Accounts
- 19 Introduction:
- 20 The Story of Saaba
- 21 Zenneb and Saint-André’s Cruise Up the Nile to Dongola
- 22 The Ordeals of Slaves’ Flight in Tunisia
- 23 African Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Manuscript of Jean Godot
- Part Five Administrative Records
- Part Six Legal Records
- Part Seven Recorded Encounters with the Enslaved: Christian Workers in Africa
- Part Eight Documents from Muslim Africa
- Part Nine Living with the Past
- Index
Summary
For the past five centuries, slavery constituted the most striking aspect of personal dependency in Africa. It affected quite high percentages of the population and only came largely to an end in the early twentieth century. More challenging is the task of finding African slave voices within the early-modern European-language sources on African slavery. The document presented in this chapter is an early-eighteenth-century French manuscript in two volumes listed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France under the label Voyages de Jean Godot tant a l'Amerique, Afrique, Asie. The manuscript, long forgotten in a miscellanea collection, was brought to the attention of African studies scholars by Jean-Claude Nardin and Hermann Spirik, who realized its relevance not only for the history of the French presence in West Africa, but as an important source of information on African societies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade , pp. 249 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013