8 - The persistence of concubinage

Summary

Most of the colonial measures that were designed to reform slavery and to promote its eventual demise were directed at men, as we have seen in the preceding chapters. Yet more than half of the slave population in the early colonial era appear to have been women. As we demonstrated in Chapter 4, issues relating to female slaves were considered to be variations on marital relationships. Women were either married, under the guardianship of relatives or other custodians, or an undesirable element in society that was associated with prostitution and crime. In this chapter, we explore the fate of female slaves after 1910, and more specifically how the institution of concubinage flourished in this period. It is our contention that concubinage presented one of the most persistent difficulties for British colonial policy towards slavery. Theoretically, concubinage resulted in the elimination of slave status for women, since concubines eventually became free. The free status of their children was legally protected even without the declaration that children born after March 31, 1901 were free. In fact, however, the demand for concubines continued, which meant that there had to be young women of servile status who could supply this demand. There were three sources of supply. Initially, females who had been born into slavery before 1901 were available; later girls who were legally free but of servile origin were pressed into concubinage; and finally the clandestine trade in children produced a steady stream of young girls.