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Deferring to Trade in Slaves: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Olga F. Linares
Olga F. Linares*
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Tropical Research InstituteBalboa, Panama
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Extract

An ever-growing literature on West African slavery has, for obvious reasons, tended to concentrate on societies that developed complex forms of domestic slavery and/or were closely tied to the export trade. Three major collections on slavery published in the last ten years deal almost exclusively with such groups. The history of peaples who refused, at least in the beginning, to take captives for the purpose of selling them to outsiders or keeping them for themselves has been ignored. And yet these acephalous groups are very instructive. They illustrate how certain structural features and other cultural preferences may have impeded, or at least retarded, the development of indigenous slaving institutions.

This paper discusses the role of slavery in a marginal area of the Upper Guinea coast. Emphasis will be placed on how practices surrounding the acquisition and disposal of captives were embedded in local institutions. Because these practices developed in the context of Africans dealing with each other, and not exclusively in the context of their dealings with the Europeans, they reflected modes of thinking and organizations intrinsic to certain forest groups of west Africa. A comprehensive history of why the Jola of Lower Casamance, Senegal, were slow to develop various kinds of slaving practices emphasizes their resistance to currents of change affecting the political economy of this region before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 14 , 1987 , pp. 113 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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Footnotes

*

This article grew out of my experiences of many years doing ethnographic research among the Jola of Sénégal. I am not, of course, a historian. My only qualifications for writing this article are that I have gathered oral accounts of latter-day slaving practices among the Jola and have discussed the subject extensively with them. First, I must thank the Jola, who consented to talk on the subject of domestic slavery even though they feel very little pride over it. Without the kind comments of the following colleagues, I would have made many more errors of fact and interpretation. M.H. Moynihan, J. Goody, J.D. Sapir, and J. Guyer made perceptive comments on the text, and their suggestions have been incorporated throughout. I am especially grateful to P.M. Weil, who spent many hours improving substance and presentation. Peter also sent me Xeroxed copies of relevant publications that have appeared recently but I had missed by being ‘posted’ in Panama. Logistic support was provided by M.L. Jiménez, whose skill in the word processor makes life considerably easier, and S. Churgin, our STRI librarian, who will get things down from Washington D.C. in no time at all.

References

Notes

1. Meillassoux, Claude, ed., L'Esclavage en Afrique Preécoloniale (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar; Miers, Suzanne and Kopytof, Igor, eds., Slavery in Africa. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, (Madison, 1977)Google Scholar; Watson, J.L., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford, 1980).Google Scholar

2. It is not easy to provide a simple definition of slavery. As Watson notes in his introduction to Asian and African Systems of Slavery, slavery is a complex social institution. He defines slaves as persons acquired by purchase or capture, whose labor is extracted through coercion. Lovejoy, P.E., in his book Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, England, 1983), 3Google Scholar, emphasizes that slavery is initiated through violence, including warfare, raiding, and kidnapping. Once people were taken captive, however, several things could be done with them. I have thus found it useful to distinguish domestic slavery, which is the indigenous use of captives as a labor force, from ransom, which is the release of captives through some form of repayment by their kin, from internal trade, which is the sale of captives to the Europeans for trans-Atlantic shipment.

3. Most experts who have written about societies that actively participated in the export trade have, of course, also emphasized the indigenous aspects of the trade. See, for example, Goody, J., “Slaves in Time and Place” in Watson, Asian and African Systems, 16–42.Google Scholar

4. Protohistorical occupations of islands and mainland areas surrounding the entrance to the river date from about 200 B.C. They continue to the time of contact with Europeans and slightly beyond, to about the 1700s (see Linares, O.F., “Shell Middens of Lower Casamance and Problems of Diola Protohistory,” West African Journal of Archaeology, 1 [1971], 23–54Google Scholar). Remains from the oldest deposits suggest that the first inhabitants of the area came from nearby areas upriver, and probably to the south. Sapir, J.D., in his article “West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun Class Systems and Consonant Alternation,” Current Trends in Linguistics, 7 (1971)Google Scholar, shows that Jola and the other Bak languages located in what is now Guinea Bissau are closely related.

5. It is highly unlikely that the Jola were pushed to the coast by the western expansion of Manding peoples, coming from the East. See Barry, B., “Economic Anthropology of Pre-colonial Senegambia From the Fifteenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries” in. The Uprooted of the Western Sahel. Migrants' Quest for Cash in the Senegambia, ed. Colvin, L.G.et al., (New York, 1981), 27–57.Google Scholar Recently, it has been argued that such massive Manding migrations never took place and that the Senegambian Manding were autochthonous peoples who adopted Manding language and culture from traders or other small groups of migrants. See Wright, D.R., “Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Man-dinka Ethnicity in Senegambia,” HA, 12(1985). 335–48.Google Scholar

6. There is no modern Jola sub-group calling itself Fulup. The linguistic connotations surrounding the term are discussed by Sapir, J.D. in his “Diola in the Polyglotta Africana,” African Language Review, 9(1970/1971).Google Scholar I will use Fulup in the general sense used by the Portuguese to refer to all Jola sub-groups.

7. da Mota, A. Teixeira, Mar, Além, Mar, (Lisbon, 1972), 2: 181, 202, 203. 260–62.Google Scholar

8. Gomes, D., De la Première Découverte de la Guinée, Monod, Mauny, R. and Duval, G., eds., (Bissau, 1959).Google Scholar

9. Fernandes, V., Déscription de la Côte Occidentale de l' Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte, Archipels), Monod, da Mota, A. Teixeira and Mauny, R., eds. and trans., (Bissau, 1951)Google Scholar

10. For this reason his statements must be taken with caution. His doubtful assertions are numerous; Fernandes claimed the Balanta lived near the Soungrougrou marigot, when it was actually the Banyuk who probably lived there; he claimed the Fulup had large canoes which were manned by crews of 50 to 60 men, when it was probably the Bijagos; he asserted that the Fulup had ‘kings’, when he was probably referring to persons of authority among the Banyuk and Manding; and so forth.

11. Fernandes, , Déscription, 61.Google Scholar

12. Pereira, D. Pacheco, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis: Côte Occidentale d'Afrique du Sud Marocain au Gabon, Mauny, R., ed. (Bissau, 1956), 69.Google Scholar

13. da Mota, Teixeira, Mar, Além, Mar, 222; Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo, 178n132.Google Scholar

14. Pereira, Pacheco, Esmeraldo, 69.Google Scholar

15. de Almada, A. Alvares, Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde, Brásio, A., ed. (Lisboa, 1964)Google Scholar; see alsoRodney, Walter, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800, (Oxford, 1970), 40–41.Google Scholar

16. Mark, Peter, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance Since 1500, (Stuttgart, 1985), 20–22Google Scholar, argues that the term comes from a Jola expression meaning “do not eat each other” or “being related”. According to him Almada was referring to the Jigouches of Mlomp village in the Buluf, and to the Esudadu of Mlomp village in the Pte. St. Georges, from where the former originated.

17. Banyuk (or Banun, Bainouk, Banhun) is not one of the Bak languages of Lower Casamanee (the Manjaku, Jola-Balanta cluster), but is remotely related to it (Sapir, , “West Atlantic,” 48–49Google Scholar and personal communication).

18. Almada, , Tratado Breve, 61.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 60

20. Ibid., 62

21. Ibid., 61

22. Ibid., 60

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 62

25. Coelho, F. de L., Duas Descrições Seiscentistas da Guiné, Peres, D., ed. (Lisbon, 1953), 29Google Scholar; Teixeira da Mota, Mar, Além, Mar, fig. 12.

26. Coelho, , Duas Descrições, 30.Google Scholar

27. It is not clear who the Sacalates were, but they were probably a Jola sub-group.

28. By Coelho's time, however, some Fulup groups may have been selling captives to the Banyuk, and also directly to the Portuguese.

29. Fernandes, , Déscription, 69–75.Google Scholar

30. Fernandes, Description, 164n132

31. Giving up wine may not always have indicated a good Muslim, however. For example, Gomes, writing at the same time as Fernandes, mentioned that the people of the Gambia river were Muslims, spoke Manding, and yet drank wine. On the other hand, making palm-wine libations to shrines is identified with the traditional religion still being practiced by non-Islamized Jola.

32. Mark, P., in Basse Casamance, 28–31Google Scholar gives several reasons for the Jolas' expansion at the expense of the Banyuk during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He mentions that the Jola were better warriors, that their population had increased, and that they had acquired, through commerce with the Europeans, a new and abundant source of iron with which to make better weapons and better cultivation tools. He also suggests that population growth was accelerated by the Jolas' system of capturing and adopting people from other communities, “It may be that the Diola system of incorporating captives into their own society was in the long run an important source of new manpower….” That trade, iron, and the need for more land were somehow interconnected is not a new idea. As Mark himself points out, Lauer, Joseph was the first to discuss this possibility in his “Rice in the History of the Lower Gambia-Geba Area” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969).Google Scholar I have also discussed this issue in my “Ritual, Labor and Technology: the Structuration of Agricultural Practices among the Jola of Senegal” forthcoming. However, Lauer did not mention that the Jola incorporated Banyuk captives as a labor force, and I find no evidence for Jola domestic slavery existing much before the nineteenth century (see below).

33. Coelho, , Duas Descrições, 30.Google Scholar When Coelho said that the Banyuk purchased wax and some slaves it is not altogether clear from whom they did so. He noted that on the north-shore they were all Fulup, yet mentioned several reinos here belonging to the Banyuk. Mark, , Basse Casamance, 26Google Scholar, referring to the same passage where Coelho says that wax and slaves were purchased at a place called Jame, identifies Jame as being the present-day Jola region called Kujamatay (from the verb ejam, to listen). I am more inclined to identify “Jame” with “Jami,” described much later by E. Bertrand-Bocandé in 1849 (see footnote 47), as the “principal market where the Portuguese purchase wax”. Bertrand-Bocandé went on to say that the inhabitants of Jami had erroneously been called Fulup in the narratives, but they were really Banyuk. Thus, I tend to see the slave trade at this time as involving primarily the Banyuk, though the Jola/Fulup were probably beginning to participate in it (see also footnote 35).

34. Coelho, , Duas desoriĉões, 33.Google Scholar

35. Mark, , Basse Casamance, 28, is of the opinion that the inhabitants of Thionk had, by the second half of the seventeenth century, probably modified a pre-existing system of domestic slavery “to provide captives for export.” He also says that some of the captives were kept as agricultural laborers and assimilated into local lineages. I have been unable to find any references to this phenomenon in the seventeenth century sources, which makes me suspect that domestic slavery developed considerably later in Thionk, or that Thionk was really a very special case. Mark himself suggests that Thionk was unusual among Fulup communities.Google Scholar

36. Cultru, P., ed,, Premier Voyage du Sieur de la Courbe fait à la Coste d'Afrique in 1685 (Paris, 1913).Google Scholar Unfortunately, the section where Jajolet de la Courbe described his 1687 overland voyage from the Heregues, (or Vintang marigot mentioned above) to Cacheu, in what is now Guinea Bissau, through Fulup-Jola controlled territories, is missing from the original. However, there is an account, published by Labat, J. B. under the title Nouvelle Relation de l'Afrique Occidentale, Tome V (Paris, 1728)Google Scholar, in which Labat described the fictitious travels made by André Brue, director of the Senegal Colony, 1697–1702, to Cacheu. As Cultru, Premier Voyage, discovered, Labat systematically plagiarized Jajolet de la Courbe's accounts, attributing them to Brüe with the intention of flattering him. A comparison of existing passages in Jajolet de la Courbe, for example his visit to the Gambia, to Labat's plagiarized account of the same voyage allegedly made by Brüe, reveals how slavishly Labat copied from the former. Every passage that appeared in Jajolet de la Courbe also appears in Labat, although at times re-arranged, out of strict order, and even embellished. We can thus assume with a great deal of confidence that the passages missing from Jajolet de la Courbe covering the crucial Gambia-Cacheu voyage re-appear in Labat. In fact Cultru is of the opinion that Labat had access to Jajolet de la Courbe's diary.

37. Cultru, , Premier Voyage, 207.Google Scholar

38. Labat, , Nouvelle Relation, 30–34.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., 42–45.

40. Moore, Francis, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, (London, 1738), 24.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., 36

42. Ibid., 42.

43. Ibid, 43.

44. As Lovejoy points out, Transformations, 159–70, in 1808 an act of Parliament prohibited all British subjects from participating in the slave trade. In 1814 France agreed to limit the trade to its own colonies, in 1818 it abolished the trade, and in 1848 it emancipated the slaves in its colonies. In 1810 Portugal agreed to limit its trade to its own colonies, and in 1815 to its possessions south of the equator, and in 1869 it finally abolished slavery, though not its legal status until 1878. There were, of course, many ways of getting around these laws, and the slave trade, as well as domestic slavery, thrived in French and Portuguese colonies for many decades after these institutions were prohibited.

45. Ibid.

46. Mark, Basse Casamance, presents much fuller data than I do on certain aspects of Jola social change during the nineteenth century.

47. Bertrand-Bocandé, E., “Notes sur la Guinée Portugaise ou Sénégambie Méridionale, Part I,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 3/11, (1849), 265–350Google Scholar; idem., “Notes sur la Guinée Portugaise ou Sénégambie Méridionale,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 3/12 (1849), 57-93; idem., “Carabane et Sedhiou: Des Ressources que présentent dans leur état actuel les comptoirs franĉais sur les bords de la Casamance.” Revue Coloniale, 2 (1856), 398-421.

48. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 281.Google Scholar

49. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 90.Google Scholar

50. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Carabanne,” 402.Google Scholar

51. See Brooks, George, “Perspectives on Luso-American Commerce and Settlement in the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau Region, 16th-19th centuries,” Fourth International Congress of Africanists, (Kinshasa, 1978). Perhaps we should also remember that Ziguinchor was, at least theoretically, a Portuguese possession long after Karaban became French. In fact, Karaban (Carabanne) had been “bought” from the Jola/Fulup of the village of Kañut in 1836 in exchange for annual payments. On the other hand Ziguinchor did not become a French possession until the year 1886.Google Scholar

52. Brosselard-Faidherbe, C., Casamance et Mellarcorée, (Paris, 1891), 32–62.Google Scholar

53. For an excellent discussion of the Jola rice trade see Snyder, F.G., Capitalism and Legal Change: An African Transformation, (New York, 1981), esp. 112–118.Google Scholar

54. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 298.Google Scholar

55. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 90.Google Scholar

56. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 327–30.Google Scholar

57. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Carabanne,” 404.Google Scholar

58. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 327.Google Scholar

59. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 91.Google Scholar

60. Heckard, H., “Rapport sur un Voyage dans la Casamance.” Revue Coloniale 2 (1852), 417.Google Scholar

61. Bertrand-Bocandé, “Notes,” 331.Google Scholar

62. Weil, P.M., “Slavery, Groundnuts, and European Capitalism in the Wuli Kingdom of Senegambia, 1820-1930,” Research in Economic Development, 6 (1984), 77–119.Google Scholar

63. Bérenger-Féraud, L.-J.-B., “Etude sur les populations de la Casamance,” Revue d Anthropologie, 3 (1874), 449.Google Scholar America probably meant Cuba, which increased its demand for slaves after the 1850s, and Brazil, which did not abolish slavery until 1888.

64. Dias de Carvalho, H.A., Guiné (República Portuguesa, 1944), 72–73.Google Scholar

65. Linares, , “Shell Middens,” 23–54.Google Scholar

66. Mark, , Basse Casamance, 27.Google Scholar

67. Robert Baum made these observations in a paper on oral traditions that he read at the 22nd. Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Los Angeles, 1979.

68. The parcel is first girdled with a high dike, the mangrove vegetation is then cut down, women come in to harvest the wood, the field is allowed to be inundated by fresh water, then drained for at least three years running, and at the end the parcel is ridged and furrowed. All this is done by manual labor, with a long-handled tool they call kanata or kangom, depending on the shape of the scoop used to lift earth.

69. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 327.Google Scholar

70. Marzouk-Schmitz, Y., “Stratégie et aménagement paysans deux ecotypes humains en Basse Casamance á partir des monographies de Kamoubel et Niamdame,” (Dakar, 1981), 62.Google Scholar

71. For example, the told me about a man called Lamin, whose Sinjan-born parents were sold as slaves in a faraway land. When he grew up, Lamin managed to escape to Sinjan (Sindian), where he died in 1984. Another old man, whom I knew in 1964, and who had been a famous chef de canton during French colonial days, had a brother called Demba who was a slave in a Manding village near Pakao. He also escaped to Sinjan, and finally died in Gambia less that thirty years ago.

72. Moore, , Travels, 43.Google Scholar

73. Weil, , “Slavery,” 77–119.Google Scholar

74. Fernandes, , Déscription, 61.Google Scholar

75. Almada, , Tratado, 59.Google Scholar

76. Labat, , Nouvelle Relation, 43.Google Scholar

77. Moore, , Travels, 36.Google Scholar

78. Heckard, “Rapport;” Bertrand-Bocandé, “Carbane.”

79. de Lima, J.J. Lopes, “Memoria dos Felupes,” Jornal de Sociedade dos Amigos das Letras, 3 (1836), 68–69.Google Scholar

80. Finley, M.I., “Slavery,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 14:68, 307–13.Google Scholar

81. Linares, “Ritual, Labor and Technology.”

82. Sapir, , “West Atlantic,” 58.Google Scholar

83. Mark, Basse Casamance, places a different emphasis on the role played by commerce within Jola society than I do, being inclined to see trade as being earlier, and more central to Jola society. I argue that, relative to peoples like the Banyuk, Manding, and Wolof, the Jola were not, and are not, a trading peoples. This is not to deny that they have for a long time bartered what they have grown or what they have gathered in the forest, against European goods. But being a full-time cultivator is a different matter from being a full-time salesman or middleman. When it comes to the Jola selling their labor power as salaried workers by migrating to cities, which they are doing in great numbers nowadays, the Jola see this as work (borok). On the other hand, they do not see funom (a word which, means both “to sell” and “to buy”) as work.

84. Weil, , “Slavery,” 77–119.Google Scholar

85. Rodney, , “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade.” JAH, 7 (1966), 432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86. Fage, , “Slaves and Society in Western Africa, c. 1445- c. 1700,” JAH, 21 (1980), 286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87. Cultru, , Primer Voyage, 202Google Scholar; however, in Labat, Nouvelle Relation, 14, there is a reference to the dwellings of the king, his wives, his valets, and his slaves as making up a large village.

88. Pereira, Pacheco, Esmeraldo, 72–77.Google Scholar

89. I find puzzling Fage's statement that “Pacheco says of the Banyun that they had many wars and many slaves” (“Slaves and Society,” 300-01). I found no such assertion in the pages of Pacheco Pereira's work cited by Fage.