Full Description
Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present offers a sweeping, accessible overview of how African individuals and communities have challenged slavery across centuries. Bringing together insights from Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabic and Ottoman scholarship, the volume presents a truly pan-African perspective on resistance movements from the precolonial era to the digital age.
The collection traces resistance across diverse geographical regions—from West and Central Africa to the Indian Ocean and Sahara—demonstrating how people confronted external slave trades, local systems of bondage and enduring inequalities that survived abolition. Foregrounding voices too often hidden in the archives, the book explores creative strategies enslaved people used to claim rights, negotiate freedoms and reshape their social worlds through customary, Islamic and colonial courts. It highlights women's pivotal roles in resistance movements, from fleeing sexual violence to forging new kinship networks. Methodologically rich, the collection draws on oral traditions, microhistory, social history and digital humanities to illuminate overlooked experiences. By linking historical struggles to contemporary grassroots activism—including digital mobilisation against modern forms of slavery—it reveals resistance as an ongoing, evolving process that continues to shape African societies today.
Essential reading for scholars of African studies, slavery studies and social history, this volume reframes African resistance as locally rooted, historically continuous and globally significant. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.
Contents
Introduction - Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present 1. Trade, Enslaved Workers, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Mozambique 2. Fleeing from the Caravan Trade: Porters' Resistance in the Transition to Legitimate Commerce in Central Angola, Mid-Nineteenth Century 3. Every Step of the Way: Collective and Individual Resistance to Slavery in Sudan, ca. 1820-1850 4. Kijiji cha Watoro: Resistance, Identity, and Social life of Nyamwezi Runaway Slaves along the Central Caravan Route in Tanzania 5. Recaptured Africans at the Cape Colony: Resistance and Community, c. 1823-1827 6. Resistance to Enslavement? Ransoming Discourses and Practices in the Sokoto Caliphate and Umarian States 7. Straddling the Worlds of Slavery and Abolition in the Hijaz, 1850s-1910s 8. Manumission, Abolition, and Wala'a: Legal Pluralism and Resistance by Formerly Enslaved on the Coast of Kenya 9. Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers, Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 1857-1903 10. Arbitrating Abolition: Women's Resistance and the Worodugu Slave Exodus of 1907 11. "Mum told me all about her ancestors": Milonga, Ancestry, and Women's Legal Resistance to Slavery, Belgian Congo, 1908-1960 12. Digitised Anti-Slavery? Online Insurgent Politics by the Transnational Soninke Movement Ganbanaaxun Fedde in Mali and Mauritania, 2016-2024
