Análisis de colocaciones

The first part of the introduction outlined the red line throughout this thesis by con- necting three emic concepts to existing theoretical notions. I described how Roads

29 _{Chapter 2 has a description of how my alliance with the King’s former domestic slaves sometimes} prevented me from establishing relations of trust with other groups of former slaves.

30 _{Troughout the theis, methods are addressed there where I deemed it most relevant to mention in the} particular analytical contexts. An overview of specific methodological choices I made are discussed in most detail in Chapter 2.

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(trajectories of social promotion) reconfigured the Ropes (cultural field of hierarchy) and the Heads (style) of slave descendants in a well-defined social network in Central Mali. Before going into ethnographic detail in the following chapters of this thesis, this second part of the prefaceintroduction first takes up some of the broader theoretical issues raised surrounding the three emic concepts described so far. I will first address the issue of slavery in anthropology and then focus on the particularities of slavery in

Fulɓe society. Finally I will discuss contemporary echoes and memories of slavery in

the public sphere and how the mobile approach can reconfigure and explain the em- bedding of these memories.

Slavery: A single institution covering a wide range of relations

Slavery covers a wide variety of institutions, practices and hierarchical social relations in different parts of the world. It is an umbrella concept that has been imbued with different meanings (Testart 1998: 31) ranging from those covering the builders of the Egyptian pyramids to the Atlantic Afro-American plantation slaves to those working in modern sweatshops in Italy. The kind of slavery that is referred to in this thesis is in- digenous slavery in the Sahel, which existed in the West African Sahel as an economic (Meillassoux 1975: 15-16), legal (Botte 1999a) and social (Meillassoux 1986) system.

Chapter 1 describes the history of slavery in Fulɓe society in Central Mali from the

eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Universal definitions of slavery are impossible because it is a notion that covers many different practices of relating. Paterson (1982: 13) defined it as a ‘total social system’ and emphasized the fact that it was not only a social relation between slaves and masters but also an institutional process in which slaves’ relations with broader society are central. In an edited volume on African slavery, Kopytoff & Miers (1977: 11) discuss how neither property nor saleability are criteria that distinguish slavery from

kinship in non-western societies.32 _{A common dimension of slaves in various societies}

is that they are excluded from the fundamental social rights central to their society

(Testart 1998: 77).33 While Greek slaves lacked citizenship and plantation slaves lacked

control over their own activities, sexuality and labour, the central issue for domestic slaves in Africa is that they lack and are actively excluded from kinship. Testart (1998: 65) observed that having rights and juridical status in most societies is linked to and guaranteed through kinship. To deny slaves legal rights, one had to exclude them from freeborn kinship systems. In the academic literature, (neo-Marxist) debates on African

slavery increased significantly in the 1970s.34 Slavery in the Sahel has been defined as a

system of control over rights in persons (Kopytoff & Miers 1977: 11) and as a way to

32 _{See also Dottridge (2005).}

33 _{Testart (1998: 77) argues for ‘exclusion from social dimensions’ as a common denominator of slavery} in various societies: ‘Whether it is about kinship ties in lineage societies, or citizenship in Antiquity, or the believing community in Islamic right, the slave is always, in every society, excluded from (social) dimensions considered to be fundamental to these societies.’

34 _{This literature focussed on the lack of slave access to kinship and social relations. It is by becoming} ‘unkinned’ (Bohannan 1963: 18) that slaves came to be at other people’s disposal: They died a ‘social death’ (Meillassoux 1986: 106). Slaves were initially strangers who ideologically remained outsiders by being deprived of kinship (Meillassoux 1986).

accumulate wealth in people (Guyer 1995), with slaves lacking both (Meillassoux

1986). Some argued that African slavery was more benign35 because of the (partial)

inclusion of slaves in local kinship systems in Africa, while for plantation slaves in

Asia, for example, kinship remained hermetically ‘closed’ (Watson 1980).36

Another important aspect of the neo-Marxist resurgence of slavery studies in the 1970s and 1980s is that they increasingly tried to gain access to ‘the slave voice’ and slaves’ experiences. There was a lack of sources describing their views from below. Most colonial reports were based on cooperation with interpreters and rulers that often, but not always, were of noble/freeborn descent. Tracking the changes in the ways of enslavement and incorporation through oral evidence is a difficult process. Informants tend to present ‘the past’ as a static period of uniform practice (Miers & Willis 1997: 481). Doing research and talking to slave descendants about their past is not easy (Klein 2009) as it is ‘the history of those who would rather forget’ (Klein 1989). At the same time the hegemonic power of freeborn elites often silences slave histories (de Bruijn & Pelckmans 2005). Nevertheless, several academics have successfully managed to distil the ‘slave voice’ from oral accounts (Olivier de Sardan 1976; Wright 1993; Greene 2011 forthcoming).

Over time, some slave groups have found ways of becoming assimilated in their new host societies. This process has been coined as ‘absorption’ by Kopytoff & Miers (1977) who emphasize that slavery was not a static, prolonged state of being but rather a practice whereby people moved in or out of a society and had opportunities to adapt their condition in this process.

Slavery in the old kingdoms of the Sahel has been distinguished from other societies where fewer slaves were kept by the term ‘slave societies’ (Finley 1981: 103). Oral traditions and written documents on nineteenth-century Central Mali clearly indicate that slave raiding was part of the economy. Slave societies had external relations with distant economies through the trade of slaves on the Atlantic Coast and towards the Middle East and Asia (Klein 1989), along with other products such as salt and ostrich feathers. The demand for slaves in Mediterranean, as well as American and African production systems stimulated the growth of military and commercial elites in the

Sahel. Too date the hierarchical organization of social status groups among Fulɓe in the

Sahel reflects the previous positions of these groups in the ‘slave economy’: Freeborn groups who occupy political positions today used to be the warriors who raided large numbers of slaves, who were in turn traded by trading groups. Religious elites ensured ideological support for slavery and had a monopoly on healing and jurisprudence, and the other subordinate but free groups were the artisans: Smiths, praise singers and woodcarvers. In these warrior economies nomadic pastoralists lived as vassals to war- riors who centralized their power and slaves worked the land of any freeborn who could afford to pay for a human being to assist him.

35 _{Cooper (1977) was accused by Morton of presenting slavery as benign and static.}

36 _{In a comparison of African and Asian systems of slavery, Watson (1980) contrasted the ‘open’ sys-} tems described by Kopytoff & Miers with ‘closed’ systems where kin groups tend to be exclusive, and where slaves remain outsiders instead of being incorporated.

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Tracking changes beyond abolition

The academic literature in the 1980s was led by historians addressing the (French) colonial role in reducing slavery to an illegal institution but not prohibiting the related socio-cultural practices and ideologies (Klein 1998). The first practical steps in the fight against slavery in the French colonies only started in 1905 (Klein 1998; Klein & Miers 1999; Kopytoff & Miers 1977). Slavery was formally abolished but no social or eco- nomic freedom emerged for the people involved (Botte 1999a: 17). On the contrary, some have argued that the colonial regime homogenized relations by categorizing a wide variety of different relations as ‘slavery’. This homogenization hardened intra-

ethnic social boundaries including those between slave and freeborn groups.37

Other scholars such as Soares (2005: 63) and Pollet & Winter (1971: 371) have, however, contested this view and indicate how colonial projects encouraged more fluidity in social relations and removed specific forms of authority. When analyzing this

from a ‘relational’ approach to modernity (Geschiere et al. 2008: 2), both situations can

exist at the same time. When applying the ‘genealogical principle’ (Ibid. 2008: 4) to the

aftermath of slavery, one discerns multiple trajectories in several directions of modern life. Like a genealogy, slavery has branched out in diverse directions and not towards a final teleological ‘end’. This corresponds to my descriptions of the Road as a two-way process.

This multiplicity of trajectories was increasingly addressed in a wave of studies on so-called ‘post-slavery societies’ (Rossi 2009a) in the Sahel in the 1990s. These con- sidered how, despite the legal abolition of slavery, practices related to master-slave relations remained in place, while others vanished. Botte (2003) describes how the embedding of social relations in the legal framework of Islam, which recognizes the property of persons and is thus fundamentally unequal, is crucial to understanding the

current legacies of slavery.38 Others (Hall 2005; Schmitz 2006) indicated how in

Sahelian societies, slavery was not racist (as in the Americas) but racialized. Those

formerly enslaved are discriminated against in racial terms and, in Fulɓe society, des-

cendants of slaves are commonly referred to as ‘blacks’ (FF: Baleeɓe). The stigmati-

zation of groups of descendants of slaves is apparent in several realms and will be addressed in more detail later.

Gupta & Ferguson (1992) argued that cultural differences are often read between analytically distinct ‘societies’. The challenge in post-slavery studies has been to describe cultural differences within one society. Most of the academic literature from the 1990s indeed opts for relational approaches to status within a given society. In his

study of the differences in the construction of self by both slave descending Riimaayɓe

and freeborn Fulɓe in northern Burkina Faso, Riesman (1992) demonstrated how child-

ren are socialized according to the specific expectations of their own social status group

(FF: Sy) and lineage (FF: lenyol). Other scholars working on Fulɓe in West Africa (Har-

dung 1997, 1998; Vereecke 1994) describe the marked differences between former mas- ters and slaves, such as labour ideology and politics.

37 _{See Amselle (1990), Bazin (1985) and, for Fulɓe in particular, Guichard (1998) & Bierschenk (1993).} 38 _{I describe the Islamic legal framwork in more detail in Chapter 5.}

Another group of studies questions linear, modern approaches to emancipation and abolition. Implicitly adopting the genealogical principle described above, they analyze the legal ways of emancipation that existed prior to colonial abolition within and outside formal slave status. Stillwell (2004) describes the possibilities for social climbing and alliances among royal slaves at the royal court of Kano in present-day Nigeria. Schmitz (2009) described how in the Senegalese-Mauritanian Fuuta Tooro region slaves were emancipated thanks to social promotion in a matrimonial or religious context. Hall (2009) describes eighteenth-century letters, demonstrating that commercial paths to emancipation existed at that time for Songhay slaves in northern Mali, while Berndt (2008) describes the religious paths to emancipation before and after Malian indepen-

dence for Fulɓe slave (descendants) in the Guimbala region. Most of these scholars

emphasize the existing variety in trajectories of emancipation prior to colonial abolition and underline how they where blocked rather than encouraged by French colonial abolition. But most importantly, their studies emphasize that there have always been ways for groups of slave descendants to improve their condition, despite their inferior social status.

Modern expectations of mobility

I indicated above that there are two dimensions of distance in which the legacies of slavery and the cultural field of hierarchy can be framed: Time and space. The distance in space generated by mobility has made some migrants more critical about the existing cultural field of hierarchy in their home societies. Being able to control one’s own mobility defines one’s liberty of movement. But is freedom the ability to choose where to go and what to do? In ‘modern’ thought, mobility is expected to bring betterment (Ferguson 1999). It is a way of moving up and enhancing social mobility. Throughout the case studies in this thesis however, this ‘self-evidency’ will be bent in directions that go against the ideas of mobility as a linear and modern process. Mobility is embedded in and controlled by socio-cultural institutions. The thesis is mainly concerned with the meso and micro level of the social organization of migration (Brettell 2003: 1-7).

The mobility turn in social sciences has also been applied to studies on the legacy of slavery in the Sahel. Due to increased attention on mobility and transnationalism, studies on social change in Sahelian hierarchies have focused on the interrelationship between social distance and spatial movement. My study is part of this fairly recent group of studies (Boyer 2005; Rossi 2009b, 2011 forthcoming) that explicitly use mobility as a methodological lens to address the Roads available to slave descendants. Boyer’s (2005) study, for example, describes how mobility brings temporary relief and social distance in imagination from slave status for seasonal labourers of slave descent among Tuareg in Niger. Other studies have compared the trajectories of slaves and migrants as outsiders (Argenti & Röschenthaler 2006: 38-39; Gaibazzi 2010; Bella- gamba 2009a; Miers & Willis 1997; Manchuelle 1997).

Lately, there has been a tendency in academia to go against an overemphasis on mobility. The mobility turn is starting to wane because there is an increasing realization that celebrating ‘nomadist metaphysics’ (Cresswell 1997; 2002: 15) is equally problem- atic. Considering nomadism as the norm risks reinforcing tropes of nomadism in colo-

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nial and national discourses (Azarya 1996). Secondly there is a large group of people who are involuntarily immobile (Carling 2002; Gaibazzi 2010; Jonsson 2008) because they face cultural, social, economic or institutional obstacles that impede their (possible) migration. This study focuses on mobility as embedded in the power relations under- lying the cultural field of hierarchy. It is the idea of being both spatially and socially

mobile that is reflected in the expression of ‘having Roads’ in Fulɓe society.

Mobility and immobility in Fulɓe society

Being mobile and on the move is a way of life associated with groups of pastoralist

Fulɓe nomads in the West African Sahel (de Bruijn & van Dijk 1995a; Botte et al.

1999a: 25; Dupire 1970). The idea of a ‘travelling culture’ (Gillroy 1993; Clifford 1992), a ‘culture of migration’ (Hahn & Klute 2007) and a ‘culture of mobility’ (Boesen

& Marfaing 2007) have been applied to pastoralist Fulɓe in West Africa (Botte et al.

1999a: 24, 28-30). This stereotype is based on the Fulɓe’s self-image as nomads.39

The recent ‘mobility turn’ (Urry 2000) and ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Urry 2007) in the social sciences has denounced ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ (Malkki 1992) where people

are naturally connected to a place and states. By taking a transnational focus (Bash et al.

1992), these studies focus on how people organize their lives and identify themselves both within and outside national borders. Migrants thus have mobile livelihoods, long- distance interactions and inhabit their country of destination and homeland simultane- ously (Levitt & Glick Schiller 2004). The centrality of mobility as a way of life in

African societies is addressed in de Bruijn et al. (2001). Increasingly, studies are fo-

cusing on the intensification of movements and connections between people that are being facilitated by modern means of communication, such as the mobile phone (Brink- man et al. 2010, Horst & Miller 2006). These have intensified possibilities for staying in touch while on the move for both researchers (Pelckmans 2010) and migrants themselves (Vertovec 2002).

Nevertheless, the focus in the West African Sahel has, for a long time, been on the

mobile lifestyle of nomads40 based on a pastoral economy. This exclusive focus on

nomadic pastoralists as movers has tended to obfuscate the mobilities of other social

groups in Fulɓe society. There is no study that addresses the mobility of former slave

groups in the Haayre region. Some freeborn social groups of Fulɓe society have in fact

become extremely immobile. Their immobility has facilitated control over conquered

territories and people, as is the case of a group of Fulɓe warriors who sedentarized in the

nineteenth-century Islamic Diina Empire of Maasina (Klein 1998: 47; Sanankoua 1990).

Some of these warriors, called Weheeɓe in Fulfulde language, settled on the outskirts of

the empire in a region called the Haayre (Map 3). Today they continue to be distin-

39 _{It is also based on ethnic stereotypes ascribed to Fulɓe by their neighbours (de Bruijn & van Dijk} 1997; Amselle 1996).

40 _{The cattle-rearing Ful}

ɓe have come to represent Fulɓe identity and have found their way into coffee- table books produced by Western photographers, such as Beckwith & van Offelemn (1983) and Mols (2000), and magazines like National Geographic (de Bruijn et al. 2001a: 66). A consequence of this mobility is that Fulɓe are regarded everywhere as ‘the other’ or ‘the stranger’ (Ibid.: 72-73).

Map 3 Haayre region and Gourma region. Overview of former Fulɓe kingdoms Booni, Dalla & Joona ruled by Dicko families

guished from other noble families by their patronym Dicko.41 As I described in the

methodology section, one such Dicko family is central to the social network in this thesis.

A central aspect of power and nobility in the Haayre region was control over the mobility of others. From the outset, enslavement meant that a person was forced to go and live elsewhere, and this removal through capture was an explicit form of ‘forced migration’ (Lovejoy 2009). Slaves were either immobilized or forced to move but had

no freedom of movement:42 _{they had no Road. Nevertheless, some tried to become}

mobile and fled their host societies if they were too oppressive. Georg-Deutsch (2003,

41 _{The word Dicko literally means ‘vultures’ and refers to the hunting instinct of this former warrior} group.

42 _{On the relationship between freedom and liberty: ‘Liberty is the ability to move freely where one is,} that is, choosing one’s activities and one’s associations; or moving to places where it is possible to act freely’ Rossi (2009b).

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2006) explains the mobility of slaves as a form of resistance to their exploitation and the exodus of slaves from some areas was problematic for their owners (Klein & Roberts 1980; Georg-Deutsch 2003).

Collective slave revolts by running away are not reported in the colonial archives for the Haayre region. The region under study in Central Mali was typically a ‘frontier region’ (Kopytoff 1987) and escape was difficult because of insecurity and instability due to raiding warlords. Also, the royal elites maintained their power over their do- mestic slaves well into the twenty-first century, effectively immobilizing them, even if the French colonial government had legally freed them.

The modernity of slavery: Confusion, conflation, ambiguity and paradox

Like witchcraft (Geschiere 1997), references to slavery are often a metaphor, sometimes with real consequences, for commenting on social inequalities in wealth and status. The