Abstract
One of the many hypocrisies of the European conquest of Africa was the persistence of enslavement under colonial rule. The abolition of slavery on the continent was one of the justifications offered for seizing territory and partitioning the continent in the late nineteenth century, but, as contemporary abolitionists and, later, anti-colonial activists pointed out, people continued to be enslaved. Indeed, there is a rich historical and anthropological literature that traces the shifting nature of unfree labor in Africa between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, demonstrating the degree to which enslavement and pawning changed to fit altered legal, social, and economic circumstances. The Persistence of Slavery by Robin P. Chapdelaine contributes to this scholarship with its emphasis on the Bight of Biafra or Igboland (in what is now Southeastern Nigeria) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Chapdelaine notes, a comprehensive study of pawning in Southeastern Nigeria has yet to be written, and while a very small subsect of the existing literature on slavery and pawning in the colonial and postcolonial eras is on child labor, this book makes an important intervention by arguing convincingly that children are crucial to understanding why pawning and enslavement continued so long into the twentieth century. After all, the overwhelming majority of people who were pawned and enslaved in the precolonial era were women and children, a situation which only intensified under colonialism. She argues that “child trafficking, child slavery, and other forms of coerced labor persisted beyond the nineteenth-century antislavery movement because children functioned as transmitters of wealth through which Nigerians negotiated their social and economic position” (2–3). Put another way, it is only possible to explain enslavement and pawning's longevity by focusing on children and the meanings of childhood in the Bight of Biafra.
Enslavement and pawning—a practice in which a person was loaned to another for a period of time, usually to assist with paying off a debt—occurred in Igboland (and elsewhere) in the precolonial period. While there were not necessarily strict categorical differences between the practice and experience of enslavement and pawning in all times and at all places, a key feature of pawning was that—unlike for enslaved people—the pawn was formally under the care of another (usually the creditor), it was not a permanent state, and pawns never occupied the same position of social outsiders as did slaves. Pawns remained enmeshed in kinship networks, able in some circumstances to appeal against harsh treatment. As subordinates within households, children who were pawned moved from living under the authority of a parent or a guardian, to that of another adult—frequently a relative—often after a formal process that underscored the duty of the creditor to care for the pawn. Children existed, then, in what Chapdelaine describes as a “social economy.” She writes that “children are valued as kin, meaning family members, and as laborers and protected as dependents, yet also used as collateral in a variety of ways when parents or guardians suffered insolvency” (2). Children were valued as children and were—in today's language—loved by their parents, but they represented other things too and, relevant especially to this book's interests, wealth was one of these.
The kinship-based norms that governed pawnship, particularly, and enslavement came under increasing pressure in many West African societies with the intensification of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century and with the encroachment of European rule across the region, a relatively long process which was preceded and accompanied by the work and activities of European-funded Christian missionary societies and merchants. Under these circumstances, the nature of pawning altered and became more widespread. The book's first chapter—and there are five chapters overall, with a separate introduction and conclusion—considers how the region responded to these two major shocks. The Bight of Biafra had long been an important node in the enslavement and transport of people around the Atlantic world and, as a result, had developed political, social, and economic systems to facilitate this. As Chapdelaine makes the point, kinship provided the “moral code” that pulled together the communities that lived and traded in the region, and also protected children who were pawned (and it is worth emphasizing that pawning existed partly to prevent enslavement). However, as demand for enslaved people grew, so these institutions and systems buckled, making both free and pawned children far more vulnerable to enslavement. As this occurred, British rule was slowly encroaching, and was felt especially through officials’ efforts between the 1820s and 1840s to encourage the palm oil trade as a “legitimate” alternative to the slave trade. Traders began to trade in palm oil alongside and later in lieu of enslaved people. Children experienced the sharp end of these changes, as traders and those investing in the palm oil trade used child pawns “as credit when they advanced guns, alcohol, and other goods” (46). Those pawns were in demand as labor for palm oil plantations.
Having promoted palm oil and also benefiting from its sales, the British colonial government found itself in a moral and practical quandary as regards regulating the labor that underpinned the production of this lucrative crop. They were outwardly committed to the abolition of slavery, which the British did in Nigeria in 1901, but also to the protection of trade, meaning that, in the same year, they allowed trading posts (or “canoe houses”) to retain their former slaves. These included many children, who might have entered the houses as pawns, but who, in reality, occupied a similar status to enslaved people. This decision provoked debate and opposition, especially from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in Britain. It is clear that in a time when children's labor was prized ever more highly precisely because they could be paid little or nothing in terms of wages, that an increas in pawning and the enslavement of children—the two statuses were indistinguishable in many cases—occurred, and that canoe houses passed off unfree children as kin or other dependents.
These are some of the key themes of the book: the colonial state's hypocrisy over the ending of unfree labor—simultaneously condemning it while allowing it to continue precisely because it was to the economic benefit of the colony—and children's vulnerability to exploitation during this period, a vulnerability rooted in the “social economy” in which they were implicated. At this point, non-Africanist scholars might wonder why a book so deeply rooted in such a specific context would be of interest to them. Indeed, one of the strengths of The Persistence of Slavery is its ability to convey the complexity of social, political, and economic change under colonial rule. Chapter 2 is on the overlapping effects of the imposition of indirect rule in the early twentieth century (a system which devolved much of local, day-to-day governance to African agents of the colonial state, many of whom were given titles such as “chief” to mimic British perceptions of precolonial governance), the creation of new legal systems, the continuance of some precolonial legal and political institutions, the introduction of a cash economy to replace local currencies (like cowrie shells), and the implementation of taxation in 1926 which needed to be paid in cash. In short, “child dealing”—the pawning, enslavement, and forced marriage of children—increased as parents and guardians in need of cash to pay taxes and raise capital pawned their children. Those pawned children's labor was in greater demand, meaning that many of those pawned children were—contrary to the original intention of pawning (the avoidance of enslavement)—sold into slavery.
Chapdelaine is aware, too, of Southeastern Nigeria's position in global discussions about children's welfare in the early twentieth century, and particularly as regards slavery and the regulation of children's work. Chapter 3 covers the League of Nations’ investigation into child dealing in the region in the early 1920s, which revealed that “the trafficking of women and children was integral to Nigeria's colonial economy” (103). Missionaries, the League and other welfare organizations, such as the International Labor Organization, were intent on eradicating all forms of unfree labor, and came up against both the colonial state's inertia over enforcing legislation which would prevent child dealing as well as the fact that child dealers, parents, and other adults engaged in these practices.
Why, then, did parents pawn their children, and why and how were adults involved in child dealing? In chapters 4 and 5 Chapdelaine explores these complex, difficult questions, providing an exemplary demonstration of how colonial records can be read against the grain to reveal the experiences of otherwise marginalized subjects, alongside oral testimony collected long after the event. These two chapters deal with the 1929 Aba Women's War and its aftermath. This revolt has been addressed by a range of historians—as Chapdelaine explains—partly because of its relative singularity as an uprising led by Igbo women against men, both African men as well as colonial officials. While scholars like Judith van Allen and Toyin Falola have argued convincingly that the war was both a reaction to women's loss of political representation as indirect rule was put into place as well as to the requirement that women also pay taxes, Chapdelaine demonstrates that the war was first and foremost about children: “At the core of the women's uprising was an unwavering desire to maintain women's security in children.” New legal and administrative systems coupled with increasing financial insecurity exacerbated by taxes to be paid in cash meant that when women pawned their children, they were at risk of losing those children to enslavement. As Chapdelaine explains, women understood “that their children's lives were at risk under the colonial taxation system.” And “when women lost access to pawned children, their social status declined and long-term security decreased” (132–3). This was precisely the social economy of a child: one child's pawning might bolster a family or parent's finances in the short-term, but children were also social investments. The more children an adult had, the greater their status—and the more secure their futures in old age.
It is unsurprising, then, that in the wake of the Women's War, child dealing did not cease despite renewed efforts from the colonial state. Across the continent, the 1930s were a decade of acute economic hardship, and this was the case, too, in Nigeria, which was so strongly connected to international trade networks. It is here that it is possible to locate some of the reasons why women and children were also involved in child dealing, which included under these conditions the kidnapping of children: … women were intricately involved in producing exports for the global economy. They provided the majority of the labor for processing palm oil and had a recognized monopoly in the marketing of palm kernels. Thus, as trade declined and the price of exports plummeted during the 1930s, women sought out other ways to earn income, often turning to the same options as men did. … Some women in Igboland were just as involved in the trade in children as were men and could often disguise the sale by claiming that the girls were their daughters (159).
As Chapdelaine concludes, these were strategies employed by both women and children to survive the Great Depression and colonial rule.
This summary of The Persistence of Slavery by no means does justice to its richness and nuance, but it should be clear that this is an economic history of unfree child labor, not a social or a cultural one. Children and their parents’ feelings and the texture of their everyday experiences are not the focus of this book. In fact, this economic history is useful for revealing precisely the meanings of childhood beyond the affective: the fact that children were prized in Igbo society (and in many others) for what they represented in terms of wealth and status too, and that those meanings changed according to context. My main response to Chapdelaine's argument is to ask what might seem like an obvious question: who does she mean by “child”? With colonial conquest, the introduction of Christianity, and other contact with Europeans, precolonial definitions of age categories—which were dynamic and subject to challenge and change—were overlaid with those of missionaries and colonial administrators. There was no monolithic “European” ideal of the child during this period either, and these groups—alongside the reformers and activists associated with the child welfare and labor movements—negotiated who counted as a “child,” as race, class, and gender worked alongside age to fashion new definitions of “childhood.” These ideas about childhood did not necessarily map on to the experiences of children and young people either. While I am entirely convinced by Chapdelaine's argument that international and colonial efforts to end child dealing failed partly because they did not recognize local economic and social realities—the fact that women pawned children too, for instance—I would be interested to understand how different ways of conceptualizing childhood shaped these failed interventions too.
Nevertheless, The Persistence of Slavery is a major intervention in the scholarship on unfree labor in Nigeria and Africa more broadly, as well as in research on modern childhoods, gender, and the family.