Martin Klein on slavery and its sources
By José van Santen
On the 4thof February the well known historian and anthropologist Prof. Martin Klein from Toronto University brought a visit to the Netherlands and accepted the invitation of the African Studies Centre to give a lecture on the topic he has been writing about and started working on already 40 years ago, that is ‘slavery’. He is the author of various important works concerning the topic amongst which the book ‘Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa’. In this book using oral sources, as well as official and missionary archives, Martin Klein describes the history of slavery during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in three former French colonies. He considers the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and the evolution of slavery both before the French and under their rule. While he discusses French policy, the main focus of the book is the constantly changing relationships between slave and master, and the attempts on the part of slaves to seek freedom or autonomy where they remained in servitude. He examines the dynamic nature of local slavery in the region over time, and changing French attitudes towards the institution, slave–owners and slaves, with particular attention to the period between 1876 and1922. Klein also edited the book Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia, and the Historical dictionary of slavery and abolition, a historical overview of slavery through the ages, from prehistoric times to the modern day, detailing the different forms, the various sources, and the circumstances existing in different countries and regions.
Ever since he started with the topic, so he stated, there had been little treatment of the relation between ‘slavery’, ‘silences’ and ‘relations’. The long distant trade of slaves is however essential to understand the history of Africa today. Origins of former slaves remain important, even if this subject is not necessarily related to economic well–being. There however is a connection with the many silences that exist – or rather not exist – in the archives: the horrible facts, experiences, sufferings that have never been described or commented upon.
Nevertheless, much information concerning these items has been orally given on to next generations ever since the slave period ended due to the French withdrawal of support for the slave trade. There–within oral tradition is a charter, not necessarily good or bad, but a charter. We must always take into account the question why a person remembers certain experiences and realise that memories are selective on the one hand but creative on the other, in the sense Anderson dealt with in his book Imagined Communities. After this period of official slave trade within Africa, many slaves have been able to return home, though informally it has been going on for another period.
I cite from my (that is Van Santen 1993) own work:
We used to be five in the house. When I was eight years old, Hamman Yadji (the lamido of Madagali, who claimed the Mokolo plains as his territory) took us. It was the lamido of the Fulbe who used to reign here in the old days. They had already taken our father. When they did that, we kids cried and screamed; because of that, the people chased us, but finally we were left with our mother. This was ten days before. Then they returned. We had just lit the fire outside to get warm. They drew their guns. I fled with my big brother. But then my big brother took another road, so I lost him. They caught me and they made me lie down on the floor and they hit me and they kicked me and then they let me go. I returned home. When I entered the house someone else just left the house. This someone had come back to fetch the people, as he had found nobody before that day. He stopped me again.
Finally they had caught us all: my little sister, my two big brothers, my little brother and me. We used to be five in the house. We were all taken by the lamido. They brought us to his house in Madagali - which became English territory afterwards - and then they sold everybody.
I had fallen asleep during the night. Before I woke up, the others left. I didn't know very many things. I was still too small. But my big brother, before I went to sleep, had bent his head down like this and he had cried, cried, cried. I asked him, "Why are you crying like that? He asked me in return, "Where are they going to take us now? Is it not true that they are going to sell us?"
He had been right, they did sell him. But me, as I said, because I had fallen asleep, the chief had said, "leave her!" but all the others were sold in Kano (North Nigeria). When I woke up my sister and brother had gone and all the other people from our village as well. When I noticed that, I cried too. They sold people to get money so that they could buy themselves clothes and things to eat.
I had to work hard. Who would give me time to play? If you did not work hard, you were hit with the rope. So I ground the millet, I swept the courtyard, I fetched water, I washed the dishes."
"So I stayed and worked with the lamido, until he gave me to his child. She was just a little bit older than I was. When she married I went with her and while I was staying in her house a guy came to ask my hand in marriage. I just started to have my periods. When the white people came they told all the slaves that they could return home. [This was when the English took over the territory around Madagali]. My mother was waiting for me to take me home, but as I had become a Muslim and was married to an Islamized Mafa, I refused to return to the mountains. She thereupon started to cry and put herself in front of the door of the white man, called ‘Wilkinson’. They asked her: ‘What do you want?’ She said ‘I want my daughter back.’ Thereupon the gendarme accompanied her to go and get me and they said: ‘Well, there you are, there is your daughter.’ But I explained to my mother; I have grown up as a Muslim, I already have a child. I cannot return with you back home, back to the mountains, to my natal village. Could I have returned to become a Pagan again? So my mother returned by herself, crying."
Martin Klein stated that these kinds of stories have not been accounted for in the historical period they were lived, so to know them we very much depend on the European sources. Martin Klein himself often used the questionnaires of the colonial administrators as a source for his work, as most researchers themselves could not lay their hand on the ‘real oral sources’ either. It was equally considered bad taste, so he mentioned, to confront the local populations as well as the colonials with the slave history they all had been part of in the past.
Getting a life history is not an easy matter, and to escape the stigma that is related with ‘slavery’ and slave trade, many researchers had to go to areas far from their own origins: do research in cities where one can hide in ‘invisibility’: also in Africa slave masters fought to maintain their control over the labour of their former slaves just as they did in the Americas, but even after they lost that fight, they maintained and in some cases, entrenched values, beliefs and institutions that reflected the slavery experience. The stigma of slave origins remains, though there is in most cases no racial difference between masters and slaves. This stigma is based on beliefs about honour and values. The question is how we understand these matters. What is cause and effect? Many valuable research results came to the fore by accident, and Klein mentions as a good example Robertson’s work on ‘women and slavery’ [Claire Robertson and Martin Klein (eds.) Women and Slavery in Africa].
Klein’s own latter-day project deals with getting people interested to continue to do research on the topic as there are still many voids: it would be extremely fascinating for example to research court cases. Another topic that deserves involvement is the subject of slavery for sexual purposes, of course an ongoing topic also in the present world.
Klein mentions several researchers who took up the opportunities and described the situations in which slaves got rid of imposed husbands. In this respect also the French changed their laws, due to fear of prostitution. [See in this respect also Marcia Wright’s Strategies of Slaves and Women]. However a large problem with all the sources he mentioned is ‘the transcript’, as it were mostly the ‘white people’ who wrote down the stories, often after having given money to the story tellers.
In a few cases people used oral sources that could still be accounted as is the case in the well-known book of the author Paul Lovejoy in which his students interviewed people who had experienced slavery themselves and were still alive. Lovejoy especially paid attention to the privileged slaves in Hausa (Nigeria) society. A methodological question that of course may arise is: how can we lay hands on these stories and how can we shift the stereotyping from the ‘real’ events?
In many societies we also find proverbs that may say something about the situation of slaves. Other important items may arise if we search: in the Cameroonian Grassfields there existed a ‘Right on Reconciliation’, which was not instigated by the state but by the local descendants of the victims. A good question to pose ourselves is why this particular area in Cameroon would be open to these types of events while other societies were not.
Another question to investigate could be: what happens to communities when they go through long period of traumatic experiences, as slave-trade truthfully affected Africa for at least 4 centuries? Martin Klein brought to mind Rosalind Shaw's work entitled Memories of the Slave Trade in which the notion of ‘habitus’ [a notion from Bourdieu, that can be explained with the words of the comic figure Lambik (Suske and Whiske): ‘Things a person knows but of which she or he is not aware that she or he knows them, JvS] is the core of her argument: Past events leave their imprints on the present; the question to pose would then be: how does this come to the fore in religious beliefs, in modern witchcraft practices, in the transfer of spirits from the past to the present? Are spirits essentialised, do they behave as slaves once did? She used events which are embedded in social structure and culture, though forgotten as history. Using sixteenth and seventeenth century accounts of religion in what is now Sierra Leone, she argues that there was a significant transformation of the spirit world during the period of the slave trade. Perhaps most important, spirits behave as slavers once did, ambushing, seizing and seducing people, converting people into commodities. Divination existed in the earlier period, but not in the secretive and defensive manner that exists today. Studying witchcraft and divination, Shaw argues that the effect of the slave trade was the creation of a world that was suspicious, secretive and defensive. Her book looks in detail at the ways people use divination to create a kind of ritual stockade to protect the vulnerable from a dangerous world. Klein considers this to be a tremendously suggestive book, though one that involves very difficult research. Like Baum’s work on the Diola, it involves a gentle effort to peel back the layers of culture and understand the fears and tensions of contemporary people.
In the discussion the concept of slavery itself was discussed, as it did get different contents in the various parts of the world.