This session explores the legacy of internal slavery in the contemporary Western Sahel, and its relation to mobility. This region is characterized by human mobility as well as by post-slavery status hierarchies, whereby people of (putative) slave origins are variously stigmatised, marginalized, and made dependent on their former masters. We will spotlight a central element of this nexus: alienation. One of the most universal features of enslavement in Africa and elsewhere was that the enslaved were strangers, subjects alienated from their own societies as well as in those of their masters. Attending to alienation allows us to track the dis/continuities of slavery beyond slavery, both temporally and analytically. Gaibazzi illustrates this point through a case study of migrant strangers to the Gambia River Valley.
Paolo Gaibazzi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna. He has previously been Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Bayreuth. Gaibazzi specializes on West African im/mobility and migration governance, and has conducted research in the Gambia, Angola and the Euro-African border zone. He is the author of Bush Bound: Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa (Berghahn). He has also published extensively on the history and legacy of internal slavery in Muslim West Africa and the West African diaspora, as well as on economies of fortune and potentiality.
The workshop is open to all members of the BCDSS, including Ph.D. candidates and M.A. students.
This workshop series is organised by the Research Group "The Concept of Slavery in African History".
Mary Afolabi
Boluwatife Akinro
Ricardo Márquez García
Jutta Wimmler
Lukas Wissel