Slavery in West Africa has long been a subject of academic discussion both within and outside the region. In contrast to claims that West Africans do not discuss the internal slave trade, scholars have documented examples of communal discourse around slavery in Sierra Leone (Shaw 2002), Cameroon (Argenti and Röschenthaler 2006), Ghana (Holsey 2008), Republic of Benin (Hahonou 2015), Niger (Rossi 2015) among others. These works highlight how slavery can play an important role in social identities and relationships, manifesting in spoken and unspoken norms. Contrary to these examples, there are few comprehensive studies on the contemporary legacy of domestic slavery in Nigerian scholarship. When slavery appears in public discourse, it is as a distant event, and its consequences in the present are rarely explored. In a 2019 speech remembering 400 years of trans-Atlantic slavery, former President Buhari made no mention of domestic slavery or its legacies in Nigeria.
In 2022, Prof. Banji Akintoye, leader of the Yoruba Self-Determination Movement (YSDM), tendered an apology to victims of the slave trade that exclusively addressed slave descendants in the Americas. The same externalist focus is present in major slave museums and in the 1993 push for slavery reparations led by the late politician Moshood Abiola (Ajayi and Vogt 1993). But if, as Shaw posits, “there are other ways of remembering the past than by speaking of it” (2002, 2), this lack of public discourse does not indicate the irrelevance of domestic slavery to Nigerian society. In this vein, our panel discussion would challenge contributors to discuss the forms that slavery discourse takes in contemporary Nigeria and the extent to which it conditions relations in the “primordial” and “civic” publics (Ekeh 1975).
The conference will be focusing on the overarching theme of "African Identities: Peoples, Cultures, and Institutions in Motion", taking place in a hybrid format from June 25th to 29th, 2024.