Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (review)

This new edited volume of essays by a remarkable collection of scholars is notable for its insights into unfree labor and trade in people in a region wholly separate from the Atlantic World that is, the main reference point for most people's conception of slavery. With few exceptions, the essays are excellent historical essays that provide a broad introduction to the Great Lakes region through the lens of slavery. Its geographical focus, in what is now Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Eastern Congo, helps connect the history of slavery in Africa to debates going back to classical texts of Greece, Rome, Judea and Arabia, by re-engaging debates about the definition of slavery. As many scholars have noted, American chattel slavery was a historical outlier. The forms of domestic, military, and aristocratic slavery common in pre-colonial Africa accord more closely with slavery in most other times and places.

But once this is acknowledged, we return to specific questions about the nature of slavery in the Great Lakes region. These questions require a return to the inconclusive debates of the 1970s by Orlando Patterson, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Claude Meillasoux, Joseph Miller, Paul Lovejoy, Patrick Manning and others that sought to define slavery in an African context. Henri Médard's introduction provides a helpful introduction to these debates. He states that no definition was imposed on authors, but rather that a general definition of slaves as "kinless outsiders" emerged (25). This is arguable, and it may have been helpful to have imposed a definition on the contributors if only to engage them in a more consistent debate. This question of definition lurks in the background of every essay, and is only rarely brought to the fore. Shane Doyle's chapter on demography, for example, does not address the centrality of demography in Atlantic studies as a way to measure the impact of slavery. A more explicit attempt to engage these debates would have made the volume far more valuable to broader audiences.

That being said, one of the strengths of Slavery in the Great Lakes is that it is not written by specialists of slavery, but rather historians of East Africa who encountered slavery in their broader studies. This brings a refreshing variety to the essays that by itself is a powerful reminder of just how ambiguous a term Slavery is. Jan-Georg Deutsch proposes a new term for the study of African slavery, suggesting that slaves suffered most prominently from "radical uncertainty," they could never be certain whether they would be treated as kin or stranger (77). This insight suggests that the kinship-stranger continuum proposed by Miers and Kopytoff does not at all imply something benign (as it is unjustly accused) but that the language of kinship was both carrot and stick, offering reward but also threatening banishment, and was as fully coercive as the ideology of race in the Americas.

The essays are useful historical portraits of the nineteenth century in the Great Lakes region, offering tantalizing insights into social structure and a taste of everyday life in societies that have often been studied from the top down. The essays reveal the nearly infinite gradations of freedom and dependency in a dynamic economy never defined by wage labor and its ideal of autonomy. Richard Reid explains that the term slavery "can reasonably be used to cover everyone from the humble bazaana—domestic female slaves—to certain bagalagala, the young and mostly male pages serving at the centres of political power," (147), while Edward Steinhart provides several more specific examples of servile labor in Buganda's neighbor, Ankole.

Lurking behind these essays, often noted but never fully addressed is the application of Paul Lovejoy's "transformation" thesis that argued that external trade changed African slavery, and that the decline of external trade led to a rise of harsher forms of African slavery before colonial rule brought slavery to a gradual end. This question...