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50 3 Female Slaves, Manumission, and Abolition On a summer day in 1877, Saluma, a Sudanese freed slave, knocked on a stranger’s door in the Palestinian village of Tira in the Ottoman Nablus Province. Saluma had been kidnapped from Cairo about five months earlier. She was smuggled through al-‘Arish to Tira, along with five other women, to be sold there as slaves. Her kidnappers had sent her to get some bread from a local bakery, and she was now waiting outside a stranger’s house, hoping for a friendly face. The woman who opened the door listened to her story and hastened to inform the local authorities in Nablus. The authorities then sent the six women and their kidnappers to the Cairo police station, and from there they returned to their homes. Two of the other women were named Fatima, and the others were Zayn al-Mal, Bakhita, and Sa‘ida.1 In this chapter, I examine the case of Saluma and her friends with two objectives in mind. The first is to see how, beginning in the 1850s, international efforts to abolish the slave trade transformed the official treatment of slaves, especially in Cairo. I focus on the Cairo police station and detect subtle but significant transformations in the official conceptualization of slavery and of police role vis-à-vis the slave trade and slaves themselves. Until 1854, the police, the shari‘a courts, and the councils upheld the shari‘a in protecting the ownership rights of masters and protecting slaves from excessive abuse. Here again I am looking at the role of the police station and the legal system at large in maintaining the institution of slavery—and the role of slaves themselves in legitimizing the distinguished function of the police and with it, of state power in neighborhood life. As I show here, from the mid-1850s onward, the legal system started perceiving its role as protecting slaves and former slaves, such as Saluma and her friends, as free persons. Female Slaves, Manumission, and Abolition | 51 My second concern here is with the effect of the prolonged process of abolition on slaves and former slaves. Following historian Ehud Toledano, I understand enslavement as a form of legalized violence and, at the same time, as a form of attachment. Enslavement stripped the individual of her earlier life—family, community, even name and religion—while at the same time integrating her into new social networks, most notably the family. It also entailed forced migration into a new cultural context, which required creative coping mechanisms, acculturation , and integration. Thus, although manumission meant freedom, it ruptured the newly acquired bonds.2 I question here how social bonds were created with enslavement and how they were affected by the slow process of abolition. The case of Saluma and her friends provides a detailed example of women’s fate following manumission. They were kidnapped because they were black, kinless , and hungry in a society where most black women were still slaves. Most of them were kidnapped as they were looking for employment. Most experienced months and years of employment uncertainty after their manumission. Their situation unfolded in the same year Egypt signed a convention committing itself (anew) to abolishing the slave trade. In her oft-quoted essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticizes historians’ attempts to reconstruct subaltern’s “pure, retrievable form of consciousness” without deconstructing colonial and postcolonial discourses and privileges. In reading sati narratives, foreign accounts of widow burning in colonial India, she demonstrates how widows’ own voices remain muted; even their names, she argues, were translated and/or misspelled to unintelligibility . Between the colonial versions of “they wanted to die” and “white men saving brown women from brown men,” women’s subjectivity remains in the shadow.3 Lata Mani’s reading of Spivak suggests we keep reading elite and colonial discourses against the grain but takes Spivak’s assertion as a warning that we cannot counter discourses of domination simply by letting the subaltern speak. What we can read, instead, are shifting subjectivities, which are sometimes hidden in colonial reports, written for other purposes altogether.4 Eve Troutt Powell demonstrates how useful (and depressing) this reading can be for historians of slavery but expresses the hope that histories of slavery will be written in which slaves themselves will be seen and heard and not relegated to the background of political and cultural affairs. She therefore urges historians to seek “original, independent voices” and “real, autobiographical narratives” in...

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