Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760--1900

8. Strategies of Struggle and Mechanisms of Control: QuotidianConflicts and Court Cases

8 Strategies of Struggle and Mechanisms of Control: Quotidian Conflicts and Court Cases Slavery was such a sensitive subject in Lagos during most of the second half of the nineteenth century that Europeans and Africans were both normally disinclined to discuss it. Their reticence has left historians with a dearth of records that illuminate the institution’s gradual demise. Silences on the subject of slavery pervade the records for most parts of colonial Africa, but in few places are they more deafening than in British Crown colonies such as Lagos, where the continued existence of slave labor on British soil was acutely embarrassing because it violated the statutory law of the nation that was holding itself up as the leader in the global crusade against slavery. Oral data of the kind used by historians of the end of slavery in certain other parts of the continent later in the colonial period are more problematic in Lagos, where slavery’s slow death began thirty to forty years earlier than in most other places. By the time I began conducting research on slavery in Lagos in the 1980s, few individuals survived who had been bought as slaves or been born of slave parents in the nineteenth century. Memories of slavery were more distant in Lagos than in parts of the continent where the institution started to unravel only in the 1890s.1 Although descendants of former slaveowners would sometimes talk discreetly about their families’ àrótà, few descendants of slaves would acknowledge their unfree ancestry and some appear to have erased it from memory. 278 / Slavery and the Birth of an African City Court records provide the only place in the documentation on Lagos where references to owners, slaves, and their descendants exist across the second half of the nineteenth century. Although anthropologists and historians have as yet only begun to explore what research using such sources can teach us about the African past, the extraordinary potential of these documents to illuminate long-term social and cultural change is by now well recognized.2 This study of emancipation in Lagos concludes by analyzing a number of court records that offer a rare opportunity to look inside shifting relationships of labor and dependency during the late nineteenth century and see how the lives of different kinds of people—owners, slaves, and their descendants, as well as other sorts of subordinates— played out on the ground. A number of the records analyzed foreground the experiences of female and male slaves who left their owners, yet remained in Lagos, by entering other relationships of dependency. Thus they provide a valuable complement to the discussion of land law in the previous chapter, which illuminated the fate of slaves who stayed with their owners. The records examined here have been chosen not at random, but rather for the specific processes of struggle and change that they uncover and help explain. The approach in this chapter adds a human face to the end of slavery in Lagos. It yields additional insights, moreover, into the agency of different kinds of men and women in shaping the profound transformations that were altering their lives and in forging a new urban colonial social order. The records examined in this chapter come from the few petitions I have been able to locate that were submitted to the early Slave Court and from the much more numerous judges’ notes on civil cases heard by the Lagos Supreme Court, established in 1876. Unlike the Slave Court, the Supreme Court could not recognize and enforce the rights of owners in their slaves, but masters, mistresses, and their descendants soon found ways to shape cases against slaves and former slaves that fit the kinds of obligations the courts would enforce. Despite great asymmetries of power, moreover, slaves in the process of emancipation occasionally managed to haul their owners into court. In addition, owners, slaves, and their descendants sometimes appeared in court during cases that had nothing directly to do with slavery, yet when they did so gave testimony that sheds light on the shifting relationship between owners and slaves or prominent people and other sorts of dependents. Court records were created for use in particular legal institutions, and the conventions of these bodies shaped what comes down to us in the sources. For this reason, it is essential to know something about the na- Strategies of Struggle and Mechanisms of Control / 279...