Some Thoughts on Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa

In the analysis of slave resistance in the Americas there is frequent reference to the significance of the activists’ African past. The evidence for resistance at the point of enslavement is thin; a partial explanation of this is undoubtedly that flight was the preferred method of avoiding the raiders’ intentions. Throughout the course of the slave trade, West Africa had become a place in which one could trust few people and, luck to provide such salvation. There are many accounts of liberated slave societies in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century was indubitably the period in which slavery became a particularly significant economic and social institution within Africa, but it was also a period of extensive self-liberation which threatened domestic and export economies as well as political control. The evidence of the extremely careful policing of slave ships in the relatively early stages of the trade must be seen alongside the frequency of reports of slave revolt aboard ship

Biology · Geography · Political science · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Ecology

• Slave Flights and Runaway Communities in Angola (17th-19th centuries)

  Open Access•Ronel Ferreira, Roquinaldo Ferreira•Anos 90•2014

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