Slavery and the Birth of an African City

In this impressive and graciously written work Kristin Mann makes a major contribution to our understanding of the transition from slave trading to ‘legitimate commerce’ (mainly palm product exports) on the nineteenth-century West African coast. Her case study, Lagos, is somewhat exceptional because it was occupied and then formally annexed by Britain between 1851 and 1861. These conditions are taken into account by Mann but, as she points out, the British concentrated on stopping the external slave trade, leaving Lagosians (who now included many European merchants as well as African immigrants from Sierra Leone and Brazil) to work out their own adaptation to the new economic conditions. What the British presence did provide for this local social process is a rich set of documents that are ably exploited by Mann to produce a most valuable social history. At the centre of this narrative is a prolonged and somewhat ambiguous contest between an established wealthy slave-owning Yoruba elite and a feisty underclass of slaves, ex-slaves, free migrants and women of various origins. The central issue between them was control of labour: a critical factor in managing both the acquisition of palm goods from the interior and the maintenance of social status, political power and high-level sustenance in the city. Because only ‘big men’ could control such labour, the elites (if not the hereditary Lagos rulers) retained much of their power but those who did the work also used the recognized value of their labour as leverage for concessions towards greater material comfort and upward social mobility. Thus many new slaves entered Lagos society (without serious British interference) during the latter part of the nineteenth century; other dependants found themselves bound by formally recognized bonds of patron–client obligation, tenancy on scarce (and ‘traditionally’ held) urban land, and even marriage. The contestation of these obligations before British courts gives Mann her best evidence of the processes involved and also the degree to which the rather thin colonial regime both adapted itself to local norms (largely favouring the powerful) and provided some opportunity for non-elites to advance their interests.

Agrarian society · CONTEST · Elite · Intelligentsia · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Underclass · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law