Mohammed Bashir Salau. The West African Slave Plantation

This revised dissertation examines the slave plantation of Fanisau in the Kano emirate from the time of its establishment in the early 1800s under the new Islamic Caliphate of Sokoto until the early 1900s when it became a part of British colonial Nigeria. Mohammed Bashir Salau's case study is based principally on oral interviews with local residents conducted in the 1970s by Paul E. Lovejoy (Salau's mentor) and by Yusuf Yunusa. In 2008 Salau and Yunusa conducted two additional interviews at Fanisau. Accounts by nineteenth-century European explorers and colonial records are also used. The author is to be congratulated for producing this sharply focused and clearly written case study. At the same time, the study's precision and validity is limited by its sources of information. Having no plantation records or hard statistical data, Salau is dependent on the imprecise dating, unverifiable generalizations, and fallible memories of informants born well after the events they are describing. Lacking other sources, the author has no choice but to take the oral evidence at face value. As a result, the study is suggestive of what probably took place but not conclusive.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Caliphate · Colonialism · Ethnology · Face (sociological concept) · Face value · Genealogy · Geography · Islam · Social science · Sociology · Statistics · Value (mathematics) · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History