Summary

West African slave emancipation has been a process patterned and experienced in multiple ways depending on the histories, geographies, and uncertainties of individual, family, and communal lives and trajectories. Regionally and culturally diversified conceptions of slavery and the condition of slaves, the interrelation of slavery with other kinds of personal dependence, the local arrangements between masters and slaves, and gender and age, together with the socio-political and economic dynamics of entire areas and regions factored into this plurality of outcomes. To some extent, this process is unfinished, as the late 20th century closed with reports of child and female exploitation akin to slavery, the political mobilization of slave descendants in Mauritania and other West African contexts, and the interlacement of the legacies of slavery with civil strife and insurgency in still others. Three aspects characterize West African routes to emancipation: the centuries-old connections with the Sahara and the Mediterranean and—since the 15th century—with the Atlantic world, early exposure to Atlantic abolitionism and West Africans’ participation in the struggle against slavery and the slave trade, the political relevance of histories of enslavement, life in slavery, and emancipation. Through case studies and historical examples, the abolition of the West African slave trade and internal slavery in the aftermath of the colonial conquest, the gendered experience of emancipation, the controversial relationships between spatial and social mobility, and post-slavery politics can be considered.