Search Results

The lives of women in late antique North Africa were shaped to a large extent by legal status and family roles. Enslaved women experienced frequent sexual exploitation at the hands of their male enslavers, who saw these encounters as proof of their masculinity. Married women, meanwhile, endured the double standard of close supervision and suspicion over their potential infidelity, as well as the physical abuse that could result. In Christian writings about mothers, the mother-child bond is seen as powerful enough to threaten the pursuit of a religious life. Widows, due to their high status in African churches, enjoyed such influence in Christian communities that unmarried women and women with living husbands attempted to join their ranks. Although consecrated virgins were thought to receive the highest rewards in heaven, the constant threat of the loss of their physical purity justified a higher degree of surveillance over them, by either their families or their bishops. To varying degrees, nearly all women were vulnerable to domestic or sexual violence. The African Church Fathers Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and Augustine of Hippo—along with the prison memoir attributed to Perpetua of Carthage—provide a vast collection of texts about late antique women, but there are limitations to the use of these sources for historical information about women’s lived realities.

Established using a conventional Islamic model of government, the new Muslim state in Sokoto, known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), possessed eventually very large numbers of men, women, and children, taken captive (usually when children) in jihad from mainly non-Muslim communities, to serve as slaves. These slaves worked on farms or within households, they might be concubines and bear children for their owners; or they might be sold as children for export to North Africa in payment for the luxury imports the new elite wanted. Slaves were, under Islamic law, deemed “minors” or “half-persons,” and so had rights that differed from those of the free Muslim. By the end of the 19th century there were more slaves on the local markets than could be sold; exports of captives to North Africa had already dropped. For some captives enslaved as children, however, the career as a slave led eventually to high political positions, even to owning many slaves of their own. But slaves’ property, even their children, ultimately belonged to the slave’s owner. Revolts by male slaves were very rare, but escape was commonplace. Concubines, if they ever became pregnant by their owner, could not be sold again. The abolition of slavery c.1903 was slow to become a reality for many individual slaves, whether men or women.