Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present offers a sweeping, accessible overview of how African individuals and communities have challenged slavery across centuries. Bringing together insights from Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabic and Ottoman scholarship, the volume presents a truly pan-African perspective on resistance movements from the precolonial era to the digital age.
The collection traces resistance across diverse geographical regions—from West and Central Africa to the Indian Ocean and Sahara—demonstrating how people confronted external slave trades, local systems of bondage and enduring inequalities that survived abolition. Foregrounding voices too often hidden in the archives, the book explores creative strategies enslaved people used to claim rights, negotiate freedoms and reshape their social worlds through customary, Islamic and colonial courts. It highlights women's pivotal roles in resistance movements, from fleeing sexual violence to forging new kinship networks. Methodologically rich, the collection draws on oral traditions, microhistory, social history and digital humanities to illuminate overlooked experiences. By linking historical struggles to contemporary grassroots activism—including digital mobilisation against modern forms of slavery—it reveals resistance as an ongoing, evolving process that continues to shape African societies today.
Essential reading for scholars of African studies, slavery studies and social history, this volume reframes African resistance as locally rooted, historically continuous and globally significant. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.
This book offers a sweeping, accessible overview of how African individuals and communities have challenged slavery across centuries. Bringing together insights from geographically and culturally diverse scholarship, it presents a truly pan-African perspective on resistance movements from the precolonial era to the digital age.
Introduction: Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present Spatial
Mobilities
1. Trade, Enslaved Workers, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century
Mozambique
2. Fleeing from the Caravan Trade: Porters' Resistance in Central
Angola During the Transition to Legitimate Commerce in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century
3. Every Step of the Way: Collective and Individual Resistance to
Slavery in Sudan, ca. 1820-1850
4. Kijiji cha Watoro: Resistance, Identity,
and Social life of Nyamwezi Runaway Slaves along the Central Caravan Route in
Tanzania Legal Strategies in the Context of Abolition
5. Recaptured Africans
at the Cape Colony: Resistance and Freedom, 1823-1827
6. Resistance to
Enslavement? Ransoming Discourses and Practices in the Sokoto Caliphate and
Umarian States
7. Straddling the Worlds of Slavery and Abolition in the
Hijaz, 1850s-1910s
8. The Abolition of the Legal Status of Slavery on the
Coast of Kenya: The Cases of Sadiki and Kiroboto Post-Abolition Resistance to
Continuous Enslavement
9. Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers,
Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 18571903
10. Arbitrating
Abolition: Women's Resistance and the Worodugu Slave Exodus of 1907
11. 'Mum
told me all about her ancestors': Milonga, Ancestry, and Women's Legal
Resistance to Slavery, Belgian Congo, 1908-1960
12. Transnational Digital
Resistance? Collective On- and Offline Anti-Slavery Mobilisations by the
Soninke Movement Ganbanaaxun Fedde in Mali, Mauritania and the Diaspora,
20162024
Marie Rodet is Reader in the History of Africa at SOAS. Her research focuses on modern African history, gender history, slavery and emancipation, public history, gamification and digital humanities. Her publications include Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900-1946 (2009), Essai dhistoire locale by Djiguiba Camara (with Elara Bertho, 2020). She has also developed public-facing digital projects such as the documentary film The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes Mali (2014), the web documentary Bouillagui: A Free Village (with Cosmo Maximin, 2020), the animation film Tous Égaux!/All Equal! (2023) and the digital mobile game USAWA (2023).
Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist based at University of Copenhagen, working on the intersection between (post-)slavery and migration in (francophone) West Africa and its diasporas. Her projects and documentary films have explored anti-slavery activism and fugitive displacements in contemporary post-slavery contexts where Africa's internal slave past reverberates. More generally she analyses the haunting of narratives of slavery in contemporary moral regimes of (legal) representation, citizenship, and resistance.
Wayne Dooling is a Senior Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His publications include Law and Community in a Slave Society (1992) and Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (2007).
Esteban Salas is a Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His research centers on West Central African precolonial and colonial societies and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. His publications include contributions on the volumes African Women in the Atlantic World, Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660-1880; Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History; and the journals African Economic History and Slavery & Abolition.
