Children, Agricultural Labor, and Engagement à Temps in the 1820s Senegal River Valley

Abstract

I examine the preference for children under engagement à temps (indenture) in Senegal, especially the Senegal River Valley, in the 1820s. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, Senegal’s administrators wished to build cotton and indigo plantations in the Senegal River Valley to replace profits lost after the turbulence of the Age of Revolutions, especially the loss of colonial Haiti, which had been France’s most profitable colony. However, France’s 1817 prohibition of the slave trade signaled to administrators that they would have to obtain non-enslaved workers for the plantations they wished to build. Thus, they created rachat (redemption) and engagement à temps. Under this system, Senegal’s administrators, colonists, and habitants bought captives on African slave markets, “redeemed” the captive from slavery, then forced a fourteen-year engagement à temps contract on the individual with the promise of eventual “freedom” from servitude. Senegal’s administrators, especially Governor Jacques François Roger, prioritized obtaining children, whom they defined as anyone under the age of sixteen, for this practice because they saw children as a docile labor force which would more easily take root in the colony, especially in its nascent plantation sector. By acquiring children, Roger hoped to create highly coercible workers committed to agriculture who would not abandon the plantations after the expiration of their contracts. Using correspondence among Senegal’s administrators, I trace the reasoning behind the preference for people under the age of sixteen, in addition to the two primary mechanisms used to acquire children. The first mechanism was rachat. An examination of rachats registered at Bakel in 1825, located in the notarial archives of St Louis at the Archives nationales du Sénégal, reveals that 59.5 per cent of rachats involved people under the age of sixteen. Second, the September 28, 1822 decree that regulated engagement à temps in the colony stated that any child born to a mother working as an engagée à temps had to work for the mother’s engagiste until the age of twenty-one, the age of majority in French legislation, in exchange for the care they had received in childhood. While this group of children did not experience rachat, the law enabled administrators to take advantage of their physical labor in addition to the reproductive labor of their mothers. I argue that the abolition of the slave trade forced French administrators, colonists, and habitants in 1820s Senegal to envision new ways to build a stable laboring population for the plantation economy they hoped to build along the Senegal River; because of free labor shortages in the region, rachat and engagement à temps appeared to be a solution. Children, seen as malleable and more coercible than adults, came to be seen as a key component of this workforce because administrators and colonists hoped they would grow up to be adults loyal to the French colonial economy. I also argue that historiographical methodologies pioneered by scholars of gender and reproduction under Atlantic slavery provide a useful way of grappling with the perspectives of people forced into engagement à temps. Overall, a focus on the importance of children to engagement à temps allows us to probe the continuities that tie together slavery and the slave trade, on the one hand, and on the other, the forced labor practices proliferated alongside abolition.