Segou, Slavery, and Sifinso

Abstract

© Cambridge University Press 2012. INTRODUCTION Slavery formed a fundamental element in the economic production systems of many historic African states. Such economies, which include documented West African cases, such as the Sokoto Caliphate, Songhai, and Segou, appear to have relied upon an enslaved workforce, derived from warfare, for agricultural production (Lovejoy 2005; Meillassoux 1991; Roberts 1987). The settlement landscape of Segou (c.1700–1861) was populated largely by individuals who have been categorized, by both contemporary observers and historians of oral tradition, as slaves (e.g., Park 2000 [1799]; Roberts 1997). Whether cultivators or soldiers, the “ownership” of groups of individuals by ruling elites and their emplacement within the state's core landscape appears to have been a major attribute of the Segou state. The present study deals with new enquiries into both the oral history and archaeology of Segou's social landscape, considering it in contrast to the mercantile “eternal landscape” of Marka urban centres. Ultimately, it is hoped that this historical archaeological study will be of relevance to the archaeology of other African polities and will inform approaches to the earlier slave economies of the West African Sahel. The extent to which state-level systems of enslavement existed prior to the sixteenth century is a question fraught with difficulties of definition and perception. As Lovejoy (2000:21) states, “that slavery probably existed in Africa before the diffusion of Islam is relatively certain…its characteristics are not.” Some scholars, such as Kopytoff and Miers (1977), have portrayed African slavery as an indigenous development out of a sliding scale of “rights in persons,” ranging from bride-price, to indenture, to actual chattel slavery. Such indigenous systems of obligation and caste may have played a role in the advent of social complexity on the continent. Others, such as Meillassoux (1991), have challenged hypotheses of indigenous slavery, arguing that the “slave mode of production” was a contagion spread by contact between the Islamic world and arid West Africa in the ninth century.