'Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ikale, Yorubaland’: A Rejoinder

Abstract

It has long been acknowledged that slavery was widespread in pre-colonial Africa including Yorubaland. But the extent to which the institution and the slave trade— Atlantic, Saharan, Indian Ocean and intra-African — underpinned and transformed specific societies, is a subject of debate. In Yorubaland, was there a very strong and almost unbroken link between the institutions of slavery and slave trade and the history of Ikale, a southeastern Yoruba district? That is, did Ikale play major roles in the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century? Drawing on extensive primary documentation this review contends that while Ikale certainly played some roles in both slavery and the slave trade, its involvement remained very marginal at least for the period before 1850. Consequently, it reassesses the impact of slavery and the slave trade on Ikale political, social, economic and gender relations and interactions with its neighbours.