’Whither do you now wish to go?’: slavery, flight and longing in and around Manado (Indonesia) in the age of abolition

Abstract

ABSTRACT The history of slavery in the age of abolition is full of contradictions. The fate of enslaved persons depended on coincidences, on bad luck and good fortune. To understand what this meant in practice, this article focuses on questions of flight and longing. It zooms in on the colonial enclave Manado, North Sulawesi (Indonesia), where slavery was both an indigenous-regional and a local-colonial phenomenon, two worlds that were never fully separated. This exploration centers around two sets of archives: a slave register and a series of interviews with runaways. These fascinating documents were produced at the same time and in the same space, but provides us markedly different perspectives. What do they tell us about motives and experiences of people who escaped slavery? To what extend can we reconstruct life in and out of slavery when we combine these two sets of sources? The critical exploration that this article presents is meant as a step towards a fuller comprehension of the history of slavery in colonial Indonesia.