‘Wives of Circumstance’: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Late Nineteenth-century Senegal

Abstract

Using the example of correspondence between a West African trader and two French colonial administrators, this article examines tensions over authority, slavery and gendered categories in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal in the early 1890s. The debate between the three men concerns two women and their questionable status as wives or slaves. The example of the two women, the options presented to them by both the trader and the colonial administrators, and their ultimate choice over slavery and freedom contributes to the historiography on gender, slavery and emancipation in Africa. The author also raises questions pertaining to the use of colonial administrative records to reconstruct the past of women in slavery in French West Africa.