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Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897-1936 by PaulLovejoy; Jan HogendornReview by: Priscilla E. StarrattThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1995), pp. 363-365Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/221619 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

SLOW DEATH FOR SLAVERY: THE COURSE OF ABOLITION IN NORTH- ERN NIGERIA, 1897-1936. By Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn. African Studies Series 76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii, 391; 2 maps, 20 tables. $69.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This volume presents a wealth of meticulous research in order to readjust the commonly accepted textbook view that Britain was the major actor in the abolition of slavery in modem times. In carefully constructed and supported arguments that proceed clearly and logically from chapter to chapter, the authors establish that official British policy in its portions of the former Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria successfully and deliberately maintained the institution of slavery from the early days of military conquest in 1897 until 1936.

It will be a shocking and new viewpoint to most readers. At the same time that the Colonial office and its officers in the field carefully constructed and executed this policy of maintaining the institution of slavery, they just as carefully cultivated their public and international image as leading abolitionists. The contrast between official statements and the secret memos of the colonial service leaves the reader as breathless as the instructions to officers to defy the British law on the return of fugitives and to return slaves to their masters whenever possible. It is the revelation of this level of official hypocrisy that is so unsettling.

The study commences with how first the Royal Niger Company and then the soldiers of the West African Frontier Forces manipulated the issue of the need to stop slave raiding to justify increasingly wider conquests of Nigerian territory and governments. The study documents the point at which military voices urging slaves to desert their masters were drowned out by British officials arguing that the conquest and subsequent rule of the Caliphate would be easier if the ruling classes could be convinced they would be allowed to keep their slaves. Much of the emphasis of the book is on studying the thoughts and policies of Sir Frederick Lugard, the influential governor of Nigeria (1912-1918), and how his policies had been formed by his experiences in the same slavery issues in East Africa.

The British took advantage of fugitive slaves recruited to the West African Frontier Force who were only too eager to help conquer their former masters in the Sokoto Caliphate. The authors establish that the Sokoto Caliphate was the largest slavocracy in Africa, in which many plantation owners far outstripped the plantation owners of the Americas in the number of slaves they owned. They estimate the total number of slaves held in the Caliphate at up to 2.5 million. Subsequent chapters

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364 BOOK REVIEWS

focus on topics including the administrative debate on the abolition of slavery, British policies to keep the slaves on their master's lands, the legal processes for freeing slaves, the uses of tax laws to achieve British goals in slavery policies, the position of slaves in the colonial economy, the continuation of the concubinage of women, the clandestine slave trade in the colonial period, and the forces that fmally led to the official abolition of slavery in 1936.

The work is exceptionally focused on its sources-primarily colonial files and reports, mission and commercial records, Islamic court cases, and the changing tax laws. The authors present more than ample evidence to prove their central thesis. The reader is quite convinced that British policies carefully manipulated laws to discourage slaves from running away, to deny slaves lands far from their masters, and to insure that slaves paid their masters fees while earning money to buy their own freedom. It is clear too that the motive for this was to prevent massive desertion of the rulers' farms by their slaves to insure continuity in the transition to growing cash crops like cotton and groundnuts and to preserve the sources of wealth of the ruling Fulani aristocracy of northern Nigeria.

What is less clear is why. While there are some general comments about the ambivalence of colonial officials toward merchant capitalism, it is not clear what it was about the personal, family, educational, class, or political background of men like Lugard or Major Burdon that made them think that keeping slaves in servitude was preferable to some type of land reform. This was the period of the Russian revolution, after all. In fact, the method by which former slaves could and would become land owners is only hinted at in the last chapter.

The authors also warn us that "It is even more difficult to speculate on the motivation and actions of slave women, because the history of Hausa women in general is so poorly understood" (p. xv). It would be safer to note that the research has simply not been done. Almost no women were interviewed by the male students whose research contributed to this work. There is no lack of formner female slaves and concubines whose voices are waiting to be heard. And if Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman and Joyce Cary's colonial novel, Mister Johnson, can be believed, British colonial wives were much more empa- thetic towards African societies and beliefs than their husbands. What did they write home in letters about the institution of slavery and its continuation or the concubines they met in African homes and palaces?

The study is focused primarily on rural slaves who worked in agriculture. There is less mention of older women who served as simple domestic slaves and little attention to urban slaves who worked as officials, or who were eunuchs or laborers in the local hand industries of tanning leather, manufacturing cotton cloth, dying, and tailoring.

Many rich details are included in this volume. How slave traders brought women and children from the Cameroons using a secret code language about the

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BOOK REVIEWS 365

cattle trade makes chilling reading as does the story of how the caliph of Sokoto had two concubines executed for giving each other sexual satisfaction. It was fascinat- ing to see how the aristocracy of African merchants and officials manipulated the Islamic courts to continue to buy and sell concubines under the very noses of the British for years before it came to colonial attention. Another detail of horror and interest concerns the emir of Madagali in Adamawa being deposed on evidence in his own diaries that between 1912 and 1922 he had conducted 119 slave raids and seized 2,025 individuals to sell or use as slaves.

The authors make it very clear that British policy must be held responsible for their astounding policies of blaming the victims of slavery-to the extent that slaves were further exploited and impoverished by having to pay their owners for their own freedom in addition to paying taxes to the British. While Lugard wrote blithely that a slave should be able to purchase his freedom in a year's time, the authors carefully document that it took many slaves between two and ten, or even twenty years, while others died in servitude first. Many became permanently indebted to their former masters, setting a pattern of an impoverished rural peasantry that still continues.

Finally, the continuation of the legal ownership of slaves until 1936 defmed the social values of that society. By maintaining the legality of slavery and slave concubinage, the British encouraged slave owners to continue to replace lost, deceased, or freed slaves in a secret slave trade. They also maintained the attitudes of social, cultural, and racial superiority that slavery nearly universally entails. In 130 years the United States has not been able to rid itself of the legacy of racial prejudice and economic discrimination left in the path of its experience of slavery. How should Nigerians be able to do this in less than half the time? Open-minded Nigerians aptly discuss the nature of a type of "apartheid" in their own society based on class and racial divisions. Most of these were unnecessarily maintained for nearly four more decades by the British policies so caringly and meticulously documented in this book. Graduate students will find a reading of this book a source of many ideas for research in economic history and the volume will be welcomed by students of economic history, slavery studies, colonial history, the histories of Afro-Islamic societies, and of historical method.

PRISCIHLA E. STARRAIT

University of Wisconsin at Superior

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