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THE RANK EFFECT: POST-EMANCIPATION IMMOBILITY IN A SONINKE VILLAGE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2012

PAOLO GAIBAZZI
PAOLO GAIBAZZI*
Affiliation:
Zentrum Moderner Orient
*
Author's email: paolo.gaibazzi@rz.hu-berlin.de
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Abstract

The end of internal slavery in West Africa is generally associated with an increase in labour mobility. This article complicates this picture by showing that the effects of status – the rank effect – on people's ability to migrate often outlasted emancipation. In Sabi, a Soninke village in Upper River Gambia, economic migration intensified and globalised from the 1950s onwards. Although they have since been free to move, the descendants of slaves have migrated less than those of the freeborn. The article attributes this relative immobility to the enduring dynamics of socioeconomic marginalisation based on slave descent.

Keywords

Gambiaslaveryabolitionmigration
Type
Mobility, Slavery, and Freedom in Mali and the Gambia
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 215 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

This article is to a significant extent the result of a collaborative project begun at a workshop on migration and post-slavery in West Africa organised by Benedetta Rossi at the University of Liverpool in 2010. Dr. Rossi offered extensive commentary on previous versions of this article. Valuable comments were also provided by Alice Bellagamba, Laura Menin, Aïssatou Mbodj, Lotte Pelckmans, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Research for this article was generously funded by: University of Milano Bicocca with Unicredit Foundation, Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Missione Etnologica in Benin e Africa Occidentale (MEBAO), and Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

References

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28 GNA ARP 31/9-11, ‘Upper River Division Annual Report’, 1949, 1951, 1956 & 1957. See also Gailey, H. A., A History of the Gambia (London, 1964), 162–3Google Scholar.

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32 Komo households were almost all located in komonkanu (slave quarters), while larger and wealthier komo households are often in other parts of the village.

33 Figures exclude men who have formed independent households in the Gambian capital, and seasonal rural-urban migrants, but include people having a permanent activity in the city.

34 A. Benini, ‘Community development in a multi-ethnic society: the URD of The Gambia, West Africa’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bielefeld, 1980), 171.

35 M. Samuel, ‘Les contradictions internes à la paysannerie continuent à agir au sein de la migration en ‘rance’, in E. Le Bris, P.-P. Rey, and M. Samuel (eds.), Capitalisme Négrier: le Marche des Paysans Vers le Proletariat (Paris, 1976), 110–1.

36 Manchuelle, Willing Migrants, 129–30.

37 Bellagamba, ‘Slavery’, 5–41.

38 Ibid. 27.

39 GNA CSO 76, ‘Dr. Gamble's files, n. 19, Slavery, Report of the Upper River’, 104–6.

40 Weil, ‘Slavery’, 109–11.

41 Writing about Allunhare, a Soninke village near Sabi, André van Dokkum has estimated that overall seasonal migrant farmers were cheaper even to employ than domestic slaves. See van Dokkum, A., You Cannot Fight a Wild Beast Alone: Land, Labour and Relations in the Strange Farmer System of the Gambia (Leiden, 1992), 50Google Scholar.

42 Swindell, K., ‘Serawoollies, Tillibunkas and Strange Farmers: the development of migrant groundnut farming along the Gambia river, 1848–95’, Journal of African History, 21:1 (1980), 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Swindell and Jeng, Migrants, 118–28. Similar changes occurred in other Soninke areas: see Manchuelle, Willing Migrants, 138–9.

43 Swindell and Jeng, Migrants, 118–28.

44 Interview with K. Silla, Sabi, 16 and 17 Jan. 2008.

45 Ibid.

46 Interview with M. D., Sabi, 2 Feb. 2008. During the 1960s in Jafunu (Mali), some male descendants of slaves lived and worked in their masters’ compound until they married, like other juniors. Then they continued to work on Saturday and Sunday mornings or remitted a small portion of their harvest. Pollet and Winter, La Société, 257.

47 Interview with Bafula Kamara, Sabi, 15 Dec. 2007.

48 The peak during the First World War was partly due to French subjects crossing the border to avoid conscription. GNA CSO 18/1, ‘The records of Fuludu East District of the Upper River Province together with a short history’, 1933; CSO 2/1903, Report on MacCarthy and Upper River Provinces for the year 1940, 1940; ARP 31/8, Annual Reports of the Upper River, 1934–6 and 1943–5. See also: Swindell and Jeng, Migrants, 169–73 and fig. 5.6.

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50 Kome women can marry freeborn men. Prior to the wedding, the bride is ritually purified of her slave status to prevent her children from inheriting it.

51 Pollet and Winter, La Société, 257; Manchuelle, Willing Migrants, 57.

52 See esp. Bellagamba, A., ‘Entrustment and its changing political meanings in Fuladu, the Gambia (1880–1994)’, Africa, 74:3 (2004), 383–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Rodet, Les Migrantes, esp. 107–20.

54 Interview with K. Silla; see also Bellagamba, ‘Slavery’, 18 and 32.

55 Interview with S. K.

56 Interview with M. D., Sabi, 6 Jan. 2008.

57 Interview with K. Silla.

58 In contrast, see Bellagamba, ‘Slavery’, 27–8.

59 Author's Fieldnotes, 20–3 Nov. 2007 and 1–6 Jan. 2008.

60 I thank Alice Bellagamba for pointing out to me that some immigrants might have been expelled from their communities.

61 Rodet, Les Migrantes, 102–20.

62 In this and the following case study, pseudonyms are used to protect the identities of the informants. The story of the Samagare family is based on interviews and informal conversations with its members and with other villagers (in particular: M. Y., Sabi, 31 Jan. and 1 Feb. 2008; M., Sabi, Dec. 2007).

63 Cattle had begun replacing slaves as a form of capital. See Swindell and Jeng, Migrants, 123.

64 For a description of the Basse traders in this period, see Barrett, H. R., The Marketing of Foodstuffs in the Gambia, 1400–1980: A Geographical Analysis (Aldershot, UK, 1988), 98Google Scholar and 105–6.

65 Tamba is not in Commissioner Jeffs's 1933 list of prominent figures of the Fuladu East district. GNA CSO 18/1, ‘The records of Fuludu East District of the Upper River Province together with a short history’, 1933, 24–7.

66 On cattle epidemics in the Upper River, see GNA CSO 18/1, ‘The records of Fuludu East District of the Upper River Province together with a short history’, 1933; and ARP 31/12, Confidential Diary, Travelling Commissioner, Upper River Province, 1921.

67 M. Mbodji, ‘D'une frontière a l'autre, ou l'histoire de la marginalisation des commerçants senegambiens sur la longue durée: la Gambie de 1816 à 1979’, in P. Kipré, L. Harding and B. Barry (eds.), Commerce et Commerçants en Afrique de l'Ouest (Paris, 1992), 233–4.

68 The term ‘kunda’ is a local suffix meaning ‘household of’.

69 The account is primarily based on interviews (esp. with M., Sabi, 2 Mar. 2007 and 6 Jan. 2008) and informal conversations (2007–8) with the Singate.

70 Interview with S. S., Sabi, Dec. 2007; see also Bellagamba, ‘Slavery’, 25.

71 The problem of indebtedness and deficient food production recurs in almost all colonial reports on the agricultural situation in the Upper River Division. Swindell and Jeng have detailed how the persistence of such concerns among the colonial officials led to a stepping up of public investment in the agricultural sector. Swindell and Jeng, Migrants.

72 In 1932, a 25 per cent increase in the Yard Tax probably accelerated the exit of permanent guests and slaves from their masters’ compounds.

73 Some of the wealthy komo did manumit their children and their sons’ wives by paying their former masters; the manumitted women would beget children who owed no rent in labour to their master. This does not mean that they could marry a ‘freeborn’.

74 Interview with Y. K., Sabi, 16 Dec. 2007.

75 In a 1949 survey of Genieri, a Mandinka village in the Middle River valley, Margaret Haswell found that ‘compounds of peoples of slave origin “owned” by particular freeborn groups were much smaller numerically [than freeborn ones].’ Haswell, M. R., The Nature of Poverty: A Case-History of the First Quarter-Century after World War II (London, 1975), 31–2Google Scholar.

76 Figures are based on a census carried out by Youth With A Mission (YWAM). See YWAM, Sabi Monographic Study (unpublished manuscript, Sabi, 2006). According to my survey, kome households have an average of 28 people, while the hoore ones have 36 (about 21 per cent more populous on average).

77 Interview with Kau Kaba, Sabi, 14 Dec. 2006; see also Manchuelle, Willing Migrants, 28.

78 Interview with M. D., Sabi, 7 Feb. 2007.

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89 In northern Senegal, Sufi brotherhoods played a crucial role in the emancipation of slaves, and later on in organising migrant networks: see Moitt, ‘Slavery’. Among the Soninke, however, Sufi brotherhoods are substantially absent, and Islamic teachers do not materially support the emigration of their students.

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