FYI.
Madiba.
=======
The Rutgers Department of History and Center for African Studies, in
collaboration with the UNESCO/SSHRCC Nigerian Hinterland Project of York
University, Canada, are sponsoring a conference, Fighting Back: African
Resistance to the Slave Trade, February 16-17th, 2001 at Livingston Campus
Student Center.
Little is known about the strategies used by Africans to protect themselves
from enslavement and the trade in slaves, and what is known is scattered
among a variety of specialist studies and in obscure corners of studies
focusing on other issues. However, no picture of the slave trade, whether
across the Atlantic, the Sahara or the Indian Ocean, or indeed within Africa
itself, can be complete without a systematic study of the ways in which
Africans responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and sale.
Africans used a variety of strategies to express their opposition to
enslavement and alienation through sale. There were personal, familial,
communal and state strategies, which sometimes were in contradiction with
one another. Tactics included but were not limited to: the redemption of
captives, occult protection, psychological defense, defensive planning of
settlements, architectural design, use of caves, captive revolts,
establishment of maroon and refugee villages, religious interdiction
against sale, written and oral denunciations of sales, attacks on forts and
slaving entrepots, diversion of rivers, relocation of villages, covenants
between communities for protection, tributes, revolts, and other armed
resistance.
Despite this evidence of open resistance to involvement in international
slavery, it is generally assumed that Africans were passive victims of the
slave trade, except for those few merchants and rulers who collaborated in
the enslavement and deportation of their fellow beings.
The presupposition of African passivity and inactivity needs to be
challenged. An exploration of history, literature, oral tradition and
traditional cultural forms reveals that the responses to the slave trade
were more pervasive than is usually thought.
Participants and the title of papers are listed below include:
Dr. Paul Lovejoy - York University
Protection Against Enslavement at the Slave Port of Old Calabar in the Late
18th Century
Dr. Dennis Cordell - Southern Methodist University
The Myth of Inevitability and Invincibility: Resistance to Slavers and the
Slave Trade in Central Africa in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries
Dr. Carolyn Brown - Rutgers University
Solidarity through Struggle: Resistance to slavery and slave trading in
Colonial South Nkanu (Igboland, Nigeria)
Dr. Martin Klein - University of Toronto
Defensive Strategies: Wasulu, Masina and the Slave Trade
Dr. Joseph Inikori - University of Rochester
The Struggle Against the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: The Role of the State
Dr. Walter Hawthorne - Ohio University
Transforming a Stateless Society: Balanta Response to the Slave Trade
Dr. Sylviane Diouf - Rutgers University
Redemption as a Personal, Familial and Group Strategy
Dr. John Oriji - California State Polytechnic University
Igboland, Slavery and the Drums of War and Heroism
Dr. Kwabena Opare-Akurang - Tulane University
We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist: The Gold
Coast Times and the British Abolition of Slavery in Colonial Ghana, 1874-75.
Dr. Sylvie Kandé - New York University
Black Loyalists and Local Rulers Against the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone,
18th to 19th Century
Dr. Elisée Soumoni - National University of Benin, Cotonou
Lakeside Villages in South Benin as Refuges Against the Slave Trade
Dr. Jose Curto - York University
The Story of Nbena: From Illegal Enslavement to Freedom in Benguela, Angola,
1816-1819
Dr. Djibril Tamsir Niane - Conakry, Guinea
Geography in the Fight Against the Slave Trade in Rio Pongo
Dr. Thierno Bah - University of Yaoundé
Slave Raiding and Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad from the 16th Century
to the 19th Century
Olotunji Ojo - York University
Slave Revolt in Yorubaland: The Oyo Uprising in Ile-Ife c. 1850
Ibrahim Hamza - York University
Resistance to Enslavement in Hausaland
Adama Guèye - University of Dakar
Kayor and Baol Responses to the Slave Trade: Habitat Mutation and Changes in
Land Occupancy in Senegal from the 16th to the 19th Century
***********************************************************************
Carolyn Anderson Brown, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of History
Van Dyck Hall, 16 Seminary Place
Rutgers- the State University of New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1108
(0) 732-932-8030
(0-Fax) 732-932-6763
email: [log in to unmask]
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