West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700-1860 (African Studies)

266 Pages·1993·5.56 MB·English

by  James F. Searing

West African societies were transformed by the slave trade, even in regions
where few slaves were exported. While many books have been written on
the import and export trade and on warrior predation, Dr. Searing's concern
is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal
River valley in the eighteenth century. He shows that the growth of the
Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa.
Slaves worked as seamen in the river and coasting trades, produced surplus
grain to feed slaves in transit, and sometimes came to hold pivotal positions
in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local
slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and
slave rebellions. The interaction of ecological crisis, warfare, and famine
shaped the history of slave exports.

WEST AFRICAN SLAVERY AND ATLANTIC COMMERCE
AFRICAN STUDIES SERIES 77
GENERAL EDITOR
J. M. Lonsdale, Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge
ADVISORY EDITORS
J. D. Y. Peel, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, with special
reference to Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London
Published in collaboration with
THE AFRICAN STUDIES CENTRE, CAMBRIDGE
A list of books in this series will be found at the end of this volume
WEST AFRICAN SLAVERY
AND ATLANTIC COMMERCE
The Senegal River valley, 1700-1860
JAMES F. SEARING
University of Illinois at Chicago
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
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Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
© Cambridge University Press 1993
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1993
First paperback edition 2003
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Searing, James F.
West African slavery and Atlantic commerce : the Senegal River valley,
1700-1860 / James F. Searing.
p. cm. — (African studies series; 78)
ISBN 0 521 44083 1 hardback
1. Slave trade — Senegal — History. 2. Slavery — Senegal — History.
3. Senegal — Commerce — History. I. Title. II. Series.
HT 1399.S4S43 1993
306.3'62'09663 - dc20 92-27508 CIP
ISBN 0 521 44083 1 hardback
ISBN 0 521 53452 6 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2003
Contents
List of maps page viii
Preface ix
1 Cosaan: "the origins" 1
2 Slavery and the slave trade in the Lower Senegal 27
3 The Atlantic kingdom: maritime commerce and social change 59
4 Merchants and slaves: slavery on Saint Louis and Goree 93
5 Famine, civil war, and secession, 1750-1800 129
6 From river empire to colony: Saint Louis and Senegal, 1800-1860 163
Conclusion 194
Notes 200
Index 247
vn
Maps
1 The Lower Senegal in the eighteenth century page xiv
2 The Senegal River valley 60
vm
Preface
On the north-east side of Goree island, facing the southern shore of the
Cap Vert peninsula, a row of eighteenth-century merchant houses stand
as reminders of the era of the Atlantic slave trade. One of the houses is
now a museum known as the Maison des Esclaves, and receives a steady
stream of visitors who disembark from the ferry that shuttles between
Dakar and Goree. Visitors can observe the spacious quarters of the
merchant house on the upper level of the museum, and the dark, cramped
dungeons and storehouses below, the captiveries or slave pens where slaves
were held.
Merchant houses like the slave museum temporarily harbored slaves
purchased by individual merchants, who were later transferred to the
prison-like fortress across the harbor where the Senegal Company held
slaves before they embarked on the middle passage to slavery in the
Americas. At the back of the house a doorway looks out on the open sea.
Once used to receive small craft ferrying slaves and provisions from the
mainland, the doorway is locally known as the "door of no return," a
passageway that separated departing slaves from Africa forever. The soft,
rose pastel of the stuccoed houses, their crumbling tile roofs, and the
beauty of the bougainvillea that hangs over the walls of the enclosed
courtyards and shades the narrow streets, contrasts sharply with the
images of terror and heartbreak evoked by the narrow dungeons that echo
with the sounds of the Atlantic.
On the same side of the island, a visitor might note that one of the
narrow streets nestled below the steep hill covered with the ruins of
ancient and modern fortifications is called the "rue des Bambaras." The
name is one of the few reminders of another side of the island's history.
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries slaves made up the
majority of the island's permanent population. In the eighteenth century
slaves were referred to euphemistically as "Bambara," because many of
them came from distant regions of the middle and upper Niger valley. The
slaves of Goree labored to sustain the maritime trade between the Atlantic
world and the African mainland. Goree's visible reminders of the past
ix
Preface
have made it the symbol of an entire historical period. In the eighteenth
century another island city, Saint Louis, in the mouth of the Senegal
River, played an even more important role as a link in the maritime trade
between the Atlantic world and West Africa. There too slaves formed the
majority of the population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The slaves of Goree and Saint Louis were the most visible manifestation
of broader historical processes that linked the slave trade and the devel-
opment of slave societies in the Americas to the expansion of slavery in
West Africa. This book is a study of the interconnections between Atlantic
commerce and the historical development of slavery on the Atlantic
islands of Saint Louis and Goree and in the adjacent mainland kingdoms
of Waalo, Kajoor, and Bawol, a distinct historical region referred to in
this book as the Lower Senegal.1 It focuses on historical processes within
West Africa, and is only secondarily a reexamination of the import-export
trade between Senegambia and the Atlantic world.
The "door of no return" is an apt metaphor for the passageway that
carried slaves across the Atlantic. Historians of the slave trade have
focused their gaze in the same direction, on the slaves and commodities
that left the continent. This book looks back into Africa through the same
passageway, using Atlantic commerce as a window for studying change
within Africa. Atlantic commerce transformed West Africa, creating a
divide in its history.
Previous historical studies of Atlantic commerce from Senegambia made
the measurement of the export trade the primary object of investigation.
This book shifts the emphasis to the ways Atlantic commerce transformed
African societies, to the emergence and transformation of slave systems in
the Lower Senegal, and to broader currents of economic and social change
associated with the export trade in slaves and gum arabic. This reordering
of priorities gives a new centrality to the trade in grain and other foodstuffs
that nourished slaves in transit, which was particularly important in the
Lower Senegal. Many of the men and women held in slavery in the Lower
Senegal performed labors crucial to the sustenance of the export trade.
Chapter 1 introduces the region and its history in the period before the
Atlantic era, setting the stage for the changes that began in the late
seventeenth century. Chapter 2 examines the connections between the
export trade in slaves and the expansion of slavery in the Lower Senegal,
presenting in broad outline some of the arguments that are fleshed out in
the rest of the book. Chapter 3 places the Lower Senegal in the wider
commercial system of the Senegal River valley, and discusses its emer-
I have used capital letters to distinguish my usage from the narrower geographic reference
usually given to the term "lower Senegal", or le has Senegal in French, referring to the
lower river valley, and thus only to Waalo, northern Kajoor, and the island of Saint Louis.
The justification for treating the larger region of the Lower Senegal as a single historical
region is implicit in the arguments presented throughout this book.