Jessica tuck 1995 free#
Pursuing free status often meant the loss of protection, thus subjection to the economic and social vulnerabilities of life as a patron-less person. For example, claiming the legal right to freedom might ostracize a slave from their master, thereby severing a relationship that could provide security. Often, the routes to emancipation and emancipation itself were hazardous and unappealing.
Those seeking emancipation would take multiple routes to achieve it, but not all these routes were open to everyone. At the same time, contests for emancipation could contribute to new forms of inequalities. Expressions and contestations of post-slavery hierarchies were extremely diverse and often very indirect.
Jessica tuck 1995 full#
Those in pursuit of emancipation searched for ways to free themselves from coercive labor regimes, procure land, migrate for better opportunities, gain dependents, secure full and equal citizenship, and overcome the stigma of slave status. Ex-owners had no reason to advertise their attempts to retain high status or claims on others’ labor, and for many ex-slaves or slave descendants, obfuscating these antecedents was an important step toward shedding their stigma. Officials and missionaries preferred to treat the problem as obsolete once colonial rule was firmly established. Thirdly, none of the parties who could have documented and born witness to the persistence of hierarchies derived from slavery had much interest in doing so. Emancipation means more than securing legal freedom or better labor conditions it is a social, cultural, economic, and political process to dismantle the master-slave distinction. Legal emancipation through abolition (the legal end to the practice of slavery), self-ransom (when a slave purchases their freedom from their master), and manumission (the voluntary freeing of slaves by their masters) were merely the beginning of post-slavery struggles. Secondly, emancipation is a protracted and variable process. Rather, as the stigma of slave status persisted long after the legal abolition of slavery, both ex-slaves and descendants of slaves developed strategies of resistance and negotiation to emancipate themselves. Firstly, it was not only slaves-that is, people legally defined as such-that sought emancipation. These routes are challenging to trace for three reasons. Routes to emancipation have been diverse and dependent on a variety of social, economic, political, and geographic factors. In East Africa, though the practice of slavery as a means of controlling labor and acquiring dependents largely ended in the early 20th century, emancipation from slavery is a continuing process. Though East African societies, rural ones especially, are readily characterized as timelessly egalitarian, they struggle to this day with the legacy of slavery and incomplete emancipation. Although political independence in the 1960s encouraged the condemnation of slavery as an aberration from a different era, slavery-derived social differences linger, and people with a genealogy of slavery may face status implications in certain situations. Moreover, male ex-slaves’ ambitions to assert their own patriarchal status by controlling women could be a major obstacle for ex-slave women’s search for emancipation. Routes to emancipation were highly gendered as female slaves within owners’ households lacked both political support and legal rights to their children. Ex-slaves pursued economic security and livelihoods through access to land and wage labor and sought to shed the stigma of slave origins by seeking religious affiliations, education, ethnic identities, and kinship ties.
As scholars have established, the legal abolition of slavery did not lead directly to emancipation in East Africa, but it contributed to the quick erosion of slavery-based labor regimes around 1900. Their experiences varied regionally, with status contests most clearly traceable in those areas where slavery had been most concentrated, especially on the coast. Slaves, ex-slaves, and their descendants have taken multiple and complex routes toward emancipation in East Africa.
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