Speaking of Slavery: Slaving Strategies and Moral Imaginations in the Lower Congo (Early Times to the Late 19th Century)

Abreu Lelitão de Almeida, Marcos

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-p7vt-c369

Work

Speaking of Slavery: Slaving Strategies and Moral Imaginations in the Lower Congo (Early Times to the Late 19th Century)

Public

Download PDF

This dissertation traces the intellectual and social history of slavery in the Lower Congo over the Longue Durée. It examines how Bantu-speaking groups of the Lower Congo inherited, constructed, reconstructed, and passed on to younger generations a vocabulary that framed their shifting slaving practices from their arrival in the region around the first century C.E. until the end of the Cuban slave trade in the 1860s. It argues that bringing outsiders into the communities for local purposes—and labeling them with different, culturally-specific, exclusionary categories—was a durable but flexible strategy that began some three millennia ago, when the linguistic ancestors of Lower Congo Bantu-speakers settled the Cameroonian lowlands. This dissertation demonstrates that ambitious individuals seeking to establish or secure their position as leaders resorted to slaving as a crucial strategy to consolidate themselves politically in contexts of new demographic, ecological, or material opportunities over three thousand years of Lower Congolese history. Building on recent scholarship that foregrounds the multiplicity of slaving strategies in human history, this dissertation develops an interdisciplinary approach based on comparative historical linguistics, archaeology and paleoclimatology to identify crucial moments in the making of slave relations in the Lower Congo. To this end, the work is based on archival and dictionary research in Angola, Belgium, and Brazil, and linguistic fieldwork in northern Angola for six months. 5 Between 1200 and 600 BCE, early Bantu-speaking communities settled in southern Cameroon in a period when their eclectic subsistence strategies flourished amidst the expansion of savanna-like environments due to a sharp climatic change. In this context, linguistic evidence and comparative ethnographic research conducted in all major subgroups of the Bantu linguistic family suggest that ancient leaders created a new ritual for incorporating kinless outsiders and a social label for extreme dependency. This new social position created a new logic of incorporation that reveals emerging ideas around alienation, capture, vulnerability, and ways of managing inter- and intra-village conflicts, which gave community leaders enough dynamism to enlarge their followers in a time when we observe the growth of village sites in the archaeological record. By the first century C.E., proto-Central-Kongo speakers, descendants of early Bantu speakers, inherited this early slaving tradition in a time of population peak, experimentation with iron tools and cereal agriculture. Central-Kongo speakers migrated to the Lower Congo coming from Malebo Pool and likely found other Bantu-speaking communities living in the region. Linguistic, archaeological, and paleoclimatic evidence shows that Central-Kongo speakers created new forms of capture, sociologies of submission and new technologies of restraint. Moreover, the innovation of words for raiding and pawnship, as well as new labels for the enslaved, suggest that Central-Kongo leaders used violence and the acquisition of outsiders to enlarge their retinue of followers, promoting slaving as an important strategy of cross-cultural exchange amidst the political and linguistic diversity of the Lower Congo during the first half of the first millennium BCE. In the following centuries, their descendants transformed these slaving practices to meet the challenges of changing environmental and social contexts. West-Kongo speakers, for 6 example, asserted control over the reproductive capacities of enslaved women when archaeological research suggests there was a sudden decrease of village sites and decline of population density between the 7th and 9th centuries on the Loango coast. In the 11th to 15th centuries, when calculations based on radiocarbon dates suggest that population sizes recovered and reached unprecedented levels, southern Kongo speakers participating in growing networks of trade and developing overarching polities used enslaved individuals to reduce transportation costs and support the emerging elite’s way of life. The early contacts with Europeans further intensified the recourse to slaving until the eighteenth century. Between 1770 and 1850, the rise of mercantile states and slave-holding oligarchies during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade prompted Lower Congo peoples to create still more new ideas and practices of slavery. Oligarchs developed a raiding economy and a new moral imagination in which the violent acquisition of outsiders and the retention of female slaves became pathways to self-realization and authority. The dissertation foregrounds the historical trajectory through which the category of slavery was built and rebuilt by Lower Congo peoples over the centuries. It revises the established literature, develops a new methodology, and calls for a reappraisal of the significant interpretations of slavery in the region. It provides a model for investigating slavery in times and places beyond literacy and for exploring the intellectual history of Africans in the Atlantic world.

Creator