Slavery in Islamic West Africa

Abstract

This chapter examines the issues of enslavement, slavery, and pathways to freedom in the nineteenth-century West African states established through revolutionary jihad in what is now mostly contemporary Mali and northern Nigeria. The jihads were primarily anti-slavery movements. Yet, the leaders of these movements were not interested in outlawing slavery for everyone, but in protecting people they considered to be freeborn Muslims from enslavement and in regulating slavery according to their interpretation of the Mālikī madh’hab, the Sunni school of law that was dominant in precolonial Muslim West Africa. Ironically, for states founded with the priority of instituting more “ethical/legal” slavery policies, slavery actually increased in the region as demand for agricultural products produced by enslaved labor, mostly women, increased.