The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast

Abstract

The most fruitful approaches to the study of slave resistance in the New World have involved examination of the slaves' struggles to create and control institutions of community and kinship in the face of planters' attempts to suppress local social reproduction altogether. Africanists who would attempt similar analysis of rebellious slave consciousness are hampered by the tradition of functionalist anthropology which dominates studies of African culture, especially Miers and Kopytoff's thesis of the integrative nature of African slavery. By contrast, more class-oriented approaches to studies of African slave resistance assume too stark a division between the consciousness of slaves and the consciousness of masters. It is suggested that Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and contradictory popular consciousness can be used to reconcile the cultural sensitivity of the first approach with the concern of the second for issues of domination and struggle. Thus a more nuanced view of slave consciousness might be reached.The case studied involves resistance to the rapid rise of sugar plantations on the northern Tanzania coast in the late nineteenth century. Miers and Kopytoff's model of the ‘reduction of marginality’ is modified to accommodate a process of conflict, as slaves struggled to gain access to institutions of Swahili prestige and citizenship and as their masters struggled to exclude them. Analysis of a large-scale slave rebellion in 1873 reveals that the consciousness of the rebels was couched in the local ‘traditional’ language of a moral economy of patrons and clients. Although this language was expressive of some of the hegemonic ideas of the emergent planter class, it was also openly rebellious. It expressed neither a slave class-consciousness nor simply the ideology of the dominant planter class but was instead a contradictory consciousness of the type that Gramsci discerned in other movements of agrarian rebellion.

‘I Am a Slave Not a Wife’: Slave Women in Post‐Proclamation Gold Coast (Ghana)

“…They tried to recast this hegemonic language in 'new variants expressive of popular resistance'. 17 Certainly, men accepted more easily than women some elements of the dominant ideology, such as men's rights over women's productive and reproductive capacities, over the institution of polygyny and over the sanctions against female adultery. The refusal by slave women to remain together with the husband in a family unit had a major impact on future social change and gender relations.…”

The Archaeology of Slavery

“…The seeming anomaly of plantation slavery in nineteenth-century East Africa was addressed by Frederick Cooper's work (1977Cooper's work ( , 1979, which attempted to draw together economic and social aspects of slavery to gain a more complex picture of the institution in this particular context. Assessing the changing nature of slavery in nineteenth-century East Africa, he argued that as planters became enmeshed in capitalist global economies their view of the position of enslaved individuals may have changed, allowing them to conceptualize them more as commodities (Cooper 1977(Cooper , 1979; see also Glassman 1991Glassman , 1995. Plantation owners were growing goods for sale through straightforward commodity transactions.…”

Plantation Households

“…Plantation owners of nineteenth-century Eastern Africa have been characterized as male patriarchs within a highly structured set of gender and class identities (Cooper 1977(Cooper , 1981Glassman 1991Glassman , 1995. Paternalism came into being through a complex web of social interactions between a plantation owner and his slaves; benevolence toward them, accompanied by a measure of violence, applied in a " judicial" manner (Cooper 1977, p. 155).…”

“…For enslaved women working in the field, their lives were limited by the demands of labor and rules of this kind prohibiting certain forms of dress. Enslaved men laboring on plantations had some opportunities to rise in social standing through working hard and developing a relationship with their owner (Cooper 1977, p. 211;Glassman 1991Glassman , 1995McCurdy 2006, p. 445). As discussed in the previous chapter, the types of local conflicts that men such as Abdalla bin Jabir had meant that they needed trusted male clients, allowing room for enslaved men to better their relative social standing.…”