At the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of slaves lived across the East African mainland, from the Swahili coast to the Great Lakes region, in the region now comprising the countries of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. Twenty years later, around 1920, these slaves regimes had ceased to function thanks to a mixture of colonial legislation, economic change and slaves' efforts to self-emancipate. While there are a handful of excellent studies concerning the end and aftermath of slavery on the Swahili coast, where the phenomenon was particularly conspicuous, very little is so far known about the fate of the slaves who lived in locations further inland. They simply disappear from the historical record. This is due to a significant extent to the fact that neither colonial officials nor missionaries, both of whom had justified their entry into the East African mainland in terms of ending slavery, were keen to admit that hierarchies derived from slavery continued despite their presence. What is less clear is whether it also reflects a situation where former slaves found it relatively easy to shake off the stigma and dependencies associated with slave origin.
The project is designed to establish what happened to the hundreds of thousands of former slaves on the East African mainland in the decades after 1920. A great deal of research, as well as contemporary politics, in other parts of the world make clear that slave regimes often have a very long afterlife. See, in particular, the difficulties of US American society in dealing with the heritage of slavery, which continues to disadvantage African-American citizens to this day. The apparently undramatic 'disappearance' of ex-slaves in East Africa therefore constitutes a puzzle, and one that may be instructive for the overcoming of the heritages of slavery elsewhere. That said, early investigation shows that the topic of slavery provokes unease in East African societies, too; the question, then, is rather how these tensions are negotiated and managed here.
Due to the shortage of written sources on the further lives of former slaves after emancipation, the research depends to a great extent on oral history. As many interlocutors are reluctant to explicitly discuss histories of slavery, the topic has to be approached broadly, through an examination of economic, ritual and social inequalities and dependencies, in both public and domestic spheres. Attention to gendered differences is particularly important, since we know that both slavery and emancipation were typically experienced very differently by women and men. In particular, women were vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and tied into owners' households both by cultural standards of domesticity and by their affective ties especially to children. The project therefore has to consider life histories, sayings, songs and stories about domestic and broader social ties alongside oral traditions and recollections specifically on the topic of slavery.
The project aims to trace the life stories and trajectories, both individual and collective, of people who had been slaves early in the twentieth century, and of their descendants. It aims to understand the continuing role of references to the slave past in political discourses and social lives in the region, and to establish to what extent the pervasive silence on the history of slavery in the region is practiced with the support and consent or against the dissent of slave descendants. It thereby aims to contribute to our understanding of how the painful heritage of past slavery can be healed.
