Slavery in Francophone West Africa

Abstract Multiple forms of labor coercion were common in West Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on two of them: one, based on interior slavery, was rooted in the longue durée of regional history. The other, colonial forced labor, was exogenous and introduced by European colonialists between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In Tahoua, the region of today’s Republic of Niger that this chapter focuses on, these two forms of coerced labor co-existed. In 1905 France abolished indigenous slavery in its recently acquired African territories and concurrently introduced a regime of compulsory labor for the building and maintenance of colonial infrastructure. In spite of French legal abolition, indigenous slavery did not die out, but started being contested and resisted more effectively by those who had been enslaved. Those formerly enslaved to local slaveowners and their descendants were also the first to be forcibly recruited to carry out construction work on colonial worksites. These two regimes of coerced labor, with different ideological origins, became intertwined and underwent substantial changes throughout the twentieth century. Their legacies have continued influencing labor relations and forms of personal dependence into the present day.