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Slavery and Slave Trade on the Atlantic Coast: The Duala of the Littoral

1995; Routledge; Volume: 41; Linguagem: Inglês

0078-7809

Ralph A. Austen,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The Duala are one of those African coastal societies often stereotyped as slavetrading middlemen. The inferences drawn from this identification have often been grossly misleading and unjust. Nevertheless, it remains true that various forms of slavery did play a critical role in the historical development of the Duala. Moreover, the traditional Duala view of their own way of life and its relationship to outside groups is intricately bound up with conceptions of servitude. Historical evidence also makes it clear that servile groups constituted important sectors of Duala social, economic, and political organization. The present paper will attempt first to define the position of slaves within Duala society at about the middle of the nineteenth century. This will be followed by a somewhat lengthy examination of the processes that produced this system of stratification and the changes in it from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. l