This article seeks a history useful for abolishing contemporary slavery and reviews the evolution of scholarly perspectives on women and slavery in West Africa in order to determine the roots of contemporary slavery and put forms of contemporary slavery on the same analytical plane as historical ones. Women’s slavery continues in the contemporary world, especially in West Africa.
The literature on women and slavery in West Africa challenges much conventional wisdom about slavery by showing that lineage rather than chattel slavery was common. Most slaves kept in West Africa were female (with local and temporal variations); the African demand for women slaves determined the skewed sex ratio in the Atlantic slave trade; women slaves were more highly valued than men because of their productive and reproductive functions; free and freed women were preeminent in owning and using women slaves; women slaves contributed to culture and identity formation in critical ways; for most women slaves, harems were more about domestic drudgery than sex; and the abolition of slavery failed for women slaves more than men for reasons relevant to the continuation of slavery for women and children in West Africa.
Authoritarian family structures and colonialism subordinated West African women, and that subordination has been exacerbated by a world capitalist economy that continues the demand for slaves used in West Africa and elsewhere. If slave status historically has often been marked by race or ethnicity, contemporary slavery is gendered female in most societies.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and West African Women
West African- and West Central African-born women experienced being sold into slavery and forced to march to the sea. Once at the coast, enslavers held these women captive, along with children and men, in fortified camps and often forced them to work before being boarded onto ships. The Gold Coast, which had forty such camps, was one of the African regions where enslavers held newly enslaved women before shipping them directly to the Charleston and Savannah ports in the early 1800s.
These women had to undergo the perilous Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, enduring putrid, inhumane living conditions and violence from ships’ sailors. Captains commonly permitted women and children some time on the upper decks, with access to fresh air, so sparing them periods of time away from the over-crowded, dark, dank "nitty-gritty" conditions endured constantly by men on ships’ lower sections. However, being permitted access to fresh air required mingling with seamen on ships’ upper decks, which placed girls and women at risk of sexual assaults by the sailors. The arduous, disorientating, and frightening journey across the Atlantic could take months to complete with high fatality rates. While around twelve million people began the middle passage, historians estimate around two million died on the way.
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For the length of the legal slave trade in the United States, 1619-1808, the vast majority of women and men-over 90 percent-disembarked in the Caribbean islands and South America. From these Caribbean Islands, slave ship captains then took some enslaved people on the well-traveled route to the Charleston port. By the early 1800s, many enslaved women in the Lowcountry were born on American soil rather than crossing the Atlantic themselves, although they may have heard stories about Africa and the Middle Passage from previous generations or watched as newly enslaved people arrived on their plantations.
Map of slave trade routes across the Atlantic Ocean.
Exploitation and Commodification of Enslaved Women
Upon arrival in America, traders sold African people at auctions or in privately negotiated sales, where new legal "owners" claimed them. Overwhelming and humiliating for the enslaved, prospective owners inspected chained people’s bodies and teeth for their physical strength and general health, similar to cattle at a market. Until the Antebellum era, slaveholders tended to favor men over women due to their perceived superior physical strength. However, during the eighteenth century, slaveholders began to acknowledge the economic benefits of enslaving women, realizing they could not only exploit their labor but also their reproductive abilities.
This led to the equalization of sex ratios among men and women and the dual exploitation of female slaves as workers and reproducers. Ultimately, enslavers purchased enslaved Africans with capitalistic self-interest in mind. Economic incentives fueled almost all of the decisions slaveowners made. Enslavers provided rations of food and clothing, housing, and varying degrees of medical treatment to protect their investments, just as they also housed, fed, and provided medical treatment for livestock. Under American chattel slavery, slaveholders thought of and used women--along with men and children--as property.
Slaveholders’ use of enslaved people was violent and cruel-they forced enslaved people to act as economically profitable commodities through their labor and reproductive abilities. In 1662, the colony of Virginia enacted the law of partus sequitur ventrem, meaning that all children born to an enslaved woman would automatically be born a slave no matter what their father’s legal status was, and a similar law was adopted in South Carolina in 1740 and in Georgia in 1755. Such "natural increase" was only possible through enslaved women’s frequent reproduction, whose offspring were born legally enslaved.
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In his work on the Sokoto Caliphate, Paul E. Lovejoy emphasized the sexual dimension in the enslavement of women. Lovejoy has argued that although women provided important productive labor, free men also considered physical attraction when acquiring enslaved women. Sexual abuse was an important aspect regarding women’s experience in captivity. In dialogue with Lovejoy’s scholarship, this article examines the experiences of enslaved women in Luanda and Benguela, the two major ports of Portuguese Angola, particularly their exposure to sexual violence. Drawing upon unexplored baptism records produced between 1800 and 1830, this study stresses how slave owners abused enslaved women in Luanda and Benguela, which resulted in the birth of children.
Population of enslaved people in North America in 1790 and 1860.
| Year | Number of Enslaved People in North America |
|---|---|
| 1790 | Around 698,000 |
| 1860 | Four million |
In 1790, there were around 698,000 enslaved people in North America. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, this number had increased to four million. In just seventy years, the number of enslaved people in North America more than quadrupled.
Modern Slavery: The Most-Afflicted Countries
Contemporary Slavery: The Trokosi System
There are global efforts fighting modern slavery, but one traditional system is still holding strong in West Africa: Trokosi. Trokosi is a traditional system where virgin girls, some as young as six years old, are sent into Troxovi shrines (shrines for gods) as slaves to make amends for wrongs committed by a member of the virgin girl’s family.
Trokosi girls in Ghana.
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Until the Trokosi system came to the attention of the general public in the 1990s, girls sent to the shrines stayed for life. After the 90’s some of the priests and elders were willing to let the girls go back home after a few years, for a few months, but had to return whenever they were sent for. When they die, the family must replace her with another virgin girl. This means that the family will pay reparation, of one girl, forever.
The Trokosi system is based on the belief that gods have the power to search for wrongdoers and punish them. People who feel an injustice has been committed against them, go to the shrine and place a curse on the offender so that they will be punished by the gods. When the virgin girls are sent to the shrines, they become the “wives of the gods” and are sexually exploited by the priests and shrine elders. The shrine priest is the spiritual head of the shrine and “proxy for the gods” while clansmen can be appointed as elders of the shrine.
The girls are forced to work in any capacity that suits these priests and elders - for instance, on their farms. If there are children born out of the relationship with them, they become the responsibility of the virgin girls’ family. It’s not sure when Trokosi systems began, but it’s an ancient practice. The word Trokosi comes from the Ewe language, Ewe communities found in Benin, Togo and Ghana. It’s a combination of two Ewe words “tro” and “kosi.” “Tro” means god or deity, and “kosi” means slave. Most of the people that live in the southern Volta Region of Ghana, southern Togo, and southern Benin believe and practice the Trokosi system.
In 1998 the Ghanaian government passed a law criminalising the Trokosi practice. Despite this, it continued because governmental agencies responsible for enforcing the law didn’t have the courage to arrest the family members, priests or shrine owners. The system invokes fear in the hearts of most people including the law enforcement personnel. Trokosi practising communities strongly believe in the power of gods to cause calamities to families. Trokosi priests ensure they are reminded of this by issuing warnings that they must send their virgin girls as objects of reparation.
The practice also thrives because there’s a group of traditionalists, mostly male, who strongly believe that Trokosi is part of the Ewe’s cultural heritage and must be preserved. Over the past two decades, Ghana’s human rights commission and various NGOs adopted different intervention approaches to end the practice.
These approaches include:
- Encouraging Trokosi priests and elders to accept other objects of reparation, instead of people.
- Negotiations with priests and shrine elders to set slaves free and sign legal documents to ensure they won’t go back to the practice.
- In exchange they receive a package that will help them generate income, replacing the loss of human capital.
- Whilst the Trokosi women are still enslaved they can be provided with vocational skills training.
They gain much needed skills which will help them generate income and support their children in the future - and it also creates some distance between them and the shrine as they attend the training in centres every day. Finally, since this issue is a gross human rights violation against women and children, the International Community should put pressure on the government and people of Ghana to enforce the 1998 law making the Trokosi practice a crime.
If pressure is brought by international organisations such as the United Nations, African Union, ECOWAS, European Union etc.
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