Slavery and the Early State in Africa

Abstract

In modern societies and in classical antiquity, slavery was largely a source of labor and slaves were at the bottom of the social structure. In earlier societies and in many many non-Western societies, most slaves were concubines, soldiers or servants of the state or of its ruling classes. They were thus often well off. The argument of this article is that slaves played a particularly important role in the emergence of the early state in Africa. The early state involved a struggle of strong men and their families to rise above their peers, to establish the right to rule others, and to impose themselves on neighbors. To do this in societies with no tradition of legitimate authority, they needed the ability to coerce. They also had to tax people who often resisted the emergence of the state. They thus depended on kin, clients, and slaves. Of these groups, slaves were the most dependable because they were totally powerless. They could not compete for power themselves and depended on the emerging rulers for their well-being. The article reviews the literature on African states to demonstrate the importance of slaves in their political structures. The treatment of slavery by modern scholars is very much shaped by a concern with forms of slavery in the capitalist world, on its fringes and in classical antiquity, which until recently played a central role in European education. These were societies labeled slave societies by Moses Finley and slave modes of production by Finley's Marxist rivals (Finley 1976: 819–821) 1 . In them, most slaves were involved in productive labour, and a reliance on slave labour played a defining role in state and society. Slavery, however existed in the vast majority of complex pre-industrial societies.

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