Emancipation without Freedom: The Practice of African Captive “Repurchase” in the French Post-slavery Era

Following the abolition of slavery in the French colonies on April 27, 1848, French colonial administrators and planters attempted to reorganize colonial labor, advocating the introduction of foreign workers under contract. It was hoped this measure would counteract the wage demands of a newly mobile workforce of former slaves, and resolve labor shortages on their plantations. The French government, responding to requests from plantations owners, turned to Africa once again. Between 1856 and 1862, more than 50,000 Africans were recruited in the area of Gabon, Loango-Congo and Mozambique, through a method called “repurchase”, whereby private merchants purchased captives in order to “free them”, in return for a ten-year labor contract in one of the ex-slaves' French colonies: Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana.

This phase of the emancipation process responded to a quantitative and/or qualitative need for a workforce previously supplied either by the transatlantic or regional slave trade. Administrators faced the problem of making compatible the conflicting aims of emancipation and supplying a colonial workforce.

This paper examines questions underlying notions of the emancipation process. Emancipation in these regions of the French Greater Caribbean paradoxically produced a dependent workforce little different from that of slavery.

This type of emancipation took place in three main stages: the purchase of an individual, his emancipation, and his subsequent commitment to work during several years for the one who bought him and “freed” him, or by exchange for the one who bought his indenture contract.

By studying these various stages and their interdependences, this paper points out how this emancipation process allowed planters and administrators to maintain a dependent, coerced colonial workforce while adapting itself to the abolitionist context. The paper demonstrates how emancipation in these colonies became a subterfuge, in fact renewing dependence and submission of the slavery era.