Comrades in Bondage, Allies in Arms: Warfare and Military Slavery in Yorubaland

The nineteenth century was an era of warfare, mass violence and enslavement in Yorubaland, resulting in the death and displacement of thousands of people, the destruction of many towns and kingdoms, enslavement of war prisoners, and the transformation of refugee towns and asylum camps into new cities and centers of new states. Rather than bring peace to the region some of the new states, like Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ilorin, and Ijaye, headed by military aristocracies wrought more damage on Yorubaland. The power of war chiefs derived less from the enlistment of freeborn soldiers than the use of slave soldiers. To the degree that militarism altered the equilibrium between slave soldiers and freeborn civilians, a number of people attributed the persistence of violence to the use of soldier slaves as slave recruiters and law enforcers. There were broad calls amongst the civilian population for the limiting of new slaving expeditions and specifically for the reduction in the influence and functions of soldier slaves. This paper will address the rationale for the recruitment of slave soldiers, the elevation of soldier slaves to positions of power, the cultural backgrounds of slave soldiers in Yorubaland, the relationship between soldier slaves and non-combatant bondsmen and women and transformations in military slavery in the region.