The Political Economy of Warfare Enslavement in Late Nineteenth Century Bahr Ghazal

This paper addresses the use of slaves as an informal military tool. It proposes to answer why slaves volunteer for informal military slavery through an ethnic, economic, and political analysis of Bahr Ghazal, Southern Sudan, in the late nineteenth century. In looking at military slaves within not just the context of slave and master but a continuum from slave to free, and from desperately impoverished to powerfully wealthy, I propose to demonstrate that in particular contexts volunteering for slavery improved the socio-economic status of free men. My sources include autobiographical narratives of Zubayr Pasha, travelers’ accounts, and government records.

The 1850s, 1860s and 1870s saw drastic changes in Bahr Ghazal as various merchants, primary among them Zubayr Pasha, gradually integrated the region into the economic and political spheres of Egyptian and British empires. This process of integration was in disparate layers, and Bahr Ghazal, on the frontier between Congo and Nile watersheds, was beyond the limit of what Khartoum, Cairo, or London could control, resulting in heavily armed merchants having a free hand in administrating rule over poorly armed locals. That free hand led to a range of abuses, aided by the employment/enslavement of informal military forces, bashibazouks. Slaves generally had more income than free men, and hence more opportunities to buy and free family members, and more opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder. Free men not connected to merchant-military forces had no recourse to legal frameworks, and hence no rights. The diverse ethnic makeup of Bahr Ghazal also contributes to a more complex understanding of the concept of slaver and enslaved as both slavers and those enslaved came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.