African Indentured Labor on the Senegal River, 1817–48

In 1817, France outlawed the slave trade and began pursuing legitimate commerce in West Africa. Historians François Renault and Céline Flory have uncovered the repressive labor practices that accompanied the abolition of the slave trade and the growth of legitimate commerce in the French empire, specifically forced indenture (engagement). French merchants purchased slaves from African traders, then offered the slaves their freedom—with a price: the former slave would have to repay the price of his or her “redemption” by working on French plantations for up to 14 years.

Flory and Renault have posited this labor system to be a continuation of the slave trade. In many cases, it was. In the interior of Senegambia, for example, French traders purchased slaves from African merchants and coerced these individuals to work on cotton and indigo plantations. However, Flory and Renault’s focus on the European slave trade has obscured the complex ways that engagement intersected with local labor migration patterns. Historians of West Africa Boubacar Barry and François Manchuelle have explored how Soninke and subjects of the king of Waalo frequently traveled for work according to agricultural and trading seasons.

In my paper, I explore how these two systems of labor intersected and sometimes conflicted during the era of legitimate trade along the Senegal River. I trace how West Africans used engagement to seek labor on their own terms. Careful study of registers containing engagement contracts, treaties, and correspondence reveals why some Senegambians may have voluntarily contracted their labor to the French. Some wished to work in the river transport sector to obtain high wages; others folded French plantation schemes into their seasonal agricultural migrations. Overall, the paper explores how different labor systems met, clashed, and functioned during the period of economic transition from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to legitimate trade.