The Tenacity of Bondage: An Anthropological History of Slavery and Unfree Labor in Sierra Leone.

Abstract

Sierra Leone was purportedly conceived of the Enlightenment’s growing antislavery movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its earliest origins can be traced to a growing discourse of human rights and a critique of slave labor for economic gain through the production of sugar, cotton and other commodities. Yet, by the late 20th century this country was embroiled in a civil war that employed contemporary slavery in the form of child soldiery for economic gain from illicit diamond-, narcotics- and gun-smuggling. On the surface, the motives, means and methods of warfare in this nation appear to be a wholesale abandonment of the antislavery principles upon which it was founded. However, this dissertation contends that Sierra Leone’s war and its apparent affiliation with contemporary slavery represent the latest manifestation of a centuries-long adaptive process that began on the eve of the American Declaration of Independence in 1775. My dissertation argues that the use of child soldier-slaves, which I term terrorist slavery, is only the most recent form of forced servitude following a long history of post-emancipation adaptations of unfree labor. My dissertation traces the national history of Sierra Leone in order to examine how slavery and unfree labor persisted through numerous reinventions in Sierra Leone from the late 18th century to the early 21st century. Sierra Leone, was, in essence, a laboratory of unfree labor — from share cropping to debt bondage to apprenticeship labor and domestic slavery. My work examines the processes that temporally and spatially span the Atlantic World from revolution and slavery in late 18th century America to revolution and slavery in late 20th century West Africa. I examine how myriad transnational factors and socio-cultural interpretations of concepts such as freedom and slavery have perpetuated unfreedom in this West African nation.