SOBRE JACK HOGAN:

Jack Hogan is Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies and the International Studies Group, of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He received his PhD from the University of Kent in 2014, for his thesis 'The Ends of Slavery in Barotseland, Western Zambia (c.1800‐1925)'. His primary research interests include the economic and social history of precolonial and early colonial Central and Southern Africa. He is also the author of pieces on vernacular ethnohistory, Zambian politics in the twentieth century, and the Anglo‐Zulu War.

RESUMO:

Slavery is a word that resonates in the minds of many when they think of Africa in the nineteenth century, but most associate the word with the trans-Atlantic trade, and count the human cost. In the popular imagination, and in academia, the functions and significance of slavery in Central Africa receive scant attention. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, as it is the Atlantic trade which first received, and continues be a focus of sustained scholarly investigation. The era of the Atlantic slave trade has been described by John Illife, one of the most distinguished of all Africanists, as a “shameful period”, but one which paradoxically “also displayed human resilience at its most courageous”. For Illife, it was a time when the “splendour of Africa lay in its suffering.” Yet the history of slavery in Africa, and indeed the world, is not only one of mass transportations. Many of man’s greatest monuments were built by slaves, or those whose labour was extracted by force. The splendour of a great many peoples has rested not simply in, but upon suffering. This paper is an attempt to reconstruct the place and meaning of slavery in the pre-colonial Lozi kingdom. Centred on the Upper Zambezi floodplain, in what is now the Western Province of Zambia, the Lozi kingdom dominated not only the plain but surrounding peoples. The nineteenth century was marked by invasion and a succession of revolts and internal power struggles, yet on the eve of the colonial moment in the final decades of the century, the Lozi faced the new challenge from a position of strength. Reflecting on the political, economic and social structures of the kingdom, and the deep connections between these structures and the environment of the kingdom, this paper charts the trajectory of Lozi history from the early nineteenth century to its final decade. Arguing for the centrality of slavery to these structures and processes, the paper will also draw out the implications of this centrality for both the historiography of the Lozi kingdom, and slavery in Central Africa more generally. But at its heart, this paper is about what it was to be a Lozi slave, and the ends to which Lozi slaves were put.