Customer Reviews

Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (CMES Modern Middle East Series)

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This is an insightful book by perhaps the leading Sudanese historian of the Sudan. Though the subject matter will limit some readers' interest, it is a lucid and well-researched study. Through judicious use of both oral and archival sources, Sikainga demonstrates that whenever slavery is abolished, the freedmen and women have to end up somewhere. That somewhere is usually the working class, whether as tenant farmers, a rural proletariat or part of the urban labor force. Some return home, others stay near their place of enslavement, while still others go to new destinations. This work focuses on the latter group, namely those who migrated to the Sudan's expanding cities and provided the muscle spurring economic growth.

Despite the abolitionist rhetoric of imperialism, most European powers valued socioeconomic stability over prompt emanicipation, which meant that in Africa they seldom abolished the "peculiar institution." Rather, they allowed it to die out along with the slaves themselves, thus depriving many courageous and resourceful people of rights and economic opportunities. Sikainga's study is especially valuable in showing how Sudanese freedpeople struggled, with some success, to make new lives for themselves under rapidly changing circumstances. In all societies, the main force in destroying slavery was the slaves' own resistance to their condition.

A paperback edition would be quite useful in teaching courses on slavery, emancipation and labor history. It is a solid work on African transitions from slavery to wage labor. S. Miers and R. Roberts eds, "The End of Slavery in Africa" gave strong impetus to this subfield 15 years ago; P. Lovejoy and J. Hogendorn, "Slow Death for Slavery" (on Northern Nigeria) probably sets the current standard. F. Cooper, "From Slaves to Squatters" (Kenya & Zanzibar) and M. Klein, "Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa," are just as good. Many fruitful parallels also can be drawn from Latin American and Asian history; see e.g. M. Klein ed, "Breaking the Chains."