Gender, Migration, and Slavery in Mali/West Africa 1890-1920

This project aims to continue some of the work I have done in my dissertation on "Gender and Migration in Mali during the colonial era," but from a different perspective, since the project will focus on the complex interactions between gender, mobility, and the end of slavery in Mali/West Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century. This perspective examines both the conditions of historical knowledge and the possibility of its reinscription. One of the main issues at stake in this project is to retrieve slave women`s voices whose presence is often hard to find in the official history of the end of slavery in Mali. The first colonial attempts to ban slavery in French Sudan encouraged new migratory movements, the so-called " slave exodus ". The slave exodus in the region of Kayes has been largely neglected in historical studies of French Sudan. However, this exodus was not as insignificant as scholars often presumed. Slave women formed the majority of those who left their masters. The project aims to deconstruct the image conveyed by the conventional historiography of slave women with more limited options than men as they suffered the double disability of being both female and slave. Examining slave women`s migratory strategies and itineraries at the time of emancipation will demonstrate that women used different social and family networks in order to gain their freedom. It will also show how women succeeded or failed through these networks to gain control over keeping their families together as a unit. Unlike what the colonial administration and later most scholars commonly presumed, slaves were neither without connections nor family ties. The project will examine which networks and relationships women slaves favored in times of tremendous social and economical change. These analyses shall help me to discuss how a significant female participation in the slave exodus informed the redefinition of marriage, family, and the sense of belonging in the region, and to which extent the end of slavery reshaped the gender relations and power hierarchies.