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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Patterns of slaving and prey-predator interfaces in and around the Mandara mountains (Nigeria and Cameroon)
Author:David, NicholasISNI
Year:2014
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (ISSN 0001-9720)
Volume:84
Issue:3
Pages:371-397
Language:English
Geographic terms:Cameroon
Nigeria
Subjects:slavery
Fulani
slave trade
historical sources
About person:Hamman Yaji (-1929)ISNI
External link:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972014000382
Abstract:While from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century there was a lasting and elastic demand for slaves in Central Africa, the practices by which they were acquired had to be adapted to the physical and human terrain, the technologies available and the socio-cultural postures of the predator and prey societies. In this paper, the author sketches the changing patterns of these variables in six slaving zones in and around the northern Mandara Mountains. Using historical sources, information from the diary of Hamman Yaji, a Fulani chief and active slaver, and data gathered in the course of ethnographic research in three of these zones by the author and his colleagues, he shows that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the extraction of slaves from particular sub-regions within these zones was highly variable, as is evident in the interfaces between the decentralized prey societies and the predatory states. Besides providing fresh perspectives on slaving and evidence for evaluating the constructions of historians, such studies open the way for research on the mutual accommodations to slaving affecting the societies and cultures of both prey and predators. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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