Gendered Enslavement in Atlantic Africa

This paper marks an early foray into a project on the history of women and gender in the Atlantic slave trade.  It begins with one detail from a memoir from the Windward Coast of Africa (modern Liberia) in the mid-19^th century: after a woman and her two children were captured by slavers, the son—but not the woman and her daughter—was ransomed back by his father and thus saved from forced migration to Cuba.  What had sealed the female victims’ fate was that their captors were connected with a male-only regional secret society called Poro, which women were not allowed to observe.  Having done so, the woman and girl in the account could not be returned to society as the boy was.  This incident raises a larger question: in what particularly gendered ways were women (and, one could add, men) enslaved in Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade?  Historians agree that the major means of enslavement was capture in warfare or raids: but what did this mean for women in particular?  Moreover, what were other, less common ways—as in the example from the Windward Coast—that their gender made African women particularly vulnerable?  This presentation draws on select narratives by slavers and the enslaved, as well as secondary literature on slaving in Atlantic Africa, to suggest some answers.  It also invites the audience to consider how a gendered analysis of slaving in the 18^th and 19^th centuries may yield insights relevant to human trafficking today.