Slave, Concubine, Prostitute: The Sexual Politics of Abolition in Colonial Northern Nigeria

The abolition of slavery in the British protectorate of Northern Nigeria had strange consequences.   The colonial regime’s non-recognition of the status of slavery and the adjudication of slaves’ self-redemption by indigenous courts were intended to result in a gradual, non-disruptive process of emancipation, but its sexual politics was fraught. Women were most often able to redeem themselves through negotiating marriages with men, who would pay their masters a price for their freedom.. Ambiguities immediately arose, because “wives” who married in this manner greatly resembled concubines—a slave status. Where many male slaves were able to transform their status, at least to that of client, many women remained substantively enslaved. Legal processes of female redemption also posed dangers to judged and other state officials, who could be prosecuted for slave-dealing. As this legal jeopardy increased across the 1910s and 1920s, officials increasingly turned to dealing with unmarried adult women living on their own as “prostitutes.” The proposed paper explores the legal regulation of unmarried adult women in the early colonial period, looking at how the legacies of slavery and abolition helped to constitute a novel set of practices regulating female sexual morality.