[What peanut trading in late 19th century Senegal tells us about
the fine line between slavery and freedom.]
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A SLOW EMANCIPATION  
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Anna Wood
June 9, 2023
Africa Is A Country
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_ What peanut trading in late 19th century Senegal tells us about the
fine line between slavery and freedom. _

, E. Diop on Unsplash

 

In _Slaves for Peanuts, _Jori Lewis, an award-winning journalist,
and writer, tells the story of how the trade in people gave way to the
trade in this humble nut. Drawing on archives across six countries, it
is a story of a slow emancipation, one that narrates how emergent
values of freedom came to be entwined with colonial aspirations of
civility, humanitarianism, and trade.

“Because each slave can bring in enough peanuts to equal his selling
price, instead of selling them, let’s use our slaves to cultivate
our fields,” the chief of Ndakaaru, as Dakar was first known, told
his people after speaking with a French trader. It set off a “peanut
rush.”

Early interest in the commodity value of peanuts, which grow in the
sandy Sahelian ground with bushy green leaves and small yellow
flowers, came from a London trading house on the Gambia River.
Vegetable oils were used by soap boilers to make the soap used to
grease the machines which were driving the Industrial Revolution.
Where the British turned to the cheaper palm oil, the French sought
the superior quality that their public was used to; and when olive
groves were hit by successive frosts, soap makers in Marseille turned
to the peanut. Later, America’s theater halls, circuses, and
baseball games drove demand.

The drama in the book arises from the particular colonial situation in
Senegal in the late 19th century, which, at the time, consisted of
trading outposts in coastal cities. France had abolished slavery in
some of its colonies in 1794, yet it would take until 1848, and
political revolution in Europe, for a second decree to make it more
definitive. The principle that “French soil frees the slave who
touches it” contained within this new legislation propels the
interwoven historical narratives that follow: the issue of fugitives
fleeing to these outposts and the contradictions inherent in expanding
trade into territory where this rule did not yet apply.

It was in Saint Louis, one such outpost, on an island in the mouth of
the Senegal River in northern Senegal, that the shelter for runaway
slaves (_Asile des Esclaves Fugitifs_) was established. The formerly
enslaved would only be granted freedom certificates after a 90-day
waiting period, a fraught time during which owners could demand their
property back. The shelter helped hide fugitives and once they were
free, provided an “extraordinary outreach program” and helped them
find “a new sense of themselves in this new world.” It was founded
by Reverend Walter Samuel Taylor, the principal pastor of the Paris
Evangelical Missionary Society’s outpost. A Sierra Leonean national,
he was the son of enslaved people who had himself been freed from the
hold of a slave ship. It is in letters between this “native
evangelist” and the Protestants in France who funded the shelter
that Taylor’s emancipatory ideals increasingly come up against
missionary ambition to “civilize” Africans and to propagate French
culture.

It is also in these letters, however, that we come closest to the
lives of the formerly enslaved. For most, records are scant. They
“splashed into history” in the freedom roles of _Moniteur du
Senegal,_ Senegal’s first newspaper founded by its French governor.
However, it is in Taylor’s letters that we hear stories—especially
of those displaying promising missionary zeal—of close escape, happy
marriages, and teenagers sent to Bordeaux for an education.

In the Preface to the book, Lewis alludes to the “muteness” of
slavery, as Zora Neale Hurston once described it. “The distance of a
century reveals only flickering, spectral forms,” she writes, and
the reader perhaps shares her frustration when she says, “I wish I
could have done more.” And yet, _Slaves for Peanuts_ can be read
to sit among other works that are “listening closely” to the
archives, to take the words
[[link removed]] of
Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore, a prison abolition activist and scholar,
draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s _Black Reconstruction in America _to
argue against the nihilism suggested by the word “abolition,”
emphasizing the “presence” it brings about instead. She cites
Tulani Davis’s study of community-making among formerly enslaved in
the American South as an example of the “reconstruction” work that
can come from careful listening to archives. Lewis’ deduction and
musing on the limited sources available can be held in a similar vein.
Maybe, too, it takes the distance of a century for voices to become
less mute. Hurston’s own book, _Barracoon_, an account of the last
surviving slave in America, written in 1931, was only published
in 2018
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The tenuous position of the formerly enslaved was somewhat alleviated
when, in 1883, a new law reduced the waiting time for freedom
certificates to eight days. Throughout _Slaves for Peanuts_, however,
we learn about the “administrative pirouettes” and “linguistic
subterfuge” (slaves became domestics and servants) of the colonial
administration. The “contortions” of the French arose from the
“delicate business” of maintaining peace and trading partnerships
with those Senegalese kingdoms that ruled over the land which would
grow these precious nuts. Early on, slavery remained an “open
secret” and efforts toward emancipation were timid: they needed to
placate rulers of the fugitive slaves they freed and protected. But it
was their efforts to advance the peanut frontier with the building of
a railroad that really turned the tide.

The Kingdom of Kajoor, a slim piece of fertile land running between
colonial outposts in Saint Louis and Dakar provides the second main
setting of the book. “The French coveted Kajoor. They ached for it
beyond measure,” Lewis writes. She describes a process of attrition
through which French authorities expanded their reach from their more
discrete coastal outposts to the transformation of kingdoms into
effective puppet states, to soft occupation, and ultimately to their
violent destruction and outright colonization. The image of machine
guns pointed out of the windows of a train forging its way as a
“scar” through the kingdom, is a particularly violent image that
stayed with me. When Senegalese rulers did not comply with the “free
soil” principle, gaining control of the land itself increasingly
became the French solution—a move that was legitimized with the
humanitarian cloak of freeing people from bondage.

A _Moniteur _correspondent who rode the peanut train’s inaugural
journey wrote: “Everyone felt as though they were at the dawn of a
new era.” I couldn’t help but feel the echo of history. At another
inauguration, for a new train leaving from the same station more than
a century later, Macky Sall, the current Senegalese
President declared:
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new dawn… a journey through time… a great technological leap for
Senegal and for Africa.” The Regional Express Train connects the old
colonial center by 32 km of track to Diamniadio, a new city under
construction; sometimes nicknamed the _voie de l’émergence_ (in
French _voie_ can mean both “way” and “train track”), it is
a flagship development project, and embodies the promise of the new
politics of “emergence,” characterized by the self-assertion of
Africa’s own priorities. It was French companies that constructed
the new train, with a fare too expensive for most.

The shift from the trade in people to the trade in peanuts was
certainly a “social revolution.” And yet, in the latter chapters
of the book, we learn too of how farmers were caught in a system of
credit that “wove a web of dependence” around them; a “crushing
supremacy,” as one geographer the author cites put it. In the final
pages Lewis writes, “The transition to freedom took longer than it
should have.”

_Slaves for Peanuts_ deftly exposes the blurred lines between slavery
and freedom at this particular crossroads in the late 19th century and
provides historical lessons that continue to resonate today.
“Françafrique” is not over
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Emancipation is slow.

_Slaves for Peanuts, A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop that
changed History_ (2022)
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Jori Lewis is available from The New Press.

_ANNA WOOD is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University
of Cambridge. Her research is on poverty and social policy in Dakar,
Senegal._

_AFRICA IS A COUNTRY [[link removed]] is a site of
opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left. It
was founded by Sean Jacobs [[link removed]] in 2009.
Unless otherwise noted, all the content on Africa Is a Country is
published under a Creative Commons
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* slavery
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* senegal
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* farming
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* colonialism
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* France
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* Trade
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* Emancipation
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