Resistance to Slavery in Africa

Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present offers a sweeping, accessible overview of how African individuals and communities have challenged slavery across centuries. Bringing together insights from Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Arabic and Ottoman scholarship, this volume presents a truly pan-African perspective on resistance movements from the precolonial era to the digital age.

The collection traces resistance across diverse geographical regions—from West and Central Africa to the Indian Ocean and Sahara—demonstrating how people confronted external slave trades, local systems of bondage and enduring inequalities that survived abolition. Foregrounding voices too often hidden in the archives, this book explores creative strategies enslaved people used to claim rights, negotiate freedoms and reshape their social worlds through customary, Islamic and colonial courts. It highlights women's pivotal roles in resistance movements, from fleeing sexual violence to forging new kinship networks. Methodologically rich, the collection draws on oral traditions, microhistory, social history and digital humanities to illuminate overlooked experiences. By linking historical struggles to contemporary grassroots activism—including digital mobilisation against modern forms of slavery—it reveals resistance as an ongoing, evolving process that continues to shape African societies today.

Essential reading for scholars of African studies, slavery studies and social history, this volume reframes African resistance as locally rooted, historically continuous and globally significant. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.

Marie Rodet is Reader in the History of Africa at SOAS. Her research focuses on modern African history, gender history, slavery and emancipation, public history, gamification and digital humanities. Her publications include Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900-1946 (2009), Essai d’histoire locale by Djiguiba Camara (with Elara Bertho, 2020). She has also developed public-facing digital projects such as the documentary film The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes – Mali (2014), the web documentary Bouillagui: A Free Village (with Cosmo Maximin, 2020), the animation film Tous Égaux!/All Equal! (2023) and the digital mobile game USAWA (2023).

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist based at University of Copenhagen, working on the intersection between (post-)slavery and migration in (francophone) West Africa and its diasporas. Her projects and documentary films have explored anti-slavery activism and fugitive displacements in contemporary post-slavery contexts where Africa's internal slave past reverberates. More generally she analyses the haunting of narratives of slavery in contemporary moral regimes of (legal) representation, citizenship, and resistance.

Wayne Dooling is a Senior Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His publications include Law and Community in a Slave Society (1992) and Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (2007).

Esteban Salas is a Lecturer in African History at SOAS, University of London. His research centers on West Central African precolonial and colonial societies and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. His publications include contributions on the volumes African Women in the Atlantic World, Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660-1880; Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History; and the journals African Economic History and Slavery & Abolition.