Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa : The Ethnic-State of Gajaaga

Exploring the complexities of identity in precolonial West Africa, Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré shows the Soninke community's resistance to the slave trades led to the formation of a united community bound by an awareness of ethnic belonging. Traoré highlights the varied ways in which West Africans crafted and negotiated their identities.

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than fifteen million people were uprooted from West Africa and enslaved in the Trans-Saharan and Transatlantic slave systems The state of Gajaage, located on the West African hinterland, offered a doorway to the Atlantic Ocean and played a central role in the wide-scale trade system that connected the histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Focussing on the Soninke of Gajaaga, Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré demonstrates how their resistance to the slave trades led to the formation of a united community bound by an awareness of identity. This original study expands our understanding of the various modes of resistance West Africans employed to stem the encroaching tide of Arab imperializing efforts, European mercantile capitalism, and the Atlantic slave trade, whilst also highlighting how ethnic and religious identities were constructed and mobilized in the region.