Introduction

A comprehensive historical study of the institution of slavery in the territories inhabited by the Somali speakers, whose presence extends from the Ogaden region in southeast Ethiopia to the northern districts of Kenya, is not yet available.¹ Some studies, however, tackle the different dynamics of dependency in specific areas of the Somali territories depending on the nature of their economies. The Somali coastal towns on the Indian Ocean such as Kisimayu, Brava, Merka, Mogadishu, Cadale, Obyo, Eyl, Benderbeyla, Hafun, and others were small or slightly larger urban centers as well as trading hubs at the end of caravan routes; the northern areas and the semiarid bush territories close to the Juba and Shabelle Rivers subsisted on a prevalently pastoral economy, while others, the hinterland of the Benaadir coast (central and southern areas), as well as the riverine and interriverine (Juba and Shabelle Rivers) zones were mostly farmed areas providing substantial agricultural production. Farms depended mainly on rainfall, but in some areas the watering was facilitated in certain periods by man-made canals (the webi gofka in the hinterland of Brava town), draining of natural basins (deshek), and by the overflow of the rivers. In these interriverine and riverine ecological niches farming activities were performed either by enslaved people or by freed and runaway slaves in several different relationships with their previous owners, ranging from client to rebel. In the mid-19th century enslaved and freed people provided the manpower for the cotton fabric produced and exported from the main Benaadir towns.² Enslaved people usually belonged to two types of people: Oromo speakers coming from the west and northwestern areas of the country in caravans managed by Somali clans, and Bantu-speaking people. The latter were captured along the caravan routes of Central and East Africa and sold as slaves by Arabic-speaking traders in the Benaadir as well as in ports farther north along the coast of the Indian Ocean (figure 1 and 2); otherwise they were brought overland from the south. In the coastal towns, which served as the crossroads for caravan routes from the Somali hinterlands, goods were traded and commercial contacts were entertained on a seasonal monsoon basis with the Swahili of Zanzibar and other countries of the Indian Ocean coast. Brava town was also a center of Muslim religious schools and in close contact with Zanzibar.³

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Figure 1. Map of southern Somalia: ecology and trade, c. 1850.

Source: Author’s adaptation of the map “Southern Somalia: Ecology and Trade, c. 1850,” in Lee Cassanelli, The Shaping of Somali Society (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1982), 151.

Slave Trade in the Somali Country and Caravan Routes

The magnitude of the slave trade in the Somali country has not been researched in depth. Before 1800 the number of slaves imported from the Swahili coast to southern Somalia was likely to have been small.⁴ Imports of slave labor from East Africa appear to have progressively intensified during the 19th century.⁵ The spike in slave imports to the Benaadir in 1830 and 1840 coincided with the prohibition of the overseas slave trade to the south as a consequence of the Moresby Treaty of 1822 and with the decline in the price of slaves in Zanzibar.⁶ Between 1800 and 1890 the southern Somali territories saw the importation of fifty thousand or more slaves, which allowed grain production to increase significantly and considerable quantities to be exported to Arabia and Zanzibar.⁷ The Shabelle region also produced and exported cotton and orchilla weeds.⁸ A heightened foreign demand for local goods such as aromatic woods, animal skins, and ivory gave new opportunities to long-distance caravan trading while foreign demand for agricultural products gave a boost to the agricultural sector. After 1840, cotton production seems to have been spurred by competition with the cheap American cotton fabrics from the New England mills.⁹ In the countries to the south of the Somali territories, growth in the foreign demand for ivory and slaves pushed Arab and Swahili traders toward new areas of the East African interior.

Martin and Ryan attempted to quantify the slave trade in the Bajuni area and the Benaadir coast,¹⁰ estimating that the Benaadir riverine plain required an annual influx of three thousand or four thousand slaves.¹¹ The majority of laborers, however, were either slaves or xabash, the latter not necessarily enslaved. In fact, enfranchised slaves became clients of the previous masters and often continued to work agricultural lands. People of pastoral origin did not till the land and had other people, slaves or freed slaves, farm their plots.¹²

Marked apparently by an increasing use of slave labor on farms, the Shabelle River region of Somalia underwent significant transformations during the 19th century. The interriverine hinterland was progressively more populated.¹³ In 1843, “many thousands of men” were “employed in cultivation” in the vicinity of Merka.¹⁴ In 1856, among the Geledi in the hinterland of Mogadishu, work on the farms was performed by slaves imported from Zanzibar.¹⁵ In 1873 the hinterland of Brava was well farmed,¹⁶ and these areas absorbed slaves who were not re-exported from Somalia to other destinations. Of those enslaved people who did not escape, some ended up embedded in the local patron-clientship system as the land could also be tilled by freed slaves who would hand their patron a share of the harvest and maintain a productive interaction with him or her.

An important influx of slaves occurred through maritime routes, and slaves from the Swahili coast were also bought by the Somali of the northernmost territories. In 1882 in the northern areas of the Majurteen, Somali speakers (figure 2), the enslaved laborers were not prisoners of war but Swahili people, bought and sold by Arab traders; they were expensive, considered a luxury, but were exploited and treated like “pack beasts.”¹⁷

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Figure 2. Partition of the Somali territories between Italy and Great Britain c. 1925, map of Italian Somalia (n.d., n.a.).

Source: Author’s adaptation of an unpublished map from the Cartoteca IsIAO, inv. 9926—Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale “Vittorio Emanuele II.”

Yet, caravan routes linking the interior to the coast were in regular use, bringing Oromo slaves from northern areas of the Juba River, across the borders of Ethiopia, passing through Lugh, crossing the Shabelle River, and arriving in Brava.¹⁸ In Brava town both Oromo and Swahili slave women were sold as early as the 1850s.¹⁹ At the end of the 19th century, the Oromo slaves in the north of Lugh were recruited by the Gherra, leaders in the caravan trade from Oromo-speaking areas, who exchanged them with their relatives for goods such as tobacco, cotton clothes, or cattle. Northwest from Kisimayo, on the other hand, slaves were also seized in raids.²⁰ From Lugh the slaves were brought to agricultural areas of the Middle Shabelle River and to Brava, Merka, and Mogadishu, while some were exported to Hadramaut.²¹ Along the Lower Shabelle valley, caravan trading routes arrived in Mogadishu through Afgooye from Daafeed and in Merka through Awdegle from Bur Hakaba and back. Several explorers report having witnessed the arrival of caravans coming from different areas, also carrying slaves to Mogadishu, Merka, and Brava. In the years 1891 and 1892 the trade by sea was still flourishing along the Benaadir coastline.²² In 1891 and 1895 slaves were disembarked in Brava town.²³ Slaves from the interior of the Somali territories were also in demand along the Swahili coast. Until after 1890 the local Uali bought slaves of Oromo origin and sent them to Pemba, Lamu, and Zanzibar.²⁴

A notable overland route from Lamu gained prominence when the sea route became more perilous. Ylvisaker and Jackson document the rise and fall of the overland slave route from Lamu to the Benaadir, attributing its preeminence to Barghash,²⁵ the Zanzibar sultan’s prohibition of the slave trade in the early 1870s and the patrolling of seacoasts. This period coincided with relative peace in the Lamu hinterland after the Oromo-Somali war.

The British consul, Kirk, estimated that by 1870 the Juba River was crossed annually by ten thousand slaves.²⁶ However, by the early 1890s, the overland route had declined. References to exports of slaves to the Benaadir from Lamu put the numbers at 1,900 in 1871,²⁷ 2,804 to Brava the same year,²⁸ while 1,800 are alleged to have left Lamu overland in 1873–1874, and 12,000 had arrived overland in Somalia in 1874.²⁹

At the end of this parabola, when abolition had just started to be reinforced and some registers of freed slaves had already been compiled, for the year 1903 Robecchi Bricchetti reports 829 slaves in Brava, of whom 434 were in town and 395 in farms. The total Brava population was approximately five thousand.³⁰ He also reports 177 slaves freed in the same town between 1896 and 1903.³¹ In Merka he found 268 slaves;³² finally in Mogadishu he counted 4,600 free people and 2,095 slaves;³³ in this town 278 had been freed by the Filonardi administration.³⁴

In the interior, an example of the ratio of slaves to free people is offered by Ferrandi for the reer of the Gasar Gudda of the town of Lugh, principal commercial intersection on the Juba River. As against 250 free men and male children there were 121 male slaves, and for 251 free women and female children there were 209 female slaves.³⁵

Up north along the Juba River, the cost of slaves in Lugh, reported in 1903 (see table 1), was calculated in cotton cloth called toob merekani—cotton fabric from New England mills that started being sold after 1840³⁶—as currency was not available in the area.³⁷ A toob merekani was a piece of cotton cloth measuring approximately 7.312 m × 0.70 m.

A footnote to the table adds that the “most beautiful women slaves, of whom those in greatest demand are aged from 12 to 14 and kept as concubines (soria), cost 60 to 70 toob merekani.”³⁸ In this area the slaves were bought with goods, half of which came from the coast and the other half was produced in Africa, a practice called tirtil.³⁹

In this socioeconomic context, locally developed forms of dependency and social stratifications also involving kinship relations continued to be crucial even when the influx of slave labor increased. For instance, farm labor was performed both by slaves and by freed slaves in patron-client relationships with the previous masters.⁴⁰

Lexicons of Enslavement in Somalia

Enslavement was one of the dynamics of subordination structuring the social hierarchy in Somalia.⁴¹ Sources from the 19th and 20th centuries report several terms in use for enslaved people among different clans and groups in Somalia. Fúf by the Ibir from Obbia and the Musa Deryo (among the Rahanweyn); horowā by the Musa Deryo (among the Habar Hawal); ‘ukkúb by the Ribi (among the Rahanweyn); donad (addon) by the Musa Deryo (among the Rahanweyn); bereey, shambereey by the Abgal; habash by the Hawiya; addon by the Darood,⁴² ‘abid or bidé by the Majurteen;⁴³ mtumwa by the Wazigula; and ujji by people in many areas of southern Somalia—all terms used in Somali and other local languages. In the coastal town of Brava, where Muslim judges were regularly called to settle disputes and whose judgments have survived in written sources, Arabic terms used in legal transactions were jins al-māl,⁴⁴ translated as “quality of commodity,”⁴⁵ “chattel,”⁴⁶ or “an article of property”;⁴⁷ al-shay’ al-nātiq, that is “speaking thing”;⁴⁸ also khādim (m). khādima (f.) khuddām (pl.),⁴⁹ which in Arabic usually means servant, but in Brava and its hinterland in the last decades of the 19th century was also apparently used for slave;⁵⁰ mamlūk,⁵¹ ‘abd (sing.),⁵² ‛abīd (pl.), or jāriya,⁵³ the latter usually indicates slave woman or domestic servant in Arabic.

Each of the words addresses the dependent or enslaved from the position of the linguistic group using it and should therefore be contextualized. For instance, the presence of a word for “slave” used among the Ibir, one of the groups deemed to occupy a place toward the bottom of the social order and thus marginalized,⁵⁴ suggests that the Ibir saw somebody in a different and possibly worse condition of dependency than themselves. The Musa Deryo among the Rahanweyn were potters and blacksmiths,⁵⁵ also an occupational group regarded as inferior in terms of social stratification (a low-stratum population), and yet they used the word addon, that is, slaves in the Somali language, to indicate the lowest social stratum of all.

The legal Arabic terms used in the Civil Register of the Brava Qāḍīs Court (1893–1900) patently indicate the enslaved people as someone’s property that can be sold, given as a pledge for debts or loans, inherited, or transferred by way of donation (nadhiri). Some of the enslaved could also acquire debts. The treatment of the slaves, therefore, does not seem to change in spite of the more or less dehumanizing terms used in the court cases. The term khādima, for instance, is used indifferently for slave, whether a khādima is donated to another person,⁵⁶ whether a slave woman is inherited,⁵⁷ or one is sold by auction together with jewelry, mattresses, pillows, and other commodities.⁵⁸ A khādim acquires a debt and his patron or master pays the creditors.⁵⁹ The term jariya literally means either slave girl or maidservant, and it is sometimes used for female slaves. Revealingly, the word khādim is also used as a signature by the qāḍīs in the first eighty-two sheets of the 988 making up the register. The qāḍī Abubakar bin Sheikh Abdurahman bin Faqi Tahir (al-Qāḥṭāni) signs himself “the humble one before God Most High, servant of the sharīʽa,” in Arabic khādim al sharīʽa, a term, khādim, which in the rest of the register actually refers to slaves. The court records paint a picture of the institution of slavery in Brava as pretty much observing the dictates of the juridical school in vogue in the Benaadir with some variations.⁶⁰

Indeed, the word khādim (servant) looks much milder, less depersonalizing than “article of property” or “speaking thing,” and it would be interesting to clarify if the Arabic words for slaves mentioned in the Civil Register were used interchangeably or whether nuances of meaning indicated the different social strata to which the slaves belonged. In other terms, it has yet to be clarified whether the records contained in the Civil Register reflect a peculiar use of the Arabic common along the Benaadir coast, as suggested by the explorer Ferrandi,⁶¹ or other considerations applied. For instance, the qāḍīs could have used the actual word “slave” (mamlūk, ‛abd (s) ‛abīd (p)), as little as possible so as to appease the colonizers; maybe words that look from an external perspective less dehumanizing, such as khādim, could be used for slaves who had been with families for a long time,⁶² or else slaves from several generations might be mentioned as “servants” (khādim) rather than “speaking things” (al-shay’ al-nātiq) or some other term.

In general, it is not clear to what extent, with what rigor, or even in which territories the sharīʽa effectively regulated all the transactions involving enslaved people. One might assume that this was the case at least for Brava and surrounding areas, as well as all along the coast of the Benaadir where qāḍīs were operating. Yet, the Italian resident of Brava (1893–1895), Ugo Ferrandi, complained that even though qāḍīs were spread all over the country in places distant from the coast, the elders often did not follow the Muslim jurisdiction but their own interest, as in the case of Lugh,⁶³ and he argued that there was a need to homogenize how the law was to be applied to everybody.

Enslavement and Enfranchisement: A Move toward Being Freed

To have a clear idea of the status of the slaves in Somalia, one would also have to address the status of the freedmen and freedwomen, which was not the same as being freeborn. In the qāḍīs records from Brava by the end of the 19th century the word for freedman is ʽatīq (m.) and freewoman is ʽatīqa (f.) of somebody. The Arab ʽatīq is the legal term for “enfranchised slave.” Enfranchisement established the relation of patronage, walāʾ, between the freed slave and the person who freed him or her.⁶⁴

In Somalia in the 1920s there was a social stratification structured on various levels of dependency, suggesting a more complicated framework than simply the application of manumission procedures according to the sharīʽa as dictated by the juridical school followed in the area.

While enslavement could be occasioned by a number of possible occurrences (raids, war, abduction, weakness of one’s own group, etc.), the difference in legal status and, thereafter, the discriminatory legacy of having been enslaved continued to attach itself to a person or group of people for a long time. Some sources describe the dynamics of shifting away from the status of slaves. In the early 1920s in central Somalia, Colucci noted the existence of different categories of freedmen, stratified by generational distance from the time of the liberation of their progenitor or ancestress; some of these groups had full political rights notwithstanding their origins. He found that a freed slave was called hor, possibly from Arabic. Habàsc was the term for the freedman son of a freedman and “habàsc gob (low freedman)” was the freedman whose ancestors had been released only a few generations back. Among the Eelaay Somali speakers the term luburòi denoted the manumitted slave.⁶⁵

Villages of highly emancipated ancient freedmen, such as the Shiidle of the villages of Golweyn and Bulo Mererta on the Shabelle River, for instance, or the Eelaay of the town of Baidoa, had their own political units and thus were almost completely emancipated from any form of subjection to their initial masters.⁶⁶ Thus a distinction had to be made within the category of freedmen according to the “intensity of the patronage bond” that bound them to their former masters, since there were also groups and villages considered freedmen of a certain lineage, for whom the date of their enfranchisement was lost in the mists of time.⁶⁷ On the Shabelle River this is also the case with the relationship between the subgroup called reer Barre of the Shiidle group versus the Somali Mobileen or that of the Eelaay Somalis of Baidoa town vis-à-vis the Eelaay Somalis of Bur Hacaba. In the course of some disputes concerning the farming rights of Shiidle freedmen and pastures frequented by the free Somalis of the Abgaal subgroup, some Shiidle had claimed that the free Abgaal Somalis had demanded the protection of the Shiidle freedmen as arifa.⁶⁸ And this, of course, implied the full possession of the political rights of those Shiidle so-called freedmen despite that they were called xabash. In 1885 xabash meant “arrière-petits-fils d’esclaves, devenus libres par conséquent,” that is, grandnephews of slaves consequently turned free.⁶⁹ In the 1960s it was a term indicating the status opposite to noble;⁷⁰ nobles still had forms of discrimination against xabash, and, in some cases, the term xabash was a label for descent from slaves, despite that some xabash in the past acquired slaves themselves.⁷¹

The legacy of slave status remained with a freed person’s progeny for many generations following his or her liberation, but there were also lineages descended from freed people who acquired autonomous political power and authority. In general, the category of “descent from slave” continued to be used to relegate its members to the lower rungs of the social ladder. The farmer groups of the Shabelle and the Shiidle were addressed by the surrounding pastoral Somali as xabash, former slaves, while a hypothesis put forward in 1934 suggested that they simply derived from the original Bantu-speaking farmers overwhelmed by consecutive waves of pastoral Cushitic-speaking populations.⁷² Thus, from a Somali perspective, being agriculturalists and the label of enslavement seemed to have become conflated in the central Somalia of the early 20th century.

Yet, in the 1960s a tripartite social stratification existed in the Afgooye area, where the population was still divided into bilis, that is, nobles, light skin, that is, of fairer complexion, and xabash.⁷³ Among the xabash were included at times both freedmen and free clients, who had no rememberable past of slavery. Moreover, among several Somali groups such as the Wa’dan and the Geledi the classification of xabash included individuals of different statuses. Among the Geledi the xabash lineages were independent, at least from a formal point of view, and had the same legal status as the bilis, while among the Wa’dan the xabash were the freed slaves and their descendants.⁷⁴

Thus, processes of emancipation from an inferior legal status to the acquisition of one conferring fullness of political powers on a group had already occurred in the past and processes of that kind kept occurring in the 1960s.⁷⁵ The farther the distance in time of an enslaved individual from the progenitor who had been enslaved in the first place, the more that individual became enmeshed in the local society, albeit very often in a subordinate position. Freed individuals in fact retained legal attachment to the person who enfranchised them. Armed rebellion or support of parties in conflict could ensure recognition of a higher status to groups of enslaved, runaways, or freed in a shorter time.⁷⁶

A striking example of groups and individuals transitioning from slavery to a freer status is provided by the freed and runaway slaves of the southern Somali Gosha area along the Juba River, a process that took more than three-quarters of a century and was impacted by many internal and external factors, including colonial activities. Their experience has been interpreted in several ways: as the result of a search for freedom in an African frontier,⁷⁷ as fostered by their central position in a commercial chain identifiable as the Juba network,⁷⁸ and as the outcome of a political situation in which the sultan Baragash could use the rebels as allies to oversee the Juba River trades and territory. Finally it is only by piecing together written and oral sources on enslavement and emancipation that a picture emerges of the role played by communities of freed and runaways from the perspective of the legal framework that defined their juridical status in Somalia, the Shafīʽī school of the sharīʽa that the local cāḍīs applied in the 19th century in that specific area.⁷⁹

Enslavement, Migrations, and Pastoralism

Abolition and Runaways

The process of abolishing slavery in Somalia started formally with the Zanzibar decree of 1876. However, abolition was not enforced for a long time; indeed, it had started timidly with the Italian presence, which only set about the task in earnest around 1903. Nevertheless, rebellions and evasions of slaves and liberti (i.e., freed slaves) occurred at different times in the 19th century and before. In addition to all those groups, the date of whose enfranchisement was lost in the distant past, the particulars of some early rebellions and revolts are known.

Examples include the Makua from Brava who rebelled in the Gosha in or immediately after 1835;¹⁰¹ the people living in the territory of Golweyn in the hinterland of Mogadishu were reported to be out of control in 1843;¹⁰² the Gosha communities of runaways along the Juba River were enlarging their ranks after 1841; and the freedmen community of Hawai were setting themselves up along the Shabelle River in 1887.¹⁰³

It was in the Gosha area that the figure of Nassib Bundo rose to prominence. He was an enslaved Yao man who initially escaped but, as narrative runs, was subsequently bought and finally freed. In 1875, when he was in his forties, he became the recognized leader of the communities of runaways, freed people living on the Italian left side of the Juba River.¹⁰⁴ Other leaders of the Zigula-language speakers and the Ngindo living on the right side of the river attracted less attention and achieved less public recognition than he did. Negotiating his status between clients of previous masters and rebel runaways, Nassib Bundo gained the support of the Baragash Zanzibar sultan, who supplied him with weapons, and Nassib agreed to allow the slaves freed from the Italian residents of Benaadir to settle in the Gosha. In the last decades of the 19th century the incipient abolition of slavery produced much turmoil among slaves, freedmen, and patrons, so that many groups and individuals escaped to Gosha in search of autonomy, far away from their previous masters or patrons. Nassib Bundo grew stronger and stronger, yet he proved dysfunctional to the colonial powers due to his intemperance and desire for independence and self-sufficiency. When he was found instigating a fresh revolt against the traders from Brava and the Arab askari of Jilib, he was caught and taken to Mogadishu where he ended his days in prison in 1906.¹⁰⁵

It is important to note that up to the present day the descendants of slaves have never enjoyed the same status, in real life, as those without slave origins.

In the early decades of the 20th century, former slaves, their descendants, and clients were the first to be conscripted for public works. With the fascist governor of Somalia De Vecchi (1923–1928), a state-levied hut tax was introduced, and the colonial state was involved in a coercive labor recruitment drive for both public and private ventures to cope with the chronic shortage of agricultural manpower, and in many instances, especially in the final years of Italian fascist rule in the colony, it amounted to a particularly cruel and abusive form of forced labor.¹⁰⁶ Wartime under the British Military Administration (1941–1949) also saw the introduction of rotating contract labor for agricultural activities and public works, as well as prison punishments for breaking the work contracts.¹⁰⁷ Those involved were the descendants of former slaves and clients who had always worked in agriculture. These fascist and colonial policies reaffirmed and fixed a social and racial stratification that, however, had allowed some room for upward social mobility before abolition, albeit across a span of several generations.

Discrimination has not ended despite the changes in the legal systems, which occurred first under colonial rule then with independence (1950–1960) and, finally, with the Siyaad Barre coup d’état of 1969. The descendants of slave ancestors continued to be discriminated against and, with the exception of some notable cases, were not given the same opportunities in the Somali nation as Somalis with different origins, notwithstanding their political participation in the Somali Youth League during the country’s progress toward independence. The civil war, which broke out at the end of 1990, and the resulting turmoil failed to level up the inequalities and discriminations, although the descendants of farmers and former enslaved people have obtained some legitimacy through the Somali Africans Muki Organization (SAMO) political party.

Further Research Needed

Indeed the very centrality of the patron-client relationship as it developed in the Somali territory is still insufficiently researched, and a black and white approach describing slavery as opposed to freedom does not give an account of the organization of labor repeatedly observed in the 18th and 19th centuries by explorers and officers as well as of the many social dynamics witnessed in the 20th century by anthropologists and historians. Nor does an approach that assimilates slavery in Somalia to other processes of racialization and discrimination do justice to the past dependence system and to the related historical processes. The social stratification in central Somalia, observed by anthropologist Helander and detailed in Virginia Luling’s ethnohistorical work from the 1960s,¹⁰⁸ along with the reappraisal of chief Nassib Bundo’s story emphasizing that freed slaves entered the walā, a patron-client relationships status, distinct from one of freeborn individuals,¹⁰⁹ taken together with political dynamics observed by Colucci in the 1930s and early names for former slaves described by Révoil in 1880s, all testify to the centrality of the patron-client relations in the Somali system of enslavement. Such relations enabled an intertwining of pastoral and farming practices. Patron-client relationships were entertained under the generic umbrella of the sharīʽa law sometimes loosely applied. An introductory chapter to the Civil Registers of the Qāḍī Court of Brava, by Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed Khassim,¹¹⁰ distinguishes between varying terms used for slaves offering insights into how slaves were treated in court cases. Later, a further analysis differentiates between more and less dehumanizing terms for slaves used by the qāḍīs.¹¹¹ Yet, it is the long and varied life story of the chief Nassib Bundo, dealt with as a freedman by colonists, that could help in analyzing other processes of emancipation from slavery and abolition in other northern East African countries through the lens of the walā relationships.

By tackling patron-client relationships, attention must be placed on the different characteristics of male and female enslavement and especially on the diverse position of men and women in the enfranchisement processes as described by Francesca Declich.¹¹² Undoubtedly, a large number of the freed people in the Somali territory were born to slave women and free men.

Eventually, except for the works on the Gosha communities of runaways and freed slaves, studies on abolition and emancipation are scarce.¹¹³ Much research is still needed on dynamics of dependence and slavery in the Horn of Africa and northern East Africa, compared with practices in the Middle East. A critical point is that only a few Somali-speaking scholars have been involved in such research. It would be worth exploring and comparing also primary sources in non-European colonizers’ languages that can defy the skills of a single scholar. Yet, challenges of research on this topic are numerous: oral sources are no longer available as elders who could recollect memories on slavery times died; moreover, during the government of Maxamed Siyaad Barre (1969–1991), slavery was a topic banned from public discourse and, as it was not allowed to discuss it, characteristics and nuances of the local practice of slavery were hardly transmitted in memories while descendants of former slaves were still addressed derogatorily as slaves.

Discussion of the Literature

The practice of slavery in the Somali-speaking territories can be deduced from various sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries, including explorers, diplomats, officers, and scholars. These sources, among whom Charles Guillain, George Révoil, and Ugo Ferrandi, offer insights into slave markets, caravans, and treatment of slaves. Ferrandi’s 1903 book provides valuable information on the commercial center of Lugh along the Juba River,¹¹⁴ describing trading practices, caravans, and cultural practices in central Somalia, near the Ethiopian border. Significant documentation emerged around the turn of the 20th century, particularly through an Italian parliamentary commission investigating the conduct of the Società Commerciale Italiana del Benaadir, some of whose officers were accused of maintaining and tolerating slavery rather than pursuing abolition.¹¹⁵ Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti’s report to the Società Antischiavistica Italiana further contributed to the understanding of slavery in central Somali areas,¹¹⁶ focusing on the practice in Benaadir and reporting data on costs, names, and ethnic groups of slaves and freed slaves in Mogadishu, Merka, and Brava.

During the Italian colonial period and subsequent years of trusteeship, slavery and its abolition were topics addressed often from perspectives aligned with colonial interests or policies. Notable contributions include Enrico Cerulli’s volumes and Massimo Colucci’s book,¹¹⁷ which detail customary laws governing relationships among enslaved individuals, freed slaves, and freeborn people. These works highlight the differences between customary practices and Islamic dictates concerning slavery.

Later studies in the 1960s¹¹⁸ unearthed previously unknown sources and eventually in 1986 Angelo Del Boca published a critical work on Italian colonialism in eastern Africa. In the 1980s, American historians examined the role of slaves in the economy of southern Somalia, particularly the Shabelle valley. Lee Cassanelli suggested that slaves were mainly involved in patron-client relationships, with no evidence that wealthy slave owners became an independent political force. The agricultural production surplus was also reinvested in livestock and pastoral activities, with slaves acquired through traditional routes between the coast and interior.

In contrast, Edward Alpers emphasized the development of grain and oil-seed production for export in Benaadir, paralleling similar developments in Malindi and Mombasa. He argued that the reliance on slave labor for export production enriched the dominant economic class and strengthened coastal-interior alliances. This approach viewed Somali slavery as part of the broader evolution of plantation economies in Africa, whereas Cassanelli’s perspective emphasized the unique socioeconomic context of Somalia’s nomadic pastoralism and its intersections with landholding and agricultural activities.