Finding the Slave-Wives of the Mzab, Algeria (1890-1910)

Abstract

This talk investigates the intersecting histories of slavery, emancipation, colonialism and articulations of 'family' in Algeria in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Until recently, most studies dealing with slavery and its demise in the Maghreb have tended to focus on emancipation and public law measures, thus privileging the concerns of local and colonial male authorities. The speaker takes a different approach, following the lead of gender historians of the Middle East and North Africa who have contextualized the ends of slavery as a critical juncture in women's history.

The main premise of the argument is that the gendered and sexualized nature of women's bondage in the Algerian interior defied French concepts surrounding slavery and 'freedom.' The women and girls trafficked from sub-Saharan Africa often performed both menial and sexual labour, thus placing many of these women in the unstable category of 'concubine.' This category was unstable for numerous reasons, including upheavals within the very household structures to which bonded women were attached, as well as the unintelligibility of feminine servitude to French observers. This is shown through cases where women and girls fled masters who claimed to be their husbands, as well as incidents of women gaining manumission through divorce, and finally - and perhaps most tellingly - in cases involving slave-women's children.

Throughout these episodes, male authorities mobilized idioms of 'family' to privatize women's exploitation, even as slaves-women's actions challenged these representations. The analysis offered here is mainly enabled by a rich and untapped archive: diaries and photographs left by a prominent abolitionist missionary sect known as the White Fathers and White Sisters, whose records are populated by the slave and ex-slave women who passed through their station seeking refuge and assistance.

About the Speaker

Sarah Ghabrial is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.