RANSOMING AND THE DISCOURSE ON LEGAL AND ILLEGAL ENSLAVEMENT

The study of ransoming highlights the relationship between captivity, enslavement, and struggles within African societies over the issue of slavery. Available studies on ransoming offer glimpses into debates about the legitimacy and morality of enslavement.Footnote ³ They pay close attention to Africans' understandings of slavery and why they permitted it, while nevertheless distinguishing between legal and illegal enslavement. People had a vested interest in preventing what they viewed as illegal enslavement. Whether mandated by law or not, all West African societies had defined ideas about who was enslavable and who was not. As with their European counterparts, African states sought to regulate the slave trade and to prevent what they determined to be illegal enslavement while facilitating legal enslavement and slave trading. Locals as well as foreigners were punished for indulging in illegal enslavement.Footnote ⁴

In Muslim West African societies, the slavery debate centered on religious identity with recognised freeborn Muslims in principle having protection against enslavement.Footnote ⁵ Non-Muslim societies also prohibited the enslavement of members of their own communities or ‘insiders’, as defined by specific cultural criteria. As Robin Law argues, in general, Africans accepted the legitimacy of enslavement through legal, state-sponsored warfare but viewed enslavement through kidnapping and banditry as illegal, especially when targeted against members of the same community or citizens of friendly states.Footnote ⁶

Regardless of their sociocultural make-up, African societies were not fully closed to outsiders. Rather, the status of insiders and outsiders was flexible and situational. Within the context of slaving operations in West Africa, the boundary between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ was fluid. Hitherto outsiders such as migrants, refugees, and slaves were frequently absorbed into host societies and became insiders while insiders who were major criminals or rebelled against their home states lost the protection enjoyed by other citizens and thereby assumed the status of outsiders.Footnote ⁷ Claude Meillassoux's study of slavery and ransoming in the western Sudan alludes to the protection extended to ‘foreigners’ and members of ‘friendly’ neighbouring states during war time. He notes that there was a better chance of successful ransom negotiations when rival states belonged to the ‘same society’; that is where hostile states had processes for ransoming and prisoner exchange.Footnote ⁸ During peacetime, these societies usually banned attacks on each other and their citizens. To do otherwise could result in retaliation against the captor/s.Footnote ⁹ Mutual protection across state borders formed part of African diplomatic strategies during the precolonial period and most likely related to some traditions of common origins between some states. Thus, it was not that Africans were hostile to slavery, it was who and how individuals should be protected from enslavement, and the effectiveness of such protection that varied between societies and states.Footnote ¹⁰

The variation in protective strategies against enslavement also permitted groups to shape the law to suit their purposes. Attacks on and enslavement of foreigners were legal while the victimisation of allies was deemed illegal even in societies that permitted legal enslavement. Therefore, while we agree with the distinction between the notion of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ enslavement, we also argue that there existed a third realm: the concept of immoral or unethical enslavement which led people to challenge aspects of legal enslavement. What was legal was not always appropriate or acceptable.Footnote ¹¹ Even when an individual was taken captive under accepted norms, the failure to release the captive by rejecting an application to ransom could be deemed by the captive's family as immoral and illegal.

More often than not, enslavement involved ‘denial of kinship’ and ‘de-socialisation’ or the rupturing of ties between captives and their homelands and their insertion into new societies as slaves.Footnote ¹² In West Africa, traditions note that many slaves destined for the Americas viewed the Atlantic crossing (middle passage) as a journey of no return because of the expectation they would die either while working on plantations in the Americas or by being ‘eaten’ by white slavers.Footnote ¹³ For others, enslavement symbolically represented spiritual nakedness. In the case of Ayuba ibn Suleiman Ibrahima Diallo (Job ben Solomon) of Bundu and his friend who were captured on the Gambia in 1731, the captors ‘shaved their heads and beards’, an act the two men ‘resented as the highest indignity’ because it made ‘them appear like Slaves taken in war’.Footnote ¹⁴

If many captives and their allies considered slavery as the opposite of freedom, it made sense that they struggled hard to avoid enslavement. Little wonder that some slaves jumped overboard during the middle passage choosing death over life in slavery or mutilated themselves, and that some families of captives employed tactics to try to prevent enslavement even when the outcome was unpredictable. To avoid captivity, which often led to enslavement, Africans utilised a myriad of defensive, protective, and offensive strategies including, if they had the means to do so, trying to ransom captives prior to their enslavement.Footnote ¹⁵ Only after attempts at ransoming had failed and the captive was transformed into a slave did kin consider more violent options to free their captive members or to seek revenge. Ransoming was not, therefore, a strategy of ‘last resort’ but a tactic in a continuum of options against enslavement and demand for the restoration of freedom. Ransom negotiations and, in particular, responses to failed negotiations, demonstrate a link between protective and offensive strategies against enslavement. Ransoming was a protective tactic. In the aftermath of failed ransom negotiations, families of the now enslaved captives went on the offensive to free their kin.

WHY RANSOM NEGOTIATIONS FAILED

In her study of ransoming in West Africa, Sylviane Diouf conflates the ransoming of captives with the redemption of slaves. Diouf lists a number of ‘obstacles to redemption’ (appropriately ransoming) or reasons why many captives were not returned to freedom. The obstacles include failure to locate the captive, loss of family members, lack of knowledge about captors, captors' unwillingness to wait until the completion of ransom negotiations or reluctance to release their captives, social distinctions between members of the elite and commoners and between freeborn and slaves, and enslavement being a symbolic form of exile for criminals and enemies.Footnote ¹⁶ The problem with some of these identified obstacles is that they do not fully account for the failure of ransom negotiations because they do not indicate whether negotiations begun. For instance, families who could not contact or did not know those who had captured their members, as well as captives cut off from their relatives or whose kin had all been captured, hardly had any means of starting ransom negotiations.Footnote ¹⁷ We contend that contact had to have been established between the captor and those intending to effect the release of the detainee before a ransom negotiation could be deemed to have failed. This was the case with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bundu.

In 1731, Diallo was captured and sold to the English slaver Captain Pike. Diallo contacted his father to arrange his ransom. This case, particularly the element of ransoming, has been cited by scholars as an example of Africans' protective strategies against enslavement.Footnote ¹⁸ Diallo, however, was not ransomed. He was sold to the Americas before ransom negotiations could be completed. We do not have information about how Diallo's family reacted to the enslavement of their son before the young man was located in Maryland.Footnote ¹⁹ While the sale of Diallo to Captain Pike was not illegal, Pike's purchase of him raised a moral question. Pike and Diallo's family were commercial partners. Indeed, in the days immediately preceding Diallo's capture, Diallo and Pike had met and successfully concluded a commercial transaction. Diallo would have expected that the familial and business relationships he had with Pike would protect him from enslavement and this he conveyed to his biographer, Thomas Bluett: ‘Soon after Job found means to acquaint Captain Pike that he was the same person that came to trade with him a few days before, and after what manner he had been taken.’Footnote ²⁰ Paradoxically, as a trader, Pike was within his legal rights to buy Diallo but, in Bundu circles, his decision to sail off before Diallo could be ransomed was immoral. Pike's action contravened a widespread practice in West Africa whereby neighbouring states, including those hostile to each other, had mechanisms to facilitate ransoming and prisoner exchange. European traders, with their complex socioeconomic and political relationships with coastal states and who often did engage in ransom negotiations with Africans could be considered, according to Meillassoux's definition, as belonging to this African society.Footnote ²¹

Diallo's case exemplifies the gulf that often occurred between what was viewed as moral versus legal slaving activities. Such social conventions were crumbling in the Sierra Leone region and its interior in the late eighteenth century when aggressive marketing and the quest for quick profit from slave trading, even if it meant attacks on and sale of allies and members of host communities, fuelled illegal slaving operations. European traders were buying slaves, many of whom were debtors and kidnapping victims, who had been seized and sold illegally by privateers. James Watt, also of the Sierra Leone Colonisation Company, reported such a case originating in the Futa Jallon region in 1794. While in Timbo, capital of the Fulbe kingdom of Futa Jallon, to negotiate trade and political relations between the Company and the Fulbe, Watt met a father who begged him for help in locating his son who had been kidnapped along with six others by a Portuguese trader when they were returning from the Pongo River. The father had first complained to the Almamy who, with the help of another British trader, discovered the names of the Portuguese kidnapper and the British trader to whom the captives were sold and confirmed that six of the captives had already sailed for the West Indies. Watt promised the father that he would ask the governor of Sierra Leone to enquire after his son.Footnote ²²

Other times, European traders, especially those owed money by Africans, promoted the panyarring (seizure) and enslavement of local debtors.Footnote ²³ Some of the victims included members of royal families of the Sierra Leone hinterland, free colonists from England, and pawns. In one case, 19 freemen, including sons of chiefs, were sold. In another case, three or four captives were sold in spite of protests from British administrators of Sierra Leone. In a third case, four women being held as pawns on a trading vessel were carried away.Footnote ²⁴ European slave traders exonerated their actions with the excuse that if they refused to buy illegally seized individuals, their competitors would not do the same thus putting the lawful trader at a commercial disadvantage.Footnote ²⁵

Illegal slaving activities in Sierra Leone undermined the Temne's, Susu's and Fulbe's confidence in Europeans, including the nascent British administration in Freetown. Consequently, reports of lack of local support for the colony, personal insecurity of colonial officials, and pillaging of the colony's property became common. Europeans were aware that attacks on local people contravened indigenous laws against arbitrary enslavement. This realisation was evident in the furious discussions between lawful traders, officials of the Sierra Leone Company, and the British Crown condemning the act which set in motion efforts to return the illegally enslaved to freedom.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, some African states like Benin, Old Calabar, and Dahomey (after 1727) delayed the departure of slave vessels and discouraged or banned human pawning to prevent both the illegal enslavement of pawns and the conflation of pawns with slaves.Footnote ²⁷

Why did the sailors in the two cases of Diallo and Sierra Leone depart before ransom negotiations could be completed? Until the late nineteenth century, West Africa was considered the ‘white man's grave’ or the ‘horrid hole’ where Europeans rarely survived the local diseases and humid temperatures.Footnote ²⁸ European sailors did not want to stay long on the West African coast and seldom left their ships. Their goal was to embark slaves as quickly as possible and leave the coast. Thus, Europeans disliked long ransom negotiations which, depending on the cost and distance between where captives were held and the location of their relatives, could take from a couple of days to several months. In Diallo's case, his family lived ten days away from the port so it would have taken at least three weeks to get a message to his family and for people bringing the ransom payment to arrive at the port town. Since Diallo was bought at the end of Pike's venture in the Gambia (Pike left for Maryland two days after he made the purchase) travel time and distance prevented Diallo's ransom.Footnote ²⁹ In Sierra Leone, the situation was different. As mentioned above, Europeans traders were not neutral in the violence that produced many of the captives. They took part in some of the kidnapping raids especially panyarring. So it would have been imprudent on their part to wait for ransoming procedures to commence.

Disagreements over the cost of ransoming also led to failed negotiations. The goal of captors was to maximise profit. In order to do so, they sometimes threatened the sale of captives to extract huge payments from their relatives. Ransom prices were usually at least twice the price the captive would fetch on the slave market and often more.Footnote ³⁰ Rich families could sometimes speed up the ransoming process by paying captors out of their surplus wealth. In certain extraordinary cases, captors demanded and sometimes received more than 1,000 per cent the value of their captives as slaves. For instance, in 1787, Barbier Borro, a Sierra Leonean man, arranged his own ransom by selling 22 of his slaves. His other slaves became so fearful that they might also be sold that they fled into the woods.Footnote ³¹ Northwest of Sierra Leone, in Futa Jallon, around 1828, a French trader, Theophilus Conneau (or Theodore Canot), recorded that an 18 year old woman was ransomed for ten slaves.Footnote ³² Three decades later in the Aïr region of the Sahara, the Tuareg were willing to pay any demanded price for the return of a ‘white’ member.Footnote ³³

Most African families, though, had limited resources for ransoming and could not satisfy the captors' demands. For example, in 1841, a boy who had been seized by Fulbe slavers near the confluence of the Niger River was sold into slavery because the ransom offered by his parents was not sufficient. According to William Allen,

As we shall see shortly, there is abundant evidence that not all of the families and communities whose ransoming applications were unsuccessful went home defeated. Some expressed their bitterness by fighting back with all their power and in a variety of ways.

A third reason for the failure of ransom negotiations was disputes between the captive's family and the ransom brokers. The engagement of a mediator by the captive's family was essential since rarely did captors and payers of ransom have direct contact with each other.Footnote ³⁵ The inability or unwillingness to pay a mediator after he had accomplished his task could result in the release of a captive from one captor only to be detained by the mediator. The mediator could detain a newly freed captive until payment was received, he could threaten to sell a newly released captive into slavery to force payment, or he could eventually sell the captive if payment was not forthcoming.

One such case was reported at Igbobini in eastern Yorubaland in 1885. Around March, Ike, a Mahin trader from Oketoro, and two slaves went to Gbogun, an Ijebu town, to collect debts. At Gbogun, the party was attacked and the two slaves were seized in retaliation for an 1881 Mahin attack on the town. During the recurrent conflicts between Mahin and Ijebu, people seized in such frays were usually sold to the Lagos and Niger delta slave markets. This could have been the fate of the two slaves. Labite, owner of one of the slaves, begged Takuro, an influential trader, to help regain his slave through ransoming. Takuro sent messengers to Gbogun to negotiate the captives' release and Labite sent another slave to witness the negotiations. Rather than free the detainees, the captors seized the slave witness, giving the captors three captives in total and greater bargaining power. After long and tortuous negotiations, the three captives were released to Takuro who paid twenty bags of cowries of his own money in ransom for each of the detainees. When he did not receive payment for his expenses and efforts in ransoming the captives, Takuro detained the slaves until he received eighty bags of cowries including twenty bags as a brokerage fee.Footnote ³⁶ Although the victims in this case were slaves and not freeborn citizens, the purpose of the negotiations was to prevent their re-enslavement and insertion into another society.

This particular case challenges Diouf's view that ransoming involved only free individuals. She argues that slaves ‘were thus excluded from the benefit of a strategy designed as an alternative to the killing of prisoners’ and that they (slaves) ‘seem to have been the only category that could not, as a matter of policy, be ransomed’.Footnote ³⁷ Diouf's implicit assumption is that all slaves not only had the same status but were always inferior to freeborn people. This is far from the truth. In reality, the status/rank of slaves varied depending on factors including sex, age, skill, and length of time in servitude. Often times, slaves with military and mercantile experiences ranked above those employed on farms just as slaves belonging to members of the nobility ranked above those owned by commoners. Such slaves who served as advisors, guards, traders, and toll collectors enjoyed more power than low-class freeborn people and non-elite slaves. These privileged slaves wore better clothes, supervised low-class slaves, and often had their own slaves. Chiefs valued their support and cooperation. In turn, elite slaves' proximity to power generally protected them from being sold or traded except in cases of heinous crimes.Footnote ³⁸ The three captives ransomed by Takuro were not new but assimilated slaves whose status supports Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff's thesis that incorporated slaves ranked higher than new ones because they were not complete aliens and their status lay midway between being enslaved and freeborn.Footnote ³⁹

Sometimes, however, ransom negotiations failed simply because of captor disinterest. For example, in about 1783, a zwāya (marabout) offered to pay two or more slaves, what the captor wanted, for the release of his brother being held on Gorée Island but the captor refused.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ten years later in Sierra Leone, a slave-ship captain refused to permit a father to ransom his daughter stating that it was currently difficult to purchase slaves. The father appealed to the governor at Freetown to intervene in his attempt to ransom his daughter from the captain. Although the captain later offered to accept a ransom payment, it is clear that he was not inclined to release the girl because the ship sailed before the father had the chance to return with the payment.Footnote ⁴¹

Finally, there were also instances when ransoming was forbidden by state officials. This could be the result of political or judicial sanction. In the Sokoto Caliphate, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the ransoming of Sokoto's enemies was often proscribed for political reasons. This state injunction against ransoming back enemies was based on the assessment that it was frequently imprudent to release potential enemies, especially when the state had not yet fully consolidated its power. If released, such enemies could lead future insurrections against the Caliphate. The refusal to permit ransoming was despite the fact that according to the Mālikī madh'hab school of law practised in the region, ransoming was a lawful means for dealing with prisoners of war. Forbidding ransoming, though, was also permissible under this law code. By the latter half of the century, when the Sokoto Caliphate was firmly established, it appears that the ransoming of prisoners held by Sokoto forces became permissible throughout the Caliphate.Footnote ⁴² The same rules applied in the western Sudan. For instance, in a 1880s case from Nioro, in modern-day Mali, Amadu condemned to death five Fulbe chiefs who were found guilty of pillaging a caravan. This was despite the fact that a high ransom was offered in order to save the men.Footnote ⁴³ In these cases, enslavement and the death sentence produced the same result. They were solutions to the problem of ridding society of unwanted criminals.

RESPONSES TO FAILED RANSOM NEGOTIATIONS

The ability to actualise the release of a captive or respond to failed ransom negotiations depended on the captives' or their relatives' power to take action or to convince others to champion their cause combined with the opportunity cost of long ransom negotiations and their assessment that such actions would be successful. Therefore in societies with a relatively strong socioeconomic base, institutional support for ransoming, and the means to effect it, ransom negotiations were permitted to continue as long as there was hope for success. Examples of these societies include the early modern central European borderland region between the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires, the medieval and early modern Mediterranean basin, and a number of nineteenth-century Muslim states in West Africa.Footnote ⁴⁴ While the established ransoming procedures within these systems minimised the faltering of negotiations and their subsequent conflicts, they also prevented individuals from pursuing other options when those negotiations collapsed. In these systems, it was the state or its agencies more than individual families of captives who moderated ransoming.

Those in charge of ransoming were aware that ransoming came with added costs beyond its actual financial costs. These included, among others, physical dangers to ransom brokers and the forgoing of other opportunities while bargaining for the captive. Therefore, a ransom broker would be eager to minimise losses by ending protracted negotiations if the cost was greater than the value of the captive. Applying the transactional economics model to ransom negotiations in the Maghrib, Attila Ambrus and Eric Chaney contend that the ransom mediator factored these personal costs into his operation when bargaining for a captive.Footnote ⁴⁵ The longer the mediator held out during negotiations, despite these personal costs, reflected the value he placed on the captive. From this perspective, it could be argued that in many cases in the Mediterranean world and central Europe, the dangers of taking action to redress failed ransom negotiations was greater than the value of the detainees, hence many captives were not rescued.

A change in the balance of power could enable one side to use other responses, besides ransoming, in its pursuit of freeing captives. For instance, beginning in the seventeenth century, in the Maghrib, if there were no other viable options for the release of a captive, Europeans continued to negotiate and pay ransoms. Yet, they no longer accepted all failed ransom negotiations as a fait accompli. According to Ellen Friedman, the presence of a Spanish garrison at Ceuta in the early seventeenth century helped ensure the fairness of negotiations between Spanish Trinitarian ransom brokers and Moroccan captors at Tetuán.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, Gillian Weiss demonstrates that after the seventeenth century, the French used its military superiority to alter the power structure in ransom negotiations within Morocco and Algiers. The French government was increasingly willing to use force to press for the release of French captives held in the Maghrib, and ultimately to stop corsair attacks on French interests.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, the United States navy was established in 1798 to end attacks on American sailors in the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁴⁸

In 1962, Ronald Robinson identified two factors in African responses to European penetration. First, he argued that because African societies were built around the ‘unity of equals, not in the unity imposed by a hierarchy’ the continent failed to provide a united front against European imperialists. If the absence of a uniting authority to coordinate reactions to European conquest exposed Africa to defeat, the unique social structure of each state was crucial in shaping its options and responses. Upswing states with a strong army, central authority, and whose economy relied on slavery had more incentives to resist whereas downturn states with diminishing authority had limited options.Footnote ⁴⁹ Robinson's theory is applicable to the political economy of slavery in Africa. African social structures underlined responses to slavery and enslavement and popular concepts of legal and illegal enslavement. John Thornton and Joseph Inikori stress the close link between the structure of African states and state involvement in the slave trade.Footnote ⁵⁰ Powerful and expansive states more easily defended their citizens against enslavement than fragmented states with limited force or whose influence or that of its leaders did not extend much beyond the city walls. Similarly, David Eltis argues that the evolution of European identity fuelled partly by shared Christian beliefs and a sense of continental racial, geographical, and cultural unity obviated the enslavement of European citizens and explains why non-Europeans became the ‘cultural other’.Footnote ⁵¹ So a preliminary conclusion is that in fragmented societies, mechanisms for negotiating ransoms across state lines were poorly developed and sometimes non-existent; hence, members of these societies often lacked the means of pursuing other responses when ransom negotiations collapsed.

Yet, we caution that parallels between a state system and the state's ability to defend against enslavement should not be overblown. While a strong centralised state structure in a balanced region of power system prevented individuals from pursuing their own interests over state interests, attempts at pursuing diplomatic finesse also sometimes delayed the state's ability to act quickly. Records show that even if acephalous states in West Africa did not possess the military force to fight off bigger states, these polities were not ‘slave reservoirs’ and their people were not readily available to be seized at will without resistance. Inhabitants of decentralised states resisted enslavement by relocating to less accessible locations such as hill tops, islands, and swamps, constructing strong defence lines, forming close-knit defence-oriented kinship ties, using guerrilla tactics, and carrying out preventive kidnappings (seizing potential slavers before they could attack) among other tactics.Footnote ⁵² A number of non-centralised states might not have the offensive power to pursue captors when ransom negotiations failed but their fragmentation offered other responses to failed ransoming that were lacking in larger states.

Indeed, in some places, weak state institutions meant that captors, and sometimes relatives of captives, could neglect or ignore local laws without fear of sanctions. Under these circumstances, private individuals had no incentive or need to convince their states to take further action when ransom negotiations failed. In West Africa, this scenario is exemplified by nineteenth-century Yorubaland where political violence undermined and, in some cases, destroyed existing state power. This encouraged widespread lawlessness and violence, leaving individual warlords and aristocrats to substitute for the state and to act as they deemed fit.Footnote ⁵³ A comparison between states in Yorubaland and Igboland, on the one hand, and Europe, on the other, would suffice. In Europe, decision-makers lived far from where captives were held. Therefore, European leaders were usually physically detached from the problems associated with ransom negotiations in the Maghrib or Ottoman Europe. In contrast, rival Yoruba and Igbo state capitals, for example, were located in close proximity to each other and, therefore, military force could be more easily and quickly mobilised to pursue failed ransom cases.

Furthermore, in the Maghrib and central Europe, ransom payments were more important to state revenue than in fragmented societies in West Africa.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Yorubaland, the states relied more for their revenue on income derived from the slave trade than from ransom payments. This, coupled with the fear of letting loose potential rebels through ransoming, meant that their authorities could more easily halt ransom negotiations and enslave or kill the captive. The urge to prevent enslavement and death meant a quick and often violent response to unsuccessful ransom negotiations. With the state system being central to ransom negotiations, West African alternatives to failed negotiations ranged from attacks on captors to road closures, trade boycotts, retaliatory seizures, and war. As Europeans gained influence in Africa, responses included pleas to European officials.

To the extent that many slaves died in bondage and many of those who survived had no means of reconnecting with their families, West Africans generally regarded enslavement as a death sentence. Anyone who turned down a request to ransom or to otherwise free a captive was comparable to a murderer who must atone for his crimes. Therefore, many relatives of captives whose ransom attempts were unsuccessful sought opportunities to kill captors. This can be seen in Yorubaland in the aftermath of the Osogbo war of 1838 fought between Ilorin and Ibadan forces. In the war, Ibadan soldiers had captured some Ilorin military chiefs including the military commander, Lateju. While other captured army chiefs were released in compliance with the military etiquette that war chiefs protect one another, Lateju was not. Instead, he was found guilty of treason (waging war against his country) and also of preventing the ransoming of a Yoruba woman in 1833. For the last offence, he was executed.Footnote ⁵⁵

Another potential response to the failure of ransom negotiations was a road blockade and trade boycott. Depending on geography, this could be a particularly effective response. For example, in 1852, Egba imposed a road blockade and trade boycott against Ijaye after they derailed ransom negotiations between the two states. Egba was located near the Yoruba coast while Ijaye was an inland state. Egba was therefore in the perfect position to impose a trade blockade and cut off Ijaye's access to European trade which it needed in order to achieve its imperial goals.Footnote ⁵⁶ Egba authorities also made use of this response against Ibadan, another inland state, in 1862, after a case of unsuccessful ransoming. In 1861, Ayawo, the wife of chief Somoye of Abeokuta, accompanied her husband to the Ijaye war where she was captured by Ibadan forces. Considered a prime captive, the captors sent her to Ogunmola, the Ibadan deputy army chief. Egba chiefs responded to Ayawo's seizure by blocking the Abeokuta-Ibadan road; thus, cutting off Ibadan's access to the sea. Without access to this road, Ibadan citizens had limited access to European traders even though they relied solely on coastal trade for vital goods such as cowries, weapons, tobacco, and textiles. Four years later with the sanction hitting hard at home, Ibadan chiefs released Ayawo as a peace gesture.Footnote ⁵⁷

The negative impact of trade embargoes was not limited to Africans. They also affected European traders including those not directly responsible for disrupting trade. We do not know how Diallo's father reacted to the failed attempt to restore his son's freedom. However, we have glimpses of possible reactions against Europeans in Liberia and at Old Calabar. In the Liberian case, William Smith, an agent of the British Royal African Company trading around Cape Mount, west of Cape Mesurado, noted in 1727 that local people refused to come on board his vessel to trade because they suspected that Bristol and Liverpool privateers had recently seized some local debtors.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although this was a case of seizure for debt or panyarring, which allowed creditors to detain debtors or their associates to coerce payment, rather than a case of a person captured in warfare or a raid, victims of panyarring were technically captives because their return to freedom had to be bought without which they could be enslaved. Relatives of the Cape Mount debtors responded to the seizure by boycotting European trade vessels.Footnote ⁵⁹ Responses were not limited to boycotting trade. They also involved violent attacks ‘when it is in [the] power’ of the local people. For instance, in early January of this same year (1727), the people of Cape Mount attacked a British vessel, Expedition, and seized Captain Benjamin Cross in retaliation for attacks by British sailors. Cross was released after four weeks when another sailor paid fifty pounds sterling in ransom. Such attacks on European traders engaged in illegal trade, according to eyewitnesses, hampered the activities of law-abiding traders who described violence associated with privateering as ‘very pernicious to the slave trade’ in the Cape Mount region.Footnote ⁶⁰

Seizures and counter-seizures were also used as responses to failed ransom transactions. Counter-seizures, depending on the number and status of captives involved, could sometimes tilt the balance against the original captor.Footnote ⁶¹ A number of West African societies viewed the refusal to ransom or otherwise release captives as a violation of codes of social engagement. Some relatives of captives resorted to retaliatory seizures in order to force captors back to the negotiating table. For example, in Yorubaland sometime in September 1848, some Egba citizens kidnapped and sold 14 Ijaye traders. In retaliation, Chief Kurunmi of Ijaye attacked and seized between 600 and 1,200 Egba traders and sold them into slavery. The victims included James Gerber, a liberated returnee slave from Sierra Leone, his brother, and a slave.Footnote ⁶²

Another response to failed ransom negotiations was collective punishment, including the total destruction of a captor's community. For instance, around 1833, a civil dispute erupted between two factions in the Yoruba town of Abemo. The winners captured some of their rivals and held them as captives. Neighbouring Oyo chiefs intervened to settle the dispute and ordered the release of the captives ‘contending that they cannot be regarded as prisoners of war but fellow townsmen and victims of a civil fight’.Footnote ⁶³ Many soldiers complied with the order and released their captives but others did not. For failing to release their victims, Oyo chiefs responded by ordering the destruction of Abemo.Footnote ⁶⁴

Warfare was another response to failed ransom negotiations. For example, in 1862, a captor rejected Chief Ogundipe of Abeokuta's offer of two slaves for his wife and infant child held at Ile-Bioku, a small Oyo town. The source is silent on why the captor rejected the offer so it is unclear if he wanted a larger ransom or if he wanted to humiliate the chief by defying Egba power. Since the captives were not released, Ogundipe led an Egba army to sack Ile-Bioku in 1878. This case is significant because it shows that some negotiations were lengthy before they finally collapsed. It could be that Ogundipe could not easily mobilise the Egba to go to war without an assurance of victory. The timing of the revenge attack is particularly revealing since it took place in 1878 when Ibadan, Bioku's overlord, was less capable of mounting a successful counter-assault on Egba.Footnote ⁶⁵

If negotiations failed or became complicated because relatives could not pay a mediator, the relatives might attack the broker or his community. To enjoy their rights as brokers, mediators needed to be seen as unbiased. The parties involved, though, usually wanted the broker to support their side and to force the other party to make concessions. This could put the broker in an awkward position, sometimes resulting in attacks. This was the case when Ketu acted as the mediator between Egba and Dahomey. In August 1851, following the breakdown of ransom negotiations between the parties over captives seized in a recent war, Dahomey planned to invade Ketu on market day knowing that the Egba were bringing Dahomian captives to the town. ‘On the eve of the market day’, Thomas Bowen wrote, ‘it was reported that a Dahomian army was coming to Ketu to free their countrymen by force.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Immediately, Ketu forces were put on alert and Dahomian traders already in town were expelled. It is unclear why Dahomey did not trust the neutrality of Ketu, which like Egba, was Yoruba-speaking, or why Dahomey believed it had the physical force to free the captives. The expulsion of Dahomian traders from Ketu disrupted trade relations between them. It appears that it took some time before Ketu again trusted that Dahomian traders were not combining commerce with espionage.

Sometimes, the threat of war instead of actual warfare was enough to restart ransom negotiations. For example, after the illegal shipment of captives taken in the Old Calabar civil war of 1767, pawns held on European ships for debt owed by the Efik were shipped to the Americas. In response, Efik authorities vowed to stop all trading activities with British traders and threatened to take revenge on an English ship captain.Footnote ⁶⁷ The seriousness of this threat was evident by the furious exchanges within the merchant community in which a number of European merchants condemned the enslavement of the pawns and set in motion efforts to return the illegally enslaved to freedom.Footnote ⁶⁸

The expansion of European imperialism in Africa starting in the eighteenth century and the anti-slavery element of this expansion slowly transformed and added to the options available to Africans in cases of failed ransoming operations. Although largely tolerant of the continuation of slavery on the continent until after the First World War, Europeans generally attacked people resorting to violence as a form of negotiation. In parts of the continent, European forces took on the role of arbiter, arresting powerful slave traders and freeing their captives, some of whom joined colonial armies with which they felt empowered to take revenge on their former captors/masters.Footnote ⁶⁹ With Europeans becoming the most powerful political force, relatives of captives began using colonial authorities to seek the release of individuals when ransom negotiations failed or as an alternative for paying ransom. This especially became an important option where there had previously been little recourse after ransom negotiations failed to produce the release of a captive. Previously, when Europeans had been involved in ransom negotiations or their aftermath, it had been to advocate on behalf of a captive's kin, such as the cases involving the governor at Freetown discussed above, or as mediators in ransom negotiations.Footnote ⁷⁰ The extension of European control opened up opportunities for kin to appeal for the use of European power to achieve their aims.

As they extended their control, French colonial authorities, for instance, were aware that ransoming was taking place in territory that they ruled.Footnote ⁷¹ For example, in October 1889, the Kita cercle commander, in modern-day Mali, noted in his political report that ransom negotiations for a group of caravaners had been concluded with some of the captives being released while the women were kept.Footnote ⁷² However, when the normative methods of freeing captives did not work, some people sought out French officials as an alternative authority for achieving their aims. For example, in Mali in 1900, a woman complained to the Bougouni cercle commander that her husband's ransom was three slaves and four guns.Footnote ⁷³ The fact that she knew by whom and where her husband was being held, and her price of his ransom suggests that she had been negotiating his release and that these negotiations had failed. Perhaps she could not pay the ransom price or did not want to if she could secure his release another way. Seeking the help of the French commander worked. Her husband's captor was arrested, his belongings and slaves confiscated, and her husband released. In this case, the captive's wife may have been able to take advantage of the personal priorities of a French colonial ‘man-on-the-spot’.

Throughout the late nineteenth century, French colonial policies regarding slavery changed under each administrator but remained united in their focus. Administrators used the language of anti-slavery in order to placate the politicians and public in Paris. At the same time, they tried to maintain the social order in their territories by manipulating the issue of slavery to favour themselves and their allies, and to punish their enemies. In general, the military commanders Louis Archinard and Louis Edgard de Trentinian put more emphasis on territorial expansion and the use of slavery, the slave trade, and slaves in that enterprise. In contrast, the civilian administrators Albert Grodet and William Merlaud Ponty were more dedicated to ending the trade in slaves. Ponty's first hesitant actions against the slave trade took place in 1900.Footnote ⁷⁴ Regions such as Bougouni cercle where there were relatively few slaves, few powerful men, and few large slave holdings were not viewed as particularly important. Anti-slavery actions would have been dependent on local French officials, such as the Bougouni cercle commander, to make them a priority.