Legacies of Slavery and Repertoires of Emancipation: The Historicity of a Village Arena in The Gambia

The case study discussed is a rural village located in an area north of the river Gambia where slavery was until the first decades of twentieth century a fundamental institution which left important traces in the economic, political and social life of the community. The village arena is internally articulated on the basis of several individual and familial trajectories of emancipation related to strong legacies of slavery which are rooted in the precolonial and colonial socio-economic rural organisation. The village has adjusted itself as the socio-politically delimited terrain of application of national and transnational ideals, policies and politics of social change which both in the past and the present have mobilised the ideas of slavery, freedom and emancipation: from the legal abolition of the slave trade enforced by the colonial ruler up to the idea of the slavery of poverty which is combated by state, development interventions and programmes. Nevertheless, the village arena has a historicity that is more than the sum of the external influences. The Gambian village case study shows that in different historical phases from the years of national independence in the 1960s, the declining trajectory of agriculture, and through the transition between authoritarian and formally democratic national regimes, people have concentrated their efforts to master the materiality of slavery or freedom attributes by managing in the everyday village life the effects of the genealogical transmission of the hierarchised belonging to different status groups, the control of space and the organisation of geographic mobility.