In recent years, clusters of scholars have gone beyond the standard Western sources and instead have searched for authentic African voices within the African communities themselves: oral traditions and testimonies, life histories gleaned from interviews with missionaries and colonial authorities, as well as folktales, songs, and other African sources. This ongoing drive, led by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, and Martin Klein, seeks to illuminate African perspectives.22 Still, their focus remains largely on the slave trade of West and North Africa, with only a relative nod toward personal slave accounts drawn from the Horn or East Africa. They have aimed, primarily, to bring the essential human perspective into play through seeking qualitative interpretations to supplement the purely numeric quantitative assessments offered by, for example, Abdul Sheriff’s statistical work on the slave trade of Zanzibar.23
With this study it has been possible to offer both, pulling the quantitative and the qualitative together in a unique and unified set of insights. On the one hand, the prosopography (or, loosely, group biography) presents group analyses suggesting trends and practices in the slave trade of the Horn of Africa; and on the other, it presents the personal accounts of each of the sixty-four children, tracking them not only during their period of enslavement but from cradle to grave.
We need to bear in mind that these accounts were almost exclusively penned as memoirs years after enslavement. The genre of the memoir is essentially one of reconstruction of an elusive past, informed in part by the inevitable interventions of experience and learned knowledge. We all experience this in recalling events from our own childhoods—how much of what we “remember” is what really happened, and how much has been suggested by and inextricably interwoven with our conversations and readings, with the natural subliminal adjustment born of the knowledge of hindsight, and with our own experiences and interpretations across the intervening years?
For example, the East/Central African life histories assembled by Marcia Wright were part biography and part autobiography, compiled by a female Moravian missionary in Tanzania “when the women were grandmothers” at the turn of the twentieth century.24 By contrast, the immediacy of the children’s narratives analyzed in this study adds a significant new dimension to our knowledge and understanding of child slave experiences. Interviewed within weeks of their liberation, each Oromo child answered the same series of questions, presenting the reader with freshly minted, systematic detail without the filter of hindsight, learned experience, or suggestion.
First-person slave accounts have, for the most part, been retrospective records of stand-alone experiences, snapshots of individual lives situated in differing times and places. These certainly provide valuable insights into individual experiences, but the historian would be on shaky ground in any attempt to draw inferences from these specifics to define a general first-passage reality. However, caches of small groups of child slave narratives do exist in East and Central Africa. Missionaries played an important role in encouraging the recording and preservation of slave biographies at their stations in Kenya in East Africa. Significant studies based on these and other missionary collections include the early work of Arthur C. Madan, in which he used narratives from the collections of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA); followed more recently by Ned Alpers (who regarded the UMCA accounts as representing “a genuine African voice”); Margery Perham; and Fred Morton, who explored narratives held in the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS).25 The groups are small—those in the UMCA archives number only twelve, with thirty-nine in the collections of the CMS. Nonetheless, these have extended our knowledge of the slave experience on the eastern side of the continent and would suggest that the discovery is possible of further caches of records in the missionary archives of East and Central Africa.
Despite this scholarly interest, no one has yet attempted a systematic group analysis of these pluralities of narratives. Should the Kenyan narratives lend themselves to group analysis, the results could provide a useful comparative study with the Oromo children’s experiences. Of course, the accounts of the Oromo children have the advantage of greater numbers (N = 64), allowing for more effective group analyses and the possibility of determining trends and representivity more accurately. Data quality permitting, there would also be virtue in amalgamating the Kenyan and Oromo data to generate fresh results from the augmented sample. These are enticing possibilities for what the consolidated data might reveal, and for the potential of extending the pioneering findings detailed in this study.
The sensitive topic of African domestic slavery—that is, the enslavement of Africans by Africans as opposed to the raiding for slaves to supply the external, oceanic slave trade—has engaged the minds of many historians of slavery, particularly those who have interpreted the phenomenon as a degree of kinship, and their interpretations have frequently produced vastly different conclusions. Anthropologists have suggested that rather than participating in the commercial trade in slaves, precolonial African slave owners exchanged rather than sold their slaves.26 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff counterposed the Western notion of slavery as a fixed status of chattel, permanently at the bottom of the social ladder, with a need to consider the influence of rights-in-persons and a slavery-to-kinship continuum within an African model of social and kinship relationships.27 Others noted the incidences of male relatives selling their children in East Central Africa, and there are comparative examples of kin selling their children in southern Asia, where this was apparently common practice.28 Among the Oromo, slave ownership was common.29 Interestingly, the Borana Oromo, living in the southern regions of today’s Oromia as well as across the border in Kenya, practiced a system of adoption, or guddifachaa, by which, for example, child war captives were adopted rather than enslaved. This practice would conform to the Miers and Kopytoff model but takes it further to include those children’s incorporation into the community and ultimately into the national Oromo stream.30
The level of detail of the Oromo children’s data informing this study included the identity of their captors and, subsequently, their successive purchasers and sellers. The children also gave details of the prices paid or commodities bartered for them—for example, “a handful of peppers”—at capture and when they changed hands. These data offered the unique opportunity to explore the nature of the moment of capture and the frequently contested question of agency. They also produced incontrovertible evidence of commodity trading rather than kinship absorption at the time of capture and later during the children’s often long periods of domestic servitude.
The social status of slaves prior to capture has long been an arena of speculation rather than empirical analysis. The rare commentaries on slave status invariably focus on postcapture and postemancipation mobility. However, the eyewitness accounts of two English army officers contributed useful insights into social conditions among the Oromo at the end of Emperor Menelik II’s reign and directly after World War I.31 And Philip Curtin contributed a useful perspective in his study of the social structure of Senegambia, in which he concluded that the slaves who fell within the Senegambian social strata were foreigners or captifs who were later integrated into Senegambian society.32 This study elucidates this generally opaque feature and period of the slave trade and pushes our knowledge forward with intricate details of parental occupation, measures of immovable and movable property (including slave ownership), the species and numbers of livestock, and other measures of relative wealth of the slave children’s families—including evidence that four of the Oromo girls sprang from princely families.
The reasons for targeting particular individuals for captivity and the methods used during capture have been largely broadbrushed in the literature. Those brushstrokes were informed primarily by the third-person