Translocal links and women slaves in the nineteenth century Somalia

The history of dependency, slavery and abolition in the Somali country reveals that women slaves, through their translocal movements and personal interactions, albeit sometimes invisible, were at the crossroad of the intermingling of people from Cushitic groups and Bantu-speaking groups. A number of Italian writers at the turn of the twentieth century tend to describe the phenomenon of slavery as “soft,” something rather non-conflictual, in which slaves preferred to be taken care of by their masters rather than take their lives into their own hands; others highlight the way slaves were dealt with as commodities and exchanged in the market. Slaves were indeed caught in a dependency system based on servile and slave labour. In fact, the institution of slavery followed local rules and dynamics which were only imprecisely understood by the colonizers. Women played a crucial role in the process and they embodied the translocal dynamics of enslavement.