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(^188) Hubert Gerbeau
to mean the purchase or capture of a man, followed by his displacement
and sale, then certain compulsory voyages, which were the result of slavery
and of the greed of masters, were indeed akin to the slave trade. In 1957-58,
while conducting research in the Niger Valley, I had occasion to see that the
manifold survivals of the phenomenon of 'family captives' sometimes involved
compulsory displacements. The most extraordinary one seemed to me to be the
annual trip made by a bellah doctor, i.e. a captive of the Tuareg, who owed his
promotion to the fact that he had been a hostage at school, where he had,
against his will, replaced a chief's son. He lived in an African capital, but
travelled regularly 2,000 kilometres to visit his former masters in their tents
and turn over to them one-twelfth of his average annual income.
When thousands of the emancipated slaves in the sugar-producing islands
fled the plantations, were they moving of their own free will to the uplands or
the towns where they would die of poverty? Was it not the colonial society
which, having always connected working on the land with the stigma of servility,
drove them to such a desperate flight towards reintegration in the human
species from which, despite baptism and the law, an attempt had been made to
exclude them? This was a death-blow dealt them by the social system, because
legal emancipation was not backed up by any welfare measure in a free economy
and society. A century later, it was discovered that some islands had operated
as a population trap and a new migration was organized.
I have alluded to these extreme cases only in order to show that by its
extent and its connotations, the slave trade may lead the historian further
afield than he had expected. On the immediate fringes of slavery, there are
many slave-trade phenomena which he will in any case be unable to overlook
and which concern the 'half-free'. It was not by chance, I imagine, that Unesco
proposed to me the subject of the traite esclavagiste and not that of the traite
des esclaves.^2 This former term lends itself not only to a value judgement on
the trade, but also amounts to an invitation to approach the phenomenon in
a broader context. A man with a pro-slavery mentality has no need of slaves
in the legal sense in order to carry on his trade. For that reason the slate's
substitutes, the 'free employees' and the forced labourers, were to become
provender for the slave trade. Their inclusion in my subject is therefore more
in order than it appeared at first sight.^3
There is still the problem of agreeing on what may be regarded as the
slave trade. I have already suggested that the traffic in Indian and African
'free employees' who worked on sugar plantations would fall within this
category. But there are, too, the Malagasy 'free employees' and the Chinese
'coolies', the political prisoners of Indo-China and Madagascar, the forced
labourers on Indonesian plantations, and perhaps even the Indian labourers
laying the railways in East Africa or the Mozambique Negroes migrating to
work in the Transvaal mines.