Rossi, Benedetta; (2020) From Slavery? Rethinking Slave Descent as an Analytical Category: The Case of the Mauritanian and Moroccan Hratin. L’Ouest Saharien , 10-11 pp. 187-208.

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Abstract

What does it mean, after worldwide legal abolition, to define groups or individuals as ‘slave descendants’ ? When slavery was legal, laws and norms distinguished between slave and free (legal) status and defined relations of production, reproduction, and property between enslaved persons and their owners. Today the vernacular terminology that identifies certain African groups as ‘slaves’ or ‘slave descendants’ (e.g. ḥarāṭīn, ˁabīd, etc.) is often an anachronism unrelated to their economic and political conditions. But in some cases slave origins continue to affect the everyday lives of people who never ceased to be exploited by the descendants of slave-owners. This article compares the identitarian, economic, and political strategies of people classified as slave descendants in Morocco and Mauritania; it discusses the connection between labels that imply slave ancestry and the circumstances of the carriers of such labels; and it considers implications for the analytical terminology of African slavery studies.

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