The Senegal Liberations Project
The Senegal Liberations Project
Joel Cabrita (History); Richard Roberts (History); and Fatoumata Seck (French and Italian)
Between 1857 and 1903, 28,930 enslaved Africans walked away from their African masters and sought freedom and freedom papers from French colonial officials in Senegal. Who they were, where they came from, and how they made their way to freedom are central questions we are asking. Most of the evidence we have on “liberated Africans” comes from those freed by European naval ships that captured slave ships at sea. Our project focuses on enslaved Africans who chose their own paths to freedom in the half century before French colonial officials abolished the legal status of slavery in 1903.
The Senegal Liberations Project expands the Slave Voyages database by focusing on slavery and freedom in Africa. Working closely with our Senegalese collaborators, the goals of Senegal Liberations Project are to make available to scholars, students, and teachers in Senegal and elsewhere a remarkable, but unused archival source: the registers of official liberations. A central part of making this project is to create a database of those enslaved people seeking their freedom and to create a platform that enables students, researchers, and teachers to produce new knowledge about slavery and freedom in West Africa. Our project team involves close collaboration with scholars, teachers, and students at Stanford, in Senegal, and in California.
