The Slave Soldiers of Africa

This study attempts an exploratory overview of African military slavery, which is marked by the unusual longevity of the phenomenon and by its surviving social legacy. Before the colonial period military slavery was not confined (as is often supposed) to the Muslim states of North Africa and the Sahel, but was also practiced in many non-Muslim sub-Saharan societies. In the late nineteenth century the colonial powers liberated, conscripted or purchased African slave soldiers for their own armies. Although the institution of military slavery died away during the colonial period, it has re-emerged in independent Africa as child soldiering.