their children play outside for fear they would be taken and
sold into slavery.
As a result slavery, rather than contracting, appears to
have expanded in Africa throughout the nineteenth century.
Though accurate figures are hard to come by, a number of
existing accounts written by travelers and merchants during
this time suggest that in the West African kingdoms of
Asante and Dahomey and in the Yoruba city-states well
over half of the population were slaves. More accurate data
exist from early French colonial records for the western
Sudan, a large swath of western Africa, stretching from
Senegal, via Mali and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Chad. In
this region 30 percent of the population was enslaved in
1900.
Just as with the emergence of legitimate commerce, the
advent of formal colonization after the Scramble for Africa
failed to destroy slavery in Africa. Though much of
European penetration into Africa was justified on the
grounds that slavery had to be combated and abolished,
the reality was different. In most parts of colonial Africa,
slavery continued well into the twentieth century. In Sierra
Leone, for example, it was only in 1928 that slavery was
finally abolished, even though the capital city of Freetown
was originally established in the late eighteenth century as
a haven for slaves repatriated from the Americas. It then
became an important base for the British antislavery
squadron and a new home for freed slaves rescued from
slave ships captured by the British navy. Even with this
symbolism slavery lingered in Sierra Leone for 130 years.
Liberia, just south of Sierra Leone, was likewise founded
for freed American slaves in the 1840s. Yet there, too,
slavery lingered into the twentieth century; as late as the
1960s, it was estimated that one-quarter of the labor force
were coerced, living and working in conditions close to
slavery. Given the extractive economic and political
institutions based on the slave trade, industrialization did
not spread to sub-Saharan Africa, which stagnated or even
experienced economic retardation as other parts of the
world were transforming their economies.
M AKING A D UAL E CONOMY