Presented at the University of California, Davis Graduate Conference in May, 2016.

This study examines the historical linkages that developed between experiences of enslavement, the legacies of slavery, and ideas of freedom before and after abolition in the early twentieth century in an area of southern Senegal known today as the Kolda region. In the Fulfulde language, spoken by the majority of the population, there are several terms and expressions to talk about freedom. The first is ndimaaku, which people tend to equate with nobility and dignity. This is the freedom of the olden days of slavery, when the capacities and qualities of the male or female freeborn stood in stark contrast to those of the slave, and being free meant not having been a slave in the first place. The second term is heɓtaare, i.e., freedom in the sense of tranquility, economic well-being, and a general ease in life and social relations. The expression jeyaal-hoore mun conveys a sense of independence, self-mastery and autonomy, while heɓtugol hoore mun literally means to retrieve one’s head, the center of individual thought and capacity for independent action. Politically, heɓtugol hoore mun stands for the end of colonial rule and the achievement of national ndependence. Socially, it refers to the emancipation of subordinated groups, like the youth and women, and it describes slaves who freed themselves from their masters. Drawing from archival sources and oral history, this essay attempts to reconstruct the discursive econfigurations of local ideas of freedom within the context of the political and social changes that affected the Kolda region in the late nineteenth century, the early colonial period, and the years before decolonization. Each historical period had its own actors, dynamics and complexities in which slavery and then legacies of slavery played a role in the definition of freedom and the entitlement of people to its benefits. As demonstrated here, however, liberation paved the way for other forms of subjugation.

Robert Gooding-Williams identifies Afro-modern political thought as a distinct genre of modern political philosophy “bound together by certain genre-defining preoccupations—for example, the political and social organization of white supremacy, the nature and effects of racial ideology, and the possibilities of black emancipation.” Over the past two decades, Patricia Hill Collins, Lawrie Balfour, Tommie Shelby and Juliet Hooker, among others, have shown how key terms of political theory—freedom, democracy, citizenship, coalition—take on different meanings when considered from the vantage point of the African diaspora and the underside of white supremacy. Reconstituting the history of political thought so that it fully acknowledges its Afro-modern strain affords us the opportunity to rethink and reconfigure keywords of modern political theory that all too often have been predicated exclusively on European and Euro-American political experience. Research into Afro-modern political thought creates opportunities for conceptual reconfiguration. The two works under review engage in conceptual reconfiguration by analyzing how Afro-modern political thinking conceives of democracy and freedom in ways that differ from dominant Western understandings. Both works succeed in this endeavor: in Nick Bromell’s case by re-centering our understanding of democracy on the idea of dignity and the experience of indignation; in Neil Roberts’ case by re-centering our understanding of freedom on individual and mass experiences of flight from New World slavery. Both books also run up against certain limits in their scope. In striving so inventively to mine African American literature for democratic resources, Bromell falls short of fully acknowledging the tenacity of inegalitarianism in U.S. political life and thus of specifying a realistic strategy to address it. Roberts strongly intervenes in the political philosophical literature on freedom by elaborating his new concept of freedom as marronage. But he falls short of showing that freedom as marronage displaces republican theories of freedom as non-domination; in so doing, he misses an opportunity to make the more plausible case that freedom as marronage and freedom as non-domination complement each other.

Paper present at the symposium, Colonoware: Materializing Colonial Identities in the Carolina Lowcountry. 24 October 2020. Hosted virtually by Clemson University and the College of Charleston.