Social Science Research Council

“Fugitive Slave Communities: Group Formation and Economic Organization in the Coastal Hinterland of 19th-Century Kenya”

This project centers on the archaeological investigation of settlements founded in 19th-century Kenya by people escaping slavery.  It specifically considers the economic insularity and cultural heterogeneity of fugitive slave groups relative to the coastal hinterland communities that neighbored them.  In the mid-19th century, intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the Eastern African coast by Omani colonists and Swahili indigenes provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade.  As the coastal plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people fled to the hinterland.  In Swahili, such fugitives were known as watoro.  This project investigates the creation of watoro communities through a dual focus on inter- and intra-group relationships.  It explores the position of these nascent communities in regional economic networks.  The project also investigates whether fugitive slaves developed homogenized group norms or, alternately, maintained long-term cultural heterogeneity.  The above inquiries will be evaluated through an archaeological comparison of watoro settlements with villages of neighboring Mijikenda peoples in the coastal hinterland.  Relying on Mijikenda settlements as alternate models of 19th-century rural Eastern African life, this project will explore how the status of watoro as refugees from enslavement shaped the economic, social, and cultural organization of their villages.  Indices targeted in this investigation include diet, trade, craft production, house style, and spatial organization of domestic activities. 

Improvised under stress by people of dissimilar cultural background and social experience, fugitive slave groups in Eastern Africa provide researchers with valuable case studies from which to extrapolate more broadly about community creation and maintenance.  By expanding the comparative perspective already fostered by fugitive slave archaeology in Mauritius, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the mainland U.S, this research will also promote cross-cultural understandings of slavery and slave resistance.  Finally, like other recent studies of how slavery and the slave trade displaced Africans within Africa, this project aligns with a multidisciplinary effort to include the continent in African Diasporic studies.