Androcentric Memories of Enslavement, Social Reproduction, and Racial Capitalism in North-Western Senegal

Abstract

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Senegal, women constituted most of the enslaved population. Despite this demographic overrepresentation, contemporary memories of enslavement are predominantly androcentric. This article highlights this androcentrism and ties it to changes in labour and gender that occurred under racial capitalism. A study of 100 newspaper articles published in Senegalese and French media during the last decade reveals that 55 percent of them were biased towards describing enslaved people as masculine figures, versus only 11 percent representing them as women. This androcentrism of memories can be attributed to the conflation of the trans-Atlantic trade with the local indigenous trade, the patriarchal nature of the Senegalese state inherited from colonialism, and the transition to racial capitalism under which women’s labour was rendered invisible. Today, these memorial processes hide the negative socio-economic legacies of enslavement on racialised working-class women and children. These findings illustrate the necessity to centre gender dynamics in studies of the memories and archaeology of enslavement.