International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 48, No. 2 (2015) 281 Copyright © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of Boston University. Stereotypes of Past-Slavery and “Stereo-styles” in Post-Slavery: A Multidimensional, Interactionist Perspective on Contemporary Hierarchies By Lotte Pelckmans Danish Institute for International Studies (lpel@diis.dk) Several post-slavery societies in francophone West Africa may not quite be as “post” as the term suggests. Does the “post” refer to the two key moments of 1) legal abolition in 1898 (abolition of the economic institution of slave trade and markets), and 2) the 1905 French colonial abolition of domestic slavery as a societal system of organization? If it does, then what of the argument made by some scholars that the 1905 abolition hardly impacted existing social norms 1 and that domestic slavery continued well into the twenty- first century 2 in certain areas and often among nomadic groups? The majority of scholars working on nomadic groups in different parts of francophone Sahel areas confirm this. My first argument then is that the term post-slavery reduces the possibility of including continuities, complexity, and diversity of past-slavery forms in present African contexts. It obfuscates even further, for example, the already existing amalgamation of an extreme variety of institutions of inequality (human trafficking, prostitution, human bondage, forced labor)—discursively referred to as “modern slavery”—and the persistence in some areas of historical forms of slavery. Rossi has proposed the following classification: continued forms of past-slavery (historical slavery); metaphorical uses of the strong language of slavery (metaphorical slavery); classification of people according to their place in a society that is impregnated with social practices and discourses recalling past-slavery (classificatory slavery); and relations whereby new forms of exploitation are interpreted as modern variations of slavery (modern slavery). 3 This is a valuable analytical model to distinguish different legacies and discursive uses of the word “slavery” in post-slavery societies. However, this model helps us to deal only with discursive references to slavery in Africa. New analytical approaches are needed to examine the polymorphism of slavery as an institution in the past and present, and the polysemy of legacies of slavery not only as a discourse, but also as an embodied practice. 1 Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 Roger Botte, “L’esclavage africain après l’abolition de 1848: Servitude et droit du sol,” Annales 5 (2000), 1009–1037. 3 Benedetta Rossi, “Introduction: Rethinking Slavery in West Africa,” in Benedetta Rossi, ed., Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 5.