Bridging Two Oceans: Slavery in Indian and
Atlantic Worlds
An International Conference organised by the Wilberforce Institute for the study of
Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, at the
Iziko Slave Lodge, Cape Town 19 - 22 November 2009
Provisional programme
Thursday 19
November
9.00-9.30
Coffee
Welcome and opening address
9.30-10.00
The Mayor of Cape Town, Alderman Dan Plato, introduced by David
Richardson, University of Hull
Session 1
Historical memory and performance
Chair: Archie Dick, University of Pretoria
10.00-12.00
Wilma Cruise, Independent artist and writer and Gavin Younge, Michaelis
School of Fine Art, Cape Town
‘Satan’s Seat: The Cape Town Slave Memorial in Post-colonial Context’
David Wilkins, University of Hull
‘Repairing historical wrongs in Africa: Whose history?’
Gabeba Baderoon, Pennsylvania State University
‘The Two African Oceans: Memories of Slavery in Yvette Christianse’s
Castaway, Unconfessed and Imprendahora’
Tunde Awosanmi, University of Ibadan
‘Slaveprints on Sand and Sea: Rewriting the slave-self in African drama’
Lunch
12.00-1.00
Session 2
Capital and labour
Chair: Judith Spicksley, University of Hull
Kwabena Adu-Boahen, University of Cape Coast
‘West African slavery under European mercantile presence: the case of 16th18th century Gold Coast’
1.00-2.30
Anil Persaud, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
‘John Rippon and the Circuits of Cane: Capital, Knowledge and Labour at
the turn of the 18th Century in the Indian Ocean’
Bonnie Martin, Southern Methodist University
‘Mortgaging Slaves in North America and South Africa: Parallels in Funding
Slavery and Slave Societies’
Coffee
2.30-3.00
Session 3
In the shadow of slavery
Chair: Chris Saunders, University of Cape Town
Bronwen Everill, King's College London
‘ “The first requisite to the prosperity of the colony is the suppression of the
slave trade”: Reassessing the Impact of Sierra Leone and Liberia’s
Antislavery Activity’
3.00-4.30
Sandy Shell, University of Cape Town
‘Prosopographies and profiles: the Oromo slave children in South Africa,
1888-2008’
Alaine Hutson, Huston-Tillotson University
‘ “Common Failings of Our Common Humanity”: A Preliminary
Exploration of Issues Common to Slavery in the Middle East and the
Atlantic World’
Friday 20
November
Session 4
9.00-10.30
Anti-slavery encounters
Chair: Patrick Harries, University of Basel
Mary Wills, University of Hull
‘Anti-slavery and the Royal Navy: encounters, experiences and beliefs’
Lindsay Doulton, University of Hull
‘The Flag that sets us free?” Anti-Slavery, Africans and the Royal Navy in
the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1860-1890’
Isabelle Denis, Université Paris Sorbonne
‘The Amélie and The Pocha: Two slave vessels and the French Navy
(Martinique 1822 – Mayotte 1840)’
10.30-11.00
Coffee
Session 5
Patterns of trading
Chair: Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, University of Hull
Stacey Sommerdyk, University of Hull
‘Examining the Merchant Communities of the Loango Coast: The
Eighteenth Century West Central African Voyages of the Middelburg
Commercial Company’
11.00-12.30
Carlos Liberato, York University, Toronto
‘The Slave Trade between the Indian Ocean and the Amazonia, 1778-1846:
Volume, Routes and Organisation’
Steven Serels, McGill University
‘Salt for Slaves; The Slave Trade at Rowayeh, the Sudan, 1880-1913’
12.30-1.30
Lunch
Session 6
Slavery and education
Chair: Wayne Alexander, Iziko Museums of Cape Town
Yvette Fox and Sue Holmes, East Riding of Yorkshire Council
1.30-2.30
‘The Pedagogy of Learning and Teaching Slavery Studies in Schools’
Albert Jauze, Université de la Réunion
‘Education about slavery and the slave trade in Réunion Island’
Saturday 21
November
Keynote
Chair: Nicholas J. Evans, University of Hull
9.30-10.30
Nigel Worden, University of Cape Town
‘Changing Networks of Slave Resistance at the Cape: Bridging the Indian
Ocean and Atlantic Worlds’
10.30-11.00
Coffee
Conceptual frameworks
11.00-12.30
Chair: David Richardson, University of Hull
Gwyn Campbell, McGill University
‘Towards an Understanding of Twin Ocean Slavery’
Nigel Penn, University of Cape Town
‘Slavery in the Cape Province’
Judith Spicksley, University of Hull
‘Debt as a Framework for the Study of Slavery’
12.30-1.30
Lunch
Political economies and social structures
Chair: Sophie White, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
David Richardson, University of Hull
‘The Demography of Slavery in Africa’
1.30-3.00
Andrea Major, University of Leeds
‘Slavery and the Raj’
Edward Alpers, University of California, Los Angeles
‘Patterns of Slave Trafficking, 1665-1831’
Coffee
3.00-3.30
Movements across oceans
Chair: Jaco Boshoff, Iziko Museums of Cape Town
3.30-5.00
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, University of Hull
‘Free and forced migration in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1580s-1670s: Western
Africa as a case-study’
Richard Allen, Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund, Mauritius
‘From Saint Helena to Sumatra: The British East India Company and Slave
Trading in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1621-1804’
David Eltis and Jane Hooper, Emory University
‘The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery’
Sunday 22
November
Keynote
Chair: Joel Quirk, University of Hull
9.30-10.30
Robert Shell, University of the Western Cape
‘From Diaspora to Diorama: UNESCO and the preservation of the legacies
of twin ocean slavery’
10.30-11.00
Coffee
The diasporic legacies of slavery
Chair: Kate Hodgson, University of Hull
11.00-12.00
James Sweet, University of Wisconsin-Madison
‘The African Diaspora in the Atlantic World’
Ehud Toledano, Tel-Aviv University
‘The emergence of African communities in the Ottoman Empire’
12.00-1.00
Lunch
Abolitionism and its aftermath
Chair: Lalou Meltzer, Iziko Museums of Cape Town
Kate Hodgson, University of Hull
‘Twin ocean travellers and late eighteenth century European abolitionism’
1.00-2.30
John Oldfield, University of Southampton
‘Transatlanticism and Abolition’
Nicholas J. Evans, University of Hull
‘The legacies of abolitionist discourse in the campaigns to abolish the White
Slave Trade’
2.30-3.00
Coffee
Contemporary slavery and historical problems
Chair: Fiona Clayton, Iziko Museums of Cape Town
Mark Johnson, University of Hull
‘Beyond the Veil: Situating Migrant Labour in the Middle East’
3.00-4.30
Deborah Posel, University of Witwatersrand
‘Apartheid in South Africa’
Joel Quirk, University of Hull
‘Modern Slavery in Africa: Historical Legacies and Contemporary
Problems’
Closing address
4.30-5.00
David Richardson, University of Hull, will introduce a pre-recorded video
message from The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu, Anglican Archbishop
Emeritus of Cape Town
‘Repairing Historical Wrongs’