In Mali’s Kayes region, people born into slave descent are still being forced to flee their home villages because local elites systematically deny them access to land. These displaced populations—mostly women and children, as men have often migrated to cities or abroad—remain invisible to humanitarian agencies and government programmes. The legal framework offers no protection, and in new host communities they face continued stigmatisation and the risk of new forms of servitude. This project aims to map the long history of these slavery-related internal displacements and, more importantly, to propose concrete measures to address them. The researchers will work with two Malian NGOs to produce policy papers, documentary films, and training materials, and to advocate directly with local and national government. If successful, the research could push authorities to anticipate and manage these “fugitive” displacements, and to design affordable, upscalable solutions for sustainable livelihoods. That would mean that one of the poorest and most vulnerable populations in the Sahel is no longer systematically overlooked in development planning.
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Descent-based slavery and its legacies continue to prevail in most communities of the west and south of Mali today. Because of the lack of protecting legal framework, populations victims of slavery-related violence often have little choice but to escape to more 'hospitable' areas, having been systematically barred from land access in their home village by the local elite. Those populations with ascribed slave status are the poorest and the most vulnerable populations in the Sahel. In many cases though, those displaced, mostly agricultural populations continue to live in precarious conditions because of continuing marginalization and stigmatization in new host communities, with risks of new forms of servitude strongly overlapping with the legacies of historical slavery. Slavery-related displacements in West Africa have been largely overlooked in the development and humanitarian practice and reporting. This is certainly a major omission in view of the Sustainable Development Goals Our project looks at the most invisibilised historical and contemporary slavery-related internal displacements, those taking place within the rural areas in the Kayes region and which concern in their vast majority women and children because men of those communities are migrants elsewhere in cities and abroad. In such crisis situation as the one prevailing today in Mali, working with populations who are considered of 'slave descent' is thus an urgent equitable development issue. Our research programme aims not only to analyse and map the long history of slavery-related protracted displacements in the Kayes region, but more importantly we propose concrete measures to redress this unacknowledged long-term crisis situation by sensitising the local and national government in Mali at every level to anticipate and efficiently manage those 'fugitive' displacements of people with ascribed slave status. Our project team brings together a unique combination of expertise and methods in African history, comparative literature, law, social anthropology and political sciences, which are less common in development approaches. It aims at constructing a synergistic approach with transformative and catalyst effect by exploring both affordable and upscalable solutions for sustainable livelihoods and proposing directly actionable recommendations for the surveyed communities (and beyond). The transformative aspect of this research relies on bridging the gaps between practitioners and scholars in and with the surveyed communities through a website, policy papers, documentary films, teaching material, trainings, research dissemination and advocacy at appropriate policy-making levels, facilitated by two Malian partner NGOs, Donkosira and TEMEDT.
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