Slavery, African Agency, and Normative Practices

A Historiographical Reappraisal from the Timbuktu Manuscripts

Abstract

The dominance of the Atlantic paradigm in Brazilian historiography on slavery, while crucial for exposing colonial violence, has consolidated an interpretive framework that often reduces Africa to a passive site of capture and exportation. This article challenges such a horizon by examining slavery in the Islamic Sahel through the normative structures embedded in manuscripts produced in Timbuktu between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a 1726 certificate of emancipation for an enslaved woman, a commercial agreement concerning internal trade between Timbuktu and Ghadames, and documents preserved by SAVAMA-DCI, it argues that slavery must be understood as a legally structured practice shaped by categories, procedures, and disputes formalized within a literate culture. Through a qualitative and historical-critical approach grounded in Mālikī legal categories, the study contends that these manuscripts functioned as instruments for producing status, legitimacy, and emancipation. Rather than administrative remnants, they constituted sites of normative ordering that reveal literate elites as juridical agents and enslaved individuals as actors engaged in processes of legal recognition. By repositioning Africa as a producer of institutional and normative rationality, the article advances an epistemological shift that unsettles Atlantic-centered readings and reopens theoretical debates on the historicity of slavery.