Sudanese Military Slavery from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

The idea of a slave soldier seems strange to us today. If, as Mao claimed, power comes from the barrel of a gun, then the holder of that gun must have some power. A slave with a rifle seems a contradiction in terms. Ye t even in recent times there have been not only slave soldiers, but also slave armies. The very remoteness of the idea of military slavery from modern political thinking and modern concepts of slavery may be one reason why analyses of slave armies concentrate on their remote origins or treat them as early stages in political or social evolution. ¹ Military slavery has not been treated as an institution of long endurance and continuity which is crucial to the understanding of political relations of dependency and marginality within the regions where it was practised. African historians still tend to treat it as only one of many possible fates for the individual slave.