ABSTRACT
Manumission was a common feature in many slave societies. It was the act of freeing individual slaves from the bondage of slavery, and in Latin it actually means ‘release, liberate from one's hand’. Schwartz (1974, pp. 604–5) defines it as ‘a juridicial action in which property rights were surrendered and in which the former slave assumed a new legal personality and new legal responsibility’. The phenomenon of manumission has been extensively examined and studied by scholars in various disciplines (see Further reading). Topics such as the nature and origin of manumission, types of manumission, the demographic characteristics of the manumitted, the status of the freed persons, and many others have been well documented. Such, however, is not the case for the social-psychological study of manumission, particularly the area of the identity structure of the manumitted.
