ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of violence against women through slavery, looking at the particular histories of Sierra Leone and Congo and emphasising labour in production and social reproduction. The slave era was a brutal period, one that permanently transformed Africa and Africans and created a Diaspora that resonates in all our lives. The slave trade, in its multiple destinations and multifarious purposes, in its enduring consequences for human and physical development, restructured lives at every level from the individual to the international. Technically, slave labour is unfree labour or work under some kind of non-economic compulsion. The story of violence carries on into the colonial period when European administrations made superhuman demands on their subjects labour in the course of extracting the continents wealth. The economic history of eastern Congo is one of rapid colonial industrialisation, the slow creation of a free labour market, and then swift deindustrialisation under Mobutu.
