ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the causes of an exodus of enslaved people from northwestern Côte d’Ivoire in late 1907. It draws on 729 ‘palaver’ cases recorded by French military officers which detail individual manumissions before and during the exodus. These cases reveal the disadvantaged position of enslaved women under early colonial ‘rachat’ policy, or the process by which enslaved people purchased their freedom in negotiations with their owners. Slaveholders often claimed female slaves as their wives, rendering them ineligible for rachat. This article argues that enslaved women’s frustrations with rachat, not the beneficence of French abolitionism, provoked the Worodugu exodus. Resisting their owners by bringing liberation claims before French officials, enslaved women attempted to broaden their narrow legal path to freedom. When arbitrating abolition failed, they spoke with their feet and fled.
