The Center for African Studies (CAS) is excited to partner with the Stanford Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for an engaging Africa Table lecture on March 4th from 12–1 PM at 123 Encina Hall. 

Thomas Cole John lived at the intersection of different worlds. He was a missionary, a linguist and a cultural mediator between African and European values, between Islam and Christianity, between the Hausa language and culture he studied and other local ethnic identities, and between those at the top and those at the bottom of various hierarchies. The son of two Hausa “Liberated Africans” who had experienced enslavement in the transatlantic slave trade, TC John graduated from Fourah Bay College in 1854 and was ordained by Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the mid-1860s. He then served at the important Church Missionary Society (CMS) station of Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. While in Lokoja, he collected, transcribed and studied Hausa sources with James Frederick Schön (an early Hausa linguist and editor of “Magana Hausa”, one of the first collections of Hausa texts, published in 1885). Many of the Hausa texts in Magana Hausa were provided by TC John, who was in contact with enslaved people and enslavers during his time in Lokoja. This paper situates TC John within the complex web of dependency relations he experienced. It analyses his own writings as a source of evidence for his understanding of these hierarchies and the place of slavery within them. It asks what we can learn from an actor-centered approach to the study of slavery and anti-slavery in Africa, and how close engagement with African language (Hausa) sources contributes to our understanding of these phenomena.

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Benedetta Rossi is Professor of History at University College London (UCL). She is the author of From Slavery to Aid (CUP 2015) and the editor of Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (LUP 2009, 2nd ed. 2016) and Les Mondes de l’Esclavage: Une Histoire Comparée (Seuil 2021, with Paulin Ismard and Cécile Vidal). She recently edited two special issues on the abolition of slavery in Africa’s legal histories in the Law & History Review (2024, vol. 42/1) and on African approaches to ending slavery in Esclavages & Post-esclavages (2024, vol. 10) and published “An Abolitionist Vicious Circle: Slaving, Antislavery, and Violence on the Shores of Lake Tanganyika at the Onset of Colonial Occupation” in Slavery & Abolition (2024, vol. 45/4). She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Advanced Grant African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB).