The Quest for Honor and Citizenship in Post-Slavery Borgu (Benin)

.... Are Persons Property? ask Margaret Davies and Ngaire Naffine in a legal debate about the fabrication of persons and things.1 This question is not only important in relation to child fosterage and adoption, human trafficking, forced prostitution, or other contemporary similar issues. It is a central question to the understanding of the ideology that justifies slavery and its legacies in post-slavery Africa. Indeed the abolition of African slavery by French and British colonial powers more than a century ago did not close the debate once and for all. One reason for that is the co-existence of competing legal norms. Some of this legal framework tolerates, encourages, legitimizes, or regulates slavery.2 The other reason is that the fabrication of persons and things is not only a matter of laws, but also of social norms.