This paper uses the specific example of the fugitive movements of concubines classified as slaves or descendants of slaves in the border regions of Niger and Nigeria. These movements of women resemble the marronage of slaves in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. I propose to go off the beaten track of the written, visual and oral forms that abound in Western intellectual spheres, and to look at one of the alternative forms, composed of movements and body language: kinetics.
By ‘kinetic narratives’, I refer to an embodied and active physical im/mobility that translates the subjective experiences of women with hereditary slave status in the Sahel. More specifically, it is their fugitive movements that I analyze as tactics of resistance to their exploitation.
The main source is a report based on interviews with concubines conducted by a Niger-based anti-slavery organization with nine cases from a corpus of 165 interviews, mainly in southern Niger and northern Nigeria.