From Slavery to Freedom: The Case of Farm-Slavery in Nigerian Hausaland

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Abstract
When the British arrived in Northern Nigeria in the early years of the century, one of their first acts was a Proclamation on Slavery (1901) which prohibited slave-raiding, abolished the legal status of slavery and declared that all those subsequently born of slave parents would be free, but which did not prohibit slaveholding as such. Faced with the existence of ancient and flourishing slavery systems, which probably involved several million men and women, it would have been altogether beyond the power of the British administration to have enforced any policy of immediate emancipation—and this quite apart from the sympathy that was felt for slave owners as a class.

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