"There is No Captive Who Does Not Want to Be Free!": Meanings of Slavery and Freedom Among Senegalese Sailors, 19th Century

Abstract From an extensive inquiry into the abolition of slavery in Senegal by the French administration in 1844, this article seeks to understand the meaning that slavery and freedom had for river and sea fleet workers in the city of Saint-Louis, known as laptots (and precisely the main interviewees), in the first decades of the nineteenth century. I will try to hear their voices from the records made in 1844, but also from other documents of various natures and periods, including reports, civil and criminal cases, population censuses, and even reports of foreign travelers who were in Saint-Louis in the early decades of the nineteenth century, collected in archives and research institutions of Senegal and France.