Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate was a major system of internal slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa. The caliphate, founded after the jihad led by Usman dan Fodio, extended across much of present-day northern Nigeria and neighboring regions. Although its leaders condemned the unlawful enslavement of Muslims, warfare, frontier expansion, disputed religious status, and economic demand supplied a large enslaved population.

Labor and social roles

Slavery in Sokoto was primarily agrarian, household, military, and administrative rather than an Atlantic export system. Enslaved people cultivated estates that supported emirs, scholars, officials, soldiers, and towns. They also worked in compounds, herded animals, transported goods, produced food and textiles, served in armies, and performed domestic labor. Women could be subjected to agricultural and household labor, concubinage, and reproductive control. Some enslaved people held positions of trust, while others lived in labor settlements attached to estates or offices; such variation did not remove owners' power over movement, labor, family life, and status.

Published reconstructions commonly place the enslaved population near the end of the nineteenth century in a broad range of roughly one to two-and-a-half million. This is an estimate rather than a census-like total, but it identifies Sokoto as one of the largest documented internal slaveholding societies of the period.

Abolition under colonial rule

British abolition policy in Northern Nigeria was gradual. A 1901 proclamation weakened the legal recognition of slave ownership and declared children born after 1 April 1901 free. British conquest of Sokoto in 1903 extended colonial authority, but officials avoided immediate universal emancipation because they prioritized political order, taxation, and cooperation with existing elites. Enslaved people nevertheless used the weakening of masters' legal claims to flee, negotiate, and assert freedom. Household and agrarian dependency therefore declined through a prolonged process rather than on a single emancipation date.

Further reading

Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936.