The second phase of the slave trade, viz., the raids for slaves to supply the internal demand from Mohammedan States and pagan kingdoms in Africa, was equally doomed to extinction by the advent of settled administration; but it did not disappear without a struggle. In the eastern Sudan the conquests of Baker and Gordon over the Turco-Egyptian slave raiders had been effaced by the sanguinary rule of the Mandi, and it was not until he in turn had been conquered by Kitchener in 1898, that effective control could be exercised.
The consolidation of French rule in the north, and the final defeat of Samory and other powerful Mohammedan potentates in the west, put an end to the organized traffic in slaves, though as late as 1926 parties of tribesmen in the desert still defied authority. In Nigeria the power of the Mohammedan rulers who annually employed large armies in raiding for slaves, and had depopulated great regions, was broken in 1902-3, and slave raiding was stopped. In the Congo region King Leopold declared war on Tippoo Tib, Rumaliza and other notable east-coast Arabs who had settled there and had become powerful despots, practi cally independent of Zanzibar, They were crushed after a severe struggle. In Nyasaland—a favourite hunting-ground of the Zan zibar slavers—a stand had been made by a Scottish trading corn pany, and when control was assumed by Great Britain, the raids of Mlozi, Jumbe and other noted slavers were suppressed. The advent of Europe was probably only just in time to anticipate and prevent a Mohammedan domination in central Africa.
Before the close of the first decade of the loth century a more or less effective administration had been established throughout Africa, under European control, ex cept in Abyssinia and Liberia. The public opinion of the civilized world, no longer limited its reprobation to the slave trade but now condemned the institution of slavery—especially of slave-dealing —and the Powers in control in Africa took steps to suppress it with varying degrees of thoroughness. France boldly decreed corn pulsory emancipation in French West Africa, but was confronted with such widespread unrest in consequence that she was com pelled to adopt more gradual measures. In the Portuguese pos sessions the prohibitions are understood to have been largely in effective, and the Government itself was at one time accused of conniving at a system differing little from slavery in order to pro cure labour for the plantations of San Thome and Principe. Ger many declared emancipation from a prospective date.
Great Britain, taught by her experience in the West Indies and in India, recognized the evils attendant on compulsory emancipa Lion, and adopted in most of her African dependencies the alterna tive measure of abolishing the legal status of slavery—as the East India company had done with success in 1843. She recognized that in many cases, especially among communities which had adopted the Mohammedan faith, or a Christianity based on the law of the Pentateuch as in Abyssinia, the institution had become so intimately interwoven with the social fabric, that sudden and enforced emancipation would bring ruin and misery to the slaves no less than to their owners.
If the legal status of slavery be abolished no court of law can recognize any rights based on the claim of any person to property in the person of another. Every slave can assert his freedom without any ransom or formality, and an owner is as liable to process of law for attempting to detain a slave against his will, or to capture a runaway as though he were free-born. On the other hand, it is not a crime for a master to retain a slave if both desire to remain in that relationship. It is permissive as con trasted with compulsory emancipation. This method was emi nently successful in the Gold Coast and in Nigeria. It was not, however, adopted in Sierra Leone until Jan. 1, 1928, then it is estimated that about 200,000 slaves were by this method enabled to assert their freedom. Local ordinances have at the same time enacted that the acquisition of new slaves and all dealings in slaves are a penal offence, and that all children born after the date of the ordinance are free-born.
The aspirations of the Berlin and Brussels Acts had been limited to the suppression of the slave trade and had not attempted to deal with the institution of slav ery. In Sept. 1919 a new convention was concluded at St. Ger mains by which the signatories pledged themselves "to endeavour to secure the complete suppression of slavery in all its forms" (art. 1). A new departure was thus inaugurated, and for the first time not only was the suppression of slavery as a social in stitution agreed upon in an international convention, but the fact that conditions of servitude might exist, which were tantamount to slavery gained international recognition; a recognition which was more fully accorded in the terms of the mandates which were soon after granted to the Powers which accepted the control of the former colonies of Germany and Turkey. This convention super seded the Berlin and Brussels Acts so far as its signatories (the Allies against the Central European Powers in the World War) were concerned. It dealt with the varied matters included in those acts but the liquor traffic and the arms traffic were relegated to separate conventions, while slavery and the slave trade occupied a single clause. Some doubt appeared to exist as to the wisdom of the cancellation of several of the slavery clauses of the Brussels Act, and as to the position of its remaining signatories. Advantage was, therefore, taken of the admission of Abyssinia to membership of the League of Nations—a country in which slavery was still a legal institution, and in which slave raiding and the slave trade had till recently been carried on, and were alleged to be still exist ing—to reopen the question as a matter of international concern.