By exploring the life histories of Malagasy domestic workers who moved from rural to urban contexts, this article will discuss how the topic of slavery is evoked by people who face present forms of exploitation. I will argue that legacies of past slavery are evident in Madagascar not only in the ways they contribute to structure current forms of social discriminations against slave descendants, but also in how contemporary forms of labor exploitation are personally experienced and socially discussed. How are memories of past forms of slavery evoked or silenced by people who are more exposed to these forms of exploitation? What is the meaning of the slavery and freedom that are attached to particular jobs and tasks? What does it mean to be exposed to contemporary forms of labor exploitation in a context where the stigma related to past slavery still produces social and economic marginalization? The long history of slavery in Madagascar and the persistent stigma that has been attached to slave descendants have shaped and nurtured a number of practices and ideologies that consider honor as a zero-sum game in which masters' prestige and the superiority is measured on their ability to reduce the honor of their employees. By showing that they can call someone andevo ('slave/slave descendant') without consequences and that they can oblige people to perform humiliating tasks, masters can demonstrate and reaffirm their social status and/or their economic success.

A paper presents an institution of roadside mini-cafes run by women - mostly poor migrants from peripheral or war-torn regions of Sudan - on Forty Days Road Street, one of the main street of Omdurman. It is not only one of many examples of women`s informal activism in urban environment but also an institution reflecting in-depth historical phenomena. An event of slavery goes back to the precolonial times when the peoples of the Nile valley were slave-riding and slave-owning. Slave raids created a situation of domination and control by Northerners over Southerners of Muslim over "pagans". It led to racial stratification and the widespread identification of the people from the South with low status - a situation which still effects the social relationships in this part of Africa. I would like to look at the institution of roadside mini-cafe as something particularly important for the urban iconography of power. Particular legacies of racial stratifications hidden in this institution are helping a city dwellers with arranging hierarchies, rivalry and legitimating status. How shall we look at the intertwining legacies of gender, race, and class in the case of Sudan`s tea ladies? What does it mean for different groups of actors? Eventually, how do all these legacies affect social and economic relationships in this urban context? Here the main questions to which the author tries to deliver the answers. The paper is based on ethnographic research undertook in Khartoum agglomeration in 2013.

In The Slave Next Door (California, 2010), Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter exposed the disturbing phenomenon of human trafficking and slavery in the United States. They identified slaves hidden in plain sight, such as dishwashers in neighborhood restaurants, street hawkers selling trinkets, and janitors cleaning department stores, and celebrated their rescue, liberation, and reintegration into society. Contemporary West African urban enslavement parallels many of the insights of Bales and Soodalter, but lesser legal and socio-structural support for rescue and recovery gives rise to innovative strategies. West African trafficking not simply a new form of slavery, but rather a complex multivalent and multi-sited process (Anderson and O'Connell Davidson, 2003), and exit strategies are tightly controlled (Fernandez 2014; O'Connell Davidson 2015). Some urban slaves subject themselves to smuggling networks, or subordinate themselves to traffickers and seek asylum beyond the sub-region (Lawrance 2017). But the majority of trafficking victims have no alternative but to remain in West Africa, and employ a combination of personal, legal, economic, and social strategies to terminate or renegotiate relationships of coercion. This paper compares two alternative strategies of contemporary urban slave resistance in West Africa, namely asylum-seeking abroad and domestic legal recourse at home to better understand the lived experience of urban slaves. Asylum testimonies and published accounts of domestic trafficking prosecutions from several West African countries provide rich details of physical, emotional, and sexual exploitation shedding light on the underbelly of the increasingly globalized economy in sprawling African urban conglomerations.

This presentation seeks to understand the reconfiguration of social relations that occurs between descendants of family slaves and descendants of masters in current Benin and specifically in Ouidah. There, the situation is quite different from the Sahelian region where a lot of recent works (Rossi, Bellagamba, …) were written. In coastal West Africa, slaves tends to be more incorporated in the lineage. This assimilation of former slaves in the main lineage, the idea of "making families" is now deeply rooted in southern Benin.

Ouidah is famous for being one of the largest slave port in the history of the Atlantic trade. Yet, it is well known that the Atlantic trade also fed domestic slavery in the coastal area. The social structure in Benin is also divided in class or groups, but in contrary with Sahelian countries, this division tend less to stuck people in their social group: a person with noble ancestor can marry another person with slave ancestry, there are no social caste(s) like the blacksmiths among the Mande, etc

This results in a social structure which is more fluid in this respect. In Ouidah, the emancipation of former slaves has gone through different processes such as migration, colonial school or simply the ending of regular relations. Despite their own internal social stratification, some of the most powerful lineages of the 18th and 19th centuries have sometimes reconverted their capital in order to still be prominent today. De Souza family here provide an exemplary case.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the relationship between urban settlement and the re-shaping of the social positioning of a minority and marginalized group within the Somali territories. This contribution is based on a fieldwork research carried out in the town of Hargeisa, in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, on a cluster of groups known as Gaboye. In the past, the latter suffered an institutionalized form of marginalization that integrated ascribed status, professional and marriage segregation, and a vaguely articulated condition of impurity. The trajectory of the Gaboye's presence in Hargeisa is delimited by the starting point of their settlement in the town and their present day concentration in certain neighbourhoods of Hargeisa. The urban settlement was the result of a rural-urban migration started in the 1930s, when Hargeisa had just been established as an urban centre and was growing rapidly under the framework of the politico-economic transformations triggered by the British colonial penetration. This process is related to the 'emancipation' route that redefined the institutionalized configuration of Gaboye's marginalization and endowed them with socio-political institutions they lacked in the past. On the other hand, the current situation of the Gaboye urban community displays some manifestations of the past marginalization's legacies; in particular, the persistent association with certain professional tasks despised by the rest of local population and the occupation of 'degraded' urban areas. In the analysis of the relationship between urban settlement and the transformations of Gaboye's marginalization, both discontinuity and continuity are relevant analytical coordinates.