Naming Names of Enslaved People in the Senegal Liberations Project

Enslavement is linked to enduring and systemic inequalities, hierarchies, and to the erasures of enslaved people's histories, including their names. Such erasures meant and continue to mean different things to different populations of formerly enslaved people. Descendants of enslaved people, especially in the diaspora, turned to well-established means of genealogical research and new forms of DNA research to trace their ancestors. However, in West Africa and in other parts of the world where obvious racialized markers do not automatically hint at an enslaved ancestor, many former enslaved people would rather forget their enslaved past or that of their ancestors, precisely because descent from enslaved ancestry remains stigmatized. Ethical considerations of conducting digital historical research on slavery and emancipation have been hotly discussed for a number of years, and given the public-facing character of many of these digital projects, the stakes of naming versus anonymity are high. This article suggests a way forward for those people recorded in the Registers of Liberation in colonial Senegal.