Arbitrating Abolition: Women’s Resistance and the Worodugu Slave Exodus of 1907
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the causes of an exodus of enslaved people from northwestern Côte d’Ivoire in late 1907. It draws on 729 ‘palaver’ cases recorded by French military officers which detail individual manumissions before and during the exodus. These cases reveal the disadvantaged position of enslaved women under early colonial ‘rachat’ policy, or the process by which enslaved people purchased their freedom in negotiations with their owners. Slaveholders often claimed female slaves as their wives, rendering them ineligible for rachat. This article argues that enslaved women’s frustrations with rachat, not the beneficence of French abolitionism, provoked the Worodugu exodus. Resisting their owners by bringing liberation claims before French officials, enslaved women attempted to broaden their narrow legal path to freedom. When arbitrating abolition failed, they spoke with their feet and fled.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".