The complex legacy of slavery: contradictory interactions between slave-descendants and their neighbours in Guéra, central Chad.

Legacy of slavery matters in Sahel. Exclusion from land ownership and weddings, as well as social stigma, 0are the more common modalities of slave-descendants’ marginalization, reported in several Sahel contexts. The tensions between slave-descendants and their previous masters are a common legacy of these discriminations. During the last thirty years, following the wave of democratization in the area, many civil society organizations within slave descendants groups have been established to fight against discriminations. However, slave-descendants emancipation in Guéra (central Chad) shows differences compared to other contexts. Guéra has traditionally been a slave-reservoir for Wadai sultanate, the main pre-colonial political power, defeated by the French in 1911. French administratively arranged Guéra during the 1920s. As there was not a clear land division of the area, the French administration located slave-descendants, locally called Yalnas (“the son of the people” in Arabic) in a canton, awarding them with the same rights they gave to the other groups of the region, including land ownership. Though the absence of the main form of discrimination (the exclusion from land ownership), the Yalnas still had to struggle against their social stigma. The outcomes of this process are contradictory. Yalnas were progressively integrated in the region, with a progressive increase of mixed weddings; at the same time, their rights over lands have often been challenged. Nowadays Yalnas have intense interactions with the other groups, both collaborative (weddings, joint initiatives related to development) and conflictive (fights for farming land). These interactions show the complexity of the social legacy of slavery in Guéra contemporary political arena and owe interesting peculiarities compared to others similar cases in Sahel. Despite the intense interactions between Yalnas and other Guéra groups, the capacity of contemporary Guéra institutions to handle with stigmatisation and finally achieve Yalnas fully integration is still unclear.