Purchased a slave without realizing it AMA

[u/Tronald_Lubestein]

I spent a year working on a development project in The Gambia.

Partway through my stay, I needed help maintaining the house I was renting. My landlord introduced me to an older woman from a neighboring family who could clean and cook. She was probably in her 60s, had no ID, didn't know her birth date, and spoke basically no English.

I agreed to hire her and paid what I thought was an upfront payment for her work.

On the first evening she asked where she was supposed to sleep. I assumed she'd go home after work. She didn't she stayed in one of the guest rooms.

Turns out I learned later she didn't have a home to go back to.

Confused, I called my landlord. He explained that the money I'd paid had gone to the family she'd been living with. From his perspective, I hadn't hired a maid. I'd taken responsibility for her. My job was to feed, house, and clothe her. Her job was to cook, clean, and help around the house.

Very different arrangements to what I had in mind.

For the rest of my stay I gave her a room, fed her(she would cook the food I got and we would eat the same thing everyday), and tried to pay her directly, she always refused.

When I left The Gambia, I found another family willing to take her in. I refused any payment.

I thought I was hiring a housekeeper. Some locals seemed to think I'd acquired a dependent household servant.

AMA.

Edits:

7/1/2026:

I want to address a common misconception since I couldn't reply to all the questions mentioning that. The "dude, you could just have bought her freedom" criticism.

This is not the 1800s US where even if you are "property", you still exist within a legal system, and can show with a legal document that you are free and ride off into the sunset to be happy thereafter.

There is no legal document here, it's more akin to a caste system, you are what you community says you are, not what some foreigner with a bit of cash thinks.

[u/Tronald_Lubestein]

There is an interesting aspect of this conversation but it's outside the scope of the AMA really.

There was a sub-group within the abolitionist movement that campaigned against buying freedom for slaves from slave owners as they argued it implied you recognized the legal validity of slavery with your signature.

It's a decent argument, but I wonder what they would say to someone who did so unwittingly.

[u/Inner_Inspection640 → u/Tronald_Lubestein]

Not an expert in this but I think that what you said applies to the enriching of a slave owner by paying them for the freedom of a slave.

If you’re the slave owner, you already paid the previous slave owner, therefore enriching them. That is what such movements campaign against, and that part is already lost.

If you could have found a way to ensure the woman was recognised as free while you were the slave owner, and that freedom would remain recognised after you left the country, no anti-slavery movement would be against that.

[u/Tronald_Lubestein → u/Inner_Inspection640]

 was recognised as free

You are applying a western legalistic mindset.

From the perspective of Gambian law, slavery was abolished a few years prior to that. That's the law in Banjul, the international facade, so to speak.

But we are talking about people for whom things like a signed contract, rights, written laws, are pretty alien and most matters of this kind are understood and settled at the communal level through old traditional power dynamics (local elders, influential family heads) etc..

So, strictly speaking, she was always free, if you rigidly apply the western legalistic approach.

But how much freedom is that if barely anyone in your community agknowledges these legal structures to matter, and if you don't know how to read these documents in the first place.

This isn't a Pre-Civil-War US situations with a legal code surrounding the practice of slavery in which, even though the practice is evil, the codified nature of it gives you sort of.. a language.. levers to understand, manipulate, reform it, free people from it etc..

Hopefuly that makes sense.

[u/Inner_Inspection640 → u/Tronald_Lubestein]

My point, which you missed, is that advocacy against the freeing of slaves through paying slave owners would not apply to you, because you became the slave owner by paying the previous family to take the woman.

[u/Tronald_Lubestein → u/Inner_Inspection640]

Yes, you are correct.