Even when slavery and human pawning were banned, they were far from extinguished. This chapter considers how far and how fast slavery and pawning declined in practice, following the early suppression of the slave trade (and thus of imports of new captives) and of panyarring, the practice of seizing hostages to enforce repayment of outstanding debts. The evidence indicates that emancipation owed much to the initiative of slaves themselves, and their kin. It also shows that slavery and pawning lasted long enough to be important sources of labour in early Asante cocoa-farming. The same applies to the Asante form of corvée, in which subjects were expected to give labour service to the chief. We will see that emancipation was very uneven in social terms: the timing varied according to the age and, especially, the gender of the slave or pawn. The destiny of slaves or former slaves was also crucially shaped by whether they had originally been taken from outside the Akan world.

Before considering what happened with each of these institutions, it is appropriate to comment on the notorious source problems involved in trying to track the destinies of actual and former slaves and pawns in Africa. For Asante at least, the difficulties are less than has sometimes been supposed. To be sure, the customary secrecy about people's origins is far from dead, and it seems inconceivable that any sample survey could obtain respondents' full and frank answers to the kind of questions necessary to establish whether, for instance, the average income of people descended from slaves has caught up with that of the rest of the Asante population.