The consolidation of colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century offered a more favourable context to the legal end of slavery in Africa. In 1900, Britain legally abolished slavery in its occupied zones in Nigeria. In 1905, France legally prohibited slavery in its West African colonies (Rodet, 2005, p. 363). But despite legal abolition, slavery persisted on the ground. Moreover, European colonial rules in zones controlled by France, Portugal and Belgium imposed on Indigenous populations slavery-like coercive labour regimes. Still today, residents of Angola remember the contratado system of forced labour imposed by the Portuguese, which existed until 1962, as slavery-like working conditions (Schenck and Candido, 2015, p. 216). In most African regions, slavery had disappeared by the time of the Second World War. Although illegal, depending on the period and region, slave labour resurfaced several times. An iconic example is Mauritania, where although slavery was first legally banned  
during the French colonial rule in 1905, a law abolishing slavery in the country was enacted in as late as 1980 (Drescher, 2009, p. 454).