Measures to legally prohibit the slave trade and slavery on African soil were used to justify European conquest and colonization. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain signed several treaties with African States, including Egypt, Zanzibar, and Madagascar, to legally ban the slave trade (Quirk, 2014, p. 73). Despite these agreements, during this first phase, Britain tolerated the existence of what many British officials defined as 'domestic' slavery, perceived as a more benign and acceptable kind of bondage (Quirk, 2014, p. 95). In regions controlled by the Portuguese, such as Angola, slavery was abolished in 1869. Yet in the three years that followed, Portugal imposed an apprenticeship system on former slaves. Slavery remained alive in Angola far beyond the date of its legal abolition (Schenck and Candido, 2015, p. 218; Candido, 2020, p. 71).  
Whereas local rulers, slave traders, and slave owners met the prohibition of slavery with resistance, enslaved men and women took these opportunities to assert their freedom by running away from their masters, returning to their former villages, and creating new communities, very often far from their region of origin (Lovejoy, 2012, p. 253; Klein, 1998, p. 159; Rodet, 2015). As was the case in the Americas, enslaved people themselves were central protagonists of emancipation (Lovejoy, 2012, p. 261).