# The roles of captive men, women, and children in production in Africa  
Reports by Arab chroniclers in the sixteenth century reveal that males and enslaved females played a role in the former Songhai Empire and Borno, both in the domestic sphere and in the cultivation of agricultural products on the margins of the Niger River (Lovejoy, 2000, p.32). During a visit to the Kingdom of Kongo, Englishman Andrew Battell described seeing libambos, or eight or nine enslaved Africans chained together (Ravenstein, 1901, p. 75). As societies in West and Southern Africa made use of enslaved labour, the consolidation and expansion of the transatlantic trade profoundly transformed both the societies that had lost individuals as well as those that had received enslaved Africans (Barry, 1998; Green, 2012). We know that the social division of work is historically constructed, as are perceptions of gender and of masculinity and femininity. The great difficulty for historians of the period prior to the Berlin Conference (1884-85) is to ascertain how forced labour for women differed from that demanded of men.