Joking Slavery

Abstract

Opening ParagraphThe Dyula of northern Ivory Coast consider that joking behaviour (tlon, a word that applies more generally to ‘play’, such as children's games) is an appropriate mode of social interaction between a variety of categories of persons. Such behaviour is by no means peculiar to the Dyula and to related societies. For the most part, the kinds of role relationships characterized by joking among the Dyula have long been familiar to anthropologists: ‘grandparents’ and ‘grandchildren’, cross-cousins, certain categories of affines (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 90–116). But there is indeed one form of joking which, if not entirely specific to the Dyula, is something of an ethnographic rarity, or else has gone largely unrecorded in the literature: second and subsequent generation slaves (worosso) can and frequently do joke at the expense of free men (horon) in general. The forms which this joking may take are, in certain respects, atypical of other joking relationships among the Dyula. Consequently, it may be of some interest to compare joking between slaves and free men with other types of joking relationships.