The New South Institute invites you to watch Dr Sarah Delius’s TEDxJohannesburg Salon talk, “How Women Break Through Systems Designed to Contain Them”.

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Delivered on 28 February, the talk draws on Sarah’s historical research into marriage, slavery, gender and political authority in Sierra Leone. It begins with a fragile handwritten document discovered in the country’s National Archives: an 1884 letter reporting that several women had left a chief’s household in a canoe, taking some of his possessions with them.

The document does not preserve the women’s names or record their experiences in their own words. Instead, it records the response of male political authorities to their departure. Sarah uses this fragment to show how historians can identify women’s agency through their actions, even when archives were not designed to preserve their voices.

The women’s departure was more than a private household dispute. It challenged social and political systems that depended on women remaining under the authority of husbands, slave owners, chiefs and colonial officials. Their movement disrupted the existing order sufficiently to attract the attention of the colonial administration and leave a trace in its records.

Sarah argues that such moments can be understood as archival pulses: points at which disruption makes normally hidden systems of power visible. Women appear in colonial archives only intermittently, often through records produced by the authorities attempting to control them. Nevertheless, their decisions to leave, refuse, negotiate or seek better conditions reveal that power was never complete or uncontested.

The talk also examines the relationship between marriage and slavery in colonial Sierra Leone. Women could occupy overlapping positions as wives, workers and enslaved people within households that formed part of a wider political system. Their options were constrained by violence, dependency and unequal authority, but their actions still shaped the operation of those institutions.

Rather than presenting agency only as open rebellion, Sarah considers how women acted within limited and difficult circumstances. Leaving a household, rejecting mistreatment or attempting to build a more secure life could unsettle established structures, even when those actions did not dismantle the broader systems of slavery and patriarchy.

As Sarah explains, the surviving archival document does not contain a manifesto or direct testimony. What it preserves is movement: women crossing water, leaving a household and forcing political authorities to respond. Their actions entered the official record and prevented them from being erased entirely.

What is TEDx?

TEDx events use the format and principles associated with TED conferences but are organised independently by local communities. They provide a platform for speakers to present research, experiences and ideas to public audiences.

The TEDxJohannesburg Salon brought together speakers to examine ideas with relevance to Johannesburg, South Africa and wider international debates.

About Sarah Delius

Dr Sarah Delius is a political scientist and historian in the New South Institute’s Histories of Government programme. She is also a research fellow in the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg.

Her research examines how marriage and slavery, shaped by the Atlantic slave trade, colonial rule and changing political orders, structured gender relations, labour and political authority in Sierra Leone from the late nineteenth century through the civil war.

Sarah holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Master’s degree in History from SOAS University of London. Her forthcoming book, The Same in All but Name? Marriage, Slavery, Patriarchy, and Politics in Sierra Leone, 1890–1990, examines how intimate institutions became sites of political power and contestation.

Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through the Conjugal Slavery in War project, and South Africa’s National Research Foundation.

For enquiries about Sarah’s research, contact sarahd@nsi.org.za.