Around commercial towns and in powerful states like Segu or Dahomey, slaves were a majority of the population, where they produced food and staffed the state. In desert-side areas slaves constituted 50 percent of the population; only in what is today southern Mali and eastern Senegal were slave concentrations small, and these areas served as labor reservoirs for more centralized societies to their north.

Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The …, loc. 109