West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana

Notes

NoTES InTroDuCTIon 1. Narratives written by West Africans enslaved in the Americas include ones by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoano, John Jea, Olaudah Equiano, Venture Smith, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Salim Aga, Boyrereau Brinch, John Joseph , Nicholas Said, Asa-Asa, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Many of these have been the subject of literary and historical studies. The narratives themselves can be found at http://docsouth.unc.edu or in Philip D. Curtin, Africa Remembered : Narratives by West Africans in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). 2. Raymond Dumett and Marion Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, 89 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 3. Edward A. Alpers, “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century East Africa,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Marcia Wright, “Women in Peril: A Commentary on the Life Stories of Captives in Nineteenth Century East-Central Africa,” African Social Research 20 (1975): 800–819; and Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lillian Barber Press, 1993). 4. Peter Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, ed. J. J. Shaffer and Paul E. Lovejoy (Basel: P. Schlettwein, 2000), 181–91; John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2002). 5. Alpers, “The Story of Swema,” 189. 6. Understanding African slavery from the perspective of the formerly enslaved based on their own testimonies is not easy. Very few texts exist. And those that do are often cryptic at best, recorded by European missionaries and government officials in the years immediately after abolition, not to document the workings of the institution from the perspective of the enslaved but rather to support their own goals. For missionary workers, this meant using information provided by the enslaved who had converted to Christianity to illustrate the mission’s success in freeing the enslaved from the bondages of both slavery and heathendom. For government officials, this meant collecting just enough information to help them determine what to do with the enslaved they encountered and whether or not to prosecute their masters. 7. Audrey A. Fisch, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, 11–27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 8. William L. Andrews, “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of AfroAmerican Literary Realism, 1865–1920,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 66, 68–69 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 9. The importance of exploring the contexts that influenced the production of slave narratives has been emphasized by a number of scholars. For representative discussions of these issues, see John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centu- 228 ries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xvii–lxv; and Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 3–17. 10. Wayne C. Booth, “The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Narratives,” in Fundamentalisms Comprehended, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, 372 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1995). 11. On the format of the typical captivity narrative, see “The Slave Narrative,” at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/slave.htm. The classic study on captivity narratives is Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981). Since this book was published many others have also studied captivity narratives and have begun to challenge the notion that the captivity narrative is quintessentially American. They have done so by exploring the development of this genre in Europe long before it came to the Americas in the late seventeenth century and its continued popularity through the nineteenth century not only in the United States but also in Britain and in continental Europe. See, for example, Paul Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Joe Snader, Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000); and Linder Colley, “Perceiving Low Literature: The Captivity Narrative,” Essays in Criticism LIII, no. 3 (2003): 199–218. 12...