Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (review)

Although scholarly literature on slavery and the slave trade in Africa has grown with increasing rapidity in the period following Philip Curtin's book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), few, if any, studies have attempted a comprehensive analysis of how Africans organized their familial and communal lives to contain enslavement and deportation across the Atlantic. This book attempts to correct this apparent imbalance by examining the actions taken by peoples of West Africa to "prevent themselves and their communities from being swept away to distant lands" (p. x). Edited by Sylviane Diouf, a leading scholar on the African diaspora, the book is based on papers presented, mainly by distinguished senior historians and a few able young scholars, at a conference held at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in February 2001.

Diouf's editorial introduction argues that the widely used concept of "resistance per se" (p. xvii) does not give an accurate image of African efforts to contain the slave trade, since resistance, accommodation, and participation in the trade sometimes overlapped. Consequently, in place of that, her brief analysis introduces and employs the concept of "strategies against the slave trade" (p. xvii). More importantly, Diouf demonstrates that, considering that the pattern of struggle included not only physical fighting, but also nonviolent strategies, African struggles against the slave trade were more widespread than hitherto recognized. She explains Africans considered their total situations before adopting any one or a combination of three strategies (protective, defensive, offensive), and that there is no evidence substantiating the view that Africans more popularly used offensive strategies. Given these facts, Diouf reasons that it is baseless to assert that Africans were passive in the face of the threat of enslavement and deportation. Indeed, she rejects the present-day popular notion among African Americans that Africans are collectively culpable for the slave trade and therefore should apologize for the past sale and transatlantic shipping of people of "their own skin" (p. xiv). For her, and others, the concept of "Africa, Africans, blackness, whiteness, and race did not exist in Africa, and they cannot be utilized today to assess people's actions at a time when they were not operative" (p. xiv).

Various contributions to the three parts of the volume support Diouf's assertion that Africans used a combination of strategies to fight against enslavement and the slave trade. Essays in part one, however, mainly focus on what is categorized as defensive strategies, and they show that Africans manipulated their environment, migrated, and embarked on social engineering as part of these strategies. In part two, Diouf argues that Africans used redemption as a protective strategy against local enslavement or deportation, while Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson emphasize how local people in old Calabar relied on cultural, institutional, and political mechanisms for the same purpose. In the third part of the volume, other contributors indicate that both centralized and decentralized states in West Africa were not passive in the face of the threat of enslavement and deportation. Violent reactions by these states are underlined by most of the contributions. Some of the essays also indicate that in reaction to slavery and slave trade, slaves revolted both locally and on board slave ships. With respect to the latter, Richardson argues in a separate essay that after 1750, slave procurement in areas in Senegambia closer to the coast increased because of political instability. Consequently, warriors taken prisoner in wars or raids found themselves boarding European ships, and many of them took part in slave-ship revolts for factors related to honor. Combining this fact with other data, Richardson reasons that African political realities, and not European management failures, were responsible for the higher incidence of revolts on slave ships departing particular regions of West Africa.

Most contributions focus on actions taken by Africans to contain enslavement and shipment across the Atlantic, but some of them address other issues as well. For instance, in his study on the Balanta of...