African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (review)

Anne Bailey, a Jamaican-born scholar who now teaches African history at Spelman College, wanted to know how Africans remember the slave trade. She started by asking people in Atorker, a former slaving port in modern Ghana, what they recall. The chapters in her book present successive approaches to what proved a difficult question Her quest always remains grounded in oral history, but she has sought to link the stories, songs, and proverbs she heard not only with a generation of Ghanaian scholarship on Ghana's past but also with her own research in archives and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

She starts from silence. How can this not be remembered? The question prompts evocative descriptions of Atorker and its vicinity today, as well as broader comments on the town's place at the end of trading routes running into the interior and on the cultural distance between coast-dwelling townspeople and their inland kin. Bailey then interweaves observations on what it means to ask questions about the slave trade in a society where the subject is still so painful and shameful that interviewees are reluctant to discuss either family stories about enslavement or their forebears' participation in the slave trade. However, one instance from the 1850s is remembered in the town: A group of local drummers, engaged to play as the enslaved boarded the ship, were lured aboard and shackled with the rest, even though the drummers included relatives of the local chief. A monument to the incident now serves as the centerpiece of the Atorker Slave Memorial Site. Bailey tries to unravel how this has been recalled in story and songs, also pursuing stray echoes in texts compiled aboard a patrolling offshore U.S. warship and in later colonial-era histories. The result is illuminating, even if some details remain vague. The ship seems to have sailed for Cuba, but Bailey was unable to locate its landing or therefore to follow any of the unfortunate musicians ashore.

Instead, a striking chapter on enslaved Africans' resistance starts from a remarkable North American autobiography by one Sylvia Dubois, "the Slave Who Whipt her mistress and Gained her Freedom" (95), whose published experiences Bailey explores to illuminate the frontier "between folklore and history" (96) and to demonstrate what "resisting" could involve.

We are also shown how the recalled misfortunes of Atorker's stolen drummers fit into and frame the region's understanding of its subsequent history, not just as a major trading center on "the old Slave Coast," but later as a secondary settlement in the Gold Coast colony under Danish and British rule; as a part of Eweland (a category that includes modern Togo); and today as a small town in postindependence Ghana. Now, however, with the Ghanaian government's decision to restore several European forts as national monuments—including Fort Prinzenstein, a 1770s slave traders' castle-depot in neighboring Keta which held slaves bought in Atorker's markets—the slave trade is again becoming an unavoidable issue for local history.

This study of the trans-Atlantic slave trade starts from specifics but addresses general questions of memory, forgetting, and the passionate efforts at "rememory" (229). It shows diverging historical priorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Episodes that appear of central importance to the diaspora and even sufficiently clear-cut to prompt calls for reparations provoke ambivalent responses in modern Africa, even as monuments and museums to slavery are being established there. The book's exploration of these divergences has produced a continually thought-provoking study. Students who encounter African Voices will relish its readability and find plenty to engage with; so, too, will their teachers.