Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (review)

Since Curtin’s 1975 examination of Senegambia, studies of precolonial Africa have divided broadly (and largely without debate) into those that, like the work of Thornton, stress African agency, and those that focus on the devastating nature of the impact of Europe on the continent.¹ Inikori’s research exemplifies the latter group.² It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, as yet, no scholar has managed to reconcile the tension between the two. On which side of this divide does Barry’s book belong? The first point to note is that the question is only just valid; the book was written after Curtin’s, but not long after Curtin’s. Though first published in French in 1988, it cites nothing written after 1982.

The book spans the era from the first Portuguese seaborne contact to the early twentieth century; more than half of the book is concerned with the nineteenth century. Barry argues that European oceanic trade quickly led to the integration of Senegambia into a system of domination that will be familiar to readers of Amin’s work.³ European contact froze the social system and ensured “stalled feudalization” for several centuries. The slave trade was “the principal cause of economic stagnation and chronic political and social crisis” (106). Peanut cultivation in the nineteenth century paved the way for colonial conquests. Colonialism laid “cast iron foundations for Senegambia’s current state of underdevelopment and dependence” (314). Though Barry’s intellectual framework is hardly new, nor indeed was it so in 1982, the volume applies it coherently and consistently to 400 years of Senegambian history.

Readers will not find that primary materials have been mined for this study. There are scattered references to French archival material in the first half of the book, but none at all for the years after 1850. No use whatever is made of Portuguese and British archives despite the importance of Portugal and Britain in, first, the slave trade; second, the switch to “legitimate” trade; and third, colonial partition. Perhaps for this reason, the author overestimates the size of the nineteenth-century slave trade from Senegambia, both legal and illegal, and seems unaware that most of the slaves brought to, or trans-shipped along, the southern part of this region at this time were not destined for the Americas, but were to remain in Africa to cultivate produce, mainly peanuts. The British FO 84 series, available on microfilm since 1972, makes this point abundantly clear.

In addition, whatever new information readers might find in this book is often hard to trace. Notes are sparse and erratically presented. The author makes heavy use of the work of others, but pulls this material together in a new geographical framework. No less than half the references in four of the last five chapters are to the work of Winston McGowan. Finally, despite the obvious economic roots of the author’s main argument, economic analysis is not one of the book’s strengths.

Although Barry locates the dynamics of events in Senegambia firmly outside the region—even militant Islam is seen as a reaction to the slave trade, or to the aristocracy maintained by the slave trade—the strength of the book is the discussion of internal political and religious patterns. Widening the definition of Senegambia to include the area south to Sierra Leone allows the author to treat Futa Jallon expansionism more effectively and integrate it with trends in the broader region. Hence, the narrative relating the process of, and resistance to, European colonial takeover in the second half of the nineteenth century has an unusual but useful regional framework. More important, Barry presents an African perspective on events.