Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (review)

Over the last decade, scholars have become increasingly interested in the development of historical memory. For Africanists, this has sometimes meant studies of oral tradition and sometimes studies of the concept of memory as it has been generally applied to history by Pierre Nora and others. Rosalind Shaw combines the two as she sets out to establish how the slave trade is remembered by people, especially Temnes, in Sierra Leone. Her particular focus is ritual, and she seeks to show how ritual performances relate to historical memories of the slave trade. As these memories are not explicit in the ritual, or indeed, in apparent popular knowledge, teasing them out requires a close and special reading of the "text" of ritual performances.

After a theoretical introduction, and a historical chapter establishing Sierra Leone's place in the Atlantic world, Shaw moves into the main body of the work, which is a special study of divination and its related intellectual and religious corpus of knowledge. She reveals techniques of divination, methods of training, and the underlying cosmologies that make people believe in divination as a means of knowledge. She explores gender roles in divination, showing differences both in who visits diviners and in how women behave in the texts of diviners' revelations. A final section explores the ideology of witchcraft and cannibalism as a means of political critique that not only applies in colonial and postcolonial contexts but relates back to the slave trade.

Throughout this presentation, Shaw uses not only her fieldwork (presented in an engaging and helpful way through telling anecdotes and quotations from informants) but also the historical literature. She draws carefully on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese descriptions, such as those of Valentim Fernandes (sixteenth century) and Manuel çlvares (seventeenth century), showing their continuities and providing an excellent annotation on these writers' observations. This not only provides welcome historical depth but also helps to establish a story of continuity that increases the possibility of divination as a conduit for memory.

Shaw's work is a brilliant piece of anthropological writing that is carefully researched, deeply thought, and well documented. Her analysis of the social and ideological functioning of the cosmological system she explores is convincing and is likely to go some distance toward helping us understand the persistently African element of political ideology while going beyond the traditional–modernist dichotomy that she effectively criticizes.

It is necessarily less convincing as a means of exploring the idea that specific historical memories of the slave trade are encapsulated in her diviners' texts. The brief historical chapter does not explore the specifics of the functioning of the slave trade and how it might be perceived in a place like Sierra Leone deeply enough to provide a background necessary to explain the divination texts. There is an implicit theory that people were enslaved by forced seizure that is not tested fully against the admittedly sparse historical record.

It is clear from that scanty record, however, that the slave trade was often an outgrowth of banditry and warfare in Sierra Leone—activities that were multifocal and that were rarely simply aimed at exporting people. Although there is little doubt that ruthless bandits and political leaders were important in enslaving people, their activities may not have been widely perceived by those who would bear the memories of the period as having an explicit connection to the slave trade. It is easier for us, from an Atlantic perspective, to see the slave trade as a root cause of political behavior than it may have been for those who participated, including even the military leaders (although perhaps not the bandits), to see selling people as their crucial motivation for their various acts of violence.

Another issue involves the question of oral tradition. The diviners' texts that Shaw quotes are not anchored historically or chronologically in any period, aside from a vaguely stated past. Traditions carried...