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

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade attempts to break through centuries of silence and repressed shame suffered by the descendants of enslaved Africans and survivors of the transatlantic slave trade. Fifteen years ago, Anne Bailey audaciously set out, with very few African testimonies (i.e., only "fragments" of memory), to inject an African-centered historical perspective into the Euro-dominated metanarrative. Her perseverance has resulted in utterances of memory distilled out of forty-two interviews with Anlo-Ewe descendants in Ghana and throughout the African diaspora. With new oral sources from direct descendants (including "Mama Dzagba, an important Queen Mother in Eweland") and others associated with the Anlo polity (including "Kofi Geraldo, descendant of Geraldo de Lima, the most famous slave trader of the area") (pp. 133–134), alongside familiar European slavers' and African ex-slaves' narratives, Bailey underscores the importance of orality and spotlights the "silence, memory and fragments of the history . . . as it pertains to both sides of the Atlantic" (p. 3).

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Bailey devotes nearly three pages to her mentors, but fittingly acknowledges Sandra Greene, esteemed African historian at Cornell University, whose publications center on the Ewe-speaking Anlo society of the Upper Slave Coast. Bailey has embraced Greene's interest, but squirreled out a topic and period of study that Greene has only dinted. The kidnapping of Atorkor drummers in the 1850s is Bailey's "main oral historical account," and it is woven into every chapter. This "single incident" metaphorically encapsulates the full story of the African Atlantic holocaust. These drummers, elite members of a coastal African community, were related to Chief (Togbui) Ndorkutsu, who had long-established and favorable relations with European slavers. But neither of these drummers nor other Anlos had observed sufficiently the traders' brazen use of deception to stay competitive in the business. Enticed into entertaining at a festive affair aboard ship, the drummers were tricked in full sight of their community. Once inebriated, they were shackled and "taken away." The "slave business," a practice that began as selective trading of particular Africans within the Anlos' possession, evolved into indiscriminate and precarious selling and capture of coastal and interior Africans before concluding in the 1890s. The Atorkor incident "affirmed [for] the Ewe people the principle" that at no time had any one of them been safe from enslavement (p. 155).

African Voices supplements any primary text about the African Atlantic slave trade. Bailey examines the complexity of why Africans sold other Africans to slavers, and critical differences between Europeans' and Africans' agency (chapter 3); Africans' resistance, citing familiar examples and "a quiet yet formidable resistance" from Anlo-Ewe mothers, who halted their daughters' participation in corrupted religious practices (chapters 4 and 7); the "systematized and entrenched" manner in which the multifaceted slave trade's operations spanned four continents and five centuries and "adversely affected every people it encountered" (p. 116), and West Africans' belief in whites as cannibals (chapter 5); the trade's destabilization of coastal societies, internal displacement of peoples, stimulation of local domestic slavery, and inducement of "fear" in residents at the first sight of foreign ships (chapter 6); the subversion of the Nyigbla and Yewe religions, and Christianity (e.g., Bremen missionaries) because of the "inherent secrecy" of cult leaders, the racial contradictions of Christian religionists, and their mutual collusion with slavers (chapter 7). Bailey ends with the reparations movement "as re-memory" and "redress of past wrongs"; she names individuals and groups that have advanced this cause (chapter 8).

What nourished Bailey while writing this work adds to its richness. Her Jamaican origins mirror the fragmented "nature of the history of the African diaspora" (p. 7). Relatives and extended family had said that she was the grandchild of a "firebrand" named Bethsheba, a royal, visionary woman, who had foretold her son's future, and before whom "everyone would just bow" (p. 4–5). Bethsheba lived...