Theatre and Slavery: Ghosts at the Crossroads (review)

This is an excellent, thought provoking, and challenging collection of essays and creative writing contributions looking at international slavery and the roles played by theatre and performance in variously condoning, interrogating, and condemning trade in human beings. What immediately impresses is the volume's range. It begins with a foreward by Aidan McQuade, the director of Anti-Slavery International, which sets the tone for the reader, establishing the book as more than an academic study of theatre and slavery. McQuade reminds us of the millions still enslaved and the danger of employing a self-congratulatory stance, even in 2007, the year Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in her territories. Subsequent writers endorse this view from a variety of perspectives. Awo Asiedu and James Gibbs both discuss the recent, possibly even contemporary, manifestations of slavery in Ghana, and Rustom Barucha speaks of many different forms of slavery active in present-day India.

The subtitle of this book, "Ghosts at the Crossroads," refers to Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo's play, Dilemma of a Ghost (1964). A production of this work, directed by Michael Walling and performed jointly by his London-based company, Border Crossings, and the National Theatre of Ghana in 2007, gave rise to the idea for a complementary book looking not only at Aidoo's drama but at the international treatment of slavery in the theatre. Aidoo's two plays—her only other play is Anowa (1970)—both discuss the "near taboo" (114) subject of slavery in Ghana, asking hard questions about African responsibility for the perpetuation of the slave trade and the subsequent African rejection of those descended from slaves. It is probably for this reason that Asiedu's essay, "Slavery and Folklore in the Plays of Ama Ata Aidoo," comes in the middle of the book, preceded by two Ghana-focused pieces: The Slaves, a play by Mohammed ben Abdallah, and James Gibbs's article "Sold down the Coast: Slave Trading in F. Kwesi Fiawoo's The Fifth Landing Stage" on The Fifth Landing Stage (1943) by F. Kwesi Fiawoo. Ghana was, of course, a center of the Atlantic slave trade, but it is interesting that so many Ghanaian playwrights have sought to challenge their countrymen to think not only about that horrendous history, but also about Ghanaian slavers and indigenous enslavement practices.

Theatre and Slavery does not, however, confine itself to Africa. Julia Swindells takes us back to late-18th- and early-19th-century England to analyze a series of plays about slavery that demonstrate complex ambivalence; while praising "good" masters and fearing "savage" slaves, these plays also at times condemn the trade and even offer limited understanding of rebellious slaves. John Thieme then completes the notorious Atlantic triangle by offering an analysis of Dennis Scott's Jamaican play An Echo in the Bone (1985), which once more asserts that the legacies of slavery live on and need to be confronted and exorcised by the contemporary generation.

A variety of oppressions are linked to the history of enslavement in this text. Mojisola Adebayo and her collaborators show—through some fabulous photographs—and discuss her one-woman production Moj of the Antarctic (2007), which links questions of racial oppression with issues of gender, sexuality, and environment with witty complexity. Roshni Mooneeram passionately argues for overcoming the linguistic oppressions that have denied Mauritian—a language deriving from the mélange of peoples originating from and often forcefully brought to the island—official status, denigrating it as merely Creole, and thus condemning the under-privileged masses to second-class status in perpetuity.

Finally, it is left to Rustom Barucha to question whether all this theatre is likely to be of any use whatsoever in challenging slavery. Barucha argues that the talk of allowing silenced voices to be heard that resounds throughout Theatre and Slavery will never lead to change, and he throws down a gauntlet (albeit one thrown down—and taken up with varying degrees of success—many times...