New Directions in the Study of Slavery and Slave Trading

The topic of slavery and slave trading has been central to academic research on Africa since African studies became part of mainstream academia in the 1960s, and it continues to generate groundbreaking scholarship today. The more we know about slavery and slave trading in Africa, the more it seems there is to know. For those of us writing and publishing in the West, slavery and the slave trade remain the most enduring connections between Africa and our own societies. Often the very idea of enslaved Africans seems to presume the middle passage and American plantations. But the study of slavery and slave trading in Africa itself has grown by leaps and bounds, revealing among other things how the expansion of slavery, particularly in nineteenth-century Africa, transformed the social, political, and economic landscapes of the continent. The first generations of Africanist scholars grappled with the big questions: How many people were enslaved? Why did slavery in Africa proliferate as the trans-Atlantic slave trade took more and more people away? From what parts of Africa did the Afro-descended people of the Americas originate? What routes did the trans-Atlantic slave trade follow and why? How did the growth of slave trading affect African state formation? Over time, the historiographical trend has been toward more specific aspects of slavery and slave trading, including the different experiences of men, women, and children; the role of Islam as a legal and cultural feature of African societies with slaves; and localized studies. The three books reviewed here—West African Narratives of Slavery, by Sandra E. Greene, Dahomey and the Ending of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, by Robin Law, and Where the Negroes Are Masters, by Randy J. Sparks—provide fine examples of recent advances in historical scholarship on this important topic and highlight the possibilities for new directions in research. All three incorporate a biographical approach to historical analysis. Each book treats the actions and experiences of particular African individuals in depth and thus manages to offer readers a better sense of what slavery and slave trading might actually have felt like for the individuals involved.

Sandra Greene’s book addresses a major gap in the literature on slavery in Africa by examining the lived experiences of enslaved individuals and their descendants through their own narratives. Noting the tremendous importance of slave narratives for North American scholarship on slavery and its legacy, Greene ventures into virtually unexplored territory to bring us some West African examples of slave narratives. She draws on her unparalleled knowledge of the history of southeastern Ghana in presenting five unique narratives that give voice to individuals for whom the experience of slavery or its legacy played a direct role in shaping their identities and life choices. She harvests these African voices from texts recorded by Christian missionaries—both European and Gold Coast–born—and provides a masterful analysis of the intermingling of the voices of narrator and recorder/translator contained in them. The result is a fascinating look into the lives of people who experienced slavery and its legacy firsthand in southeastern Ghana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example, readers get a glimpse of what it was like to be a child captured and enslaved by invading Asante armies, as Aaron Kuku was; to face a mother’s choice between remaining in the household of a former slave master or abandoning...