Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic by Wendy Wilson-Fall (review)

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic is a brave attempt to analyze the historical documentation relating to the movement of Malagasy slaves to Virginia and the recollections passed down among descendants of those captives. The specific focus is recondite to an extent, because the flow of slaves covered in the book was relatively small in scale and is not usually associated with histories of Virginia. Madagascar, as one might suppose from its location, mainly supplied slaves to the Indian Ocean world. However, between 1670 and 1698, an unknown number of Malagasy slaves were dispatched to New York, and between 1716 and 1721, around 1,500 Malagasy captives were shipped to Virginia and sold there. This latter cohort forms the basis of this book’s analysis regarding memories of the Malagasy slaves’ presence in Virginian society. The book later broadens its remit to discuss the possible Malagasy impact on the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Wilson-Fall’s methodology is to divide each of her six chapters into two parts, the first consisting of a summary of the written information on these Malagasy captives and the second drawing upon collective memories of their lives in North America. This approach is intended to allow for “some cross-pollination from one perspective to the other” (152).

Although the existing documentary material about slavery and the slave trade in Madagascar in relation to the Indian Ocean world is plentiful, the amount of written material about Malagasy slaves in Virginia is decidedly thin. Wilson-Fall does not hide this fact: She notes that “after 1721 there are no . . . official written records known at this writing that speak of arrivals from that island [Madagascar] until after the Civil War” (144). Wilson-Fall does her best to pull together the written evidence, scouring the Chesapeake archives for relevant documents. She cites, for example, material from the account books of the planter John Baylor—located in the University of Virginia library—about sales of Malagasy slaves during the early 1720s. No other significant archival sources for information about the Malagasy slaves appear to be available. The sparse documentary evidence compelled Wilson-Fall to deploy more general material about the Atlantic slave trade and Virginia, which is abundantly disseminated in the scholarly literature.

Wilson-Fall’s strengths lie in her perspectives as an ethnologist. The recollections from which she draws in the book are based on family genealogies, oral testimony, and field research. Using information taken from telephone conversations, e-mail exchanges, fieldwork in Madagascar, and thirty personal interviews, she documents the collective memories preserved about the presence and legacy of Malagasy people in North America during the past three centuries. Some sections of the book—such as Chapter 5, dealing with the role of Malagasy people in the nineteenth-century United States—derive from virtually no direct written documentation, deploying instead information from collective memories of the illegal shipment of Malagasy slaves to North America’s eastern seaboard.

Wilson-Fall hopes that the dual presentation of material from written records and oral testimony will illuminate the Malagasy presence in the United States. This methodology is problematical, however, for two reasons: (1) The historical issues covered by the documentary sources and oral testimonies are often distinct in each chapter; they do not provide an overarching, interconnected argument. In Chapter 2, for example, very little of the written material cited deals with the slave trade between Madagascar and Virginia, and the oral testimonies cover different aspects of the topic, such as the kidnapping of captives in Madagascar and the ability of Malagasy slaves to distinguish themselves from enslaved people of other African origins. (2) As suggested above, Wilson-Fall allocates too much space in each chapter to well-known general matters relating to the slave trade, with only scrapings and shavings included about Malagasy captives. She would have done better to discuss all of the written documentation...