Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana: The Tabom, Slavery, Dissonance of Memory, Identity, and Locating Home by Kwame Essien (review)

Over 12 million Africans were captured, shipped over to the Americas, and sold into slavery during the transatlantic slave trade, creating one of the most emblematic and studied diasporas of modernity. Still, during the times of slavery, a significantly smaller number of Africans and some of their descendants returned to various places in West Africa, forming communities with unique transatlantic identities. In this book, Ghanaian historian Kwame Essien explores the history and identities of this "reverse diaspora" by focusing on the Tabom, a small and understudied group whose ancestors relocated from Brazil to Ghana during the nineteenth century. The author weaves issues of European colonization in West Africa, slavery in Brazil and West Africa, local economy and social history, regional and transatlantic migration, and land tenure disputes in the Gold Coast with oral stories in arguing that the Tabom have constructed a dual identity (Ghanaian and Brazilian) based on historical memory, a memory that at times can be "dissonant." Essien convincingly argues that despite weak connections with contemporary Brazil, home for the Tabom is both in Ghana and in Brazil.

Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana is the first book-length systematic study of the Tabom, superseding previous historical accounts in depth and scope (Schaumloeffel 2008) and offering a solid scholarly context to various existing noninterpretive works (e.g., Diaz 2016). The author skillfully combines sources from archival materials from Ghana, Brazil, Nigeria, and England (among which colonial records on land tenure in the former Gold Coast stand out) with dozens of interviews to explore how past events register in memory. Although this book is a direct development of Essien's (2010) doctoral research, it is also a result of his larger preoccupation with reverse migrations from the Americas to Ghana (e.g., Essien 2008, 2009). Overall, the book contributes to literature about returnees from Brazil to West Africa, and to broader debates on slavery and cultural circulation in the Atlantic basin.

The book is organized in three sections in chronological sequence and flanked by an introduction and a brief conclusion. The first section, "From Brazil to Ghana," consists of five chapters covering the "first leg of migrations from Brazil directly to Ghana or to Nigeria and later to Ghana" (xxxi). I have heard many references to this "stopover" in Nigeria while studying the music and religion of the Tabom and was pleased to learn in this section about the reasons for these arrivals in Lagos, the returnee's motivations to stay in Nigeria or to move on to other West African locations, what made Accra and its people particularly attractive to the returnees, and the challenges posed by the British colonizers to the returnees. Essien explains all these events in detail, how they are remembered by the Tabom and how they contribute to building a multi-sited sense of belonging.

The three chapters of the second section, "Contradictions of Return," cover the history of settlement in Accra, including the integration of returnees and their descendants into the Ga group, their contributions to Accra society, and their ironic participation in slavery. The author's discussion of the "enabling conditions" that facilitated this participation (the widespread practice of slavery in the Gold Coast and the double standards of the British who pushed abolitionism while practicing slavery) is particularly strong and contributes to paint a more complex and accurate picture of many of the emancipated returnees, which resonates with the findings of other studies of slavery in West Africa and Brazil (Kelley 2016; Mann and Bay 2001; Reis 1993). The discussion could have been strengthened by acknowledging that some of the returnees already owned slaves before their return to Ghana (Parés and Castillo 2015). The main arguments here are that, in presenting themselves publicly, the Tabom emphasize memories about their contributions to Accra and ignore memories of slavery.

The third...