African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Beyond the Silence and the Shame
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?--Chief Awusa of Atorkor
For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade.
Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Focusing on the stories passed down from generation to generation among the Anlo Ewe community in southern Ghana an area once known as the Slave Coast Spelman College historian Bailey offers a noteworthy, carefully researched contribution to the study of the African slave trade. Few accounts in the copious literature have adequately addressed the African viewpoint, says Bailey, and the oral histories she offers are designed to correct that silence. Examples include "the incident at Atorkor": sometime in the 1850s, a breakdown in the working (though unequal) relationship between white slave traders and a coastal African chief the chief's kin were taken along with inland, "approved" captives heralded a new phase in the slave trade, one in which African slave traders became nearly as vulnerable as their African captives. In compact chapters, Bailey considers the political and economic impact of the slave trade on the West African region; West and Central Africa's class-based practices of domestic slavery; and the issue of European, American and African agency in the slave trade. Though dense prose makes this a better choice for the scholar than the lay reader, Bailey brings unheard historical voices to the fore.
