African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade. Volume 1: The Sources Edited by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. KleinAfrican Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade. Volume 2: Essays on Sources and Methods Edited by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein

Abstract

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the need for utilizing autochthonous African sources on various aspects of African history as part of the ‘decolonization’ process started to gel. Thus the UNESCO, through its Slave Route Project, spearheaded in the 1990s the initiative of unearthing authentic African voices on slavery from the victims and the protagonists (that is, the enslaved and their heritage) and the descendants of slave merchants/owners and the society at large. The work under review, which is one of the outcomes of that initiative has, on the one hand, an eerie atmosphere of intimidation by the size of the first tome, about 600 pages (henceforth AVSST 1), and on the other hand, a discomfiting reminder of a dark phase in human history during which cowrie shells were shown to have grown on the rotten corpses of slaves (AVSST 1, pp. 47–54). However, the silhouette of the dark history continues to loom large in modern times by virtue of new forms of slavery and the profundity and enormity of methods and documentary sources associated with it. Volume 2 (henceforth AVSST 2) is all about this. The first public sale of African slaves was held in Lagos, Portugal in 1444 and the first direct shipment of slaves from Africa to America was said to have taken place in 1518. Thus, we have a transatlantic phenomenon with a deep root in world history. From the historical to the economic, from the anthropological to the transcultural, from the written to the oral, among other binaries, the 47 contributions in AVSST 1 reveal the complexity of slavery and the slave trade across temporal, spatial, and cultural divides. The volume, making use of primary sources, such as folk songs, elicited memories, proverbs, and folk tales, throws light on the internal and external dimensions of slavery in African religion, politics, and economics, among other areas of life over the past five centuries or so.