African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

December 13, 2004
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.