Panning for gold on the Slave Coast
African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame
Anne C. Bailey
2005, Beacon Press
298 pages
Reviewed by Michael Madill
Two narratives compete for the reader’s attention in Anne Bailey’s new book, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, and making sense of either requirs an effort which obscures the wealth of insight into African history and historiography that the oral histories within make possible. The legacy of the slave trade and its implications for modern African and American cultures occupy much of the book. The African voices and their stories sit conspicuously in Chapter Two, wanting attention as the remainder of the book swirls around them. It is worth reading for the second chapter alone, but as an academic exercise the book would be better received as a pointer to opportunities for further research and scholarship than as a purely analytical contribution to the history of Africa or the slave trade. The overriding impression upon finishing it is of mixed success in the search for new perspectives on the Atlantic slave trade and on the valuable role of oral history in understanding the trade’s influences on contemporary African and American societies.
| 'The world owed a debt to "re-remember" its collective memory in the positive exclusion of the slave trade from influence on the everyday life. In other words: get over it' |
The book is nominally about the social, economic, and cultural effects of the Atlantic slave trade on African American, Caribbean, and African societies. The reader is introduced to these themes in the first chapter of the book, and then to the African voices of the title in the second chapter’s collection of oral histories from the Anlo Ewe of Ghana, part of West Africa formerly known as the Slave Coast and later as the Gold Coast. The book ends with an exploration of reparations as "re-memory", or the incarnation of collective memory: fear, guilt, shame, pride, obfuscation, and entrepreneurship of the slave trade among the Anlo Ewe and others, in contemporary social, economic, and cultural structures, primarily in Ghana. The intervening four chapters traced a convoluted path through the history of the Atlantic slave trade and some of its effects on contemporary African American society. The broad theme of the book is the impediment of collective guilt in the development of modern institutions of social and political governance. This receives some treatment in each chapter, although more in some places than others.
A close reading of the first, second, and final chapters in the book reveals a sub-text which is much more in keeping with the book’s title, but which is not addressed directly anywhere in the narrative. Several times in the middle four chapters, Bailey comes close to the argument that contemporary African society would have been better off without the repressed collective guilt, shame, and anger associated with the slave trade. While less slavery would have been undeniably better than more, it was clear that oral history in this portion of Africa was so powerful precisely because of the slave trade, and that this history fomented the crises of modern-day West African government, economy, and society. The world, by way of the memories of the Anlo Ewe and others, owed a debt to itself not to forget the slave trade, but also to "re-remember" its collective memory in the positive exclusion of it from influence on the everyday workings of government and village life. In other words: get over it. This sentiment was unlikely the author’s motivation in writing the book, given the sympathy for the plight of the Anlo Ewe and for African Americans which is expressed throughout, and no direct argument for it appeared in the text. But its imprint was unmistakable. A recurrent theme of the middle four chapters of the book was the entropy of repressing collective memory: so much energy was devoted to avoiding discussing, or even admitting, the role of the Anlo Ewe in the Atlantic slave trade, as if repression fed on itself in a slow process of self-destruction. The implied solution: develop coping mechanisms that recapitulate collective memories so that they can be stored safely away, to be addressed separately in an international debate on reparations, while social and economic development for contemporary Africans, and African Americans proceeded unencumbered. Informed by it, but unencumbered.
The difficulty with reconciling this subtext with the available historical arguments in the book lay in the absence of detailed analyses of either the political economy of the slave trade or the social psychology of collective guilt applicable to the Anlo Ewe or to African American and Caribbean culture. In both cases the connections did exist, but they were treated with only cursory attention in Bailey’s text. Having mentioned them, the book should deal with them thoroughly. This is where it served better as a pointer for further research than as a strictly analytical work. The "debt carrying African society", for example, was rooted in far more than guilt over Africans’ role in the slave trade, but the author does not discuss or even acknowledge other social and economic factors which might have made a thorough discussion of the relationship she suggested. Bailey raises many issues that go unresolved or which lie beyond the scope of her text and analysis, and many small claims go unsupported by evidence in the book. If slaving was indeed the primary economic activity of the Asante in the nineteenth century, more evidence than that supplied by the author’s informants was required to prove the case, which was central to her thesis: that the Anlo Ewe economy and society was so consumed by slave trading, and its descendants so deeply scarred by memories of it, that escape from a vicious circle of repressed guilt, social instability, cultural dislocation, and economic underdevelopment was impossible without a full accounting of the shame and silence of the trade’s participants. This is a good argument, but the evidence presented in the book is sparse.
Similarly, the course of world economic history wants a more detailed, nuanced analysis than the reader expects given the centrality of it in Bailey’s argument. The Atlantic slave trade played an important role in the rise of the fortunes of America and Europe, but the lack of a detailed treatment render later arguments which depend upon it weaker. At times the book veers away from evidence-based discussion, especially concerning of the role of the slave trade in the industrialisation of Europe, and makes sweeping judgments about the effects of the slave trade with little supporting evidence. Detailed records of the trade were often destroyed, or never created, as a means of obfuscation in the face of rising abolitionist sentiment and enforcement of anti-slaving laws, so their absence from the book’s bibliography is understandable. But the omission of important, recent secondary sources, such as the encyclopaedic work of Hugh Thomas, The Atlantic Slave Trade, which would have validated her reasoning is puzzling. It leaves the impression that the motivation for the argument was Walter Rodney’s persuasive but shallow polemic, which does appear in Bailey’s list of sources.
In the first chapter, the author previews the debate over reparations for slavery in the United States, suggesting that the book would advance understanding of the historical and cultural factors motivating participants on at least one side. But the reader waits until the very last chapter to see more than a mention of this debate, and is then presented with a discussion which, while relevant to the reparations debate in the United States, drew very little from any evidence presented throughout her book and almost not at all from the oral histories which she claims are its centrepiece. Reparations as re-memory was hardly a key theme in mainstream US political discourse, and too many opinions about the nature and purpose of reparations exist, even in Black America, to draw meaningful conclusions yet. But re-memory seems an unlikely outcome of any reparations programme, since the debate about reparations in the US has been focussed on issues of compensation and therefore implicitly on the assignment of blame for the evils of the slave trade. This book could be a far more valuable contribution to re-memory if it stayed away from the reparations debate altogether. Entering it required the taking of sides, and in doing so the research became an instrument of one side instead of a frame of reference, agreeable to all sides, in which issues would be discussed and resolved.
The primary research presented in the second chapter of the book was pure gold of oral and African history. But much of it was obscured in the slurry of secondary research in other chapters. The oral histories were reduced to merely another source supporting arguments which originated in the secondary literature. These oral histories should be the centrepiece of the book, which would have been much different, and better, if this were the case. Forty-two was a good number of interviews on which to base arguments about local oral history if those 42 interviews were conducted with key informants, those who introduced entirely new material or points of view and who served as guideposts for the processing of other interview data and for making sense of secondary research data. But it was an insufficient number of interviews to stand alone as the key body of primary research in a broad historical argument spanning 500 years and four continents. Yet, these interviews painted such a powerful picture of a community at war with its own history, struggling to beat back the shameful legacy of complicity in the slave trade, that it was difficult for the reader not to imagine the wider implications for African society, for American and Caribbean societies, and for History. Certainly the processes of suppression and alienation described in the book would affect cultural, political, and economic structures in societies touched by the slave trade, but these were left unargued in the book.
The African voices of Bailey’s title are heard, but only just. Readers should finish this book looking forward to Bailey’s next installment on the same subject. A long volume which presents a thorough reckoning of the history of the slave trade and of world economic history in that context would be ripe for publication, since the last serious attempt by Hugh Thomas would be 10 years old by the time such a book comes to be published. Integrating a wealth of oral history from Africa, the Caribbean, and America into such a volume would multiply its value to academics and casual readers alike: the interviews Bailey records in her present volume are a tantalising start. A rigorous examination of the reparations debate would lend great forward-looking sociological credentials to any new volume. A book of this scope and depth would surely be five years in the writing, even after research was completed. But a great deal of the required secondary research is already published, and this would leave the experienced historian time for the real craft: the making of connections between the past as documentary history recorded in Curtin, Williams, Thomas, and others; the past-present as oral history among Africans, Caribbeans, and Americans as Bailey has shown possible; the present as contemporary political economy, of which an overabundance exists in print; and the future as argued on available evidence, with implications for reparations, political and economic development, and social psychological evolution.
Michael Madill is an writer and historian based in the USA
