Sylviane A. Diouf has assembled a collection of provocative essays by scholars of African history that challenges the idea of West Africans’ complicity with the transatlantic slave trade by examining various strategies of resistance. Through the use of oral histories, ship logs and records, as well as archaeological findings, these scholars unveil a resistance to slavery that occurred in West Africa primarily before slaves were boarded and transported to the New World. The collection is divided into three parts, examining of different strategies of resistance: defensive, protective, and offensive.
The scholars in this collection overwhelmingly argue that certain populations of West Africans were keenly aware of the devastating impact of the transatlantic slave trade on their societies, and these populations sought to mitigate the damages as best they could. One method used was to develop defensive strategies, such as the environment, for protection. Elisée Soumonni and Thierno Mouctar Bah in their essays “Lacustrine Villages in South Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade” and “Slave-Raiding and Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” respectively, examine the relations between the movement of refugee populations to the lake area and the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on these populations. They contend that as the market for human cargo increased, some West African communities relocated to environments that less accessible to slave raiders.
In addition to the use of environmental features as a defensive strategy, architectural features were also used as a means to protect against slave raiders. Homes and villages were often designed with labyrinths, high walls, and various points of ingress and egress to impede easy access by slave raiders. While West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade are the primary foci of this book, Dennis D. Cordell’s essay “The Myth of Inevitability and Invincibility: Resistance to Slavers and the Slave Trade in Central Africa, 1850-1910” focuses on resistance to the Muslim slave raiding and slave trade in north-central Africa. This also involved peoples relocating, abandoning their villages and taking refuge in caves and tunnels, and banding together in large settlements to ward off slave raiders.
While defensive strategies were used, protective strategies also proved to be compelling response to the slave trade. Part two, “Protective Strategies” is highlighted by an essay by Diouf, “The Last Resort: Redeeming Family and Friends.” In this essay, Diouf explores the practice of captive redemption. One example Diouf vividly resurrects is the fascinating story of Ibrahima abd al-Rahman Barry who spent 40 years in bondage in Mississippi, and how he returns to Liberia in 1829 to gather money from his wealthy family to purchase his five children and eight grand children from slavery. Unfortunately, Ibrahima dies before the caravan arrives in Monrovia carrying $6,000 to $7,000 in gold (p. 81).
If captive redemption was a viable protective strategy against the slave trade, the rise in secret societies and alliances amongst various groups helped to protect some West Africans from enslavement. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson’s essay “Anglo-Efik Relations and Protection against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740-1807” explores such arrangements, and specifically how the Arotraders were able to travel with security throughout Old Calabar, “which supplied over a quarter of a million persons for export to the Americas between 1740 and 1807”, with the use of oracles, chalk markings, and kinship ties (p. 102). A rise in secret societies amongst the Efik and in the Ekpe society also helped to protect African slave raiders and traders against enslavement.
The offensive strategies examined in part three range from training children to act as scouts for detecting the encroachment of slave raiders, to revealing a continuum of resistance that culminated in the Mandingo Rebellion, 1785-1796; the Hubbu Rebellion against the Futa Jallon state in the 1850s; and the Bilali Rebellion, 1838-1872. John N. Oriji in “Igboland, Slavery and the Drums of War and Heroism” also uses oral traditions and other sources to examine offensive strategies that involved such practices as communities forming alliances and pacts to protect themselves against Abam slave raiders; people dropping poisoned food, water, and wine along strategic slave raiding routes; and young men receiving military training to protect their communities. Ismail Rashid’s examines the importance of slave rebellions as an offensive strategy in “A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty.” Rashid refutes the pervasive belief that “antislavery [...] emanated solely from religious, economic, and philosophical ideas of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment” (p. 132). He argues that “the Mandingo Rebellion in the eighteenth century and the Bilali Rebellion in the nineteenth century —attest to the tenacity of the enslaved in resisting slavery and asserting their freedom” (p. 133). But even asserting freedom came with a price, such as adapting practices that challenged tradition and created dubious roles for some West Africans, particularly those communities that were decentralized.
Walter Hawthorne challenges Joseph Miller’s notion that “those persons who were not sold or traded into the transatlantic slave trade or enslaved in Africa were ‘human flotsam’” (p. 153) in his essay, “Strategies of the Decentralized.” Hawthorne asserts that for decentralized communities often the best strategy to protect themselves against the slave trade was to become slavers (p. 154). In “The Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Role of the State,” Joseph E. Inikori seeks to answer the question, “what factors explain state involvement in the export trade in captives?” (p. 171). In Inikori’s concise historical overview, he asserts “the slave trade was dependent on transportation and weak or non-existent centralized government” (p. 172), ultimately concluding that those West African communities that did not centralize their
(Originally appearing in African Studies Quarterly | Volume 10, Issue 1 | Spring 2008 http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v10/v10i1reviews.pdf)
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