Silences that Speak to the Slave Trade

AbstractThis article reviews three books that address the memory and commemoration of the slave trade in West Africa.  The author contextualises these books in the political context of slave trade commemoration and its academic analysis.  In contrast to several European countries that have publicly admitted that this trade constituted a crime against humanity, in many African countries slavery and the slave trade remain silenced.  The books discussed here address this “silence”.  Holsey examines the politics of commemoration amongst the coastal population of contemporary Ghana. Historically complicit in the slave trade, these populations have “forgotten” the complicity of their forebears.  The books by Shaw and Argenti suggest that the historical memory of the slave trade is no longer available in discourse, but embodied in ritual and performance.  The unspeakable violence perpetrated against historical forebears is still remembered in today’s divination rituals and masked performances.  Thus, these books provide sophisticated analysis of the ways in which a nightmarish modernity is remembered today and why the history of the slave trade is unfinished. Whether sequestered in discourse or embodied in ambiguous performance, the slave trade maintains a ghostly presence.