Fighting the slave trade : West African strategies / Sylviane A. Diouf, editor.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Diouf, Sylviane A. (Sylviane Anna), 1952-

Series:

Western African studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slave trade--Africa, West--History--Congresses.

Slave trade.

History.

West Africa.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 242 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press ; Oxford : James Currey, 2003.

Summary:

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention. Our picture of the slave trade is incomplete without an examination of the ways in which men and women responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and deportation. Fighting the Slave Trade is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade and shows that resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged by the orthodox interpretation of historical literature.

Focused on West Africa, these essays examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. Some chapters discuss the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, and marronage. Others deal with violent assaults on ships and entrepots, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it. All told, Fighting the Slave Trade presents a much more complete picture of the West African slave trade than has previously been available.

Contents:

Part 1 Defensive Strategies

1. Lacustrine Villages in South Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade / Elisee Soumonni 3

2. Slave-Raiding and Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century / Thierno Mouctar Bah 15

3. The Myth of Inevitability and Invincibility: Resistance to Slavers and the Slave Trade in Central Africa, 1850-1910 / Dennis D. Cordell 31

4. The Impact of the Slave Trade on Cayor and Baol: Mutations in Habitat and Land Occupancy / Adama Gueye 50

5. Defensive Strategies: Wasulu, Masina, and the Slave Trade / Martin A. Klein 62

Part 2 Protective Strategies

6. The Last Resort: Redeeming Family and Friends / Sylviane A. Diouf 81

7. Anglo-Efik Relations and Protection against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740-1807 / Paul E. Lovejoy, David Richardson 101

Part 3 Offensive Strategies

8. Igboland, Slavery, and the Drums of War and Heroism / John N. Oriji 121

9. "A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price": Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries / Ismail Rashid 132

10. Strategies of the Decentralized: Defending Communities from Slave Raiders in Coastal Guinea-Bissau, 1450-1815 / Walter Hawthorne 152

11. The Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Role of the State / Joseph E. Inikori 170

12. Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade / David Richardson 199

Epilogue: Memory as Resistance: Identity and the Contested History of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria, an Oral History Project / Carolyn A. Brown 219.

Notes:

"First published in United Kingdom 2004"--T.p. verso.

Papers presented at a conference held Feb. 2001 at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0821415166

0821415174

0852554478

0852554486

OCLC:

52455402