Teaching history, we turn to primary sources to give our students the opportunity to analyze and interpret the documentary evidence themselves. Finding new primary sources, especially for those of us teaching courses on the Early Africa and the slave trades, can be difficult. There are the mainstays: Olaudah Equiano's narrative; Ibn Battuta's travelogues; and, sundry European accounts. Fortunately, there are a growing number of collections of African voices from the past including Robert Collins, African History in Documents, William Worger et al., Africa and the West: a Documentary History, and recent work from Anne Bailey and Trevor Getz. The newest addition is the tremendous African Voices on the Slave Trade edited by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, and Martin Klein. This massive collection, with nearly forty entries from some of the very best scholars working on slavery in Africa, brings a host of African voices – both the enslaved and enslaver – into the classroom. It will prove an invaluable resource for instructors, undergraduates, and graduate students.
In Parts One and Two, the contributors delve into experiences of enslavement through oral traditions, verbal arts, and material culture. Some of the most impressive chapters, especially those by Alice Bellagamba, Felicitas Becker, and Martin Klein, include the contributors' reflections on interviews they conducted with individuals who had personal, familial, or communal connections with past practices of slavery. The authors in Part Two have the difficult task of bringing literary and visual arts to life and explaining their relationship with slavery. E. S. D. Fomin's presentation of Cameroonian prayers and dirges and Olatunji Ojo's analysis of Yoruba proverbs successfully evoke people's memories of enslavement.
Parts Three to Six focus on the sources with which scholars and students will be most familiar: written accounts by Africans, European travelers, and colonial officials. Here the documentary evidence clearly shows how Africans used impressive networks of affiliation and knowledge to contest or prevent their enslavement. Pierluigi Valsecchi's chapter on Kwadwo illustrates how the man's understanding of European law in western Gold Coast in 1819 and his access to a wider kinship network enabled him to avoid his enslavement to Dutch merchants. Trevor Getz offers us the fascinating case of Abina Mansah and her effort to free herself from her master Quamina Eddoo through colonial courts. Through the transcript, we can hear the voice of a female slave arguing with those male voices of the British court and her master, each seeking to control her.
African Voices shifts again in Parts Seven and Eight to focus on Christian and Muslim records. Each of the chapters listens carefully to the din of missionary and African voices, informing students how historical texts can contain multiple, competing, yet not always contradictory, perspectives. Sandra Greene's chapter provides a heart-wrenching look at the terror and desperation of slaves designated for sacrifice and the methods they used to survive, methods intertwined with the missionary project of saving souls and abolishing the trade. Bruce Hall and Yacine Daddi Addoun offer materials coming out of the Institut Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou project in Timbuktu. They discuss letters from slaves who traded along the Niger River and explore issues of status, familiarity, and brotherhood among the traders – slave, master, and freeborn alike. The collection ends with Part Nine and a discussion of memories and legacies of slavery in Africa today.
As a teaching tool, African Voices offers scholars and students a wealth of intimate, extraordinary insights into the lives of slaves and worlds of African slavery and trade. Sometimes, though, the contributor's voices overpower the very African voices they introduce. While this background context will be useful to instructors unfamiliar with the material, the collection offers a little too much information. The beauty of these documents is that they force students to think critically and creatively – to practice the work of historians and to seek out other sources to develop their interpretations. This might be harder when some of the contributors do the analytical work for them.
In addition, the editors might consider moving beyond text as the exclusive format for presenting African Voices. As the editors rightly note, so much of the African past is understood and remembered through in oral, visual, and performative modes. It would be interesting to hear and see some of these oral traditions, poems, proverbs, and prayers rather than simply read them on a page. A digital version of African Voices in which students can hear the oral traditions recounted, watch dances performed, study colorful murals closely, and examine original court documents would push them to engage with the sources in new ways and develop new skills.
But these are minor quibbles. In all, African Voices is one of the best resources historians of Africa have to incorporate African perspectives into our courses. Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein (as well as the many contributors) have done an incredible amount of work bringing together such a large and diverse number of sources. This collection enriches our study and teaching of the African past.
