African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame

It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?--Chief Awusa of Atorkor

For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade.

Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.

• The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History
• The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome
• Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (New Approaches to African History)
• The Slave Ship: A Human History
• Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Studies in Comparative World History)
• Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
• The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia)
• A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History
• Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Ser.)
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism