Reading West African Slave Narratives/Writing Biographies

After more than 40 years of sustained research, historians have learned a great deal about the trade in human beings that existed in between 1500 to 1870, the era of the Atlantic slave trade.  We know that more than twelve and half million individuals were sold for export to the, and that even countless more were enslaved within west Africa itself or exported to north Africa. We know where and how slaves were acquired within the region, and the relative importance that warfare, kidnapping, legal mechanisms, economic processes and religious institutions played in generating an enslaved population. We know the West African trade routes that were used to transport slaves to regional and local markets. We know as well the forms of resistance employed by the enslaved and the ways West African slave buyers, sellers and owners attempted to thwart that resistance. Yet there is still so much we do not know. This is especially true with regard to the impact that slavery and the slave trade had on the individual.

By analyzing the lives of two individuals enslaved in West Africa, by understanding them as persons whose thoughts and actions were influenced as much by their earlier pre-enslavement experiences as by the time they spent as captives, this paper explores the individual experience of enslavement in west Africa, while also using  the materials available about the lives of two specific  individuals (a woman who was captured and enslaved in West African c. 1871 and a man of slave descent who used his diary –first begun in 1879- to explore identity issues of concern to himself and  his family)  to discuss the challenges associated with working with (auto)biographical materials from  late 19^th and early 20^th century West Africa.