Storing Power: Mobility, Energy, and Politics in West Africa, 1400–1900

Boubakar Barry’s masterful study, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, explores the complex history of the Senegal-Gambia region. Barry establishes the integrity, cohesion and shared history of that region, despite its ethnic and political diversity and its present-day territorial division, an inheritance of French and British colonial rivalries. In this approach, Barry refuses to let contemporary borders and nationalist imperatives (and the funding structures that often accompany them) define either his unit of analysis or his historical vantage point. At the same time, Barry unwaveringly shows the dramatic, destructive and enduring legacies produced by the transatlantic slave trade. My paper pays tribute to Barry’s method and analysis in its geographic and temporal disposition, as well as in its consideration of the profound effects in Africa of the Atlantic system. It also considers carefully, as does Barry, the role of environmental factors and natural resources in shaping economic and political dynamics. But whereas Barry takes as a given the mobility of people and things through the Senegambia – a process that is central, if unexplored, in the book – my paper does not. It contends that attention must be paid to the material foundations of mobility in West Africa. Exploring the ways that canoes and head loads fueled the movement of people and things through the region, and considering how those strategies changed– particularly in the era of the slave trade – helps to explain both the reach of the Atlantic system, as well as the limits that acted upon it. This analysis also reveals that a truism of African state formation, that power derives from control over people, is too simplistic, for it overlooks the ways that elites invested in containers of various kinds to store wealth, build relationships, and manage the passage of time.