Fighting the slave trade West African strategies (Ohio University Press, 2003)
Papers presented at a conference held Feb. 2001 at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Includes bibliographical references and index
Lacustrine villages in south Benin as refuges from the slave trade - Elisě Soumonni -- - Slave-raiding and defensive systems south of Lake Chad from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century - Thierno Mouctar Bah -- - The myth of inevitability and invincibility: resistance to slavers and the slave trade in central Africa, 1850-1910 - Dennis D. Cordell -- - The impact of the slave trade on Cayor and Baol: mutations in habitat and land occupancy - Adama Guÿe -- - Defensive strategies: Wasulu, Masina, and the slave trade - Martin A. Klein -- - The last resort: redeeming family and friends - Sylviane A. Diouf -- - Anglo-Efik relations and protection against illegal enslavement at old Calabar, 1740-1807 - Paul E. Lovejoy - David Richardson -- - Igboland, slavery, and the drums of war and heroism - John N. Oriji -- - '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 -- - Strategies of the decentralized: defending communities from slave raiders in costal Guinea-Bissau, 1450-1815 - Walter Hawthorne -- - The struggle against the transatlantic slave trade: the role of the state - Joseph E. Inikori -- - Shipboard revolts, African authority, and the transatlantic slave trade - David Richardson -- - Memory as resistance: identity and the contested history of slavery in southeastern Nigeria, an oral history project - Carolyn A. Brown
Annotation 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. But 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 a nd 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, the essays collected here examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. In ch apters discussing the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, marronage, violent assaults on ships and ports, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it, Fighting the Slave Trade presents a much more complete picture of the West African slave trade than has previously been available