Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone

Rosalind Shaw. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xv + 299 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $21.00. Paper.

The central message of this very insightful work is that much "traditional" practice in Sierra Leone culture derives from Sierra Leone's violent integration into the Atlantic economy. Temne communities in northern Sierra Leone and in its capital, Freetown, provide the ethnographic focus of this book. Shaw analyzes divination, sorcery, and the ways that people react to rumors to show the extent to which memories of sudden violence, predation, and betrayal left Temne people to reshape popular culture in order to devise ways of getting by and managing these dangers. Unlike many scholars who mark the end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century as a watershed, Shaw shows how social practice suggests the continuity of uncertainty and vulnerability, first through the violent period of "legitimate trade" up to the 1896 establishment of the British Protectorate, and most recently in Sierra Leone's tragic rebel war.

The analysis of Temne perceptions of the occult is particularly welcome. Shaw consults early documents describing Temne society at the very start of the slave trade. She traces transformations in their perceptions of the spirit world, from powers that heal and with which people negotiate to destructive assailants and thieves who steal children, fertility, and sanity. She points out additional cultural similarities in other realms, from the historical violence of predatory warfare and commerce to contemporary domestic arrangements. For example, one of the best chapters highlights the ambiguous roles of diviners arid those who consult them, especially married women. Real historical memories and cultural practice recall situations in which women who married into communities revealed secrets that compromised their husbands or threatened towns' defenses. This shapes the social context in which contemporary wives are potential conduits for outside forces, spiritual or temporal, that could threaten the patrilineal space of towns or households.

Shaw offers two crucial observations. First, she shows how shaping cultural practice is a reciprocal process. The cultural models discussed in the book are applied as coping mechanisms in contexts of violence and danger. This modifies some recent analyses of spiritual forces in West Africa (i.e., Stephen Ellis's Mask of Anarchy [NYU, 1999]) which view them primarily as tools for the powerful to intimidate others or as convenient frameworks that people use to pin their immoral actions on external occult agency. Shaw shows how nineteenth-century subjects used accusations of sorcery against rogue chiefs who abused their power. Paradoxically, the arrival of colonial rule gave people even more leverage, at least in these matters, since they could recruit the colonial legal system to investigate mysterious happenings, especially ritual murders and those accused of them.

The book's other strength lies in tying the rebel war (which begun in 1991 and, one hopes, ended in 2002) to historical notions of power and cultural practice. While much of the fieldwork for this book took place in the fifteen years before the war, Shaw provides a superb demonstration of how recent fighting changes the context of this practice. In a striking case, Shaw describes how, amidst political violence and extreme economic hardship, a young government solder in 1992 was able to treat his wife much like a kidnapped woman of nineteenth-century trade wars, free of the claims and protections of her kin. He used his position, in a predatory economy to make his own rules. At the same time, his wife's access to diviners and other spiritual powers gave her some control over her situation.

This book offers deep insight to Sierra Leone's present hardship. Memories of the Slave Trade might: not be the most accurate title inasmuch as Shaw really shows not just memories but also a continuity of predatory economies for this country on the periphery of the world's economy, and how people still must manage uncertainty in their everyday lives. No doubt all this seemed a matter of the past, at least in its more violent manifestations, when Shaw began her fieldwork in the 1970s; unfortunately the subsequent war reinforced the relevance of her work. Her analysis of the possibility of agency in this construction of culture also suggests that the spiritual realm will be critical to postwar reconstruction, for knitting communities together again and controlling otherwise very dangerous fighters.

William Reno

Northwestern University

Evanston, Illinois

Copyright African Studies Association Apr 2003
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