Africa Remembered

Résumé : Eight of the ten personal narratives collected in this volume are the personal reminiscences of Africans who were enslaved and sold on the West coast. They provide a testimony from the other side of the slave trade, all too rare in the abundant literature of the humanitarians. They reveal the thoughts and feelings of men who, unlike thousands of their fellows, had the luck to be liberated and educated; and they provide case studies of a few of West Africa's early élite who linked the late eighteenth-century slave-trading societies of the interior with the partially urbanized an alien-occupied commercial centres of the colonial period. Only one of the reports-the letters of Philip Quaque-deals with events as they happened in the words of the narrator himself, only two testimonies were written in an African language. (C. W. Newbury)