“The Atlantic slave trade was one of the greatest intercontinental migrations of world history; today about one-third of all people of African descent live outside of Africa. Yet the historical record of the slave trade remains curiously uneven. Ten personal narratives collected in this volume reveal aspects of this slave trade between 1730 and 1830. Eight are the original accounts of Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the coast for sale to Europeans; two other observers on the local scene (an African and a Tatar from Astrakhan) saw the slave trade from the African point of view. Thus the collection represents a fascinating sample of the experience of millions of slaves who were shipped to the Americas, but whose personal reactions are all but unknown.
Here is the account of “Job ben Solomon,” who served as a slave in Maryland - and was later presented at the British court. Other narrators, like Abü Bakr al-Siddiq and Sãlih Bilãli were members of the upper class in their home countries, Muslim in religion, and literate in Arabic. Yet the first became the slave of a stonemason in Jamaica, and the second ended his career as a plantation hand in Georgia. Other accounts represent the boyhood memories of men who later became important in their own right. Samuel Crowther rose to be the first African bishop in the Church of England. Joseph Wright became the first African ordained as a Methodist minister.
Ali Eisami of Bornu gives a very rare personal account of the early phases of the “holy war” between Bornu and the Sokoto empire. From Southern Nigeria, Osifekunde’s account of Ijebu culture is the earliest and most detailed report we have of any Yoruba-speaking people, pieced together by a French ethnologist from interviews with a man who had served almost twenty years as a slave in Brazil.
Reflecting the other side of the slave trade, Philip Quaque’s letters from the Gold Coast tell of his experiences as an African who was also an Anglican priest and chaplain to the European garrison of the British slave-trade post at Cape Coast Castle. The one account by a non-African is equally extraordinary. It is the narrative of Wargee, a Tatar from Astrakhan, who travelled widely along the trade routes of the Western Sudan at a period before European penetration of the interior.
Many of these documents have been known to specialists, but they were hard to interpret without expert knowledge of the appropriate region of Africa. In the present edition, each is introduced and explained by a leading Africanist scholar. The contributors include G. 1. Jones, Margaret Priestley, Ivor Wilks, H. F. C. Smith, D. M. Last, Gambo Gubio, P. C. Lloyd, J.. F. Ade Ajayi, and Philip D. Curtin. Thus the collection makes a range of unknown or neglected sources available for the first time—sources not only for the history of ‘West Africa, but for the history of Negro people everywhere.” BOOK JACKET.