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African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade . Ed. by Bellagamba Alice , Greene Sandra E. , [and] Klein Martin A. . With the ass. of Carolyn Brown. Cambridge University Press , Cambridge [etc.] 2013 xxii, 563 pp. Ill. Maps. £65.00.
In this volume, thirty-five scholars of slavery highlight the voices of the enslaved in Africa. Without question, this is a major contribution to the study of work, workers, and labor relations in the context of African history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While it has been well established that slavery had a profound impact in Africa, not only as a source for the global diaspora of Africans who traveled to the Americas and throughout the Muslim world and the Indian Ocean, it has often been argued that slavery in Africa was somehow different, even more benign, than was the case elsewhere.
These studies elaborate on this complex issue by focusing on sources that have been known almost exclusively to specialists, especially archival documentation and oral sources that enable some understanding of how the enslaved experienced their subjugation and understood their dependency. The collection owes its inspiration to Martin Klein, who has been involved in the organization of a series of conferences, first at Bellagio, then the University of Toronto and finally in Buea, Cameroon. Professor Klein has worked closely with his co-editors, Alice Bellagamba and Sandra Greene, and also Carolyn Brown, who collectively have promoted a wide-ranging discourse on the history of slavery in Africa. Because this is a review, it is also necessary to state that I have sometimes been involved in this ongoing exchange, although clearly I am not a contributor to this volume. Nonetheless, I have endorsed this volume because, in my opinion, this collection has "transformed the study of slavery in a way that will require a revolutionary reassessment of what we think about slavery and how we study...