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Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. By Rosalind Shaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. 312; 19 illustrations. $52.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.
Unlike North America, where the legacy and memory of enslavement is very much visibly intertwined in the fabric of everyday life, politics, and society, in Africa they are not in the forefront of daily political discourses and social concerns. But does this mean that enslavement is not remembered or is not part of the texture of African life? Is the trauma of violence, captivity, and forced deportation of Africans out of the continent forgotten, or did it have long-term effects on African societies and their social practices? Using mainly the divination systems of the Temne of Sierra Leone, Rosalind Shaw argues convincingly for the most part that memories of the Atlantic slave trade are deeply interwoven into the daily fabric of indigenous ritual practices and popular imagination. Drawing mainly from theoretical constructs of Pierre Bourdieu (habitus), Anthony Giddens (social consciousness), and Michel Foucault (power), Shaw highlights...