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Manuel Barcia , West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807–1844 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. xi + 190, £65.00, hb.
Women and men sent to the Americas from West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century experienced warfare, dislocation and enslavement during the fall of Oyo, the expansion of Dahomey and the jihad that led to the rise of the Sokoto caliphate. In his latest work, Barcia provocatively suggests that scholars of slave resistance in the Americas have misinterpreted West African-led movements in Bahia, Brazil and Cuba during that time as slave revolts, uprisings and insurrections. He contends that these were acts of war whose practices West Africans (the Yoruba, known as Nagô in Brazil and Lucumí in Cuba) – most of them recently arrived from war-torn lands – had transferred across the Atlantic. Through this lens, these movements become military actions whose ‘uninterrupted perpetuation’ from their homelands becomes evidence for the ‘direct links and continuities’ between West Africa and Bahia and Cuba.
The chapters take the reader across the Atlantic, from politics and warfare in West Africa in Chapter 1 to enslavement, the African slave trade and the Middle Passage in Chapter 2. The experiences of the new arrivals to Bahia and Cuba in Chapter 3 are followed by detailed discussions in Chapters 4 and 5 of West African warfare – its organisation, strategies, weaponry and war paraphernalia – in the Africans’ destinations. The uneven source material translates into chapters that read quite differently. For the...