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Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Edited by Sylviane Diouf Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxvii, 242. $65.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.
Sylviane Diouf, accomplished Atlantic and African historian, has undertaken a labor both of passion and of erudition in editing Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. In her introduction to this edited collection, she struggles to bring together an uneven set of conference papers with some success. In providing overarching themes for the strategies used by West Africans against the Atlantic slave trade, she reaches beyond "resistance" (p. x) in an attempt to understand how Africans acted to preserve self, family, and society. She challenges prevailing opinion that seeks to portray Africans as the "other" in the slave trade, pointing out that Europeans, after all, had deported their own as well, and making reasonable comparisons between the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust (pp. x-xi). Yet she does not seek to be an apologist for Africans, does not shy away from either the difficult question of "betrayal" of Africans by Africans (pp. xiii-xiv) or the African/African-American divide evident to those who have studied roots tourism in Ghana and elsewhere (p. xvi).
In twelve chapters and an epilogue, Diouf has collected a far wider and sometimes more incisive set of analyses of West Africans' resistance to the depredations of the Atlantic slave trade than published previously. Despite the title, most of the papers do not describe armed struggle at all, but instead adopt approaches taken by James Scott and others in understanding resistance to colonialism in terms of less obvious strategies avoidance, self-interest, foot-dragging, and even exodus. The Africans in Fighting the Slave Trade flee to defensible or less penetrable environments such as forests and caves, they trade their own slaves and newly won captives to Europeans in exchange for their relatives, they change their cultivation habits, undertake informal boycotts, and give misinformation to raiders. They also engage in both planned and organic...