Klein, Rockel, and the contributors ground their understanding of the enslavement paradigm (e.g., life histories) in resistance and resilience, drawing on enslaved people’s lived experiences. Thus, these two terms intersect to highlight the significance of enslaved participation in the pursuit of freedom and emancipation. The authors emphasized the importance of advocacy to highlight the experiences of Africans as individuals, thereby entering the literary space within the ontology paradigm. In each chapter of the book, life histories, including enslaved people’s autobiographies, portray the struggles of marginalized individuals. However, the book’s content emphasized intersectionality (e.g., ethnography, ontology) to express the lived experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. This ontology perspective is crucial to decolonizing knowledge and better educating future scholars, who will shed light on African stories.
This book is broken into thirteen narrative chapters, an introduction, and enslavement narratives, each written by a different author. Each chapter describes the life stories of research from the authors in different parts of Africa. All the contributors, who surpass the limit of existing scholarly work, are reluctant to touch upon the dishonor part of the enslaved. The contributors conducted research with academic rigor to uncover the whole truth about the enslaved and their descendants, questioning informants from a narrative perspective across the thirteen chapters. All the essays in this book are dedicated to the phenomenon of enslaved individuals’ lived experiences. The essay in Chapter Nine highlighted the experiences of indigenous enslaved and the export trade among the Bodaye Gbaya. The author pinpointed the main instigators of slavery in the Cameroon region (e.g., Ndiba and his son Mbartwa).
Furthermore, four chapters (Eight, Nine, Twelve, and Thirteen) elucidate Cameroon’s history of enslavement. The authors underpinned their knowledge of the expansion of slavery and of memories over the years. The focus on Cameroon in Chapter Eight is intended to highlight the country as a significant focus of enslaved historians in the region. In Chapter Eight, historians have been criticized by Steven Feiermann for listening only to the voices of powerful rulers, which may have obscured history, and for proclaiming that they would hear different voices.
The contributors tracked the evolution of enslaved narratives from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, as mentioned. It is easy to follow the separate narrative of each chapter. With the antislavery movement of the 1940s, secular narratives shifted toward an enlightenment of thought, bringing other narratives through institutional involvement. The contributors encompassed knowledge on the enslaved subjective lives on the continent, from Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon to Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa. Paul Lovejoy articulated the missing history in the context of “freedom narratives” (56).
Significantly, the contributors pinpointed the resilience of enslaved Africans as follows. In Chapter Six, “I Married Knowledge,” the authors highlighted the knowledge paradigm of the deficit lens that a long history perpetuated about Africa, which is unsupported by evidence, for eighteenth-century enslaved women overcame barriers of literacy and raced to become doctors and instructors in medical school. Based on the gap in existing literatures about Black histories, the authors drew on the enslaved stories using ontology perspectives as a contribution to knowledge particularly African studies. The authors presented knowledge more characteristic of the enslaved, distinguishing it from that of free people. Their marriage rights, for example, are impeded, despite considering them as property; some are doing domestic jobs, and they receive better treatment as family members. When Dorugu uses them, they are Bawa (masculine singular) /bayi (plural), a term borrowed from Hausa, whether they are called slaves or servants. To the enslaved story of Dorugu, Dyrregu, or James Henry Dorugu (1840–1912) who was born in Nigeria, he was captured in a slave raid to serve Europe. From Slavery, he became an author focused on culture and language. He made history in young age for his contribution in Hausa language book in 1885 as a non-paid contributor. His work made an incredible impact on literary and linguistic.
The book’s meaningful strengths lie in the authors’ provision of narratives about the enslaved individuals’ lived histories from the perspective of emancipation. Enslaved narratives in this context foster the ontology paradigm by offering individual experiences in a relative context. The book’s audience will gain firsthand knowledge of the missing early history of Africa. However, history has a shortcut about where real history begins. This book will not be without effect on scholars and historians, serving as a wake-up call to question the historical paradigm by decolonizing knowledge to shed light on the real past. Thus, the book provides scholars and policymakers with invaluable insights for reconsidering the historical context.
Furthermore, one of the key components of this book is the specific language and culture that are not commonly found in many readings, and it sheds light on the organic cultural aspects. Despite limited documentation, the authors conducted rigorous research to provide policymakers, researchers, and educational stakeholders with invaluable knowledge about the real-life stories of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Another interesting point about the book is that it highlighted the truth about enslaved Africans in the context of resilience, despite the conditions that made it difficult to succeed, becoming doctors and professors at the medical school, as proclaimed in Chapter Six.
The enslaved narratives in this book shed light on specific themes (e.g., emancipation, escape, literacy, resistance, resilience). In all aspects, enslaved individuals’ suffering enhances their resilience and their resistance to escape, whether physical or literal. After escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass became an abolitionist a 19th-century figure who contributed to African American rights. His work from autobiographies to advising president reshaped views on African American equality. Both James Borugu and Frederick Douglass became author as enslaved who impact the literature. Despite their hurdles as enslaved people, the asset-based perspective remains one of the factors that impacts the outcomes of the marginalized group in the school system worldwide. In this context, the book stressed the ontological and ethnographic paradigms to explain the subjective lives of enslaved people and their descendants within their cultural context. In future editions, this work may further enhance knowledge of slavery in Africa and its impact worldwide. Enslaved Africans in the context of emancipation and freedom is a worldwide history.
