The Vile Trade is a wide-ranging anthology about the impact of the slave trade in its African and global contexts, with a particular focus on the ‘blame game’ and the attendant issue of reparations. The volume is part of Toyin Falola's African World Series, and Africa is defined broadly to include the diaspora to the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America. The perspectives and methodologies are equally varied, representing linguists, archaeologists, political economists, historians, and storytellers. Most of the contributors are African or of African descent and about half are based in West Africa, most in Nigeria. For all these reasons, undergraduates will find The Vile Trade engaging. The authors’ discussions of the limits on archival sources, the framing of oral interviews, and the range of theoretical approaches should also encourage lively debates among graduate students.

Much of the discourse in The Vile Trade will be familiar to scholars of slavery and the slave trade, though there is a refreshing subtlety to some of the arguments made here. Quince Duncan echoes Ngugi wa Thiong'o in acknowledging that while racism was a social construct in a brutal, multigenerational assault by whites on blacks, it is time for global Africans to liberate their minds from slavery: ‘the war is over: African peoples of the world survive, and never again will anyone be able to impose upon Afro-descendants such malignant suppressions’ (72). The antiquity and complexity of servile institutions among the Nembe of the Niger Delta is explored by Atei Mark Okorobia who argues that British colonialism, in its attempts to eliminate ‘domestic slavery’ in the early twentieth century, inadvertently increased the incidence of pawnship in a tightening labor market (here one thinks of Judith Van Allen writing about Aba women's protests). Gloria Emeagwali takes the definition of slavery in a different direction, asserting that the structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s on African states should be considered a new form of coercion. Given that many of the chapters are by Nigerian scholars, a critical discussion of the oil industry in the modern state would have made an interesting addition to the volume.

The focus of The Vile Trade, however, is the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. It violently displaced 11–12 million Africans, about 3.5 million of whom were from what is now Nigeria. The trade is often called a holocaust; Chinweizu, who wrote the last chapter in the anthology, argues that it is more accurately called a war (330). The question underlying many of the chapters is this: had there been no willing (European) buyers, would there have been any willing (African) sellers? The contributors are replying in part to a 2010 New York Times article by Harvard professor and prominent African American intellectual Henry Louis Gates in which he argued that ‘because African elites were involved in the transatlantic slave trade as commercial partners with Europeans, blame is necessarily and equally assigned to them as well, spreading guilt around so much as to render it meaningless’ (159). In this argument, contributor Michael A. Gomez notes, Gates found public support from the noted Nigerian playwright and public intellectual, Wole Soyinka. It is a mainstream position, rejected outright by Chinweizu, who, as an Afrocentrist asserts: ‘the entire thing was organized by Whites of European stock, and they were its prime beneficiaries’ (324).

Eric Hobsbawm has quantified Chinweizu's assertion: the majority of the financial benefits from the Atlantic slave trade went to the West, not to the rest. The excess capital generated by the slave trade helped fund England's industrial revolution. If this is the premise, are Africans, both of the continent and of the diaspora, and African states owed reparations? Even as we acknowledge the participation of some African states in the slave trade, we cannot invoice Dahomey, which no longer exists. However, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States do. Can these still predominantly white beneficiary states be handed a bill? Akin Oyebode suggests that under international law, it is worth trying. Paul Chike Dike asks us to consider the range of Africa's encounter with Europe, from slave trading through colonialism, and notwithstanding the continent's undeniable struggles with corruption, to cancel Africa's debts and work toward the ‘dismantling of racism and colonialism and its vestiges, wherever they may exist today’ (308). The Vile Trade is an anthology worth reading and assigning. It will encourage the active discussion of questions about which we have too long been silent.