Many scholars of slavery in Africa over the years have bent over backwards to demonstrate that slavery in Africa was practiced differently than in the Americas. This edited volume, The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present, suggests that in the legacy of discrimination caused by slavery, however, the two experiences have much in common. The editors demonstrate that the legacy of discrimination and stigma from slavery are not based on race alone but rather develop from the ways slave-owning societies create silences around the history of slavery in order to preserve the power of former slave owners in the present. The book offers a complex glimpse at the ways in which western African communities have struggled with the ongoing discrimination and stigma of slavery, as well as how slave-owning and trading-communities deal with their past participation in a practice internationally condemned as inhumane. At the same time that this book breaks new ground intellectually in its innovative perspective on the scholarship of slavery and memory in Africa, it also offers insight into the methodological difficulties of finding and using primary sources on slavery and memory.

The book consists of an introduction and nine case study chapters. These chapters come from a series of conferences convened by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein (the book's editors) on the voices of slavery. A number of books have come out of these conferences and, like most of these, this book is concerned with giving readers direct access to the primary sources used for writing about slavery and emancipation in Africa. The chapters cover a region ranging from Senegambia to Cameroon including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, and Mali. The introduction gives a brief overview of slavery in Africa, the means of emancipation for slaves in Africa, and how former slaves and their descendants have struggled for political and social recognition in independent African nations. Each chapter gives the full transcription of a primary source and then offers a brief context and analysis of the document.

Almost all of the chapters deal with some element of memory; be it the memory of former slaves, communities attacked by slave traders, or former owners or traders of slaves. In some of the cases, former slaves and their descendants acknowledge their heritage and try to alleviate it, while in other cases descendants fiercely challenge the discrimination they face. In one community in Ghana, they have memorialized their status as the survivors of slave traders, bemoaning the loss of so many souls to enslavement. However, the voices of former slave traders and owners on many levels dominate in the chapters. Those former owners who still upheld elements of the social hierarchies of slavery appear throughout the chapters. And yet, the descendants of many former slave traders and owners also express guilt or concern about the ways in which their ancestors participated in the slave trade and try to atone for these practices. Memories of the stigma of slavery are contested and struggled with in a variety of ways: through open discussion and opaque dialogue; through celebration; and, most dangerously, through silence. Several chapters hint at the continuing violence done through the silence that surrounds discussions of slave descent. Unfortunately the chapters do not work in conversation with one another to consider how these codes of silence shape government policies and customary practices across the region of western Africa.

The limited analytical framework of the chapters is made up for the by the methodological discussion of primary sources. Each chapter includes the primary source documents used to make the argument of the chapter. A range of sources are included such as oral interviews, material culture in the form of vodun pots, newspaper articles, proverbs, songs, and manumission documents. This range of sources makes the book an excellent one for teaching about the history of slavery in Africa for both undergraduate and graduate students. Ugo Nkoweji's chapter in particular does a wonderful job of conveying the difficulty of doing oral interviews about slavery, even for a ‘son of the soil’. He demonstrates that when a person takes on the hat of the researcher, individuals being ‘researched’ treat conversations in very different ways. His discussion of the ways informants tried to shame him into stopping his questioning on various topics is an excellent example for graduate students to think about how they might construct their own oral interviews and how informants will actively work to shape the answers and the questions asked about sensitive topics.

This book forces readers to confront the legacy of slavery in African societies and to consider how it continues to shape them. Yet the chapters do not consider the ways in which these historical social hierarchies allow modern forms of enslavement to occur in many African countries. The editors note that heritage politics hinder socioeconomic development but I wish they had pushed their contributors further to consider how the codes of silence among African communities and beyond allow forms of slavery to continue in Africa.