The topic of slavery and slave trading has been central to academic research on Africa since African studies became part of mainstream academia in the 1960s, and it continues to generate groundbreaking scholarship today. The more we know about slavery and slave trading in Africa, the more it seems there is to know. For those of us writing and publishing in the West, slavery and the slave trade remain the most enduring connections between Africa and our own societies. Often the very idea of enslaved Africans seems to presume the middle passage and American plantations. But the study of slavery and slave trading in Africa itself has grown by leaps and bounds, revealing among other things how the expansion of slavery, particularly in nineteenth-century Africa, transformed the social, political, and economic landscapes of the continent. The first generations of Africanist scholars grappled with the big questions: How many people were enslaved? Why did slavery in Africa proliferate as the trans-Atlantic slave trade took more and more people away? From what parts of Africa did the Afro-descended people of the Americas originate? What routes did the trans-Atlantic slave trade follow and why? How did the growth of slave trading affect African state formation? Over time, the historiographical trend has been toward more specific aspects of slavery and slave trading, including the different experiences of men, women, and children; the role of Islam as a legal and cultural feature of African societies with slaves; and localized studies. The three books reviewed here—West African Narratives of Slavery, by Sandra E. Greene, Dahomey and the Ending of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, by Robin Law, and Where the Negroes Are Masters, by Randy J. Sparks—provide fine examples of recent advances in historical scholarship on this important topic and highlight the possibilities for new directions in research. All three incorporate a biographical approach to historical analysis. Each book treats the actions and experiences of particular African individuals in depth and thus manages to offer readers a better sense of what slavery and slave trading might actually have felt like for the individuals involved.

Sandra Greene’s book addresses a major gap in the literature on slavery in Africa by examining the lived experiences of enslaved individuals and their descendants through their own narratives. Noting the tremendous importance of slave narratives for North American scholarship on slavery and its legacy, Greene ventures into virtually unexplored territory to bring us some West African examples of slave narratives. She draws on her unparalleled knowledge of the history of southeastern Ghana in presenting five unique narratives that give voice to individuals for whom the experience of slavery or its legacy played a direct role in shaping their identities and life choices. She harvests these African voices from texts recorded by Christian missionaries—both European and Gold Coast–born—and provides a masterful analysis of the intermingling of the voices of narrator and recorder/translator contained in them. The result is a fascinating look into the lives of people who experienced slavery and its legacy firsthand in southeastern Ghana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example, readers get a glimpse of what it was like to be a child captured and enslaved by invading Asante armies, as Aaron Kuku was; to face a mother’s choice between remaining in the household of a former slave master or abandoning her only child, as Lydia Yawo did; and to have one’s social standing permanently degraded by the stigma of a slave ancestor, as Paul Sands did. The book not only sheds light on a little understood but pervasive aspect of Ghanaian history and culture, it also invites and makes possible the comparative study of North American slave narratives with those that represent the experience of slavery for Africans who remained in Africa.

Robin Law’s Dahomey and the Ending of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade deepens our understanding of the kingdom of Dahomey as it existed in the 1850s by carefully analyzing the journals and correspondence of Louis Fraser, an aspiring British zoologist who lived in the coastal town of Ouidah in 1851–52 and made three visits inland to the royal court of King Gezo. Law presents these previously unpublished documents and several others together with historical analysis and contextualization that only the leading expert on West Africa’s Slave Coast could provide. Law takes us inside ongoing negotiations (palaver) between one of precolonial Africa’s most powerful kings and a rather helpless and untrained British diplomat. Their interactions reveal the personal as well as political and economic motives of each man. Frazer fancied himself Gezo’s biological and cultural superior and a hero of the abolitionist cause, while Gezo clearly viewed Frazer as merely a spy and a minor hindrance to Dahomey’s inevitable domination of the region. Reading Fraser’s accounts against the grain, Law reveals the use of power in the day-to-day diplomatic negotiations of the Dahomey kingdom and in the commercial, social, and religious life of numerous inhabitants of Ouidah.

In many ways, Law points out, Fraser’s ignorance of and lack of interest in African languages and customs help make his accounts easy to mine for factual information. The book’s close-up view deepens our understanding of a particularly confusing era in African history. In the middle part of the nineteenth century many African elites encountered pressure from European agents—including Christian missionaries, private trading firms, diplomats, and military personnel—working to promote so-called legitimate commerce and/or Christian evangelism. Yet, like Gezo, no one at the time could have anticipated that European nations would actually establish territorial colonies throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Europe’s leading power—Britain—had no economic incentive to annex large African territories, and most of the remaining European trading posts in Africa were unprofitable. While it is tempting in hindsight to view the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a direct and inevitable precursor to European colonization of Africa, the historical record—including the documents reproduced in Law’s book—shows a much more complicated relationship between Europe and Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Law illuminates the ways in which African elites exercised power over Europeans in their commercial and diplomatic engagements, as he has done repeatedly in his scholarship.

Sparks’s study of the Ghanaian town of Anomabo during the era of the slave trade also foregrounds the unquestionable authority of African merchants and political leaders in the making of trans-Atlantic webs of cultural, diplomatic, and commercial exchange. Sparks highlights two individuals who played major roles in the day-to-day operations of slave trading at Anomabo—John Corrantee and Richard Brew. Corrantee (Kurentsi) was the paramount political authority in Anomabo during the middle part of the eighteenth century and is depicted in Sparks’s study as a powerful “spider [who] wove a large and complex web designed to ensnare his many rivals and opponents. . . . Over time, that web . . . reached not only up and down the Gold Coast and inland, but all the way to Paris and London”(43). Sparks details how Corrantee manipulated both the French and British royal trading companies and used his influence with them to send two of his sons to Europe for an education. Another chapter is devoted to the career of Richard Brew, an Irishman who took a position serving the British Royal Africa Company on the Gold Coast as a young man in 1745 and spent more than thirty years (the rest of his life) there. Brew eventually established a private trading house at Anomabo and—with his African wife—created an African branch of the Brew family that later produced some of the leading merchants of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Sparks shows clearly how John Corrantee and Richard Brew, together with many other African, European, and mixed-race inhabitants of Anomabo, functioned and defined themselves within a cosmopolitan urban setting with their fingers always on the pulse of trans-Atlantic political and commercial activity—as well as the latest tastes and fashions in Europe and the Americas. By drawing attention to the crucial roles the African residents of Anomabo played in the commercial systems of the British Atlantic world and early America, Sparks successfully bridges the pesky divide between Africanist historiography and that of the rest of the Atlantic world.

All three of these works contribute to scholarly understanding of Africa’s significance in the making of a dynamic, interconnected Atlantic world. Through the individuals whose experiences are portrayed in these books, it is possible to see how even the most local bits of African history were connected to, if not shaping and shaped by, trans-Atlantic people, processes, and events. Aaron Kuku was enslaved in Asante and estranged from his mother because of the militarization associated with the slave trade on the Gold Coast. King Gezo forced the hand of the British government not only to create a vice-consulate at Ouidah, but also to invest military resources in Abeokuta and Lagos to protect their trade and settlers there. And John Corrantee’s “English” and “French” sons embodied the hallmarks of Africa’s eighteenth-century Atlantic creoles, combining European dress and business ties with African kinship ties and royal authority.

By including the full texts of hitherto unpublished historical sources, Sandra Greene and Robin Law provide valuable materials for the teaching of precolonial Africa. These books will allow students access to rare primary sources for analyzing slavery in precolonial Africa, the nineteenth-century slave trade, the international abolition movement, and the changing relationship between Europe and Africa in the decades prior to European colonization. These two books are also an important reminder that there are still many sources for the precolonial history of Africa—including documentary ones—that deserve historical analysis and publication.

It should be noted that scholarship relating to the British slave trade and drawing primarily upon English-language sources—as these works do—continues to shape historical knowledge of the topic far out of proportion to Britain’s actual role in the overall trade. More work is needed on the slave trade during the periods before and after the eighteenth century and on the documentary sources in Arabic and Portuguese. Nevertheless, as the historiography of African slavery and slave trading continues to grow broader and deeper, these books will ensure that the experiences of particular, knowable African individuals are available to scholars and students grappling to understand a vast topic encompassing multiple continents and several centuries.