Sandra Greene, the leading expert on the precolonial and colonial history of southeastern Ghana, has written a unique study that affords insight into one of the most complicated issues in modern African history: the emancipation of slaves. This short book examines the numerous factors at play as elite African slave owners decided how, when, and indeed whether to loosen the bonds that held women, children, and men as their personal property. The book consists mainly of three case studies of elite African men who owned slaves in the early colonial period (late nineteenth century and early twentieth century). Greene’s decades-long experience of research and consultation among the Anlo-Ewe population of this region has enabled her to reconstruct the life stories of these individuals with a degree of intimacy and accuracy that perhaps she alone could achieve.

The book’s main goal is to expand scholarly understanding of how former slave owners responded to the pressure to manumit their slaves under colonial abolition laws. The book’s brief introduction makes the important point that as individuals found numerous ways to resist, accommodate, or embrace the new realities of colonial rule, one key aspect of many people’s responses was how to deal with their slaves. Overall, the pattern was to modify the institution of slavery by making (or renaming) slaves “subordinate kin.” But a range of other options existed, and each case involved unique individuals with their own personal reasons for acting as they did. Greene also highlights the ways in which slave owners’ responses to abolition have continued to shape relationships between former slaves and former slave owners in subsequent generations up to the present. The introduction also presents a helpful discussion of the historiography of slavery in Africa and the numerous reasons why the topic of slave owners has received scarce scholarly attention. Notably absent from this discussion is the work of Dr. Akosua Perbi.

Each of the case studies is centered around a prominent male trader who had multiple wives and many dependents, including slaves. The first, Amegashie Afeku (himself a former slave), resisted abolition (and colonial rule more broadly) and even took action to limit the escape of slaves who were not his own property. The second case is Nyaho Tamakloe, who took a more moderate approach, making his former slaves members of his family and providing them the option of a free mission school education. The third case is Noah Yawo, who went through a profound transformation in mid-life, apparently as the result of a series of disasters and hardships which led him to become a devout Christian, deciding as a result to completely renounce slavery and emancipate his slaves.

We see in these three men some things we might expect. They all worked to secure their personal wealth and status throughout the process of renegotiating their relationships with their slaves, whether this meant fighting abolition, empowering former slaves in ways that would benefit themselves, or delaying emancipating their slaves until they had achieved financial security. But we also see three individuals who are making radically different choices based on a wide variety of influences distinct to each one’s particular situation. Even their personality traits can be seen as affecting their decisions about how to change or preserve their relationships with their enslaved wives, children, and laborers.

The life stories of these three individuals certainly merit a volume unto themselves, but some readers might find the information here lacking a bit in historical or scholarly context. It occurred to me at several points in the book how many connections and parallels there are between the changes described here with regard to slavery and abolition in the Gold Coast Colony and historical changes taking place elsewhere at the same time—particularly in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Could we compare the transition from slave labor to sharecropping in West Africa, for example, to the same transition occurring in the U.S. South? (52) And how common was it around the nineteenth-century Atlantic World for former slaves to become slave owners, as Amegashie Afeku did?

Overall, this book makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship about an extremely complicated and sensitive subject by bringing to light the biographies of three individuals who represent a transformative turning point in African history. In Slave Owners of West Africa, slavery is not an “institution,” and abolition is not a “movement.” Instead, the reader gains insight into individuals who have ownership rights over other individuals within the context of very personal, human relationships.