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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Despite critical assertions that West Africa has experienced an "amnesia" regarding the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its effects, this reading of the West African literary canon provides previously unconsidered insight into the way African authors explore the traumatic history of the slave trade on Africa's shores. The central argument is that even when texts ostensibly depict some later period or concern, West African writers can hardly avoid the pervasive presence of the slave trade in the memory of the region. This article traces the way in which Amos Tutuola, in particular, imbues the landscape of his novel with the memory of the trade, representing the way in which the memory of the trade continues to haunt the collective psyche of West Africa. As a figure of that memory, the protagonist in the novel is both physically captured and enslaved within the bush. For Tutuola, the bush becomes a space of Freudian traumatic repetition from which the protagonist can hardly escape.
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A chille Mbembe, in his article "African Modes of Self-Writing," mourns the dearth of African discourse on the slave trade as it affected Africans on the continent. He claims that "there is, properly speaking, no African memory of slavery" (259). He contends that Africans have neglected to respond to the slave trade and its effects on contemporary African life because of a variety of political and cultural barriers to open discourse regarding African participation in the slave trade. Bogumil Jewsiewicki and V. Y. Mudimbe agree that the era of the slave trade has been erased by African scholars such as Ali Mazrui in a sort of "colonial parenthesis" that ignores the traumatic eras of West African history in favor of an essentialized, mythical African past (1). Similarly, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, professor at Cape Coast University declares:
What can be observed about modern African literature with regard to the range of its themes is that very few of Africa's writers have demonstrated commitment to the fullest exploration of the African experience. For the most part, our creative writers hug the bare shorelines of African history, touch the colonial experience, and report that to be all there is. The vastest depths and stretches of African history, slavery and the slave trade are never regarded in a sustained way or mined in any serious fashion for their lessons, their truths and their metaphors. [...] Modern African literature, then, is essentially a literature of forgetfulness, and the evidence is related to a gap in our history four hundred years long. (219)
Unlike their African American and British counterparts, West African writers have seemed somewhat hesitant to confront the trauma of the slave trade. While Toni Morrison indicates that representing slavery is a responsibility, claiming that it is her "job [...] to rip that veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate'" (124), West African writers appear to turn away from the traumatic history of the slave trade to focus on either the history of Africa before the European invasion, the more recent colonial drama, or present-day concerns regarding hunger, poverty, motherhood, and government corruption.
Mbembe and others, however, mistakenly assert that there is an "amnesia" in Africa regarding the slave trade. We cannot rightfully claim that this history has truly been forgotten. In comparison to work produced by writers of African descent in the diaspora, it does seem as though African literature is at the very least quiet in its portrayal of the slave trade. In the United States and in other parts of the Americas, the civil rights movement had a tremendous effect on the way African Americans thought about themselves and their past. Seeking an end to the denial of extreme forms of racism and to the shame regarding their past, African Americans produced a body of literature that made obvious the nightmare of slavery at the same time as it presented the black reading public with a usable past, replete with stories of survival, agency, and resistance. In the 1960s and '70s, the genre of the neo-slave narrative clearly emerged, through which authors were able to explore the trade through fictional reconstructions of the lives of slaves. Authors such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Sherley Anne Williams brought slavery to the attention of readers all over the Americas and provided a countermemory to the institutionalized version of the history of the period that depicted a very different, often Eurocentric and paternalistic, vision of human bondage. Numerous scholars have presented studies analyzing the slave trade and the middle passage in literature or the neo-slave narrative as a genre in the Americas, but none has included a study of West African literary perceptions of the trade. Even Maria Diedrich's collection of essays called Black Imagination and the Middle Passage does not include a single black imagination from Africa.
Perhaps the tradition seems to reveal a very different position towards the depiction of the slave trade because in West Africa, postindependence cultural discourse had a similar drive towards the past, but a markedly different intellectual trajectory, affecting critical and literary responses to the slave trade in Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, a lively literary community converged at the University of Ibadan, producing both creative writers and literary scholars. Some significant part of the intellectual work done in environments like this in the years after independence was involved in creating a usable past for Africa after the years of the slave trade and colonialism. However, the continuing influence of Negritude meant that much of the work focused on unearthing a precolonial usable past. This archaeology sought to undermine the colonial mythology of Africa by recovering lost African traditions. Thus, works which openly investigated the slave trade were not as typical of this renaissance as we find in the post-civil rights era in America. The point of critics might be well-taken, then, that on the continent, there seems to be a myopic view of West African history that often overlooks the more problematic and traumatic realities of the past as well as its effects on the present. If memory is a collective experience as Maurice Halbwachs claims in his oft-cited work entitled On Collective Memory, then we must recognize that some parts of the past are allowed into the common discourse of memory while others fall by the wayside (182-83). And as Paul Connerton (among many others) reminds us repeatedly, those...
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