Memories of the Slave Trade Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone

In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, diviners' visions, the imagery of divination techniques, and accounts of an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.