Abstract
Senegalese author and director Ousmane Sembène, as a socialist and contributor to the pervasive legacy of social realism in African literate, followed a political program of littérature engagée in his approach to depicting history in fiction and film. His short story “Le Voltaïque” (1962), translated as “Tribal Scars,” chronicles two time periods in West Africa: the era just after independence and the era of the European slave trade. Allegories of slavery and modernity intertwine to present readers with powerful metaphors of scarification—the aesthetic designs of tradition as well as the scars of history and trauma—as transformative marks of resistance, unity, and Pan-Africanism. Sembène’s nouvelle is examined against the backdrop of a growing body of Africanist anthropological and photographic perspectives on slavery and scarification, comparing African literary contexts to current scholarship on the “neo-slave narrative” and to Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “slave sublime,” or “ineffable trauma,” in The Black Atlantic. The treatment of slavery in African fiction opens a vital dialogue on the relations between history and fiction, aesthetics and politics, the West and Africa.
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Notes
- 1.
Ousmane Sembène, “Tribal Scars or the Voltaïque,” Tribal Scars and Other Stories, translated by Len Ortzen (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 102–116 (hereafter abbreviated “LV”). The translation by Orzen will be used here with the significant exception of the addition of the last line of the story, inexplicably left out: “Readers, what do you think?” [“Lecteurs, qu’en pensez-vous?”]. Ousmane Sembène, “Le Voltaïque,” Le Voltaïque, la Noire de—: nouvelles (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962), pp. 189–216. Although he uses the word “tribu” in the story, Sembène does not employ the term “tribal scars.” The term today evokes the controversy of the colonialist use of “tribe” and stereotypes of primitivism. For decades the term etnie, ethnic group, has become the norm in Francophone Africa. A common word, like cicatrice, usually designates “scar” or “scarification” (which I employ to signify intentional scaring in this context), while the word belafre, employed by Sembène, has a rather obscure origin in Old French leffre and balèvre. The story employs terms such as “négrière” [slaver] and “esclave” [slave]. This paper frequently uses the words “slavery” and “slave,” as do the sources cited here; however, the terms “enslaved or enslaved person” are also employed to respect the humanity of individuals, as opposed to generic references.
- 2.
“Griot,” a term that evolved in Francophone Africa, may be defined, according to specific cultures and roles, as traditional praise-singer, sage, storyteller, poet, historian, royal linguist, etc. French dictionaries trace the word to the seventeenth-century term “guiriot,” of uncertain origin. Essentially every West African culture has specific terms for these important figures, from the Mandé term djéli to Wolof term géwél to the Twi (Akan) term okyeame. For an investigation of the origins and cultures of the griot in West Africa, see Thomas Hale, “From the griot of Roots to the roots of griot: A new look at the origins of a controversial African term for bard.” Oral Tradition 12, no. 2 (1997): 249–278.
- 3.
Key titles on the neo-slave narrative and slavery in African American literature may be referenced in Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2019).
- 4.
Achille Mbembe, “The Subject of the World,” in Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. Gert Oostindie (London: James Curry, 2002), p. 25: “[T]here is, strictly speaking, no African memory of slavery […] At most, slavery is experienced as a wound whose meaning resides in the domain of the psychic unconscious.”
- 5.
The relationship between slavery and the history of anti-Black racism—from Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (1453) to the invention of hierarchies and pseudoscientific categories by thinkers such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Morton, Gobineau, etc.—has been documented in many studies, including Ibram X. Kendi’s recent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017). For primary documents of the racism of European philosophers in the era of Enlightenment, in which philosophers promulgated equality for Europeans and slavery for Africans, see Emmanuel Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997).
- 6.
Among recent efforts to excavate primary documents from African sources, see Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein, eds., African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Vols. 1 & 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2016).
- 7.
See, for example, Edward M Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290–304; Brempong Osei-Tutu, “The African American Factor in the Commodification of Ghana’s Slave Castles,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 6 (2002): 115–133; Jennifer Hasty, “Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture.” Africa Today 49, no. 3 (2002): 47–76; Sandra L. Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons.” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 617–637.
- 8.
Ella Keren, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghanaian Academic Historiography: History, Memory, and Power.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009), p. 976.
- 9.
Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004), p. 62.
- 10.
In the period between 1640 and 1840, “the most brutal and inhumane system of slavery in Ghana’s history,” European slavers abducted approximately 1,209,000 captives. Rebecca Shumway, “Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, ed. Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 29, 31. Despite its significance as coastal center of trade, the Gold Coast was not the leading source in the transatlantic trade. See Patrick Manning, “The Slave Trade and the Demographic Evolution of Africa,” in From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited, ed. Doudou Diène (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, and Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2001) p. 109: “We are all well acquainted with the powerful images of slaves being embarked on ships from castles along the Gold Coast, or from factories on Gorée. In contrast to these images, it appears that the great majority of those who made the middle passage across the Atlantic started their crossing from other points along the coast. The greatest numbers came, in order, from Angola, the Bight of Benin, Loando (Central Africa north of the Congo River), and the Bight of Biafra.”
- 11.
Anderson Cooper, Interview with President Barack Obama. CNN. 19 July 2009. “President Obama in Ghana at the Cape Coast Dungeons.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmDoon_yC0. See also Wayne Drash, “Obama on slavery: ‘Capacity for cruelty still exists.’” CNN. 19 July 2009. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/17/obama.slavery/#.
- 12.
John F. Harris, “Clinton Says U.S. Wronged Africa.” The Washington Post. 25 March 1998. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/03/25/clinton-says-us-wronged-africa/ca090cd0-bdb8-4e33-9dfc-e66fdc2e59b6/. While United Nations International Law recognizes an apology as an official path to legal action for violations of human rights, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, accused of stopping short of apologizing for Britain’s significant role in the slave trade, followed his statements with an apology on the 200th anniversary of British abolition. Reuters staff. “Blair says ‘sorry’ for slavery.” Reuters. 20 March 2007.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-blair-slavery-idUSMOL06003620070320. The most rhetorically sophisticated, epideictic act of contrition of an American president came in the form of George W. Bush’s 2003 speech on Gorée, written by speechwriter Michael Gerson. The White House. “President George Bush Speaks on Gorée Island in Senegal.” 8 July 2003.
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/07/print/20030708-1.html.
For a critique of the manipulative rhetoric of the speech, which included references to numerous Black abolitionists and intellectuals, see Walter Johnson, “Slavery, Reparations, and the Mythic March of Freedom,” Raritan XXVII, no. 2 (Fall 2007), p. 42: “Standing on the spot where thousands were herded from stinking pens across a small wooden bridge to be packed into the holds of ships set to make a Middle Passage that many would not survive, the President of the United States—remarkably, brazenly, outrageously—described the slave trade as part of God’s ‘Providence.’ Through their struggles against injustice, he explained, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Bush thus subordinated the history of slavery to the history of ‘freedom.’”
- 13.
Bayo Holsey, “Charged Memories: The Slave Trade in Contemporary Political Discourse,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, p.234.
- 14.
See Akosua Perbi, “The Legacy of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, pp. 202–218. Perbi examines the effects of slave ancestry in modern interpersonal relations and legal decisions since abolition by colonial authorities in 1874 (extended to Asante and the northern region in 1908). Given that the 1992 Constitution of Ghana recognizes customary law, Perbi conducted interviews on traditional institutions such as chieftaincy in all of the administrative regions of the country, finding that on average 75% of respondents stated that a person of slave ancestry could not assume the office of chief. Family status and the legacy of slavery continue to profoundly affect “traditional political institutions, land tenure, issues of inheritance, and social affairs” (217). For another example, the case of Bénin, see the comments of Professor Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai: “This is still a country divided between the families of the enslaved and the slave traders. But the elite don’t want to talk about what happened here.” Kevin Sieff, “An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves.” The Washington Post. 29 January 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/an-african-country-reckons-with-its-history-of-selling-slaves/2018/01/29/5234f5aa-ff9a-11e7-86b9-8908743c79dd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80bb6e5b46ff.
- 15.
Author’s notes at Cape Coast Castle, taken in the summer of 2009.
- 16.
Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (Accra: Afram Publishing, 2004). See also Kwesi Brew, The Return of No Return, and Other Poems (Accra, Ghana: Afram Publishing, 1995). Written in Fante, the first poem on the castle and slavery retains a place of enduring importance in Ghana’s literary history: Gaddiel Acquaah, Oguaa Aban (Mfantsipim: Cape Coast, Ghana, 1938).
- 17.
Ama Ata Aidoo, “Of Forts, Castles, and Silences,” in Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. Gert Oostindie (London: James Curry, 2002), p. 30.
- 18.
The destructive economic and political impact of the slave trade, preceding the eventual European conquest of powerful polities and colonization of the continent, cannot be underestimated. From the Empire of Dahomey, rulers from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, from King Tegbesu to King Angonglo to King Adandozan, sent delegations to Salvador de Bahia and Lisbon to ensure exclusive markets of slavery with Brazil and Portugal. See Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 22–29. In contrast, in 1526, King Mvemba a Nzinga of Kôngo, famously wrote to King João III that the Portuguese “in order to satisfy their voracious appetite, seize many of our people, freed and exempt men,” asking that, in place of men engaged in pillage, he send doctors and others of good will. The letter is reproduced in Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1961), p. 147. Regardless of the response to the slave trade, European military dominance ensued, whether the seventeenth-century Portuguese conquest of the Kingdom of Kôngo or the nineteenth-century Belgian and French colonization of Congo and Dahomey, respectively—the same fate, in the most famous example, that would befall the Asante, after decades of the Anglo-Asante Wars, defeated by the British in 1900.
- 19.
Diadie Ba, “Senegal’s Wade Calls Slavery Reparations Absurd.” Independent Online. South Africa. 11 August 2001. https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/senegals-wade-calls-slave-reparations-absurd-71782
- 20.
See Note 12. Reuters, “Blair says ‘sorry’ for slavery.”
- 21.
Néciphore Soglo, “Foreword,” From Chains to Bonds, p. xiv.
- 22.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” New York Times. 23 April 2010.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html. In his speeches and interviews during the 2009 visit to Ghana, President Obama made it clear that he would continue the neoliberal economic stance of his predecessors when he asserted that he was “a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa,” and that he objected to “excuses about corruption or poor governance” that connected Africa’s problems to the colonial legacy or to neocolonialism. Quoted in Holsey, “Charged Memories,” 233.
- 23.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2003): 39–40.
- 24.
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, “Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” No date. http://ncobra.org/events/ReplyToGates.html. For an overview of the movement for reparations, see Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. For diverse perspectives on reparations, see Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, edited by Raymond A. Winbush (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
- 25.
Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 89.
- 26.
Bayo Hosley, “Owning Up to the Past?” Transition 105 (2011): 76.
- 27.
On “racial capitalism” in the making of modernity, see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). For a new engagement with the capitalist production of “racial subjects,” see Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017) p. 129: “But to understand the Black slave in the first era of capitalism, we must return to the figure of the ghost. A plastic subject who suffered a transformation through destruction, the Black Man is in effect the ghost of Modernity. It is by escaping the slave-form, engaging in new investments, and assuming the condition of the ghost that he managed to endow such transformation by destruction with a significance for the future.” Mbembe departs from the radical tradition’s reliance on Marxian models in “The Subject of the World,” in Facing Up to the Past, pp. 21–28: Starting with an apparent effort to point to the simultaneous validity and philosophical poverty of the major theoretical approaches to slavery and exploitation of Africans—from “deracination” (i.e., Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme) to “disappropriation” (i.e., Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) to “degradation” (i.e., Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death), even as the latter would seem to have influenced Mbembe’s subsequent investigations into “necropolitics”—he then criticizes nativist and nationalist approaches that rely upon “the idea of a unique African cultural identity founded on membership to the black race” (23), as well as the revolutionary application of Marxian theory, which he finds the most damaging because he believes it inevitably relies upon violence to achieve national liberation, dependency on an overdeveloped state, and the rejection of liberal democracy. Sembène the revolutionary would have disagreed vehemently with the critique of socialist revolution, but he held similar views on race, stating that “my solidarity is not based on race” and “mine is a class struggle,” which he also applied to the question of solidarity between Africa and the Diaspora. See Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist, translated by Moustapha Diop (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 141.
- 28.
Ousmane Sembène, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène by Olivier Barlet.” (Paris, 1998) 27 August 2007. http://africultures.com/interview-with-ousmane-sembene-by-olivier-barlet-6843/. Like all responsible scholars of Africa, Sembène points out the differences between domestic slavery and the European trade. Samba Gadjigo et al., Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 103: “We were the first slavers. Whenever there was a war, members of the defeated group or community were enslaved […] Traditional slavery differs from the slave trade in that the slave trade was based on money and profit. Traditionally the slaves had a representative who participated in the debates during the community meetings. Sometimes the representative was even very close to the king.” Note: Sembène’s original French responses in these interviews are also available online or in the publications.
- 29.
Ousmane Sembène, Man is Culture [bilingual text]. Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. March 5, 1975. African Studies Program (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1975), p. 3.
- 30.
Like Négritude writers whose philosophy he challenged, Sembène came of age as a writer in France—where he met intellectuals from Aimé Césaire to Jean-Paul Sartre to Richard Wright—having lived in Marseille, in what he called a French “little Harlem,” where he wrote Le Docker noir. In “Ousmane Sembène: artiste postcoloniale?,” Savrina Parevadee Chinien writes, “L’œuvre d’Ousmane Sembène est didactique et ‘engagée,’ inséparable d’une élaboration idéologique et politique,” Africultures. 5 April 2009. http://africultures.com/ousmane-sembene-artiste-postcolonial-8521/. The engaged writer should be “engaged in what? Defending freedom.” See Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), pp. 64–65: “I demand of all freedoms that they require the liberation of the colored peoples from the white race.” For an overview of the development of his work in fiction and film, see Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist.
- 31.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, pp. 32–33.
- 32.
Regarding the controversy of a baptismal record showing Equiano was born in South Carolina, which could undermine the story of his African birth, capture, and experience of the Middle Passage, Lovejoy presents some possibilities for a forged baptismal record (without denying its possible authenticity), and points to key aspects of Equiano’s life that evince an African birth, not the least of which was his lack of English in his early years in Barbados and England. See Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African.” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (December 2006): 317.
- 33.
Elizabeth Odachi Onogwu, “Between literature, facts, and fiction: perspectives on Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative”; Dorothy Chinwe Ukaegbu, “Igbo sense of place and identity in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative,” in Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections, ed. Chima J. Korieh (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009), pp. 153, 106.
- 34.
Elizabeth Allo Isichei, Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Descriptions (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978), p. 34.
- 35.
Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter, translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas (Oxford: Heinemann International Publishing, 1981), 49; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 532.
- 36.
J.E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969), 171.
- 37.
Elechi Amadi, The Slave. (London: Heinemann, 1978).
- 38.
See Modupe Olaogun, “Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta.” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (2002): 171–193.
- 39.
Murphy, Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), p. 179.
- 40.
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, “Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries.” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 4 (2009): 28.
- 41.
Yaw Boateng, The Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. v.
- 42.
Ayi Kwei, Armah, The Healers (Popenguine, Sénégal: Per Ankh, 2000), p. 340.
- 43.
See Kwame Ayivor, “The Golden Image of the Akan Negated: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers.” English in Africa 27, no. 2 (2000): 59–84.
- 44.
Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Chicago: Third World Press, 1980), p. 5.
- 45.
Kwavuki Azasu, The Slave Raiders (Accra, Ghana: Yamens Publishing, 2004).
- 46.
Obi O. Akwani’s March of Ages (Enugu, Nigeria, 2003), p. 73.
- 47.
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), p. 39.
- 48.
Nonki Motahane, Oliver Nyambi, and Rodwell Makombe, “Rooting Routes to Trans-Atlantic African Identities: The Metaphor of Female Descendancy in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.” African Identities 19, no. 1 (2021): 24.
- 49.
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, p. 89. The analogy, extended through fires consuming and haunting the family line in Ghana, is strikingly similar to one made by a scholar focusing on slavery in Ghana. Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (New York: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 72: “My preferred analogy, given that a trade in human beings, though marginal, did exist prior to European arrival, is to view the European and American presence as a match that was lit to bits of paper on the African coast. Once lit, it became a fire. If there had been no match, perhaps there would have been no fire.”
- 50.
When feminist scholar Roxanne Gay called the novel “exceptionally engaging and the strongest case for reparations and black rage I’ve read in a long time,” her review was cited by multiple reviewers and interviewers. Roxanne Gay, Online review of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. 23 April 2016. www.goodreads.com/review/show/1618778364. When asked about her position on reparations, Yaa Gyasi replied, “I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates in that there is a case for it.” Yogita Goyal and Yaa Gyasi, “An Interview with Yaa Gyasi.” Contemporary Literature 60, no. 4 (2019): 483.
- 51.
Yogita Goyal and Yaa Gyasi, p. 481.
- 52.
Notable contemporary works, of various disciplinary approaches, include: Philip Curtin, ed. Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Cornelius Oyeleke Adepegba, “A Survey of Nigerian Body Markings and Their Relationship to Other Nigerian Arts.” (Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1976); Arnold Rubin, Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body (Los Angeles: University of California, 1988); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Enid Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 319–344; Marcos André Torres de Souza and Camilla Agostini, “Body Marks, Pots, and Pipes: Some Correlations between African Scarifications and Pottery Decoration in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” Historical Archaeology 46, no. 3 (2012): 102–123; Megan Vaughan, “Scarification in Africa: Re-reading Colonial Evidence.” Journal of the Social History Society 4, no. 3 (2015): 385–400; Roland Gavre and Mariam Gavre et al., “Scarification in sub-Saharan African: social skin, remedy and medical import.” Tropical Medicine 22, no. 6 (2017): 708–715; Adair Rodrigues, “African Body Marks, Stereotypes and Racialization in Eighteenth-Century Brazil. Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 2 (2021): 315–344. Research on scarification represented in African arts, such as sculptures and masks, is also extensive, for example: Joseph Nevadomsky and Aisien Ekhaguosa Aisien, “The Clothing of Political Identity: Costume and Scarification in the Benin Kingdom.” African Arts 28, no. 1 (1995): 62–100. See note 61 on Yoruba practices.
- 53.
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Scarification and the Loss of History in the African Diaspora,” in Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2019), p. 221–249.
- 54.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- 55.
Exposing aspects of slavery and domination under Islam in West Africa and the Sahel region in particular, Sembène’s film Ceddo (1977), banned after its release by the Senegalese government, evokes a comparison with slavery in the U.S.: after the ceddo (outsiders, non-Muslims) perform their own religious rites during Muslim prayers, the soundtrack shifts to American Gospel music at the moment their Muslim oppressors are shown selling slaves to a European merchant. See Amkpa, Awam, and Gunja SenGupta. “Picturing Homes and Border Crossings: The Slavery Trope in Films on the Black Atlantic,” in Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011), pp. 359–387. A work often considered West Africa’s most controversial novel also deals with a taboo depiction of Islamic domination and Arab slavery: In a complex satire drawing on Sufi theology and intertextual collage, Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968) portrays the centuries of violence in the Western Sudan wrought by Islam since the Songhay Empire, and by French colonialism and Christianity.
- 56.
Christiana Oware Knudsen, The Patterned Skin: Ethnic Scarification in Developing Ghana (Højbjerg, Denmark: Intervention Press, 2000), p. 20.
- 57.
A notable colonial-era source on the Gold Coast is R. S. Rattray’s The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland Vols I, II. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), which includes various illustrations on scarification and classification of societies in a region that endured centuries of slave raiding and extensive slave markets (including the largest, Salaga). Among the most widely known field workers of the early twentieth century, Rattray attributes to powerful Muslim slavers such as Babatu the practice of marking peoples bound for slavery to the point that “whatever once may have been the value of tribal marks as a means of distinguishing tribes or clans, tattooing, with certain exceptions, is now a somewhat uncertain criterion by which to judge such matters” (229). On the shortcomings of the nonetheless indispensable work of Rattray, see McCaskie, T. C. “R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal.” History in Africa 10 (1983): 187–206.
- 58.
Terence S. Turner (2012 [1980]). “The Social Skin.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 503.
- 59.
Joana Choumali, Hââbré: The Last Generation (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 2016). Eleven of the book’s photographs are published in large format in a feature review online, which highlights the perspectives of West Africans in the “last generation”: Brooks, Catherine, “This Is The Last Generation Of Scarification In Africa.” Huffington Post. 6 December 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scarification_n_5850882.
- 60.
Wole Soyinka. Aké: The Years of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 146.
- 61.
Oluranti Edward Ojo and Israel Abayomi Saibu, “Understanding the Socio-Cultural Identity of the Yoruba in Nigeria: Reassessing Cicatrix as Facial Marks, Scarification and Tattoo.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 27 (2018): 145, 150. The literature on Igbo and Yoruba practices is extensive. Recent detailed studies of the latter include: Olatunji Ojo, “Beyond Diversity: Women, Scarification, and Yoruba Identity.” History in Africa 35 (2008): 347–374; Ọlanikẹ Ọla Orie, “The Structure and Function of Yoruba Facial Scarification.” Anthropological Linguistics 53, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 15–33. Orie also concludes that “the culture of marking facial stripes is fast disappearing among the Yoruba,” mentioning federal and local bans on the practice (30–31).
- 62.
On the life and career of Anton Wilhelm Amo, see Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 111–130.
- 63.
Alluding to Plato’s ideal of philosophers as leaders in the Republic, the phrase reflects the advanced degrees and intellectual accomplishments of several African postcolonial presidents, borrowed from Ali Mazrui, “On Poet-Presidents and Philosopher-Kings.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 2 (1990): 13–19.
- 64.
Annette Busch and Max Annas, eds. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), p. 52–53. On French neocolonialism, see Françios-Xavier Verschave, Françafrique: La plus longue scandale de la République (Paris: Stock, 1998); Pascal Airault and Jean-Pierre Bat, Françafrique: Opérations secrètes et affaires d’État (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2019).
- 65.
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, “Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries,” p. 28.
- 66.
David Murphy, Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Oxford: James Curry; Trenton: Africa World, 2000), p. 42. Two other articles briefly discuss “Le Voltaïque”: V.S. Boafo, “‘Voltaïque’ d’Ousmane Sembène. Commentaires et observations.” Présence francophone 15 (1977): 11–30; Denise Brahimi, “L’anthropologie factice de Sembène Ousmane dans ‘Le Voltaïque.’” Bayreuther Beiträge Zur Literaturwissenschaft (1987): 203–209. Brahimi correctly suggests, without analysis of the relevant aspects of the story, that “Le Voltaïque” departs from the ethnographic approach of Africanists.
- 67.
In the preface to a novel first published in 1964, Sembène compares the griot and the modern novelist. Ousmane Sembène, “Avertissement,” L’Harmattan (Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine, 1980), p. 9: “In the Africa that we might call the classical age, the griot was not only the dynamic element of his tribe, clan, and village, but also the witness, the recorder of every event. It was he who, under the palaver tree, registered for the community the deeds and gestures of every member. My conception of my work derives from this task: to remain just as close to the real and to the people.” Translation by the author. [[D]ans cette Afrique qui passe pour classique, le griot était non seulement l’élément dynamique de sa tribu, clan, village, mais aussi le témoin, patent de chaque événement. C’est lui qui enregistrait, déposait devant tous, sous l’arbre à palabre, les faits et gestes de chacun. La conception de mon travail découle de cet enseignement: rester au plus près du réel et du peuple.”]. See also Anthère Nzbatsinda, “Le Griot dans le récit d’Ousmane Sembène: entre la rupture et la continuité d’une représentation de la parole africaine.” American Association of Teachers of French 70, no. 6 (1997): 865–872; Mbye Baboucar Cham, “Ousmane Sembène and the Aesthetics of Oral Tradition.” Africana Journal 14, nos. 1–4 (1982): 24–40.
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Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Kwame Nkrumah, Two Myths (London: Panaf Books, 1968); on Nkrumah and communalism, see also Hountondji, African Philosophy, pp. 131–155.
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Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 97–144.
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David Murphy, Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction, 46.
- 71.
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 106. With respect to the realist history of the politicization of allegory, Fredric Jameson summarizes the “vulgar Marxist practice of reducing characters to mere allegories of social forces, of turning ‘typical’ characters into mere symbols of class.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, he also stresses the ability of allegory, as opposed to symbol, to register historical duration and decay. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 71–73, 193.
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Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 215.
- 73.
King, Martin Luther. “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist ChurchKing, Martin Luther. “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2001), p. 96.
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Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 216.
- 75.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 133, 169.
- 76.
Christopher Wise, “Saying ‘Yes’ to Africa: Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx.’” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 130.
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Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979), p. 25.
- 78.
Quoted in Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres, p. 53: “I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears,” wrote Richard Wright after the sentimentalism of the reception of his Uncle Tom’s Children. Goyal mentions Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Edward Jones, and Charles Johnson as writers who have to a certain extent followed Wright’s effort to deny readers’ easy identification and sentimentalism in the neo-slave genre.
- 79.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 2001), p. 23.
- 80.
Anna Phillips, The ‘Slave Sublime’ (Master’s Thesis, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2008), p. 38.
- 81.
See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1994); The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
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Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (Serpent’s Tail: London, 1993), p. 221.
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Janis, M. (2024). African Scarification and Slavery: From Anthropology to Allegory. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52026-6_11
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