Shrines of the Slave Trade

1999-05-13

By a process that remains unclear, participants in the slave trade gradually gained control of one of the most central shrines of the Esulalu community. They became the intermediaries in prayers for the well-being and fertility of most ...

Author: Robert Martin Baum

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

ISBN: 9780195123920

Category: History

Page: 287

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In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height. Baum shows that Diola community leaders used a complex of religious shrines and priesthoods to regulate and contain the influence of the slave trade. He demonstrates how this close involvement with the traders significantly changed Diola religious life.
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Shrines of the Slave Trade

1999-05-13

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height.

Author: Robert M. Baum

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 0195352475

Category: Religion

Page: 304

View: 952

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In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height. Baum shows that Diola community leaders used a complex of religious shrines and priesthoods to regulate and contain the influence of the slave trade. He demonstrates how this close involvement with the traders significantly changed Diola religious life.
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Memories of the Slave Trade

2020-04-04

First, in the Casamance region of Senegal, Diola lineage spirit shrines (hupila) underwent profound metamorphoses during the Atlantic slave trade— which, on this part of the West African coast, endured until the late nineteenth century ...

Author: Rosalind Shaw

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226764467

Category: Social Science

Page: 320

View: 183

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How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? 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, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques. 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. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.
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The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas

2011

14 Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade, pp. 116-118. 15 Africa was a land of graves without bodies – part of a poem of the Ghanain poet Kwadmo Opoku- Agyeman, after: Hartmann, Markets and Martyrs, in: Hartmann, Lose Your Mother, pp.

Author: Ulrike Schmieder

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

ISBN: 9783643103451

Category: History

Page: 169

View: 491

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For centuries, social and economic relations within the Atlantic space were dominated by slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. However, when the trade ended, slave labor in America was replaced, by other forms of coerced labor. This book focuses on the transformation of societies after the slave trade and slavery. It combines micro- and macro-historical approaches and looks at the agency of slaves, missionaries, abolitionists, state officials, seamen, and soldiers.
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Activating the Past

2009-12-14

This shrine had no wooden fetters by its altar and was considered to be one of the oldest shrines in Esulalu.19 As the relationship between the Hupila shrine and the slave trade intensified, Esulalu traders became more familiar with ...

Author: Andrew Apter

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

ISBN: 9781443817905

Category: History

Page: 470

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Activating the Past explores critical historical events and transformations associated with embodied memories in the Black Atlantic world. The assembled case-studies disclose hidden historical references to local and regional encounters with Atlantic modernity, focusing on religious festivals that represent political and economic relationships in “fetishized” forms of power and value. Although memories of the slave trade are rarely acknowledged in West Africa and the Americas, they have retreated, so to speak, within ritual associations as restricted, repressed, even secret histories that are activated during public festivals and through different styles of spirit possession. In West Africa, our focus on selected port cities along the coast extends into the hinterlands, where slave raiding occurred but is poorly documented and rarely acknowledged. In the Caribbean, regional contrasts between coastal and hinterland communities relate figures of the jíbaro, the indio and the caboclo to their ritual representations in Santería, Vodou, and Candomblé. Highlighting the spatial association of memories with shrines and the ritual “condensation” of regional geographies, we locate local spirits and domestic terrains within co-extensive Atlantic horizons. The volume brings together leading scholars of the African Diaspora who not only explore these ritual archives for significant echoes of the past, but also illuminate a subaltern historiography embedded within Atlantic cultural systems.
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African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade Volume 2 Essays on Sources and Methods

2016-04-14

Robert Baum has written about the ways Diola shrines facilitated the slave trade.32 Rosalind Shaw has seen in witchcraft belief the fears and insecurities engendered by slave-raiding and slave-trading.33 Scholars working in the Americas ...

Author: Alice Bellagamba

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781316538784

Category: History

Page:

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What were the experiences of those in Africa who suffered from the practice of slavery, those who found themselves captured and sold from person to person, those who died on the trails, those who were forced to live in fear? And what of those Africans who profited from the slave trade and slavery? What were their perspectives? How do we access any of these experiences and views? This volume explores diverse sources such as oral testimonies, possession rituals, Arabic language sources, European missionary, administrative and court records and African intellectual writings to discover what they can tell us about slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Also discussed are the methodologies that can be used to uncover the often hidden experiences of Africans embedded in these sources. This book will be invaluable for students and researchers interested in the history of slavery, the slave trade and post-slavery in Africa.
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Philanthropy in the World s Traditions

1998

Refugees always had the possibility of fleeing to safety , even if they were being pursued by the king's men.24 During the slave trade period , many regions had shrines to which slaves , or people in danger of becoming slaves , could ...

Author: Warren Frederick Ilchman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

ISBN: 025333392X

Category: Social Science

Page: 382

View: 418

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Though voluntary association for the public good is often thought of as a peculiarly Western, even Christian concept, this book demonstrates that there are rich traditions of philanthropy in cultures throughout the world. Essays study philanthropy in Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, and Native American religious traditions, as well as many other cultures.
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Fighting the Slave Trade

2003-10-24

Thus, he built his capital, Hamdullahi, off the major trade routes. ... All the tradition tells us is that slaves served and were freed. ... Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia.

Author: Sylviane A. Diouf

Publisher: Ohio University Press

ISBN: 9780821441800

Category: History

Page: 288

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While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention. But our picture of the slave trade is incomplete without an examination of the ways in which men and women responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and deportation. Fighting the Slave Trade is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade and shows that resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged by the orthodox interpretation of historical literature. Focused on West Africa, the essays collected here examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. In chapters discussing the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, marronage, violent assaults on ships and entrepôts, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it, Fighting the Slave Trade presents a much more complete picture of the West African slave trade than has previously been available.
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Slave Traders by Invitation

2018-07-01

Notably Robert M. Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade. Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford University Press, 1999), 97 & 178; Shumway (2011b), 133. Law (2004a), 50. Ibid., 153. See her books Et si l'Afrique ...

Author: Finn Fuglestad

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780190934972

Category: History

Page:

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The Slave Coast, situated in what is now the West African state of Benin, was the epicentre of the Atlantic Slave Trade. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, it was this coastline that witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relation-ship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organised? And how did the locals react to the opportunities these new trading relations offered them? The Kingdom of Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Fuglestad's book seeks to explain the Dahomean 'anomaly' and its impact on the Slave Coast's societies and polities.
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