Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso remembers U. S. President George W. Bush asking him, late in 2001, “Do you have blacks in Brazil?” Gerald Horne's book is for persons who know the answer to Bush's question but are less aware of the U. S. role in bringing captive Africans to Brazil in the nineteenth century and dealing with the large South American slave power. Horne draws together several strands of the story of how U. S. nationals dealt with, and thought of, Brazil during the eighty years before abolition came to that country in 1888. At the core of each strand is either the slave trade or slavery. In the 1830s, slave-based agriculture was expanding in the U. S. South at the very time opposition to human bondage was growing in other parts of the country—and beyond. In states where slavery was outlawed and abolition movements were springing up, American investors, ship builders, manufacturers of trade goods, and shippers profited from the fact that slaves were steadily being acquired along Africa's tropical coasts and transported to Brazil for sale. Helping this along was the U. S. government's refusal to allow British patrol ships to search suspicious vessels flying the American flag. Once gold was discovered in California and shiploads of Americans headed for California by sea around Cape Horn and stopped in Rio de Janeiro, interest in Brazil heightened, especially among slavery's supporters. Some southerners—Horne focuses on two Virginians, Governor Henry Alexander Wise and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury—considered Brazil as a possible spot to relocate with human chattel and, as the Civil War approached, entertained notions that a strong trade relationship with Brazil might hold off abolitionist pressures from the northern states and Great Britain. With the war's end and emancipation, Brazil became a place of retreat for former Confederates, who could not abide life in the United States on a theoretically equal footing with their former slaves. Unable to bring their human chattel with them, most of these expatriate “Confederados” faced disappointment and returned. The few who remained in Brazil grew bitter as they fought abolition in their new homeland.

Arnold Hughes and David Perfect. A Political History of The Gambia, 1816–1994. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2006. xviii + 530 pp. Map. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 91.00. Paper. - Volume 50 Issue 3

As we examine the extraordinary recent scholarship on slavery in colonial North America (1), it is important to recognize how far we have come, and how fast. When I attended high school in the early 1960s, teachers still used Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager's The Growth of the American Republic. (It was the tenth printing of the fourth edition, published in 1950, which emphasizes how long textbooks tend to hang around high school classrooms.) This book, which set the standard for American history for a generation (in spite of the authors' unfortunate characterization of the typical antebellum slave as “Sambo”), contained virtually no mention of slavery's existence in North America before the nineteenth century. I completed graduate course work in 1974, shortly before Peter H. Wood's Black Majority (1974) and Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), opened many eyes to slavery's origins...

Lamin Sanneh. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 291. $29.95 Sanneh Lamin. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 291. $29.95. Donald R. Wright Donald R. Wright State University of New YorkCortland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 4, October 2001, Pages 1508–1509, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.4.1508 Published: 01 October 2001

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture - subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In an example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies. Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, this text aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.

I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in which, in the first part, I taught about “Bantu Expansion” as I had done in my first year on the job, way back in 1976. I had read Roland Oliver's 1966 article in theJournal of African History, which had made everything clear to me once upon a time.With that as a basis I laid out an entire scheme about how these humans, who spoke related languages, had populated nearly all of sub-equatorial Africa since the beginning of the modern era. I had maps on overhead projection (copies handed out) showing when the Bantu migrated where; I spoke of the evidence for it all, even reading from Ptolemy'sGeographyand thePeriplus of the Erythraean Sea; and recalled how clear it all was to myself and the students, who wrote down nearly every word and made notations on the maps.Then, in the second part of the lecture, I talked about how incorrect it all was (student pens here coming to rest)—how our reading of some of the linguistic evidence was faulty, how we read things into Ptolemy and thePeriplusbecause they fit the scheme, and how subsequent archeological evidence has simply proved most of the neat scheme wrong. I concluded with an honest, if pessimistic, note that, because of the paucity of evidence, there simply is a lot about early African history that we will not be able to know.

From Free Trade to the imperialism of Free Trade - the geographical and historical background of 19th-century Guinea competition between two states - Kaabu and Futa Jallon the rise of Faladu the internal crisis in Senegambia and Guinea, 1880-1903 Legitimate Commerce and the investment in law and order Portuguese colonialism and its discontents - Abdul Njai and the investment in law and order on the ground, 1903-1919.

I made a mistake teaching my course on precolonial African history this past fall. I vowed (to myself) to be absolutely honest. I decided to admit to students how little historians know for certain about much of Africa's early history. I focused on the evidence, emphasizing how little there is for determining what occurred several centuries ago—let alone 2000 years ago—in sub-Saharan Africa. I gave one lecture—downright sterling, I thought—in which, in the first part, I taught about “Bantu Expansion” as I had done in my first year on the job, way back in 1976. I had read Roland Oliver's 1966 article in the Journal of African History, which had made everything clear to me once upon a time. With that as a basis I laid out an entire scheme about how these humans, who spoke related languages, had populated nearly all of sub-equatorial Africa since the beginning of the modern era. I had maps on overhead projection (copies handed out) showing when the Bantu migrated where; I spoke of the evidence for it all, even reading from Ptolemy's Geography and the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea; and recalled how clear it all was to myself and the students, who wrote down nearly every word and made notations on the maps. Then, in the second part of the lecture, I talked about how incorrect it all was (student pens here coming to rest)—how our reading of some of the linguistic evidence was faulty, how we read things into Ptolemy and the Periplus because they fit the scheme, and how subsequent archeological evidence has simply proved most of the neat scheme wrong. I concluded with an honest, if pessimistic, note that, because of the paucity of evidence, there simply is a lot about early African history that we will not be able to know.

Journal Article Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775. By Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xviii, 402 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2197-7.) Get access Donald R. Wright Donald R. Wright State University of New York, College at Cortland, Cortland, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 1, June 1996, Pages 178–179, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945497 Published: 01 June 1996