Slavery in the Age of Memory

Engaging the Past

Ana Lucia Araujo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350048508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Exploring notions of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past explains how ordinary citizens, social groups, governments and institutions engage with the past of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It illuminates how and why over the last five decades the debates about slavery have become so relevant in the societies where slavery existed and which participated in the Atlantic slave trade. The book draws on a variety of case studies to investigate its central questions. How have social actors and groups in Europe, Africa and the Americas engaged with the slave past of their societies? Are there are any relations between the demands to rename streets of Liverpool in England and the protests to take down Confederate monuments in the United States? How have black and white social actors and scholars influenced the ways slavery is represented in George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in the United States?How do slave cemeteries in Brazil and the United States and the walls of names of Whitney Plantation speak to other initiatives honoring enslaved people in England and South Africa? What shared problems and goals have led to the creation of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC? Why have artists used their works to confront the debates about slavery and its legacies? The important debates addressed in this book resonate in the present day. Arguing that memory of slavery is racialized and gendered, the book shows that more than just attempts to come to terms with the past, debates about slavery are associated with the persistent racial inequalities, racism, and white supremacy which still shape societies where slavery existed. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past is thus a vital resource for students and scholars of the Atlantic world, the history of slavery and public history.

1

Weaving Collective Memory

Over the generations, despite myriad of obstacles, enslaved men and women and their descendants have managed to preserve a collective memory of the period in which they lived in bondage. Marked by gaps, absences, and unanswered questions, in most cases collective memory of slavery is accessible through oral accounts passed on by the last generations of enslaved individuals. As collective memory relies on transmission, the families of rich slave merchants and slave owners, who today still carry the names of their ancestors, tend to have better preserved oral accounts, narratives, documents, and artifacts, permitting them access to parts of their past, which, in turn, nourishes their collective memory. This same kind of transmission could hardly occur among bondspeople and their descendants. Regardless of exceptions, most enslaved persons and freedpeople remained illiterate. Moreover, they faced myriad obstacles that deprived them of the very basic means for livelihood. Hindrances such as being prevented from accumulating property, and family separation, seriously complicated the propagation of reminiscences, knowledge, and experiences to their descendants.

This chapter discusses what collective memory is and how it relates to slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. I argue that in the context of these atrocities collective memory is racialized, gendered, and shaped by the ideology of white supremacy. Therefore, this modality of memory is neither homogeneous nor immutable.¹ This is the reason why it would be inappropriate to refer to a collective memory as being true or false, because memory, like history, to varying degrees, is always biased.² By exploring examples from West Africa and the Americas, this chapter shows how certain narratives predominate among specific groups in former slave societies and societies that were deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade. I open the chapter by examining the contrasting ways the descendants of slaves and slave traders have addressed the slave past in their own families and at the local level in the Kingdom of Dahomey, today part of the Republic of Benin, a small country in West Africa. Next, I discuss how descendants of slave merchants and slave owners in the United States have engaged with the slave-trading and slave-owning pasts of their families, in contrast to the ways groups who identify themselves as descendants of slaves remember this tragic history. I analyze three examples that have become well known in the United States. I start with the case of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and his enslaved black family, the Hemingses. I also explore two other examples: first, the Balls, a large slave-owning family from South Carolina; second, the DeWolfs, a family of slaveholders and slave merchants from Rhode Island. I emphasize that collective memory of slavery and the slave trade is never uniform. Instead, it varies among various groups and sometimes among different members of a same group, depending on how they position themselves in relation to these past atrocities.

Intertwined Memories of Slavers and Enslaved

Can descendants of slave merchants celebrate the slaving past of their families? At various times and in different places, the progeny of some slaveholding families and slave traders have continued to take pride in their ancestors’ slaving activities. Until the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, many descendants of slave owners, especially in the South, were not at all ashamed of the fact that their ancestors owned slaves. Perhaps today, these families no longer dare to make public statements praising their slave-owning past. Yet, in West Africa today, many scions of slave owners and slave merchants still commend their families’ slave-trading activities in private and public spaces.

The Republic of Benin, a West African country encompassing the region of the old Kingdom of Dahomey, offers one of the richest cases for the study of collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade. Dahomey emerged in the seventeenth century in the hinterland of the Bight of Benin (bay stretching from Cape St. Paul in Ghana to the Niger River’s Nun outlet, in Nigeria) and started expanding its territory in the early eighteenth century. The kingdom was ruled by a dynasty of speakers of Fon, a Gbe language that is part of the Volta-Niger subdivision of the Niger-Congo family. Since its inception, Dahomey was a militarized state, in which warfare played a central role.³

Engagement with Europeans gave Dahomey access to firearms. These weapons afforded the kingdom an advantage to lead raids and wage war against its neighbors, including the Ewe in the west, the Mahi in the north, and Yoruba-speaking groups located mainly in the northeast area, up to present-day region of Abeokuta, in Nigeria. The Dahomean army took many prisoners during these raids and military campaigns. Some captives remained enslaved in the kingdom’s territory, where they performed religious duties, agricultural labor, and domestic service. Others were sacrificed during religious ceremonies. But most captives were sold into slavery. Among them was Oluale Kossola (c. 1841–1935) known as Cudjo Lewis, who was brought to the United States on board the slave ship Clotilda in 1860. Kossola narrated in detail how he was captured during one of these raids, then transported by middlemen to the coast, where along with others he was sold to slave merchants and shipped to the Americas.⁴

During the eighteenth century, Dahomey expanded. After conquering the Kingdom of Hueda in 1727, the kingdom seized the port of Ouidah, gaining direct access to the coast. Ouidah alone exported nearly 22 percent of the enslaved Africans sent to the Americas.⁵ In the next decades, Dahomey became a major player in the Atlantic slave trade in the Bight of Benin. Yet the kingdom did not have a monopoly on the slave trade in the region. In this same period, the Oyo Empire, located northeast of Dahomey, became one of its fiercest rivals. After successful raids during the first half of the eighteenth century, Oyo forced Dahomey to pay huge tributes, an imposition that lasted until the 1820s. Over the eighteenth century, Ouidah became the second largest slave port in Africa, second only to Luanda in present-day Angola. But progressively Oyo came to control slave ports such as Porto-Novo in the modern-day Republic of Benin. Gradually other ports such as Lagos and Badagry, in contemporary Nigeria, acquired importance as well. Slave merchants from Europe and the Americas established themselves in Ouidah and other Bight of Benin ports. Moreover, during the nineteenth century, hundreds of freedmen and freedwomen who left Brazil after a failed slave rebellion settled in the region.⁶ Back in West Africa, several of these formerly enslaved individuals became slave merchants or worked on activities related to the infamous trade.

The Republic of Benin’s complex involvement in the Atlantic slave trade shapes the collective memories of the descendants of slave traders, slave owners, and enslaved persons. How do freedpeople who left the Americas to settle in Ouidah, as well as heirs of slave owners and descendants of the Dahomean royal family, collectively remember slavery? How do descendants of men and women who were kept in slavery on African soil and those of freedpeople from Brazil who settled in the region remember slavery and the Atlantic slave trade? Understanding these multiple dimensions of collective memory helps us to see that bondage and the trade in human beings have been conceived differently for multiple social actors and groups during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. These different views that have survived in the present still model the relations among the descendants of these different groups. In other words, these questions provide clarification of such nuances, which are important to comprehend today’s debates around the history and legacies of these atrocities.

The slave merchant Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849) is one of the most controversial figures embodying the slave-trading past of Dahomey and the present-day Republic of Benin. Souza was most likely born in Salvador (Bahia) in Brazil in 1754.⁷ He first arrived in the Bight of Benin in 1792 and may have remained in the region for nearly three years, before returning to Brazil and then back to West Africa in 1800. In the early nineteenth century, the slave trade between the Bight of Benin and Brazil was at its summit. Souza first settled in Ouidah to work at the Portuguese fort of São João Batista da Ajuda, moving on later to become the fort’s director.⁸

Souza’s wealth and political power made him a pivotal figure in the construction of the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade in the Republic of Benin. His influence was based on a large network including the Dahomean royal family, other slave merchants, as well as freedmen and freedwomen who left Brazil to settle in Ouidah. The importance of Souza’s large and extended family along with his intrepid life as a slave trader has inspired novelists and screenwriters who often represented him as an adventurer. His legacy is still alive among his clan and in the Republic of Benin’s collective memory.⁹

In Ouidah, a city whose current population is estimated at around 92,000 residents, Souza is a well-known character. Since the nineteenth century in Dahomey and until today in the Republic of Benin, the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade is manifested through a variety of modalities. Religion is one of these frameworks. The collective memory of slavery, especially in the Souza family, is shaped by Catholicism, the religion of the clan’s founder. But another influence is Vodun, a West African religion characterized by trance, possession, and the belief in the existence of a great number of deities.¹⁰ Family in and of itself is a key framework of collective memory. Among Souza’s descendants, the Atlantic slave trade is remembered through stories about their forefather. These recollections are also fashioned by the clan’s current relations with the Dahomean royal family and with the descendants of his collaborators and other men and women who depended on him, among whom there were persons locally enslaved.

Souza’s slave-trading activities impacted not only his immediate circle but also the lives of a wide range of individuals, including the Dahomean royal family; European and American-born slave merchants; the men, women, and children owned by him; as well as entire families of freed individuals, who over the nineteenth century settled in Ouidah and the neighboring towns. Each of these groups and their descendants remembers the slave trade, and Souza’s involvement in it, in different ways.

Souza’s earliest activities in Ouidah coincided with the reign of the infamous King Adandozan, who ruled Dahomey from 1797 to 1818. Although Adandozan is an important figure in the Republic of Benin’s collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade, his successors to the throne erased his name from the list of Dahomean kings. The king acquired a bad reputation because after taking power he allegedly transgressed local customs by selling into slavery Dahomean-born individuals, including noblemen and noblewomen, involved in the plot that led to the assassination of his father.¹¹ However, he was not the first king to break this rule. Actually, preceding and later rulers also sold members of the royal family into slavery. Indeed, Adandozan governed Dahomey during a period of economic and political crisis, when Ouidah’s slave trade activity, the kingdom’s main source of revenues, went into decline. Following the end of the British slave trade in 1807, Britain increased the pressures to prohibit the slave trade from Africa to Brazil, one of the main destinations of enslaved Africans embarked in Ouidah. Moreover, during the same period its position as the largest West African slave port was threatened by the growing importance of Lagos.¹²

After a clash with King Adandozan, probably because of debt related to the slave trade, Souza was jailed in Abomey, the capital of Dahomey. In prison, Souza encountered Prince Gakpe, Adandozan’s half-brother and future King Gezo, who organized his escape, a story depicted in Werner Herzog’s motion picture Cobra Verde.¹³ Later, Souza supported the prince in a coup d’état that removed Adandozan from power. Once made king, to pay back his support, Gezo awarded Souza with financial advantages and political power. Over the next years, Souza became one of the wealthiest slave merchants of West Africa and Gezo’s most important intermediary in Ouidah’s slave-trading activities. Because of his close ties with the Dahomean royal family, Souza is still today considered the founder of a dynasty of sorts and referred to as the Viceroy of Dahomey, even though this title did not exist. In his family, Souza is remembered as a great leader, a wealthy and seductive man, whose exceptional qualities made him a key player in changing the course of Dahomean history.

Souza’s relations with Gezo also contributed to the development of other dimensions of the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade in Dahomey. Oral tradition, today largely accepted by scholars, states that when Adandozan took power, he sold Gezo’s putative mother, Na Agontimé, who subsequently may have been sent into slavery to Brazil.¹⁴ As Souza was Brazilian, oral tradition also emphasizes that Gezo gave Souza the task of traveling to Brazil to find his Dahomean enslaved mother. But despite the existence of several cases of emissaries sent to the Americas to rescue African noble individuals sold into slavery, there is no evidence that Souza effectively traveled to Brazil to accomplish this task or that Na Agontimé was ever rescued. A persistent familial recollection by the members of Souza even today, this story is an important example on how Souza is associated with the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade in Dahomey, not as a slave merchant who sold individuals into slavery but rather as a redeemer.

British travelers who sojourned in Ouidah also contributed to construct an image of Souza as a compassionate man. Contemporary accounts not only depicted him as disposed to liberate his slaves but also described him as a man concerned with human rights. Scottish traveler John Duncan reported that Souza and other slave dealers were all benevolent to their slaves. Likewise, Duncan stated that slaves did not perform much work in Dahomey. Also, Souza treated his slaves so well that they refused to be freed.¹⁵ Likewise, British naval officer Frederick E. Forbes underscored that Souza’s values differed from those of the indigenous population, because he opposed the practice of human sacrifice.¹⁶ Travelers who met Souza also attested to his projected image as a great philanthropist, substantiating that he saved the lives of many captives he purchased for export preventing them from being sacrificed in Vodun religious ceremonies. Souza’s descendants still remember him through a praise-name that, according to them, states that he bought an enslaved man to give him back to his family. However, this praise-name indeed asserts that Souza “bought the child and the child’s mother,” conveying a clear reference to Souza’s power and wealth.¹⁷

Religion as a Framework of Collective Memory

The collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade as embodied by Souza and his lineage also operates within a religious framework. Both Portugal and its Brazilian colonies were Catholic societies governed by a monarchy. As a Portuguese subject until 1822, year of the Brazilian independence, Souza is perceived not only as a Catholic but also as the one who introduced Catholicism in Dahomey in the early nineteenth century. Yet the Brazilian slave trader also embraced other local religious traditions, especially Vodun. Therefore, when Souza settled in Ouidah, King Gezo ordered the installation of several Vodun shrines in the city to protect him. Still today the descendants of the priests sent to Ouidah during Gezo’s reign remain close to the Souza family. These religious chiefs were captives captured in neighboring regions. Whereas some were brought to Ouidah to be sold into slavery and sent to the Americas, others remained enslaved locally.¹⁸ Their presence exposed the conflictual relations between Souza and the Dahomean royalty, as through them the king could exert control over the slave merchant and his family.

Upon his death, Souza himself became a sort of Vodun deity. Following the local tradition, his body was buried inside his original house located in his compound in Ouidah, transforming it into a family memorial. The memorial houses a gallery of portraits of various important male members of the family. It also includes the slave trader’s tomb and his original bed, which is prepared every day as if he were still alive. The religious framework of Souza’s collective memory is emphasized in a large statue of a barefoot Saint Francis of Assisi. Lying at one end of the white marble tomb, the statue of the Catholic saint implies that practicing Catholicism and selling human beings were not conflicting activities. In addition to Catholicism, other religious traditions are represented in his memorial. Close to Souza’s tomb is a large ceramic jar that according to his family members was brought by him from Brazil. This jar contains water, used in libation rituals aimed at healing members of the family. Embedded in a religious construct that mixes Catholicism and Vodun, the collective memory of the slave merchant and his progeny remains alive through a variety of artifacts and rituals, in which Souza’s Brazilian origins play a prominent role.

When showing the site to visitors, Souza’s family members explain that when their ancestor died, the King of Dahomey sent a dozen slaves to be sacrificed and buried in his tomb. But Souza’s children rejected the ritual and ordered instead the men to be freed. Despite this Westernized and humane image of the family opposing both local ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Slavery and Memory
• 1 Weaving Collective Memory
• 2 Shrines of Cultural Memory
• 3 Battles of Public Memory
• 4 Setting Slavery in the Museum
• 5 Memory and Public History
• 6 Art of Memory
• Epilogue: The Persistence of the Past
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint