Africa Then

...The volume is divided into three parts: African travelers of the Eighteenth Century, travelers to the Gold Coast hinterland, and four Nineteenth Century Nigerians...

...All of the documents describe the slave trade from the non-European viewpoint, but, at the same time, they have all been filtered through what we might call the Westernizing experience...

...The most sophisticated of the narratives are the four reports from Nineteenth Century Nigerians...

...At times elliptical, at times uncertain, at times remote, the accounts are a curious mixture of invaluable information on West African history and the slave trade and of miscellaneous personal recollections...

...All four," Curtin writes, "report some view of Nigerian history, particularly the breakup of the formerly powerful state of Oyo and the beginning of the Yaruba wars that were to occupy most of the remainder of the Nineteenth Century.'' Two of the Nigerian narrators became missionary teachers after they won their freedom...

...Only two of the narratives were originally composed in an African language...

...Both were early representatives of that class of westernized African intellectuals who, a century later, would be the leaders responsible for African political independence...

...Africa Then Africa Remembered, edited by Philip D. Curtin...

...All but one of the African travelers were, at one time or another, slaves...

...Most of the authors were shipped from the West African coast during the great forced migration of the African slave trade...

...Curtin's accomplishment in putting together such a diversity of material, useful to both the scholar and the interested reader, is a technical tour de force as well as a substantial scholarly contribution...

...As Curtin writes in his general introduction, the strength of the collection is that it both adds something to our knowledge of West African history and "gives us some notion of the feelings and attitudes of many millions [of slaves] whose feelings and attitudes are unrecorded...

...The imperfections of human memory, the shock of the experience of slavery, the difficulties of expression in another language, and the knowledge that they were writing or remembering for a European audience—all these factors have had their influence on the narratives...

...This extraordinary collection, handsomely published by the University of Wisconsin Press, is an impressive and scholarly achievement...

...Reviewed by James Duffy Edited by historian Philip Curtin, Africa Remembered is a gathering of ten personal accounts by Africans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries...

...The other accounts—childhood memories recalled later in life—were either put down by the one-time slave in a Western tongue or told to a sympathetic European and thus recorded indirectly...

...in some ways the editorial commentary is more important than the narratives themselves...