African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame Paperback – January 1, 2006

What would our country be like today if there had been no slavery? Imagine the increase in our current population if some 600,000 whites and blacks hadn’t lost their lives in the Civil War; imagine blacks being welcomed to our shores as first-class citizens and offered equal opportunities, most particularly educational opportunities; imagine a nation which considered skin color irrelevant; imagine; imagine, imagine … .Instead, slavery to a great extent has brought us to where we are today, a nation still divided and haunted by anti-black racism more than 150 years after the very last slave was freed, A NATION WHERE, WHEN BLACKS FIRST ARRIVED IN AMERICA, THEY WERE CONSIDERED NO BETTER THAN FARM ANIMALS THUS SOWING THE VERY SEEDS OF HATRED AND PREJUDICE WE SO OFTEN HEAR ABOUT AND READ EVERY SINGLE DAY. How did this all come about?In her mesmerizing book African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, Professor Anne C. Bailey describes for us as best anyone can the origins of the Atlantic Slave Trade and what drove Europeans, Americans and even Africans to pursue this god-awful business. Making a number of trips to Africa, interviewing countless Africans and to some extent relying on the research of others, Dr. Bailey attempts to explain this dreadful phenomenon. However, for her the journey was far from easy. Why? Because the slave trade’s history is unwritten—its history is oral, passed down from one generation to the next. Yet those Africans whose ancestors either engaged in the trade or were its victims are so ashamed of their past that, for the most part, they are unwilling (maybe even unable) to talk about it. Still, through persistence spanning many years Dr. Bailey did learn about the trade’s origins and workings and shares all this with us in her magnificent book.Sadly, in our high school and college US history courses little mention is made of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And yet it is of such core importance to what we are today that it must be taught—perhaps “shouted out” is a better term. And that is what Dr. Bailey accomplishes in African Voices, a book that should be required reading in every single high school and college throughout the country.Highly recommended!

I recommend the book, it's well written and full of thought-provoking information.

For those seeking an in depth look into our holocaust, this is an excellent book. In many books on the subject, they tend to separate different aspects until the reader gets the idea that Africans didn't resist and made it fairly easy for Europe to gain their economical power. By the time I finished, I had the same emotions and thoughts as I did when I watched movies like Mississippi Burning, Rosewood and Roots. If this book doesn't empower you, you probably need to visit Ghana's Elmina dungeon and see it for yourself.

I am disappointed in the book because it dances around the question of where there resistance by the Africans against the slave trade? and the answer is no. She goes on and on and on and on, and she never gets to the point. She even says that large African tribes had control over the selling of their people to say that at one point the African chief stopped selling the men. Okay, they stopped selling the men, but there is no record of Africans fighting as a group of people to resist the slave trade. The truth is Africans sold their own people into slavery for over 400 years nonstop without firing one single shot or one arrow to resist the slave trade. There is no record of it!

We modern Americans want to be able to tell our history in mutually acceptable broad statements but this can never happen without leaving huge gaps in the stories. Anne Bailey's African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade is a huge contribution to the history of American slavery. It relies on years of oral history interviews with African descendants of powerful chiefs and their ilk who profited by human trafficking during the two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. It doesn't shift the blame away from the Americans who profited even more and who can be blamed for institutionalizing the racist ideas and prejudices we still express and contend with in our society now. However, by carefully collecting oral memories retained on the African continent about how and why Europeans and Americans were enabled to purchase and enslave people from across the African continent, this book pushes us to think more critically and to come more explicitly to grips with what still wounded issues remain between us should be brought into the light, acknowledged and hopefully, forever, disrupted and displaced by a humility that allows for the opening of a new conversation. This book should be required reading in high school and college classes of American history and culture.

Ein sehr wichtiges Bush in die Rassismus-Debatte. Empfehlenswert.

After you have visited the Slave Forts in Ghana, read this book. Take a walk in African shoes in the time of the Slave Trade....