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Credit: Allen Howard
In Sandema, Ghana, dancers perform a
ritual honoring the defeat of slave
raiders. Front right, Professor Kofi
Anyidoho, University of Ghana, Legon,
who co-directs the project with the
Rutgers team.
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Few Americans know that some Africans organized the interior trade that supplied European slavers on the Atlantic coast, or that many Africans resisted slave trading and enslavement. A Rutgers research project aims to promote understanding of the interior routes and the legacy of slave trading by creating new teaching curricula for New Jersey schools and colleges.
Over the summer, a team of 12 people, including four Rutgers researchers, a faculty member at a state college, and seven primary, middle and high school teachers, toured areas of Ghana and Benin, from which millions of enslaved Africans were taken to the Americas. The participants were chosen from among 25 applicants who submitted essays describing how their research would be developed into teaching materials.
Funded by a $65,000 Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Grant, the five-week tour included visits to cities, remote villages, markets and historic castles that once held captives. Researchers interacted with prominent African scholars and spent time talking with urban and rural residents about the legacy of the slave trade and its impact on contemporary society.
“This initiative is designed to show the slave trade in a larger context, as it existed before and after the start of the trans-Atlantic sale of slaves,” said associate professor of English Abena Busia, co-director of the project with Allen Howard, professor of history, and Carolyn Brown, associate professor of history in New Brunswick.
The research is part of efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to better understand the legacy
of the slave trade, which may have removed approximately 12 million people from the continent. Complicating the picture are the widely varying roles that captive peoples held in different societies in the interior of Africa, Howard said.
For example, he said, female captives were sometimes bought by wealthy African men; these women could move on to hold considerable social status as wives in prominent families. Slave raiders were hated by the people on whom they preyed, but were wealthy and influential in their hometowns.
In New Jersey, residents will bring these complicated stories to life by creating new teaching materials geared to K-12 and college communities. The materials will be tested in classrooms and in collaboration with the state Department of Education’s social studies division.
“Americans teach African-American history from the ‘middle passage’ (trans-Atlantic voyage) but we saw much more that isn’t taught,” said Anayra Calderon of North Bergen, who teaches African-American literature in Jersey City.
“It was amazing to me, as an African-American and a history teacher, to see that slavery in America wasn’t taught in some rural African schools,” said Brenda Nero of Paterson, also a Jersey City teacher. “For many rural people, the captives disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to them.”
The group also saw evidence that slave raiders met with considerable resistance. Researchers visited a settlement that residents had constructed over a large lake to keep the community safe from local slave raiders and attacking armies. In another place, occupants built a forbidding wall, part of which still stands, to prevent the kidnapping of residents who, if captured, would be sold into slavery.
The New Jersey contingent also traveled to a cemetery for captives in Salaga in northern Ghana, the site of a major slave market. Near a large old tree, religious ceremonies – held regularly for many generations – honored the memory of captives who died in Salaga or during the arduous forced marches to the coast.“It was long thought that these captive people were lost to history,” Howard said. “But they aren’t lost – they are remembered to this day.”
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