Emmanuel Saboro’s study on memories of the slave era in northern Ghana is a most welcome addition to a long and storied scholarly tradition examining song lyrics associated with the institution of slavery. As one might expect, the vast majority of such studies focus on the music traditions of the enslaved in North America. Collected between the mid-19th and early 20th century, historians, musicologist, and literary scholars have systematically analyzed these songs for what the lyrics can tell us about experiences during the era of slavery and the slave trade.1 Similar works that focus on West Africa, however, are rare indeed.2 This is what makes Saboro’s study so welcome. Like his North American counterparts, he examines the songs of northern Ghana as coded messages that express hope, comfort, resistance, rage and triumph over adversity. Having “no fixed meanings”, Saboro describes them as both flexible and greatly useful for conveying a variety of meanings.
Equally significant, his study expands upon the existing scholarly work on lyrical traditions in Ghana, by focusing as no other scholar has on the memory of the slave trade era in these northern Ghanaian songs.3 In doing so, Saboro brings attention not only to the songs from this region, but also to the experiences of those who suffered attacks but were never enslaved.
We first became aware of Saboro’s interest in this most neglected song tradition and region, in 2007 when he approached Sandra Greene, and shared the fact that he was studying for a Master’s degree in literature at Cape Coast University in Ghana. He indicated he had collected songs of the Bulsa people of northern Ghana and was interested in knowing where he could go with this project. Sandra Greene suggested that he contact Martin Klein. This, began a relationship with both Greene and Klein that has lasted 14 years. At the time, Greene and Klein as well as Alice Bellagamba and Carolyn Brown were launching a project to collect African sources for the history of slavery and the slave trade in Africa. We were responding to the fact that most sources on Africa’s slavery and slave trade were by Europeans, often slave traders, but also missionaries and colonial administrators. In two conferences and a series of workshops, we found a lot of them. Some of them were conventional sources like archives and travel accounts, but we were also interested in exploring less conventional sources like songs, proverbs, and folklore, which could give us an insight into the way Africans had experienced the slave trade. The first question was where Saboro could best develop his skills. Klein tried to persuade him to switch to history, but he saw his songs as literature. He ended up doing a doctorate in African Studies with David Richardson at the Wilberforce Institute of the University of Hull in Great Britain. This book is a revised and expanded version of his thesis at Hull.
As indicated, other scholars have used songs as sources for the study of slavery, but Saboro collected a massive number of songs which stood at the very center of his research interests. Many were songs of lamentation, of a people victimized by slave raids, but he also recorded songs of triumph, as the Bulsa were able to successfully resist the most important of the predators in the region. To this day, men dress up as warriors and sing their songs of triumph at an annual festival. For his doctoral dissertation, Saboro broadened his arena of research by including the neighboring Kasena, another decentralized society. In this book, he places all these songs in historical context.
A significant factor in Saboro’s success in collecting so many songs is the fact that he is from northern Ghana himself. His knowledge of the languages and traditions of those he has studied opened doors for him, but his northern origins are important in another way. Northern societies were during the period of the Atlantic slave trade either conquered by Asante or raided by northern tributaries of Asante. They were then during the late 19th century victims of raids by warlike savanna states like those of Babatu and Samory. But during this same period, in the process of resisting – at times quite effectively, they also became slave-raiders themselves. They were not passive victims. Yet, their position as potential, and in some cases, actual sources of labor did not end with the demise of slave raiding. During the colonial period, they also served as a source of labor in the more prosperous south of Ghana, and because of their poverty-induced emigration, they were often looked down on as a backward people. Saboro is effective in explaining these linkages between the past and the more recent present. In so doing, he is able to add to the growing literature on decentralized societies, as they have adapted to changing times during both the era of the Atlantic slave trade and in the colonial and post-colonial periods.
This study is important for another reason. It opens up the study of those who were not actually enslaved. This is a group that has not received a great deal of attention, though they were as much victims of the violence and insecurity created by the trade as those who were actually enslaved both locally and in regions outside the African continent. Too little, in fact, has been written about those who escaped enslavement, but who were forced to live with the constant fear of raiders and kidnappers.4 It shaped where they lived, how they built their houses, how and where they farmed. It meant that it was dangerous to go anywhere alone, or even in a small group. For these individuals and communities, loss was a constant presence, not only in terms of the loss of children, spouses and kin to predators, but the loss of those who died resisting predators. This fear shaped the way people related to each other and the way they thought about others. These are difficult issues to research because it is hard to differentiate one period from another. Was there a time before fear? The study of songs, folklore, proverbs and such religious beliefs as witchcraft is a beginning. This book is an important contribution to the effort.
Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein
See for example, William W. Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp: a collection of songs for anti-slavery meetings. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1851; William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867; Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977; Arthur Jones, Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of Spirituals. Boulder, Colorado: Leave a Little Room Pub., 1993; Rebecca Lynn Raber, Conducting the Coded Message songs of Slavery: Context, Connotations, and Performance. PhD. Dissertation. Challey School of Music, North Dakota State University, 2018; Abdus Shomad, “Analysis of Metaphors in terms of Slave Resistance as Reflected in Bob Marley’s Song Lyric: Redemption Song and Buffalo Soldier,” Rainbow: Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, 3, 1 (2014) 1–9.
But see articles by Francesca Declich, Jeanne Maddox Toungara, and E.S.D. Fomin in Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene and Martin Klein (eds.), African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
For a contribution that touches briefly on northern Ghana songs about the slave trade era, see Kwame Jua, “The Impact of the Slave Trade on the Sissala” in The Slave Trade and Reconciliation: A Northern Ghanaian Perspective. Edited by Alison Howell (Accra: SIM, 1998) 12–17. More common are studies that include a song or two about slavery and the slave trade era in what is now southern Ghana. See J.H. Nketia, Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (London: T. Nelson, 1963) 193; Marion Kilson, Kpele Lala (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) 158–159, 244; Thomas Lewin, The Political Structure of Political Conflict in Asante, 1875–1900. PhD Dissertation (Northwestern University, 1974) 207; Yaw Botsoe, The Poetry of Ve (Ewe) Hunters’ Songs. B. A. Long Essay. English Department, University of Ghana, Legon (1987) 69, 70; E.Y. Aduamah, Traditional Customs and Literatures of the Lower Volta Basin, Paper LVB4. Folklore Institute, Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University (July 1973) 7–8; Sandra E. Greene, Field Note #61: Interview with Xove Banini, Anloga (1987). Greene Papers, Northwestern University; E.Y. Egblewogbe, Games and songs as an aspect of socialization of children in Eveland. M. A. Thesis: University of Ghana, Legon, 1967. p. 73–74.
Notable studies on those who did indeed remember the pain of having lost relatives, friends, and fellow citizens to the slave trade include Anne Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004; and Sandra E. Greene, West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011) Chapter 8: Our Citizens, Our Kin Enslaved. For studies of how different West African communities used their physical environments and altered their ways of life to resist being enslaved, see Louis E. Wilson, The Krobo People of Ghana to 1892: A Political and Social History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1991) 14–4; Sylviane Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).