Stories of Slave Trading: A Review of International Textbooks

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: International Perspectives on Curriculum and Instruction

Abstract

I reviewed 22 textbooks used in several Anglophone countries to learn how authors wrote about slave trading between Africans and Europeans. I wanted to find out whether Africans were brought “onto the stage as fully drawn historical actors” alongside Europeans (Manning 1990, 2). In most textbooks, actions of African traders were given much less space than those of Europeans. Australian, English, and Scottish narratives were inhibited by Eurocentric perspectives that prevented the authors from fully acknowledging the agency of Africans. In Ghana, Namibia, and South Africa, the need to unite diverse ethnic groups gave rise to evasions in identifying African groups involved in slavery. West Africans emerged as full participants in Atlantic trading only in Jamaican and Caribbean texts.

Author

• Laura Jeanette Dull, SUNY - College at New Paltz