Review: [untitled] Author(s): Edna G.

Bay Reviewed work(s): Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone by Rosalind Shaw Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2004), pp. 289290 Published by: Edinburgh University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3556936 . Accessed: 09/01/2011 08:49
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Strike of 1950 similarlydraws attention to weakness of colonial organisational structuresand political control over the city's Africanpopulation. Minimum health and housing standards are also essential requirements. Milcah Amolo Achola considers the colonial policies towards urban health in Nairobi. The extremely low density housing of European settlers tended to occupy the higher healthy plateau areas whereas non-Africans were crowded into the more mosquito-infestedlowlands, where feversand poor health became a way of life. To add insult to injuryAfricanswere blamed for bad sanitationand health practicesthat were believed to be the basis of their poorer health. David Anderson's chapter reinforces this picture of poor African living conditions in his analysis of the colonial government's housing policy in Nairobi. Municipal government funds were lavished on creating an impressive capital city while wantonly and often corruptlyoverlookingthe housing needs of the expanding working class. Nairobi's now infamous shanty slums have their origin in these policies. Above all, the lack of stability of the African urban population has been a major constraint and a main defining feature of what might be called East Africa's historically equivocal urbanisation. Tsuneo Yoshikuni examines Harareand the strength of pre-colonial agrarian-based traditions and identities that gave Shona culture an anti-urban character reinforced by the colonial government through its bachelor wage migration system. Shimelis Bonsa traces the gradual build-up of Kistane (Gurage) migration to Addis Ababa, demonstrating how it took a number of generations before its seasonal and circularmigratorypattern gave way to permanent urban settlement. Finallythe last section of the book, highlightingNairobi, reflectsmany of the above listed constraints to urban life. John Lonsdale points to the intrusion of rural politics, gender and generational divides into the fabric of Nairobi town life suggesting that it is no accident that rural political economy dominates urban social themes in East Africanliteratureto the present. The two chapters by Bodil Frederiksen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo echo this, demonstrating how the impermanence of male residence in Nairobi and the near outlawing of women from urban areas during the colonial period pervades urban gender relations and stereotypes to this day. Overall, this is a pleasing book with many intriguing black and white photos and maps interspersed in the text. The editor has done an excellent job in assembling a wide-ranging set of detailed empirical case studies that are extremely thought-provokingand well worth a read. However, the rather ephemeralhistory of East Africantowns combined with the book's absence of a frameworkfor comparativeanalysismay leave some readerswondering:whenis a settlement a town? Conflating the urbanisationprocess and urban outcomes can create considerableconfusion.
DEBORAHFAHYBRYCESON

Afrika-studiecentrum. Leiden
ROSALIND SHAW,Memories of the Slave Trade: ritual and the historical imagination

in Sierra Leone. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (hard covers US$52.00, ?36.50, ISBN 0 226 75131 7; paperback US$21.00, ?15.00, ISBN 0 226 75132 5). 2002, 312 pp.

While Africanist anthropology and history are deeply indebted to each other, from time to time the two disciplines diverge over questions of methodology.

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BOOKREVIEWS

More than a generation ago, for example, structuralist anthropology proved incompatible with historians' then-current methods for interpreting oral traditions. Recent debates over non-discursive forms of memory are producing a comparablemethodological impasse. Rosalind Shaw's book, based on long field research on divination in the Temne area of Sierra Leone, is a contribution to the anthropological side of this new debate. Elegantly written and rich in field data, the book argues that forms of divination, ritual practices associated with witchfinding, stories of human leopards, rumours of politicians' supernaturalunderpinningsand even suspicions of wives within the households of their husbands are all part of a Temne moral universe in which those who transgress social norms may be identified and judged. Such ritual processes, Shaw asserts, grew out of and reflect the insecurity brought about by the Atlantic slave trade. It is here, in focusing on a single and specific cause for ritual invention and mythic explanation, that historiansmay take issue with her thesis. From a historian's perspective, the argument is simultaneously too general and too specific. At the general level, there is little reason to quarrel. Ritual, indeed culture itself, of necessity must be created out of human experience, and to the extent that ritual responds to human needs for protection from harm, it is clearly related to periods of social and political insecurity which in the Temne experience would include the Atlantic slave trade. However, in order to argue that the non-discursive practices she studies were caused specificallyby the Atlantic slave trade and that they date to that period, Shaw must assume a near-Edenic history of the Temne area prior to the arrivalof Europeansalong the coast, and must assertthat the consequences of majorrises and falls of Sudanic empires produced only a peaceful linking of the Temne 'to long-distance trade routes controlled by Mande-speaking peoples to the northeast' (p. 26). She must further assume that the sixteenth-centuryMane invasions similarly had no impact on ritual invention, and that later historic experiences of insecurity simply reinforced non-discursive practices invented with the arrivalof the Atlantic trade. At the level of specificity, the problem for historians is the relative value of the non-discursive memories that Shaw studies for enriching understandingof details of Temne history. For example, Shaw cites Karin Barber describing items from different periods of Yoruba history as they appear in oriki praise poems: 'The items from differenthistoricalmoments arenot usuallyarrangedin chronologicalorder, nor are the most ancient units separatedfrom the newest ones; they may be performed in virtually any order and combination.' We currentlyhave no methodology for unravellingthese 'phantoms from different layers of time' (p. 264) to allow them to deepen our knowledge of people and events at any given moment. Historians thus will continue to look to discursive evidence linking testimonies, however tainted and difficult to evaluate, to specificities of time and place. Historians' quarrels aside, Shaw's study, presented in eloquent detail, is a rich contribution to our understanding of ritual practice in SierraLeone. And whatever the origins of these processes, Shaw's work leaves the reader with a chilling reminder of the depths of suffering of African peoples at the hands of centuries of predators.
EDNA G.BAY

Emory University