Yesterday and today

Abstract

Research on African slavery covers a variety of situations and contexts that show both parallels and divergences due to local historical trajectories. In relation to the role of slavery, the slave trade and its abolition in the historical experience of African individuals and communities, oral sources can provide insight into the lives of African slaves, slavers and their contemporary descendants. These materials were important in the 1960s and early 1970s, when research on African slavery started, and they remain so today thanks to the growing activism of slave 1 This chapter was completed thanks to funding from the European Research Council in the framework of the ERC project 313737-Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: A Historical Anthropology. I also thank the EURIAS program, the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin and the Gilder Lerhman Centes for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition of the University of Yale. Research in the Senegambia was carried out under the auspices of MEBAO Missione Etnologica in Bénin e Africa Occidentale , a project financed from 2000 by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.