Slavery memorial on Ile de Gorée, Senegal. John and Melanie/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Newspaper ads, plantation records, travellers’ accounts, government documents, interviews and speeches from the era when slavery was legal can tell us a great deal about the history of human bondage. All have been used to document, analyse, and understand an institution that operated in all parts of the world for many millennia. It is these kinds of sources that have been used to study slavery in ancient Greece, Rome and China, in medieval Europe and south Asia, in Africa, and in North and South America.
But only slave narratives – those autobiographical accounts written by the formerly enslaved or dictated to an amanuensis – allow us to hear and understand what the enslaved themselves experienced and how they remembered their time in bondage. Only slave narratives reveal the anguish and the pain felt by husbands when separated from wives, parents when separated from their children. It is these accounts that recall the fears and the hopes, the perseverance and the triumphs when the enslaved sought and sometimes were successful in their efforts to exercise some degree of control over their own lives. As sources on the past, these historic narratives have become essential as historians and literary scholars study an institution that affected the lives of millions.
