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History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822

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Following the television series, Wonders of the African World by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Africanist world refocused attention on slave trade in Africa. Gates Jr. oversimplified the complex history of slavery by suggesting that if Africans had not sold slaves, there would not have been any slavery. Pier Larson's text comes at an appropriate time, to demonstrate just how complex the story of enslavement was and to correctly warn that we do a lot of injustice to a complex history by stopping at identifying losers and winner, benefits and disruptions.

The study focuses on the realm of cultural transformation and is exceptional in several identifiable ways. First, it pays immense attention to the process of enslavement and to those who remained in the slave supplying society. Secondly, it re-integrates Madagascar into the wider Indian Ocean mercantile system and into the general history of Africa. Thirdly, the study demonstrates that slave trade entailed opportunities and challenges and that people made choices on the basis of their circumstances, some of which changed drastically and forced some to enslave kin, neighbors and relatives.

Larson argues that the notion of diapora ought to be extended. Many people were displaced within Africa. They were mostly women and children and they were more than those who crossed the Atlantic. The notion of diapora, he argues, ought to be extended to include intra-continental displacement. Finally, the study shows that some societies worked to create a post-slavery dispensation that was fruitful to their existence. In Madagascar, Larson demonstrates how the people constructed memories of slavery that they used to create their political and later ethnic identity as Merina while at the same time they constructed historical amnesia about those things they did not wish to remember.

This study is a welcome addition to the history of slave trade, the historiography of Africa and to the discipline of history. The study re-interprets the notion of historical sources in a more inclusive perspective. This should be intriguing to all historians. It also extends our history of social displacement which should be good reading for human rights activists, humanitarians and people operating in conflict situation. The author is not only persuasive but is also innovative and lucid in his analysis. I strongly recommend this book to all those mentioned above and students of African studies around the world.