Slavery's Ghosts

Between 1440 and 1870, 11 million African people were forced into slavery and sent to the Americas. This trade in human beings deeply changed the African continent’s equilibrium. Even after the slave trade was abolished, it enabled 20th-century racist theories to fester, and left vivid marks in collective and individual memories, as well as in the histories of all countries involved in the trade. With the abolition of the slave trade during the 19th century, the memory of this past has been censored in a sense, locked in the secrets families keep. But since the 1980s, the taboo around this story began to crumble gradually, and a series of voluntary and public initiatives have started to spread internationally. A wealth of material can now explain this chapter of modern history: the descendants of families, oral traditions, rituals both traditional and Christian, and historical sites. This photographic project, called “Cham” and taken in Ghana and Benin in 2011, is part of a series that, between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, interrogates the living memories of the slave trade and colonial slavery. Memorials and commemorations cannot give a thorough account of the nonofficial living memories that lie within individual and personal experience. In Western Africa, slavery represents a past that is both morally and socially hard to accept. The narratives around these events generate much unease, and yet the memory of those times has not disappeared. In taking these photographs, I wanted to explore the complexity and ambiguity of this memory, which is found between the past and present, the visible and invisible worlds. The past seems to have sunk deep within individual consciousnesses, in a language that blends fears, desires—and also resilience.