Early reactions to the Ghana DVDs

“A more vivid and challenging account of the abolition of the Anglo-American slave trade I cannot imagine. Historians from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, gathered at a conference in what was once a slave port in Ghana, comment on the origins, effects, and legacies of abolition on a background of African art, music, and dance, and raise questions and reveal paradoxes that are of great present concern.”

Bernard Bailyn
Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History,
Harvard University, Emeritus

“There is a contagious immediacy to scholars interpreting the history of the abolition of the slave trade two hundred years ago at a site in Ghana from which 1.8 million Africans we retransported to slavery. The vivid images of the slave trade that accompany the short talks shock viewers much as they were intended to do at the time. Listening to historians from Africa, Great Britain, and the United States debate the legacies of the slave trade pushes us to reflect on what should be the public memory of a subject at once painful and inspiring. Here is the past come alive in the present.”

Alfred F. Young
The Newberry Library and Northern Illinois University, Emeritus

Potential for classroom use . . .
“‘The bloody Writing is for ever torn’ is a beautifully filmed compilation of an important gathering of international scholars. The inclusion of the proceedings let the viewer ‘in’ on the perspectives, passions, and discourse of the academic community. There are compelling imagery and graphics as well as a soundtrack that complements the viewer’s comprehension of the history presented. But there is something else that most don’t get to see—the impact of historical place on the historians themselves. This DVD serves as an interesting and challenging primer for the educator.

“The second DVD is especially accessible to educators and their secondary-level students because of the inclusion of dynamic graphic material that frames scholars’ theses. This technique will be extremely useful in contextualizing the scholarship for classroom discussion. The film gives educators an opportunity to expand students’ critical thinking regarding the meaning and importance of the slave trade and the decisions taken by England to end the traffic in human cargo.”

Christy Coleman
President, The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, Richmond, Virginia

“This DVD set has all the marks of a great conference—a hot topic, some great speakers, a magnificent—and poignant—setting, and some remarkable surprises. Like a great conference, too, the participants walk out refreshed, informed, engaged and energized. Precisely because of its origins as a conference, the films are superb learning tools, bringing history alive for students and connecting them with the seriousness of scholarship and its contemporary meanings, legacies, and resonances. The DVDs show history not as something for them to learn or memorize but as a process of experience, discussion, and debate and as a series of intellectual and personal challenges. Parts I and II of The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade especially bring alive the debates and differences between historians, while Part III suggests why these things might matter today, and for whom. This is absorbing and thought-provoking material. Indeed, the most important aspect of these films is that they provoke and challenge and in the end raise a huge range of important questions—about the slave trade, abolition, the legacy of slavery and abolition, and about differing interpretations and differing perspectives on the past—even about intellectual imperialism. The films will excite and energize students and leave them wanting to find out more, even as they realize that they too can make a contribution. I cannot wait to use these DVDs in the classroom. Watched together, ‘The bloody Writing is for ever torn’ and The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Effects, and Legacies might be the closest we get to bringing students along to an academic conference. I can’t think of a better way to introduce them to what we do and why it might just matter.”

Michael A. McDonnell, Senior Lecturer
Department of History, University of Sydney

“These DVDs and the accompanying material are an absolute gift for teachers, whether of Atlantic, American, African, Caribbean, Latin American, European, or African American history. Evocative visual images and eloquent discussions combine to make the historiographical issues surrounding the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade come alive. The DVDs are unique in transforming an academic conference into a visually arresting, powerful, and provocative undertaking, one with clear relevance for both historical and contemporary debates. The first DVD, ‘The bloody Writing is for ever torn,’ dramatically portrays issues of abolition and the continuing painful resonance of the slave trade for a great number of nations, including those in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The second, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Effects, and Legacies, lucidly presents key scholarly understandings of the issues involving abolition and slavery. Altogether, these DVDs offer a stunning intellectual and emotional odyssey for students, teachers, and scholars alike. As one of the participants, Nana Dr. S. K. V. Asante (President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences) phrases it, this conference—and the DVDs based on it—are ‘more than an academic exercise.’ They are instead ‘an invitation to search our souls and grapple with troubling questions about man’s inhumanity to man and the resilience of the human spirit.’”

Sarah Pearsall, Assistant Professor
Department of History, Northwestern University

Reflections of a conference participant . . .

“Watching these films brought back to me the tremendous emotional impact of the Ghana conference. I would never have guessed that academic papers and comments could be extracted, edited, and resented to such stunning effect. Anyone who teaches the Atlantic slave trade will find material here that will engage and excite students. In the shadow of one of West Africa’s great slave castles, ‘The bloody Writing is for ever torn’ explains the nature and significance of this meeting of scholars and students, the first such meeting of African historians in more than a generation and the first-ever congress of African and non-African scholars of the subject in Africa. The footage of people in northern Ghana still living in a fort built to protect them against slave raiders and alive to the reality of an internal slave trade that is much more than historical memory is tremendously powerful. The film of the Ghanaian dance company’s representation of enslavement, sale, and the Middle Passage, played out amongst the ominous shadows of the great slaving fortress of Elmina, embodies a kind of living history that challenges teachers and students alike to think anew about African slavery.

“The second film—The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Effects, and Legacies—was a revelation. Having attended many academic conferences, I am well used to the fact that many of us may be good scholars but not necessarily great communicators. Yet this DVD organizes and edits excerpts from papers given by well-known historians caught up in the emotion and power of a commemoration of the first governmental efforts to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and presents key aspects of the origins, effects, and legacies of abolition in a compelling fashion. I am eager to integrate this material into my teaching, from survey courses to postgraduate readings seminars, for the film invites students to enter West Africa and engage with prominent historians, to weigh up their arguments and analyses, and to reach their own conclusions about the nature and significance of abolition. This DVD is a tour de force and for many of us will become an essential text. The power of Africans’ reclamation of their own history and its commemoration, matched by the eagerness of western historians to come to terms with their own past, all come together in powerful fashion to present students fascinated by this subject with the opportunity to engage with its historiography in a strikingly direct and innovative fashion. Watching these films will make them eager to read the works of Phil Morgan, Seymour Drescher, Ira Berlin, and other key historians.

“For me, as a historian who teaches slavery and the slave trade, these films will be of more direct utility than anything I have read in years. They transcend printed media and use historians, modern scenes, historical images, and re-creation to bring to life West African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in a manner I had not imagined possible.”

Simon Newman
Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American Studies
Director, Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies
University of Glasgow