The Shock of the Slave Trade in Francophone Africa: A Study of Selected Narratives

This book examines the narrative and aesthetic strategies through which three contemporary French-speaking African novelists - Togolese Kanganyi Alem (Esclaves, 2009), Cameroonian Leonora Miyano (La Saison de l'ombre, 2013), and Congolese Wilfred Nsunde (Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents, 2018) - address the painful legacy of the transatlantic slave trade from the African shore, moving away from the diaspora perspectives that dominated the field.This research argues that these works reconstruct the slave trade through what is theorized as the simulation of trauma and the formation of history, aesthetic practices in which narrative fragmentation, polyphonic mourning, and imaginative engagement with archival silence result in the embodiment of a collective trauma work that traditional historiography cannot contain.By organizing its analysis on the morality of families, spatiality in commerce, and physicality in violence, the study shows how the mournful Mulungu women in the works of Miyano, a painful rehabilitated anti-slavery king, and a silent Congolese priest in the works of Nsunde, each exemplify a distinct dimension of what the slave trade destroyed, and how their shared rejection of the narrative solution constitutes an ongoing act of mourning and a foundation for the African Renaissance.