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While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.

By comparing the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, and slaves across these two regions and throughout the nineteenth century, this book reveals the causes of the astounding success of slave owners, and also the factors that could, and in some cases did, lead to slave liberations.

Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the the transatlantic slave trade, Metaphor and the Slave Trade shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation and persist in West African discourse.

Ouidah, an African town in Dahomey, now Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region and this is the first detailed study of the town's history and its role in the Atlantic slave trade.