The Currency of Memory: Ndidi Dike's Waka-into-Bondage and the Materiality of the Slave Trade in Nigeria and Britain

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Notes

I would like to thank Dr. Kirsten P. Buick and Dr. Ray Hernández-Durán for reading and providing comments on earlier versions of this article. My thanks further extends to Dr. Nii O. Quarcoopome for helpful literature suggestions.

Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rcin.

1 The Westminster Abbey commemoration was interrupted by the leading Pan-Africanist Toyin Agbetu, who protested against the “white-washed” nature of the commemorative event that celebrated White British abolitionists such as Wilberforce without acknowledging slave resistance (Wood, 2010; Hamilton et al., 2012, p. 1).

2 Ghana is one exception, as 2007 also coincided with Ghana's 50-year independence. Marcus Wood cites Manu Herbstein, who criticized the British Council's involvement in Ghana's commemorative events—specifically, its efforts to silence references to British involvement in the slave trade in Ghana (Wood, 2010). In the 18th century alone, an estimated 2.4 million slaves were shipped from what are now Nigeria's shores on the Bights of Benin and Biafra (Rediker, 2007, pp. 90–94).

3 Spivak wrote: “In 1992, asked to give the first T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town after the lifting of apartheid, I suggested that we learn to use the Enlightenment from below. I used the expression ‘ab-use’ because the Latin prefix ‘ab’ says much more than ‘below.’ Indicating both ‘motion away’ and ‘agency, point of origin,’ ‘supporting,’ as well as ‘the duties of slaves,’ it nicely captures the double bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant regarding the Enlightenment. […] This distinguishes our efforts from the best in the modern European attempts to use the European Enlightenment critically, with which we are in sympathy, enough to subvert! But ‘ab-use’ can be a misleading neographism, and come to mean simply ‘abuse.’ That should be so far from our intentions that I thought to sacrifice precision and range and simply say ‘from below.’ This too rankles, for it assumes that ‘we,’ whoever we are, are below the level of the Enlightenment. A double bind, again” (Spivak, 2012, p. 4).

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Johanna Wild

Johanna Wild ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her dissertation on contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE, is tentatively titled Playing the Culture Game: Yinka Shonibare MBE's Critiques of Empire and his Reception in Four Transnational Case Studies. Research for this article was performed during a one-month fellowship with the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) in Lagos, Nigeria, in the summer of 2015.