Yesterday and today: studying African slavery, the slave trade and their legacies through oral sources

This chapter explores the potentials (and limits) of oral sources for an in-depth understanding of African histories of slavery, slave trade and abolition. In assessing the work done on African oral sources, it puts major debates in the field in dialogue with original ethno-historical insights drawn from personal research experience in The Gambia. The objective is to assess the ambiguity of oral knowledge, its changeability and its expression of power relations that can also shift and change, the multiple versions of history that can exist in the same community and the importance of contexts to comb this kind of evidence in order to understand the understanding of slavery and emancipation from an African point of view.