Wounds of Our Past

Emmanuel Saboro’s study on memories of the slave era in northern Ghana is a most welcome addition to a long and storied scholarly tradition examining song lyrics associated with the institution of slavery. As one might expect, the vast majority of such studies focus on the music traditions of the enslaved in North America. Collected between the mid-19th and early 20th century, historians, musicologist, and literary scholars have systematically analyzed these songs for what the lyrics can tell us about experiences during the era of slavery and the slave trade. Similar works that focus on West Africa, however, are rare indeed. Like his North American counterparts, Saboro examines the songs of northern Ghana as coded messages that express hope, comfort, resistance, rage and triumph over adversity. Having “no fixed meanings”, Saboro describes them as both flexible and greatly useful for conveying a variety of meanings.