Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South ...

governments and international institutions—their common slave past. The slave past is alive among the descendants of slaves who remained in the old Kingdom of Dahomey, as well as the ex-slave returnees, the slave merchants, and those who collaborated with the Atlantic slave trade enterprise, even though they did not live the experience of their ancestors. As a result, it is necessary to note that studying the memory of the descendants of victims, collaborators, and perpetrators means dealing with mediators because the witnesses of the traumatic events no longer exist in the present. This mediated memory is what Marianne Hirsch called postmemory, a memory that “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor re-created.”²⁹ In this framework of a mediated memory, the notion of heritage, material or immaterial, is unavoidable because heritage is an inheritance that actively participates in the transmission of identity.³⁰ Ruptures, gaps, and denial mark the memory of the descendants of the victims of slavery. But among the descendants of the perpetrators, such as masters, slave merchants, and other collaborators, memory is often characterized by continuity. The families of descendants of American and European slave merchants, who had settled in the West African coast during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, have been able to preserve both their bonds with the cities in which their ancestors developed the slave trade as well as their connections with the coastal cities on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. These relationships and the wealth accumulated via the Atlantic slave trade allowed these families to perpetuate their personal and family possessions, such as residences, furniture, objects, and photographs. The stability of their elite position in the local society helped them to preserve cultural and religious practices associated with their Brazilian or Portuguese community of origin by incorporating into them indigenous customs. This highly developed South Atlantic identity, largely based on Luso-Brazilian traditions associating paternalism and Catholicism, is solid but at the same time flexible and mixed because of its openness to reciprocal exchanges.³¹