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the victims and the perpetrators but rather to show that it was possible to overcome and commodify the past and celebrate the future. Although the discourse of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other official agencies attempts to unify these plural and conflictive memories, the memorialization phenomenon put in evidence plural and conflictive memories of slavery. By memorializing slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, some local citizens aspire to belong to a global western world in which national capitals museums and monuments occupy a central place. In this context, the local authorities do not adhere to the idea of financial reparations, which were advocated for at the beginning of the 1990s by some African leaders. Reparations are instead conceived as a memorial enterprise carried out through the construction of monuments valorizing specific representations of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Although several monuments and memorials represent enslaved Africans as absolute victims, several others emphasize the importance of African cultures and civilizations and their role in the building of the Americas.
This book contains seven chapters. Chapter 1, “Impacts of Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade,” revisits the ongoing discussion about the estimates of the Atlantic slave trade and its impacts in Africa. It discusses how the establishment of accurate estimates of the Atlantic slave trade have helped or not helped to (1) quantitatively measure the suffering caused by the massive deportation of Africans for more than three centuries, (2) determine the demographical impact exerted by the Atlantic slave trade on the African continent, and (3) identify the origins of the continent's underdevelopment. The chapter also examines the recent changes in English, French, and Brazilian slavery and Atlantic slave trade historiographies, which have started to pay more attention to the daily experiences of enslaved men and women, and not just to demographic data. Chapter 2, “Plural Memories of Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” presents an overview of the debates on the memory of slavery that emerged in the last fifteen years in Benin, Brazil, France, England, and the United States. A brief overview of the civil rights movement in the United States and the anticolonial struggle in Africa help us