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The traces of the slave past found in the oral tradition, religion, music or dance, or preserved in the architectural heritage are transmitted and repeated through generations, remaining quite stable. Unlike tradition, the work of memory expressed by festivals, monuments, and local museums remembering and commemorating slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in Southern Benin, belongs instead to the scope of postmemory, to which Hirsch refers. They constitute what Régine Robin defined as “a transitional space where this past is relived, re-experienced, and where this new representation allows [one] to not remain fascinated, hallucinated, but to occupy a conscious position of distance.”32 As a result, the work of memory is not a simple transmission of information. The work of memory allows re-creating, reinventing, and rethinking the past.
At first sight, instead of a contribution to reconciliation and reparations of past wrongs, the monuments and festivals commemorating the Atlantic slave trade in Southern Benin can be perceived as places of memory imposed on a diverse community that would prefer to forget its painful past. This hypothesis was only partially confirmed during my fieldwork in Benin in 2005. Since 1992 many prominent local individuals appropriated the official discourse about the history and the memory of slavery. Although, for many of them, the monuments and museums built in Ouidah, Cotonou, and Porto-Novo seem to be an external initiative that is unrelated to their lives, other members of the local elite took advantage of these initiatives in order to promote the memory of their ancestors and make their homes and properties essential landmarks for international tourists to visit. The public spaces of cities in Southern Benin such as Ouidah, Porto-Novo, and Abomey are occupied not only by historical sites (such as the buildings of the royal palaces that were restored during the 1990s and the old Portuguese fortress of São João Batista da Ajuda) but also by monuments and memorials recently built, in which the connections with the slave trade are not always immediately clear. This phenomenon of memorialization, locally appropriated, fits the idea of postmemory, in which museums and monuments are part of a living and dynamic process marked by the reinterpretation and creative reinvention of the past. Indeed, these initiatives did not aim to point out