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

briefly shows that the evolution of the estimates of the Atlantic slave trade's volume led English-speaking historians to undertake an active debate about the demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa. However, while English-speaking and French-speaking scholars focused on the volume of the slave trade, some scholars neglected the living experiences of enslaved Africans. This trend started to gradually change over the course of the 1980s, when a growing number of studies developed in Europe and the Americas began to take into account the experiences of enslaved men and women.

The Numbers Game and the Demographic Impact

The end of World War II, the Cold War, and the decolonization of Africa positively contributed to the development of African studies and the research on slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, both in Europe and the United States. Under the influence of the civil rights movement, the image of Africa in the United States was essentially based on two very different conceptions. As Bogumil Jewsiewicki pointed out, most African Americans perceived the African continent (Egypt, in particular) as both the place of origin of human civilization and the place where Africans were raped, enslaved, and colonized by whites. Whites, however, very often saw Africa as a place of corruption and barbarity.¹

In the 1960s, during the period of decolonization of Africa, the discussion about the demographic impact provoked by the Atlantic slave trade was a crucial element in the construction of emancipation discourses. Hence, historians were interested in understanding not only the effects of forced African migration to the Americas but also the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa.² It was necessary to quantify the damage to the population in order to explain the immense human drain the Atlantic slave trade caused in the African continent. Demographic shortage was considered as the main cause of African underdevelopment. The Atlantic slave trade took from the continent its human capital; colonialism extorted its natural resources and its cultural and artistic heritages as well.