Introduction

As memories of slavery re-emerge in recent historiographies of the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary visual culture from Francophone Africa is participating in this reassessment of the past as part of an on-going discussion of ‘development’ in present-day Africa. By engaging with the history of the slave trade and exploring its connections with the use of African labour in contemporary modes of production in West Africa, recent art works from the region that once formed the heartland of the French slave trade can be seen to offer a discursive platform on which to foreground ‘alternative memorial practices and forms of memory-making’ that are moving ‘beyond patrimonial discourses and the nation-centredness of the abolitionist movement’ (Frith and Hodgson, introduction to the current volume, 17). Two- and threedimensional and digital works produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by artists originating from Francophone Africa, many of whom now live and work in Europe, draw on a visual imaginary that invokes the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in its contemporary relevance to aspects of development in the former French-speaking colonies of Africa.

In some cases, this body of cultural production engages with European iconographies of slavery by recreating and/or subverting the visual elements that made up the original modes of representation to offer a transnational platform from which to address the economic relationship that has bound Europe, Africa and the Americas for almost four centuries. In other examples, the works draw on textual rather than visual references to the era of the slave trade. In all the various aesthetic and conceptual modes of engagement explored here, the content analysis focuses on how these works are memorializing a past, while simultaneously redefining the history of that past and developing a critical understanding of its legacy in the present.

The works looked at in this chapter are by artists from Benin, the former Dahomey, and West Central Africa, both major centres of the French engagement in the transatlantic slave trade. Key amongst them is arguably the best-known piece of installation art from the region, La Bouche du roi, by Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé.