The Book of Negroes

In addition to trying to understand what the term “African” actually means, Aminata also struggles to find out where Africa is. She spends many years longing to see a map of Africa. But when she finally succeeds, she is disappointed. In Chapter 11, entitled “The shape of Africa,” Lindo takes her to the Charles Town Library to see a map of Africa. She asks, “Who says it has that strange shape?” (211). She is angry when she realizes that cartographers have drawn towns and other details in the Western European areas of the map. The only place names that appear on Africa are on the coast, and the rest of the map is blank. When she presses Lindo for an explanation, he replies that these regions “are unknown to the people who made this map” (212).This map was made in 1690, Lindo says, as he reaches for a more recent one from 1729. Yet that one too has pictures of children sleeping with lions and other “ridiculous” things. The only words it contains are: “Slave Coast, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, and Grain Coast” (212). This map defines the terms by which Europeans value Africa: for profit and its products.

There are many other instances of maps in the novel. One of the most important scenes takes place in the Governor’s mansion in Halifax, when Aminata and John Clarkson are invited to discuss their plans to start a colony in Sierra Leone. The map of Guinea is described as “typical,” showing “half dressed African men and naked African women” with plenty of “baboons and elephants nearby” (367). It is at this very moment that she finds the passage by Jonathan Swift that mocks the gross unintelligence of cartographers. She is comforted, feeling that she and the famous author both understand that “every stroke of paint told me that the map-makers had little to say about my land” (368).

At the end of the novel, John brings her a new map of Africa (468), and May has found a cartographer to work with the publisher of her mother’s memoirs. Aminata herself shows the children in May’s school a map of the world, pointing out London and Bayo while weaving the story of her life into her geography lessons. The “dot” (468) which represents Bayo was drawn by Aminata herself—she has literally “put Bayo on the map” (470).

The symbolism of currency is prevalent throughout the novel, as every culture it depicts has its own ways of determining value and running an economy. In Bayo, Mamadu Diallo must “compensate [Sira’s] father for the loss of a daughter,” paying him six goats, seven bars of iron, ten copper manillas and four hundred strung cowrie shells” (11). At the slave auction in Charles Town, South Carolina, as Aminata stands in the crowd, yoked to her fellow captives, she sees something “in the dirt by her feet”: it is “a glittering piece of metal” with a “man’s head on one side” (113), the same object she saw in Tom’s cabin aboard the ship. She thinks this object is “ugly,” and “not as attractive as cowrie shells”; she just cannot “imagine what gave this thing value” (113).

Later, when Lindo teaches her about different kinds of currency, she learns that the gold on his wedding band comes from Africa. She is incredulous that the whites “were taking both gold and people, and using one to buy and sell the other” (203). In this sentence—and in the world of the novel—“gold” is conflated with “people”: they are exchanged, and exchangeable. Later she learns that sometimes whites are interchangeable too, when Armstrong, head of the British fort on Bance Island, shows her a Spanish coin that has been converted into British currency simply by stamping the head of King George III over the head of the Spanish king. Monarchs come and go, the text implies, but currency endures and economies evolve. On her journey to Bayo with Alassane, Aminata brings both herbs and Guinea gold, not knowing which one will have more “value” (430), the medicine or the coins.

Underlying all of this currency exchange is the economy of a village, a country, and a region, indeed the entire world. The slave trade, to name one example, involved so many points of reference, economically speaking, that the life of one little African girl hardly seems to matter. Except, this novel argues that Aminata’s life does matter, and that it has value. 

Singing and music play a symbolic role throughout the novel, as a means of celebration, an act of resistance, and an expression of loss. The male captives sing on the foredeck of the ship as they plan their slave revolt. There is singing at the wedding of Aminata and Chekura. There is singing in Birchtown, both in the churches and in the streets. But music also signifies loss. The cellist Adonis Thomas, plays beautiful, mournful melodies that express his own yearning for freedom, as well as Aminata’s longings. And in the woods, the “Voices of Africa” mourn for a dead child whom they bury; later, Aminata and her friends will do the same for Miss Betty, the elderly slave. 

Music is also a symbol of white oppression, as Tom the medicine doctor sings “Rule Britannia,” a song which later re-awakens those terrible memories when Aminata hears the song in a London church. It is also emblematic of migration, forced and otherwise. And, interestingly, music can be used for intimidation, the novel suggests. In Freetown, the local ruler, King Jimmy, sends canoes full of Temne warriors past Freetown’s shores at night, the men “whooping and hollering and beating drums as they went” (393). The black Nova Scotians are terrified and plead with Clarkson for more guns, but Aminata likes the sound of the drums: she likes the way they “vibrated within” her body, and they make her “feel closer to home” (393). To her, the music is saying: “Go find your village…go see your people” (393). The motif of music is thus more complex than it seems at first, for when Aminata tries to get back home, the Temne let her know she is not one of them. Thus, music expresses deep yearnings, complex emotions, and the convoluted geographies of the land and of the mind.Singing and music play a symbolic role throughout the novel, as a means of celebration, an act of resistance, and an expression of loss. The male captives sing on the foredeck of the ship as they plan their slave revolt. There is singing at the wedding of Aminata and Chekura. There is singing in Birchtown, both in the churches and in the streets. But music also signifies loss. The cellist Adonis Thomas, plays beautiful, mournful melodies that express his own yearning for freedom, as well as Aminata’s longings. And in the woods, the “Voices of Africa” mourn for a dead child whom they bury; later, Aminata and her friends will do the same for Miss Betty, the elderly slave. 

Music is also a symbol of white oppression, as Tom the medicine doctor sings “Rule Britannia,” a song which later re-awakens those terrible memories when Aminata hears the song in a London church. It is also emblematic of migration, forced and otherwise. And, interestingly, music can be used for intimidation, the novel suggests. In Freetown, the local ruler, King Jimmy, sends canoes full of Temne warriors past Freetown’s shores at night, the men “whooping and hollering and beating drums as they went” (393). The black Nova Scotians are terrified and plead with Clarkson for more guns, but Aminata likes the sound of the drums: she likes the way they “vibrated within” her body, and they make her “feel closer to home” (393). To her, the music is saying: “Go find your village…go see your people” (393). The motif of music is thus more complex than it seems at first, for when Aminata tries to get back home, the Temne let her know she is not one of them. Thus, music expresses deep yearnings, complex emotions, and the convoluted geographies of the land and of the mind.