African Scarification and Slavery: From Anthropology to Allegory

Senegalese author and director Ousmane Sembène, as a socialist and contributor to the pervasive legacy of social realism in African literate, followed a political program of littérature engagée in his approach to depicting history in fiction and film. His short story “Le Voltaïque” (1962), translated as “Tribal Scars,” chronicles two time periods in West Africa: the era just after independence and the era of the European slave trade. Allegories of slavery and modernity intertwine to present readers with powerful metaphors of scarification—the aesthetic designs of tradition as well as the scars of history and trauma—as transformative marks of resistance, unity, and Pan-Africanism. Sembène’s nouvelle is examined against the backdrop of a growing body of Africanist anthropological and photographic perspectives on slavery and scarification, comparing African literary contexts to current scholarship on the “neo-slave narrative” and to Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “slave sublime,” or “ineffable trauma,” in The Black Atlantic. The treatment of slavery in African fiction opens a vital dialogue on the relations between history and fiction, aesthetics and politics, the West and Africa.