In The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), Aminatta Forna describes her journey to Sierra Leone, to retrace the events leading to the arrest, torture, and killing, 25 years earlier, of her father, a political dissident. Forna finds Sierra Leone “utterly familiar and ineffably alien,” a landscape populated by “living ghosts—amputees, deranged rebels” that make her feel “like a revenant.” Yet Forna also makes clear that these postcolonial ghosts, victims of corrupt regimes and of a brutal civil war, are specters, as well, of a colonial geography and history that extend from West Africa to Britain, and from the 15th century through the era of the transatlantic slave trade and into the high imperial age of the late 19th- and early 20th centuries.
The paper explores the ghosts that populate the life writing of Forna and Ekow Eshun (Black Gold of the Sun 2005) and the photography and installation of Yinka Shonibare. I look at the ways that “Africa” plays out in the British scenes these writers and artists portray and, conversely, at the pressure that Britain, British colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath exert on the African sites they describe. Moving, in their work, between Britain, where they live, and West Africa, birthplace of their parents and forbears, Forna, Eshun, and Shonibare fashion themselves as transnational subjects by elaborating their own diasporic genealogies. In this, I suggest, they offer both new protocols of auto/biographical practice and new paradigms of British identity.