Reconfiguring African trade beads: the most beautiful, bountiful and marginalised sculptural legacy to have survived the middle passage

The greatest cultural historian of beads Lydia Sciama dramatically instructs us that: ‘One cannot over-emphasise the importance of glass beads in the European colonization of a vast portion of the inhabited world.’ True words, and yet beads have been and continue to be shamefully and wilfully neglected within international slavery studies. Beads, whether of African, Asian or European manufacture remain peripheral, scarcely studied and hardly seen, let alone recognised as a unifying cultural entity within slavery studies, and indeed within the officially sanctioned sites for the memory of slavery. This chapter teaches us that how a culture now moves around beads and memory can tell you a lot about its creative health, its perceptual vigour, its aesthetic virtue, its artistic democracy, and its ability to understand slave aesthetics and art.