Emmanuel SABORO(PhD)

Email: esaboro@ucc.ed.ugh

Phone: +233 (0) 54 2027 650

Office Location: Centre for African and International Studies

College of Humanities and Legal Studies

Faculty of Arts, Communal Block Building

I am an Associate Professor and currently serve as Director of the Centre for African and International Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. I describe myself as a Trans-Disciplinary Scholar with research interests centered on the interface between African Literature, Cultural Memory, and Slavery Studies. Specifically, my work explores the impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa, Slavery and Anti-Slavery Discourses, and 19th Century African Internal Slave Trafficking—particularly in Northern Ghana.

My recent research focuses on Memory, Trauma, Resistance, and Identity Construction in Northern Ghana. A key feature of my scholarship is expanding the methodological tools available to uncover histories of regions and periods where written sources are scarce or inaccessible. I apply historical, cultural, and literary methodologies to the study of Indigenous African cultures, collecting and interpreting oral traditions, songs, and oral histories related to slavery, its legacies, and afterlives through extensive ethnographic fieldwork. This complex data is complemented by literary analysis, contextual interpretation, and insights from Cultural Anthropology to construct rich narratives of the slave experience in West Africa and Ghana.

My first monograph, Wounds of Our Past: Remembering Captivity, Enslavement and Resistance in African Oral Narratives (Brill, 2022), examines memories of the slave era in Northern Ghana through song. It contributes to scholarship on slavery-related lyrical traditions by analyzing songs among the Bulsa and Kasena ethnic groups as coded expressions of hope, resistance, and resilience. Having “no fixed meanings”, I describe them as both flexible and greatly useful for conveying a variety of meanings. The work is significant first for its originality as the first and currently the sole source on the memory of the slave trade era in these northern Ghanaian songs, and secondly for amplifying the experiences of those who suffered violence without being formally enslaved. 

My current research, Sites of Memory: The Lost and Hidden Stories that Spaces and Places Tell about the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana, explores how cultural and historical sites in Ghana can be read not merely as physical structures but as Symbolic Spaces imbued with metaphorical meaning. My previous research partnerships include Authoring Slavery: Authorship and Agency in Narratives of Slavery in Ghana (with Danish partners, 2021–2024) and African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB), in collaboration with University College London and institutions in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Cameroon (2021–2024).

I currently serve on the International Advisory Board for PASSAGE (Partnership for Atlantic Slavery Scholarship, Archiving and Global Exchange), funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. This project combines archival research on the history of slave ships with public engagement initiatives and an international research mobility programme that will center and support the research of scholars on the history of transatlantic slavery from West Africa and the Caribbean.

Biography:

I attained my doctoral degree at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull, England. I have been teaching at the University of Cape Coast since September 2010. I was a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies, African Humanities Post-doctoral fellowship in 2017. I have held visiting fellowships at various Universities including the Summer International Advanced Research Institute (BIARI) at Brown University, Providence, USA, in 2018; Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Bonn Centre for Dependency Studies, University of Bonn, Germany in 2023; Visiting Scholar fellowship on the Speculative Play and Just Futurities Program, University of Indiana, Indianapolis, USA, 2024.

 Research Supervision:

I am interested in supervising MA/Mphil and PhD research projects on the following themes:

• African Slavery and Anti-Slavery Discourses
• African Literature and Representations in Film
• Cultural Memory and Collective Identity in Africa
• African Oral Traditions
• Ethnicity and Race-Making in Africa
• Reparatory Justice on both Transatlantic and African Indigenous Slavery