This paper examines the different representations of slavery and the slave trade found on the Slaves Route in Ouidah, present Republic of Benin. It aims at understanding how these representations express and reconstruct different memories of the Atlantic slave past. The paper shows that Ouidah's Slaves Route is a constructed space, where we can find two different images of enslaved Africans: the absolute victim and the resister. The proposed itinerary suggests two levels of interpretation: on the one hand, the monuments staging the past aim at emotionally move the diaspora (especially African Americans) who have the financial resources to travel abroad; on the other hand, the statues conceived by Cyprien Tokoudagaba and the existing vodun temples on the Slaves Route place the visitor at the crossing position between different memories and different histories of slavery, where victimization is replaced by cultural assertion, through the promotion of African art, religions, and cultures.
memory; heritage; slavery; vodu
