“Zomayi”. An Anthropological Research by Means of Theatre To Come to Terms with the Past

This article dwells on the latest stage of a long-running project that began over twenty years ago : the “Zomayi” project. It consisted in a workshop that was held in Lomé in November 2023. From the outset, the project articulated theatre and anthropology by staging a historical novel revolving around the slave trade in what is today’s Togo’s coast at the time of the clandestine slave trade. Written by Togolese writer Kangni Alem, the novel Esclaves (published by J.-C. Lattès, Paris, in 2009, then in Portuguese by Pallas, Salvador de Bahia in 2011) tells the story of one of the victims of this gruesome trade, whose imaginary biography is a collage of snippets inspired by real protagonists. However, this detour through fiction and theatre – and the ethno-dramaturgical reflections it provokes – is an anthropological investigation into a work of memory in progress.