The institution of slavery and the practice of slave trading in Africa have been the subject of increasing debate over the past few decades, with historians and anthropologists considering the relationship between domestic slavery and the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades, as well as the impact of these external trades on the traffic of slaves within Africa. Forced migration patterns across the Atlantic form the majority of the commemorative discourses on slavery in West Africa. Conversely, domestic slavery, which not only pre-dated and co-existed with the transatlantic and trans-Saharan trades, but has also outlived both, is often relegated to the background. Yet domestic slavery remains inscribed in the social, economic and political codes of everyday life through which its memory is perpetuated negatively, forcing slave descendants to actively dissociate themselves from their past by hiding their slave ancestry and creating new identities. The attribution of a generic ethnic identity to denote people of slave origin, as in the Gando of Benin, the unwillingness to marry slave descendants and the challenge to their political authority all constitute contemporary forms of discrimination against people of slave ancestry (Hahonou and Pelckmans, 2012: 93–97).

These contemporary memories of domestic slavery form a social narrative rooted in historical practices through which hierarchical boundaries were defined and the distinctions between slave and freeborn were maintained. Similarly, the oral epic tradition is a social memory through which identity and hierarchical structures are perpetuated across generations. By accessing the past through royal lineages and geography, epic accounts of foundation myths explain origins, migrations and the current geographical location of a people. Whether in the context of a myth of origin or through sociopolitical accounts of historical events, the epic serves as a reaffirmation of identity through its recourse to the past. This literary form, however, indicates a bias towards the socio-political centre and a neglect of those at the margins, characterized as it is by the presence of larger-than-life heroes, legendary rulers of vast empires and mythological figures with supernatural powers.

The epic idealizes historical and mythical symbols and the ideologies of the socio-political centre, of which the slave is seldom a part. As the criterion for inclusion within the social memory is belonging to a social, political or religious centre, the slave who is on the margins of society is rarely the subject of the epic.