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By revisiting my ethnographic engagement with the Baga of coastal Guinea, West Africa, in this article I analyse, in the first place, the ways in which secrecy and its associated verbal arts (silence, metaphor, gesture) has worked as an ‘imagination trigger’ in a post-iconoclastic religious landscape in the 1990s and early 2000s, inviting people to create in their minds possible scenarios of pre-iconoclastic pastness and notions of ‘double-ream’, or dabal, in Baga language; in the second place, and in sharp contrast, I discuss how Baga of today, belonging to a generation historically removed from the traumatic colonial iconoclasm but facing new and dramatic environmental challenges, are relating to historical knowledge in ways that make the arts of secrecy, so prevalent in the field twenty years ago, less relevant, but that nonetheless highlight the plastic, transformative nature of African systems of secrecy. A particular attention is given to the changing relationship between the ethics of secrecy and the presence or absence of slavery memories in the villages.

How to Do Things with Secrets: Secrecy and Historical Imagination among the Baga of Guinea