The impact of the trauma of the Middle Passage raises issues of how people identified and how they were identified, relating to questions of consciousness of historical events and false consciousness arising from the strain of survival among the enslaved population. How do we understand the ability of individuals to modify and otherwise chart a course through the cultural oppression of enslavement and the inevitable subjugation they endured under exploitative work regimes, and the related racialized and dehumanizing social discourse of enforced inferiority? How do we unpack the complicated and debilitating experiences of these people? What does it tell us about Africa? It is important to recognize the impact of trauma because we want to understand how individuals made it through that experience.  
The statistics of slavery inform our understanding of the odyssey, furnishing details in terms of mortality, malnutrition, exposure to disease, the incidence of rape, brutal treatment, suicide and the consequent degrees of degradation. Individual voices, however, are often lost in the analysis. Moreover, what does the experience of the Middle Passage tell us about Africa? We have long tended to look at the Middle Passage from the perspective of the Americas, as something that took place beyond the shores of Africa, as where African history ended. The study of slavery in the African context has often been overlooked.  
Furthermore, that passage was sometimes reversed, as Kristin Mann and Lisa Castillo demonstrate in their study of individuals who returned to Lagos from Brazil and maintained relationships with kin on both sides of the Atlantic.