Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Cambridge, Mass.
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo andAngola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.
“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” by Henry L. Gates Jr.: Some Perspectives
By Kwabena Akurang-Parry
LET me state some caveats that my effort at interrogating the conclusions of Professor Henry Louis Gates does not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of enslaved Africans worldwide, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Africa as well as some African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, I do understand Gates to mean that the blame for the Atlantic slave trade should be debited to both Africans and Europeans/Americans, consequently, reparations should also be the responsibility of Africans. Third, this is not about reparations, but more so about querying and rethinking some of Gates’ historical arguments and conclusions from the standpoints of “Akan” oral history wedded to “Western” sources, indeed, a bold departure from most of the commentaries framed around “Western” sources.
CAREFUL readings of Gates’ efforts at illuminating the Atlantic slave trade and the quest for reparations, pivoted on Obama’s presidency, illustrate Gates’ subtle preoccupation with blaming Africans for the slave trade. Gates’ present essay, full of inaccuracies and spiced with dizzying barber-shop narratives, revisits his perspectives on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade couched during his Conradian scholarly-tour of Africa, packaged as
THE viewpoint that “Africans” enslaved “Africans” is obfuscating if not troubling. The deployment of “African” in African history tends to coalesce into obscurantist constructions of identities that allow scholars, for instance, to subtly call into question the humanity of “all” Africans. Whenever Asante rulers sold non-Asantes into slavery, they did not construct it in terms of Africans selling fellow Africans. They saw the victims for what they were, for instance, as Akuapems, without categorizing them as fellow Africans. Equally, when Christian Scandinavians and Russians sold war captives to the Islamic people of the Abbasid Empire, they didn’t think that they were placing fellow Europeans into slavery. This lazy categorizing homogenizes Africans and has become a part of the methodology of African history; not surprisingly, the Western media’s cottage industry on Africa has tapped into it to frame Africans in inchoate generalities allowing the media to describe local crisis in one African state as “African” problem.
GATES writes that “Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.” Asante dominated the Akan gold trade and exported gold overseas; thus, they didn’t have to sell slaves to import gold. In sum, Asante had access to gold in the area described by Kwame Arhin as Greater Asante. Absolutely, the slave trade contributed to the expansion of Asante, but Asante’s political economy was not wholly dependent on the export of slaves. What is also clear is that the profit from the sale of slaves was used in purchasing guns, the most important commodity that facilitated both the military defense of individual African states as well as the supply of slaves to the Europeans. For its part, the Kongo state was already prosperous before the advent of the Portuguese in 1483. Although, slavery and slave trade were a part of the political economy of the Kongo, it was by no means the dominant one. The people of the Kongo dealt in iron, copperware, pottery, and textile goods, and had extensive markets as well. It was the Portuguese presence that intensified the incidence of slavery and eclipsed other forms of economic ventures just as much as the Portuguese, British, Dutch, etc. presence increased and reconfigured the institutional mechanisms of enslavement in West Africa.
ADDITIONALLY, Gates notes that:
“some African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.” Even if Africans knew about the conditions of slaves in the Americas, there was very little that the so-called 90 percent of “Africans” enslaved by fellow “Africans” could do to thwart their enslavement. In other words, they did not choose enslavement over freedom. Besides, Africans educated in Europe were pedagogically conditioned to accept the demonization of people of African descent in currency, and when they returned home imputed similar inferiorization to other Africans. For example, Gates should know that Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein, an African intellectual giant educated overseas had even defended the slave trade. Capitein was born in 1717 in the Gold Coast and sold into slavery to Jacob van Goch, an official of the Dutch West Indian Company then operating in the Gold Coast. Capitein accompanied his master to the Netherlands, studied and attained advanced degrees, and in 1742 chronicled
THERE are a number of subtle suggestions which undergird Gates’ essay of blame-game that are plucked from the works of Linda Heywood and John Thornton whose conclusions are shaped by the extant Eurocentric records. One is the notion that wars in precolonial Africa were mostly geared toward the acquisition of slaves for the Atlantic market. Oral history/traditions amply illustrate that some wars in precolonial Africa, even during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, also served as conduits of freeing slaves. Historians of slavery in Africa, mostly non-Africans, have overemphasized the colonial conquest and its consequent wars as auspicious moments that enabled slaves in Africa to take to the pathways of freedom. Conversely, warfare among precolonial African states and African wars of resistance to incipient European domination in the precolonial 19th-century, both of which contributed to slave flights and reunited deserting slaves with their families, have not garnered the attention they deserve. For example, in 1730-31, when Akyem Abuakwa assisted the region of Akuapem to wean the inhabitants off Akwamu domination, a large number of Akuapems, who had been enslaved by the Akwamus, returned to their families in Akuapem and public celebrations were used to welcome them home. Also in the aftermath of the Asante resistance to the budding British imperialism in 1873-74, “slaves,” according to colonial and Christian missionary reports as well as newspaper accounts, left their slave-holders in Greater Asante and its coterminous regions, including Bono, Adansi, Asante-Akyem, Denkyira, etc. and returned to their families and communities. Of course, not all fleeing slaves were able to return to their respective homes in a timely fashion, and about this, the reports describe massive “refugee” movements in the area between the Pra, Ofin, Birim, and Densu Rivers, notably encompassing parts of Akyem Abuakwa, Denkyira, Gomoa, Agona and Fante territories. Even war-scares, such as the ones which occurred between the Akuapems and Krobos in the l8th and 19th centuries, also triggered slave flights and some of the fleeing slaves found their way home, or built slave villages that would form the nucleus of some Krobo and Akuapem satellite communities.
ECONOMIC motives, according to Gates, are what compositely explain the “role Africans themselves played” in the Atlantic slave trade as suppliers of the European slave traders’ appetite for slaves. Although, direct economic reasons may be used to explain the European involvement in the age of capitalism and slavery, it does not fully explain African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. More than economic gain was the pernicious gun-slave-cycle that compelled African states to arm themselves with European-made guns, the most important commodity of the Triangular Trade to West and West-Central Africa, both for protection and as a means of acquiring war captives to sell to European slave traders in order to paradoxically procure more guns for protection. In my view the participation of African states was conditioned more by political motives for protection than short-term economic gains.
GATES argues that since European slave traders lived in the coastal trading posts, the blame for the Atlantic slave trade wholly lies with Africans who captured fellow “Africans” in the interior and sold them to Europeans. His argument is an attractive proposition obviously quarried from the historiography. Unlike “Western” sources that inform much of the historiography, the use of oral history allows us to interrogate Gates’ conclusions at several levels. First, 1871, Gates’ date for the so-called European exploration of the interior of Africa, is wrong: long before 1871, Europeans had visited the interior parts of the continent. Oral history collected by scholars at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, shows that during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, “aborofo/oburoni”[whites] visited the interior of what is today Ghana, broadly defined as the region between Greater Asante and the littoral stretching from Edina [Elmina] in the west to Keta in the east. Even granted that Europeans never set foot in the interior of West Africa and West-Central Africa, there is no doubt that their presence in the trading posts along the coast enabled them to influence politics that led to wars of enslavement, and the example of Portuguese predatory activities in the Kongo may be summoned to elucidate this conclusion. Second, oral history shows that some indigenous rulers in the Gold Coast and European agents held regular meetings regarding the on-going slave trade in the precincts of the castles and forts. During such durbars or “palavers” Asafo Mma [so-called Companies] or lineage-based warrior groups exhibited their weaponry and demonstrated their military skills defined by warrior “traditions” to the delight of all. Third, the extant literature illustrates that the forts and castles served as permanent hegemonic sites that enabled some European states to influence economic, social, and political developments in both the coastal and immediate interior regions. Finally, the bolts of supply and demand were not tied to space and physical presence: some European/American states’ demand for slaves existed and African states like Asante and Dahomey supplied it; more importantly, the Asante and Dahomian supply curves met the European/American slave traders’ demand along the lines of proliferation of European-made guns which fueled the political economy of destructive gun-slave-cycles in much of West and West-Central Africa.
FURTHERMORE, Gates, like most Western interpreters of slavery, slave trade, and abolition, attributes abolition solely to non-African agency. The Atlantic slave trade was as much a trade in “commodities” as it was in diffusing prevailing osmotic abolition ideologies in the Atlantic world. Even if we assumed that abolition began in the West as a staple pearl of the historiography would have us believe, the movement of osmotic ideas was also assimilated by Africans, unless Gates and others want to argue that Africans did not know the meaning of freedom, or were incapable of constructing and applying freedoms during the global abolition epoch. In fact, recent research amply suggests that the seeds of abolition in the Gold Coast had been nursed by the Gold Coast educated elite long before the British colonial agents implemented abolition in 1874-75, and the Gold Coast educated elite led by Timothy Hutton Brew, for example, argued that the British colonial government’s abolition policy was woefully inadequate.
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