Q: I live in a small town and local white people say why are blacks still upset over slavery. They sold themselves. There way iff base but I dont have enough knowledge to debate them. What should I say? I know why its still a issue but I think their kinds racist and I want to stand up to them. What do you think?
– Roy A. Liljequist via direct message to the BRU Facebook Page
A: The truth is that the people of Africa south of the Sahara who were involved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans (TTA), were not eager to sell themselves into slavery among strangers. The opportunists who participated were few compared to the masses who resisted, mostly in defense of themselves and others who belonged to their own self-identified native communities. Furthermore, those who resisted were not often effective in ending the constant incursions against them due to the more powerful alliances of African armies with avaricious European arms dealers. Without the element of widespread racial prejudice that became a mainstay of European societies, Africans who kept other Africans as slaves on the continent were not compelled to inflict the same level of brutalities against the enslaved that European slaveholders did. African forms of slavery were generally not of the barbaric type in which people were treated like they were animals. Therefore, it is also inaccurate to paint African people culturally in the same or worse light than Europeans in regards to the ways they treated each other compared to how total strangers treated them.
This question has many layers to it. To answer, we first have to dissect each layer and address them one at a time.
This question can be addressed in 4 parts.
- How Did People Become Slaves in Africa?
- How Were Captives Treated in Africa?
- How Significant a Role Did African Opportunists Play in the Slave Trades?
- How Large a Resistance Was There From Africa?
How Did People Become Slaves in Africa?
So what really happened?
It is first important to get the facts straight regarding the way this history unfolded.
Professor Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, spoke earlier this year on the subject of Africans willingly selling Africans into slavery at the The PJ Patterson Institute for Africa Caribbean Advocacy, calling it ‘a very divisive myth that the Europeans have imposed on us.’ He further stated that the archives tell a different story, which is that Africans were not mere business partners with Europeans but were acting out of terror. He also argued that Europeans came to Africa with better weapons like the canon and used these weapons to ‘unleash terror across the West African space.’ Beckles paints the picture of Europe as a gunman marching through Africa barging down doors and raping the inhabitants with the only choice given to Africans being to choose one victim or another.
We must acknowledge, in reference to Professor Beckles’ argument, that the historical record consists not only of the gunman’s perspective on African shores or in halls of debate, but also of interviews with Africans who were captured and transported to the Americas, interviews with Africans who were recaptured by other Europeans from on board slaving vessels, writings by Africans who were captured and sold, writings by Africans who fled captivity, interviews with African leaders who were involved in the slave trade, testimonies of inherited knowledge about the trade from persons whose parents and grandparents experienced it, and ceremonies of cultural remembrance by West African traditional community leaders such as the royal Oba of the Kingdom of Abomey in Benin. The details were not only recorded by enslavers with a controlling interest in the trade, but also by African people who had themselves been victimized.
The archive does in fact show that European traders had the cooperation of African traders from early on. Howard professor of history Ana Lucia Araujo has noted in her latest book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (2024) that trade links had been established between Africa and Europe long before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Most of this trade was indirect, with West Africans trading with Berbers, who traded with Arabs, who traded with European and Asian merchants. While Europeans under the Portuguese flag did start out capturing Africans along the West African coast from the time of their arrival in the 15th century, they encountered resistance from the natives who simply wriggled free when they could and fled to the interior where it would be very difficult for persons unfamiliar with the landscape to safely and effectively pursue them.
From these early excursions (a period of roughly 20 years beginning in 1444), the Portuguese managed to capture 240 natives to be sold as slaves in Lisbon. Over time, the demand for these laborers skyrocketed.
Professor Araujo writes:
As the trade in enslaved Africans to the Iberian Peninsula and to the islands increased, the raid strategy that predominated in the first years of the Portuguese’s pioneering engagement in the Atlantic slave trade was eventually reconsidered. This wasn’t however, out of any kind of humanitarian concern.
Rather, one historian explains, it was only a result of the Portuguese realizing that risky raids such as those they had previously undertaken would get in the way of satisfying the new growing demand for an enslaved workforce. In the 1460s, Portugal started developing diplomatic relations with West African societies, a process that led the kingdom to seal peace treaties and trade agreements with local rulers.
To develop their business endeavors into a full-fledged industry, European merchants approached African merchants with items they felt African people might find valuable enough to trade for. The fluctuating demand for these goods in African markets and for everyday use influenced the number of these goods that African traders were willing to negotiate over per captive. By the middle of the 16th century, a steady stream of trading vessels was landing on the coasts of Africa ready to transport virtually the one thing Europeans were willing to trade for. Market logics can explain the reason why African traders gradually agreed to capture so many persons and bring them to European traders. Africans were eager to trade many things besides gold which was itself a currency of exchange (along with iron, copper, salt, cowrie shells, and strips of cotton cloths) and most readily available in gold-producing areas. Africans offered wood carvings, pottery, animal hides, ivory, horns, eggs, feathers, and kola nuts, for example. But Europeans would not offer much in return for those things, giving African traders less to bargain with when they returned to markets further inland. If and when they traveled to Europe or the Arab World, the profits of these transactions would be worth even less. Soon, an African who was not trading captives was less likely to be successful in business and therefore, would be less likely to become a wealthy merchant. Furthermore, an entrepreneurial African in debt to another African (or European) would themselves be packed up and shipped off by their debtor if they were not able to find a quick, reliable, and profitable way to pay their debts. On the other hand, Europeans would save the best of their inventory for only the things that would earn them the most profits when they returned to European markets: Black bodies. At the beginning of the trade in the 1440s, Europeans might only part with a horse if they got at least two dozen slaves for it. In the 1500s, a half dozen slaves was acceptable. But they were less likely to trade that same horse if only beads and shells were offered. A European embarking on long, expensive voyages and not bringing captive Africans back to the marketplaces of Europe was less likely to even afford those voyages in the future. The reason was that many voyages were financed in advance on the promise that sponsors would get a return on their investments. A European entrepreneur failing to fulfill such promises could face imprisonment and a ruined reputation, not for themselves alone but their entire family name.
Let us briefly compare the investments and returns on both sides. Trading 12 human beings, potentially living another 20 years, represents a cumulative 240 years of labor that could save significant time and health (both physical and mental). European traders utilized surplus captives to sustain and expand their business enterprises. This value is incomparable to the material goods that African traders held in high regard. Their most significant acquisitions at the height of trading, firearms and gunpowder, were predominantly used to obtain more slaves for Europeans. The use (or abuse) of brandy, another prized commodity, often yielded the same outcome. David Northrup is one scholar of history who fiercely disputes the idea of a continent-wide ‘guns-for-slaves cycle,’ citing pre-European victories in battle, examples of African arms manufacturing current with the slave trade, and statements by King Kpengla of Dahomey and King Osei Bonsu of Asante (around 1780 and 1820 respectively) to that effect.
In any case, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was a system which was engineered by Europeans (not Africans) for the sole benefit of Europeans (not Africans). A refusal to participate meant suicide by invasion from enemies armed by Europeans. An agreement to participate meant survival through invasion of neighboring communities with European arms.
We call it the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but for Africans, it wasn’t really much of a “trade.”
Nigerian theologian Venatius Chukwudum Oforka puts it this way:
In terms of trade, therefore, Africa exported its human resources for nearly nothing. The little capital it gained from the trade, it spent by importing products, which, rather than improving its own economic standard, unleashed terror and complete destabilization. Through this trade, therefore the future of Africa was mortgaged and up to now is yet to be redeemed.
Against that background, it must be made perfectly clear that the statement that the people of Africa sold themselves and did so eagerly for their own pleasure is both inaccurate and misleading. It is also an oversimplification that distorts the truth when taken at face value.
Nigerian professor of history Joseph Inikori insists that on an individual level, no one gave themselves up willingly to be a chattel slave – to be treated like a mere item without personhood. Neither were communities of free persons searching far and wide for masters to abuse them.
Canadian historian Paul Lovejoy writes that only when they were starving would someone agree to give up all their freedoms and that was rare. Additionally, it was only because such opportunities to be a slave were even available that the offer was made and the very conditions that prompted such decisions were the result of social inequalities that slavery itself had caused. If slavery was not an option, a person would have chosen the next best option.
What about the whole prisoners of war thing?
Was that forced too, or did people go willingly?
To start with, traders did not typically target members of their own village or tribe during raids, which became the most commonly known way that bodies were acquired for sale according to most historians.
History professor Colleen Kriger details how captives ended up in the inventory of the British Royal Africa Company:
Most of the captives coming into company hands had been free people who were seized from their homes and families and then forcibly taken [emphasis added] to some unknown place far away to be sold into slavery. This initial uprooting might occur during wartime or in times of relative peace, as individuals might be rightly or wrongly convicted of a crime, held against their will as collateral, or given as payment for a debt. It might also be that a slave would find himself or herself uprooted and transported once again during times of food insecurity or for reasons having to do with inheritance after a master’s death; or it might be because of a family emergency or as punishment of some kind.
In African societies, a person could be sold as punishment for a crime or to settle a debt they did not satisfy through ordinary means. Professor Araujo has further elaborated that in these cases, the people were not sold within the nation where they had been charged but were sold to other nations.
According to U.S. professor of African and African diasporan history Linda Heywood, individuals could also be enslaved as a result of marital disputes, particularly cases involving adultery. Additionally, people were sometimes pawned away as collateral in exchange for a bride price.
All this was not done due to European influences; it was just the way that things had been done for centuries. But just because slavery was part of the way society operated does not automatically mean it was considered a good thing any more than any other form of punishment. It was never something people wanted for themselves as law abiding citizens, only a condition for social outcasts.
We read of slaving parties. Who were they targeting? Common sense tells us that an army cannot raid itself, nor will it charge into the very community it calls home to capture its own fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. No amount of goods that can be sold anywhere will be enough to make that happen. The state itself would collapse along with the community providing the soldiers and the sustenance for them. Such a thought, says Inikori, is simply asinine even in a worst case scenario.
How exactly were African people actually being captured?
We see in several narratives how African leaders waged wars and captured prisoners from enemy nations. Then, these prisoners were sold as slaves. While Professor Beckles’ short presentation seems to portray a more direct role for Europe in the destruction process without necessarily explaining that role, he provided more detail on this process years ago in a book he authored with fellow UWI scholar and professor Verene Shepherd, Trading Souls: Europe’s Transatlantic Trade in Africans (2007). In the chapter titled “The Transatlantic Trade and African Economic Decline,” Beckles outlined the ways that European nations would fuel wars between African nations by providing arms and ammunition to those willing to trade captives (this, Beckles says, was mostly an English strategy in West Africa). It was then the better-equipped armies of Europe’s most cooperative customers which unleashed the constant ‘reign of terror’ that Beckles referenced on video. To a lesser frequency, European ships landed in places where they could do the raiding themselves (direct confrontation, Beckles says, was mostly a Portuguese strategy employed against Congo, Angola, and Dahomey). As I have written in previous articles, the Portuguese would actually send punitive expeditions to take out royals who attempted to shift their economic base away from a reliance on slave trading.
In some narratives of survival, we find instances of Europeans convincing natives by some form of trickery to board the slave ships where they would be chained afterwards. For example, in 1767, two Efik slave traders named Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin John, who were part of a royal family in the trading hub of Old Calabar on the West Coast of Africa (in modern-day Nigeria), were ambushed and captured by English slavers after being betrayed by Efik business rivals from a different town. The records suggest that these rivals devised a scheme against the Robin Johns’ community along with English ship captains and the ruler of another town by having the captains invite the enemy king and his entourage to a party on board the ships then trapping them for a surprise attack. The Robin Johns documented their ordeal in a series of letters to Methodist co-founder Charles Wesley and others while in England, following their time as slaves in the British North American colonies. (U.S. history professor Randy Sparks who uncovered the letters during in the course of his research notes that these accounts were ‘written in their own hand.’) After successfully obtaining their freedom through legal action, the Robin Johns returned to Old Calabar, where evidence indicates they resumed their involvement in slave trading activities.
There was one other popular method of capture.
The Ibo abolitionist Olaudah Equiano wrote in his autobiography that as a young boy, he thwarted a kidnapping attempt in the neighbor’s yard by calling out to the adults when he saw a bandit sneaking around while the children were outside playing. Later, he and his sister were captured by a party of three individuals. In that instance, the children still recognized the danger, but were not given a chance to cry out in time. “They stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood.”
Here we see an example of capture that does not involve any army or governing figure but a few opportunists trying to make some money by dealing to Europeans. These were not simply some shady simpletons out to sell friends or family members. How else were Equiano and the other children of the village able to identify these individuals as body snatchers unless they could see that these people were clearly strangers, even if they belonged to the same ethnic group? Oforka identifies that such persons were actually called “Ndi Ogaga” by the Ibo, which literally translates to “wandering strangers.”
While governments were not directly involved in this banditry, government officials incentivized these activities by purchasing captives from these hustlers in the marketplace to meet their foreign partners’ strict slave quotas and supplying their own stock of captives and criminals for merchants.
It should be settled by now that opportunists looking to obtain valuable items which they could use to prosper themselves and their own people were usually targeting persons they did not share social bonds with.
Lovejoy makes it clear:
It is inaccurate to think that Africans enslaved their brothers – although this sometimes happened. Rather, Africans enslaved their enemies.
The question at hand further presumes that Africans were cold and unfeeling towards the persons they had deprived of liberty. The evidence shows us otherwise.
How Were Captives Treated in Africa?
Equiano wrote that at some point during the journey to the coast, he and his sister were separated by the kidnappers even as they protested. He relates his time with a certain family that he was sold to. He acknowledged that this family treated him ‘extremely well, and did all they could do to comfort me; particularly the first wife, who was something like my mother.’ He remarked that much of the day-to-day work was similar to what he was accustomed to in his own neighborhood and the people there even spoke the same language despite being a fay way from the land he called home. That family sold him soon after one of their own children died.
The fact that Equiano still tried to abandon this new living situation is at odds with the common claim that the slavery prevalent in this period was a normal part of African and other global societies and was therefore accepted and acceptable. Again, common sense tells us that no parent would willingly sell their child to be treated like an animal (as Inikori tells it) and any child who is stolen from their family without their knowledge and consent would resist and attempt to return given the first chance to do so. You can’t even take a newborn baby from its mother without that baby crying in protest.
The next group of people who purchased Equiano took him to a house where his sister was also brought. Their reunion moved the new owners to sympathy. Equiano recalled, “When these people knew we were brother and sister, they indulged us to be together.”
After this, Equiano was separated again from his sister and sold to another family, which had a tradition of waiting on the eldest slave (himself at the time) to eat before anyone else. He was surprised at this tradition because it was also practiced in his own village.
Indeed, every thing here, and all their treatment of me, made me forget that I was a slave. The language of these people resembled ours so nearly, that we understood each other perfectly. They had also the very same customs as we. There were likewise slaves daily to attend us, while my young master and I, with other boys, sported with our darts and bows and arrows, as I had been used to do at home. In this resemblance to my former happy state, I passed about two months; and I now began to think I was to be adopted into the family, and was beginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget by degrees my misfortunes…
When Equiano was suddenly awoken at night and carried on the road again, it was like being rudely awaken from a pleasant dream.
…all at once the delusion vanished.
Still, he found that many of the cultures he passed shared so much in common.
All the nations and people I had hitherto passed through, resembled our own in their manners, customs, and language…
People who have so much in common are less likely to treat each other without respect as if they are dealing with animals. Though he was always on guard, we see that Equiano really did have some relatively positive experiences among these cultures.
…Indeed, I must acknowledge, in honor of those sable destroyers of human rights [the traders], that I never met with any ill treatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them, when necessary, to keep them from running away.
These descriptions were specific to the people who lived far inland. The last group which he encountered was very different from any he had seen, with practices he thought were strange, though they were still African. Equiano was in awe of them and slightly appalled by what he saw, describing their habit of sharpening their teeth as a form of disfigurement which he declined when invited to indulge. This is additional proof that Africans from different regions did not see each other as one and the same people.
It is important to note that the people he described gave him the opportunity to choose whether or not to assimilate into their culture. This does not indicate a rigid form of slavery in which a person must always do as they are told.
By the time Equiano reached the slave ship on the coast, we see a totally different picture of captivity among the Europeans.
At first, Equiano was relieved to learn that the Europeans were just taking them to a place where he and other captives were going to be working. After all, that is something he was now used to for the past eight months at least while serving under different masters (all African). But soon, reality settles in. This new slavery was going to be more than just work. It would mean torture and even death.
In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men, I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us? They gave me to understand, we were to be carried to these White people’s country to work for them. I then was a little revived, and thought, if it were no worse than working, my situation was not so desperate; but still I feared I should be put to death, the White people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty; and this not only shown towards us Blacks, but also to some of the Whites themselves [emphasis added].
One White man in particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute. This made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner. I could not help expressing my fears and apprehensions to some of my countrymen.
By Equiano’s account, we should be more concerned about how Europeans treated each other than how Africans treated each other.
This was even before casting off to sea. The longer Equiano stayed aboard the ship, the worse his opinion of the Europeans got.
Every circumstance I met with, served only to render my state more painful, and heightened my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of the Whites.
Our opinion should be no different when we read examples in Beckles’ and Shepherd’s collection of European sailors punishing African rebels by hanging them, chopping them, tossing them to sharks, and even forcibly feeding them to other captives – atrocities for which we find no true parallels in African systems (otherwise, such demonstrations of terror would be unable to achieve their desired effects).
Lovejoy writes that the brand of slavery that was practiced in Africa before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade did share certain features which were common to all forms of slavery, namely ‘the property element, the alien identity, the role of violence, and productive and sexual exploitation.’ However, the scale of the slave trade led to increased mechanisms of control and greater abuses than previously existed. In their efforts to manage the increasing number of slaves, African masters subjected them to forced marches, inadequate food, exposure to disease, exhaustion, and overall poor treatment.
How Significant a Role Did African Opportunists Play in the Slave Trades?
African opportunists played a significant role in the slave trades. Their assistance at each point in the trade was invaluable to its continuance. This assistance included the procurement of captives (that alone was no small matter considering the risks to life and limb), the transport of caravans on months-long journeys to the coast, the supervision of captives on board slaving vessels, and even the translation of negotiations between Europeans and local leaders and traders.
However, Africans did not start the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade or organize the most brutal part of the trade in which people were chained to each other, crammed into the holds of ships, and made to suffer in waste-filled, vermin-infested, disease-ridden environments for months at a time only to start new lives working nonstop for people who hate them. Africans did not make decisions to assemble timber in order to build the ships, they did not sail the ships, or torture and kill the people who tried to escape the ships. In all narrative accounts of the slave trades, this is the part that survivors remember most for the trauma it imprinted on their minds.
African people on the continent were not entirely oblivious to the scenes unraveling before their very eyes. Folks who had been enthusiastic about acquiring foreign luxuries such as alcohol, horses, textiles, and jewelry, were surely alarmed at the ways business with European merchants was beginning to threaten their traditional way of life.
U.S. historian of the African diaspora Sylviane Diouf writes:
In a vicious cycle, raiding and kidnapping became more prevalent as some communities, individuals, and states traded people to access guns and iron to forge better weapons to protect themselves, or in order to obtain in exchange the freedom of their loved ones.
Beckles and Shepherd add:
The TTA stimulated African domestic political conflict. Increased levels of warfare weakened the potential for economic development. The political survival of states, and the ability of the elite to maintain their authority, soon depended on engagement with the trade. This process in turn created specific conditions for their own subversion, decline, and destruction. In effect, the masses of people were victims in the client relationships kings and nobles established with the heavily armed European slavers.
With a small and shrinking assortment of powerful African kingdoms in collusion with Europeans such as Dahomey (which effectually toppled two other slaving giants: Allada/Arda/Ardra in 1724 and Ouidah/Whydah/Hueda in 1727) and the Asante/Ashanti (which did the same to Denkyira in 1701 and Akwamu in 1742), Professor Inikori notes in the same volume that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade could only have been facilitated by a far greater prevalence of comparatively vulnerable settlements, or in his words, ‘the existence of weakly organized communities whose members can be captured and sold at little cost to the captors’ and ‘without [significant] fear of retaliation.’
A whole transformation took place with European nations ultimately wielding the power to set up certain kingdoms for dominance and obliterate others simply by altering the flow of (substandard) weapons and providing or withdrawing tactical support on the battlefield.
From Beckles and Shepherd:
Old states were subverted and destroyed, and new ones formed as elites vied to become clients of European slave traders. The changed political landscape of West Africa, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, had more to do with this development than any other single factor.
When communities recognized the extent to which their leaders were compromised and corrupted by the trade, they developed independent, mass-based resistance strategies against them and their European business partners. The TTA, then, created a long-term political circumstance in which the military superiority of European slavers and their African clients criminally victimized millions of people.
But captured Africans and many African communities did not collaborate with the project of selling Black souls. Indeed, Africans did not wish to be sold into slavery across the Atlantic and protested whenever they could.
Lovejoy explores the ways that systems of slavery in Africa were influenced by the pressures of European capitalism just as with pre-existing systems of slavery in the Americas. The ideological differences, he says, largely remained, with African slavery being lineage-based. But whereas incidences of enslavement prior to European contact, was relegated to the margins of society, there was a growth of plantations slavery and an increased demand for domestic slaves, who were still mostly women. ‘Slavery,’ says Lovejoy, ‘became a central institution and not a peripheral feature.’ “The changes that took place resulted in the emergence of slave societies in places where previously there had only been a few slaves in society.”
How Large a Resistance Was There From Africa?
Slaveholders loved to parrot the lie that African people all over the continent were already far more brutal to each other than Europeans could ever be in an effort to convince everyone that they were doing Africans a favor by beating, raping, and killing them. Another lie they commonly told to justify slavery was that African people enjoyed being slaves. This, of course, is far from the truth.
On the very first wave of expeditions sent by Portugal to the West Coast of Africa, Araujo notes:
During this significant period, West Africans repelled Portuguese invasions. They used naval power to fight back, resisted inland, and also opted to escape to the interior.
Africans resisted captivity at every turn and from the very outset of enslavement under European rule. Any chance they got, they tried to escape, even if that meant plunging into a watery grave. As we read earlier, even children like young Equiano attempted to end their predicament by fleeing their captors.
The fact that individual Africans did not go willingly into the slave trades tells us that slavery was not considered a normal condition to them. They did not choose to give up their freedoms and “sell themselves” into slavery; that choice was made by others against them.
Continental Africans also resisted as small parties, nations, and confederacies.
In fact, 3 out of every 4 recorded instances of violent resistance against the crew of slave ships happened while these ships were still within view of the African coast.
After examining numerous evidences of shipboard insurrections and attacks on slave ships waiting awaiting departure, Beckles and Shepherd write:
Africans, then, did not wish to be captured, enslaved, and sold as a commodity. Despite the extensive record [emphasis added] that speaks to the client relationship which elite Africans entered into with European traders, there is considerable evidence that details the nature of widespread community resistance.
In the end, all Africans, whether in their roles as suppliers, client traders, ruling class collaborators, or captives, were adversely affected by the TTA.
One Nigerian writer has suggested that African people had enough military capacity to crush the European slaving powers on the battlefield as the weapons Europeans were using in the first four centuries of the slave trade were largely inefficient and required close combat. It might be said that warring nations south of the Sahara had the advantage of numbers, knowledge of the terrain, and well-developed fighting strategies. Internal political fragmentation, divergent economic interests, and possibly the persistence of historic grievances between different nations are some of the many factors that contributed to the lack of enduring alliances against foreign adversaries.
But Diouf urges us to recognize that, similar to African resistance in the Americas, African resistance on the continent manifested in various forms and should not be evaluated solely based on the success of large-scale, sustained physical combat.
The absence of an intercontinental united front, she posits, is no indication of a universal apathy or ‘collective passivity’ of the part of continental Africans.
Diouf has made a most compelling case for the outright dismissal of such hindsight impressions, which she believes are intended, through constant recycling in public venues, only to maintain strife and divisions between African people in the present:
The fact that Africans did not constitute one population but many whose interests and needs could be vastly divergent has not reached the general public. Although it seems acceptable that the French and the English or the English and the Irish, fought one another for dozens of generations and did not see themselves as being part of the same people – not even the same race – such a notion is still difficult to grasp for many when it comes to peoples in Africa. Their conflicts based on land, religion, politics, influence, dynastic quarrels, expansion, economy, territorial consolidation – which they considered as serious as the French and English did theirs when they launched, and doggedly pursued, their Hundred Years’ War – appear trivial to many in the face of the onslaught of the slave trade and the rise of racism.
…
Nowhere in the Africans’ testimonies is there any indication that they felt betrayed by people “the color of their own skin.” Their perspective was based on their worldview that recognized ethnic, political, and religious differences but not the modern concepts of a black race or Africanness.
…
The concepts of Africa, Africans, blackness, whiteness, and race did not exist in Africa, and they cannot be utilized today to assess people’s actions at a time when they were not operative.
Lovejoy concludes that it was both external and internal factors that are to blame for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
The external demand for slaves and the rivalry between African states directly affected the spread of slavery, for both caused tensions that led to the enslavement of people.
Hopefully, we have settled the question, leaving no further room for doubt and ignorance on the subject.
The framing of these questions is often a sign of the kind of response that the person asking them is seeking. It is a negative framing, which assumes African people are inherently wild, self-hating, and genocidal. Sometimes, the problem is greater than the person asking the question. Sometimes, they know better, but are only asking such questions to stir up controversy. Sometimes, they know that if they do a little research, they will find information that disagrees with their agenda so they leave all of the research to others. Sometimes, they have seen the truth while doing their own research but selectively choose certain findings to share and not others so that they can convince other people to believe a certain way about certain groups of people in our world today. Sometimes, the best thing is not to engage with the people making these questions. Sometimes, the best thing is to be strong in the truth and to be confident about the ways that you are applying that truth to make the world a better place, rather than to give a stage to people who want the world to be a place where people continue to be confused about these issues so that they can continue to perpetuate injustices while others are blamed for actions for which they are actually responsible. Sometimes, you have to stop and think: is that who you want to be? A person who answers every time you hear someone say “hey n*gger”? Sometimes, you have to stop and think about whether someone else should be able to determine how you spend precious moments of your time on this Earth as an obvious and (extra)ordinary human being. Sometimes, the best answer is to know yourself and know your worth.
– Omri Coke, Black Researchers United Admin Team
Read More from the books Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (1977) by John W. Blassingame, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2000/2011) by Paul E. Lovejoy, Africa’s Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850 (2002) by David Northrup, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (2003) edited by Sylviane A. Diouf, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (2004) by Randy J. Sparks (Sparks also authored the book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (2014)), Trading Souls: Europe’s Transatlantic Trade in Africans to the Caribbean (2007) and Saving Souls: The Struggle to End the Transatlantic Trade in Africans (2007) by Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own (2007) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Bleeding Continent: How Africa Became Impoverished and Why it Remains Poor (2015) by Venatius Chukwudum Oforka, Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’s Guinea Coast (2017) by Colleen E. Kriger, and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of the Slave Trade (2024) by Ana Lucia Araujo (Araujo also authored the book The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (2023)).
Read More on this topic here:
https://blackresearchersunited.net/2022/01/22/essay-did-africans-sell-other-africans-into-slavery
