In The Womb Of West African Slavery The Birth of The African American

Many African Americans today when asked about their legacy of slavery answer in the affirmative belief that it was mostly the evil acts of the “white man,” i.e., the Europeans and Americans. At the root of this “evil white-man” theory rest the notion (widely held by significant numbers of African Americans) that West African participation in the slave trade was minimal because they were either conquered by Europeans and Americans who then ventured deep into the interior of Africa stealing and kidnapping millions of free-living innocent Africans, or that, - in reality only a few African tribes were actually involved in slave trading. This simplistic view of the of the trans-Atlantic slave trade appears to have become more entrenched in the minds of African Americans after the fictionalized Hollywood version of African slavery presented in Alex Haley’s Novel and subsequent motion picture Roots. Both works support the fabricated notion that unscrupulous white men were the people solely responsible for the theft and enslavement of millions Africans. In a piece written by Thomas Sowell (January 30, 2002), he states, “When challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley called his work "faction" -- part fact and part fiction. He said that he had tried to give his people some myths to live by. It was not that "Roots" merely got some details wrong. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened -- false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”

Contrary to the present-day African American view of slavery, this essay will document the facts and present historical evidence that shows that for three centuries West African Kingdoms, Chieftains, tribal leaders and Africans at-large, - were indispensable participants who were integral to the success of the holocaustic Atlantic slave trade. This essay challenges the erroneously held African American notion that West Africans played a minimal role or had only a casual involvement in the three centuries long Atlantic slave trade. To be precise, along the African Atlantic coastline West African Empires had maintained control of internal slavery for centuries prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued to do so until slavery’s final demise. As the evidence in this essay will show, the strategic location of the West African Empires rendered them as the prime beneficiaries in capturing and selling slaves to sea faring Europeans and Americans. Onced purchased, Europeans and American vessels transported and controlled external slavery outside of Africa. That is to say, once the slaves left the continent of Africa, their fates and final destination lay squarely in the hands of the American and European slavers. Historical documentation also demonstrates that irrespective of the great demand for slaves, the supply of slaves would not have succeeded unless the suppliers (Africans who captured and sold slaves) were successful in their unrelenting slave raiding endeavors. For centuries this descriptive supply and demand analogy not only maintained the equilibrium that was essential to the success of New World chattel slavery but more importantly rest at the foundation of the West African trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Robert Edgar Conrad in his excellent study ” Children of God’s Fire A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (chapter 1 page 17), explains the ancient custom of Africans enslaving Africans; “When a Kingdom makes war against another Kingdom and is victorious, possessing the right to kill their conquered enemies, this right is transformed into that of slavery, and thus captives can be bartered.” Daniel P. Mannix in his A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade Black Cargoes states that, “Slavery in Africa was an ancient and widespread institution, but it was especially prevalent in the Sudan. Many of the Negroes transported to America had been slaves in Africa.” Accordingly, Davis Brion Davis, - Inhuman Bondage-argues that “In the 1400s, as in many preceding centuries, indigenous slavery and slave trading were very wide spread in West Africa. Slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue–producing property recognized in African law…and thus the main symbols of private wealth and success were large numbers of slaves (and wives, in accordance with socially accepted polygamy)…African “political and economic elites” were eager to sell large numbers of slaves to whoever would pay and thus fueled the Atlantic slave trade.”

In the 15th century the Spaniards inability to enslave the Hispaniola Indians and their succeeding mass death as a result of violence, heavy labor and European diseases, - all ushered in the mass importation of African slaves to the Caribbean island. Daniel P. Mannix writes that “…in 1517 Bartolome de Las Casas, later Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico and known as the Apostle to the Indies…stood before the throne of Charles V, …and implored him to spare the last of the Indians…As an act of mercy toward the Indians, Las Casas begged his majesty to import Negroes. As early as 1518…the Atlantic slave trade was under way.” Robert Edgar Conrad contends that “…after 1500…African slaves began to reach Brazil in substantial numbers… from 1676 until 1851, over 3,000,000 slaves went to Brazil from Africa. During two-thirds of Brazil’s recorded history it was an established and nearly unquestionable practice to uproot black people from their native societies and transport them across the Atlantic to Brazil…Once referred to by a slave trader as “the most lucrative trade under the sun,” this trafficking in human beings was a fully integrated component of African cultures, of the Portuguese Atlantic system, and of the Brazilian colonial economy. The renowned Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in his Pre-Colonial Africa (page 152-153) describes African domestic slavery as “the great chink in African social organization…but that African slaves who were not deported in general enjoyed living conditions incomparably superior to those of white slaves in Europe.” But when the need for cheap labor arouse in the West and was in demand, the plight of the African slave changed…After its contact with Africa, sixteenth-century Europe progressively lost the custom of internal slavery and, taking advantage of its superiority in arms, substituted Black slavery. After the contact with Europe, the lot of Africa’s (domestic) slaves suddenly got worse, since it then became possible for them to be sold to persons who would export them, with the whole chain of well-known evils entailed in these forced crossings.”

Daniel P. Mannix, describes the typical manor in which one becomes a slave in Africa; “they were criminals sold by the native chiefs as punishment, or they were individuals sold by themselves or families in times of famine; or they were persons kidnapped either by Europeans slavers or, more often by native gangs; or they had been slaves in Africa and were sold by their masters; or else they were prisoners of war.” In any event, after the 15th century the every day lived experiences of the African domestic slave change as well as for millions of other Africans who were not slaves. WEB Du Bois in his classic Black Folk Then and Now tells readers “The modern slave trade began with the Mohammedan conquest in Africa, when heathen Negroes were seized to supply the harems, and as soldiers and servants. They were bought from the masters and seized in war, until the growing wealth and luxury of the conquerors demanded larger numbers… As Negro kingdoms and tribes rose to power they found the slave trade lucrative and natural, since the raids in which slaves were captured were ordinary intertribal wars. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the demand for slaves made slaves the object, and not the incident of African wars.”

David Brion Davis argues that just as “…Joseph Cinque (whose real name was Mendean Sengbeh) who was seized by four black strangers from his own tribe or clan and marched like a prisoner to Lomboko, on the Sierra Leone coast…For nearly four centuries West Africans had been devising techniques, including war, to enslave other Africans-usually members of other lineage or ethnic groups – to sell to European and American traders on the coast…virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried out by other Africans, but as the African American historian Nathan Huggins pointed out long ago, the concept of an African “race” was the invention of Western rationalist, and most African merchants “saw themselves as selling people other than their own.” Daniel P. Mannix asserts that “by the middle of the eighteenth century most of the slaves purchased by the English either had been captured in local wars (which had become, in large part, mere slave-raiding expeditions) or else had been kidnapped. Both techniques were highly organized and were conducted on a large scale…Simple kidnapping had become much more common than sale for pretended crimes. Kidnapping of Negroes by white men called “buckra panyaring” was a fairly common practice. Even so, “Whites and blacks cooperated in …panyaring the famous case of the Old Calabar River is one example were …kidnapping amounted about seven thousand slaves a year…Although panyaring by professionals had become an important source of slaves, it continued to rank second to wars among nations, tribes and villages…these wars were conducted chiefly for the purpose of obtaining captives for sale.”

According to David Lamb, The Africans “… For the most part the Arab traders did not venture far into the interior to capture slaves. That service was provided by African Kings and chieftains who, unable to adjust to the new economic temptations of a changing world, subjugated and sold their people for the luxuries and essentials they had only recently been introduced to: cloth, metals, beads, spirits, tobacco, firearms. The slave trade made Kings rich in the interior, and along the coast created a new class of African merchants.” Mannix argues further that “grand pillage is executed by the King’s soldiers, from three hundred to three thousand at a time, who attack and set fire to a village and seize the inhabitants as they can…the lesser pillage…is done by individuals who do not belong to the King but are private robbers.” In David Lamb’s The Africans he contends, “…in addition to half a dozen imported European languages, (Africans) speak 750 tribal tongues, fifty of which are spoken by one million or more people. Both Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in West Africa are spoken by more than 25 million people. In Zaire alone, there are seventy-five different languages…in Africa (Africans stay within the security of (their) linguistic boundaries.” Thus, as noted by the indigenous African scholar J.C. deGraft-Johnson in his book African Glory, - millions of African slaves were taken from the tribalized interior and brought to the coastal Kingdoms to be sold and transported. Also cited in deGraft-Johnson’s book, Professor Torday points out that “it was on a peasantry…that the slave trade fell…Tribal life was broken up or undermined and millions of de-tribalized or decentralized Africans were let loose upon each other…Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves…Violence, brutality, and ferocity became the necessities of survival, for generosity and good neighborliness had lost their meaning…The excesses of the slave trade must never be forgotten, for in them lie much of the horrors of the African continent.”

David Lamb writes that, “…the steps to abolish slavery were taken outside Africa, not in it. Denmark barred its citizens from slave trading in 1803, Britain followed in 1807, the United States in 1808 and France in 1818. Despite the ban, US citizens continued to buy slaves, and slaving still flourished in many areas of the world because African and European merchants were unwilling to server this lucrative economic link. Britain meanwhile had set out to enforce its abolishment decree, establishing a twenty-ship antislavery fleet that patrolled the West African coast and stopped vessels suspected of carrying slaves. Between 1825 and 1865, Britain detained 1,287 slave ships and liberated 130,000 slaves. The decisive factor ending the trade was the US Civil War and the resultant emancipation of slaves…(in) a continent where up to 50 million people …were forced to migrate to other worlds…The migration had influenced events economically, politically and socially in the United States to this day.” In return for the better than three centuries of horror and dreadfulness the African slave trade brought upon the simple people of the interior, according to Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800, Third Edition the “typical payment (West African slave traders received) in the eighteenth century for an African slave man or girl: One roll of tobacco, one string pipe coral, One gun, three cutlasses (a curving sword), One brass blunderbuss (a short wide barrel musket), Twenty-four linen handkerchiefs, five patches [of cloth], Three jugs rum, twelve pints mugs, one laced hat.”
Yet contrastingly, David Brion David argues “The slaves value came to an estimated $3.5 billion in 1860 [U.S] dollars, that would be about 68.4 billion in 2003 dollars. But a more revealing figure is the fact that the nation’s gross national product in 1860 was only about 20 percent above the slaves value, which means that as a share of today’s gross national product, the slaves value would come to an estimated $9.75 trillion.” Lamb states that “Africa has 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power supply, the bulk of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 30 percent of the uranium in the non-Communist world, and 50 percent of the world’s gold, 90 percent of its cobalt, 50 percent of its phosphates, 40 percent of its platinum, 7.5% of its coal, 8% of its known petroleum reserves, 12% of its natural gas, 3% of its iron ores, and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmland. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity. Yet as Lamb contends “According to the United Nations Council on Africa, the economics of thirty of sub-Sahara Africa’s forty-six countries have actually gone backward since independence…(Africa) is not catching up with the rest of the world, it is falling further behind. Africa is no longer part of the Third World. It is the Fourth World.”

"The slave trade could not have endured for four centuries and carried (millions) of people out of Africa without the cooperation of a huge network of African rulers and merchants," says Dr. Robert Harms, a professor of African History at Yale University who has extensively researched the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” John Burnett NPR Morning Edition audio April 12, 2004. “Today, 150 years after the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there is still bad blood between descendants of raided villages and descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey," Burnett says. "The kings of Dahomey -- located in Abomey, in present-day Benin - aggressively captured and sold neighboring tribes people to the slavers. The practice was quite developed, and went on for some three centuries." The story of the slave trade is kept alive in the songs of village griots, or tribal storytellers, who sing the history of the slave-conquering kings of Dahomey, Slavery's Legacy in West Africa Descendants Cope with Complicity in Brutal Trade.

Zayde Antrim Slave Kingdoms Episode states, “although the historical reality is sometimes difficult to accept by African Americans who still face racial discrimination over a century after the abolition of slavery, African complicity in the slave trade neither justifies today's social problems nor minimizes their seriousness. Fifteenth-century Africa was not a homogenous group of people. Some African elites benefited from the enslavement of their rivals, their enemies, their poor, and other culturally foreign groups from the 15th century through the 18th and even into the 19th centuries. Class, language, religion, gender, and ethnicity divided Africans, and it was along these lines that certain Africans participated in the slave trade. Understanding the dynamics of African complicity in the slave trade is important in understanding Africans as historically active and diverse human beings. This understanding should not detract from the horrors of the slave trade or from its American legacy of inequality and racism.” Mannix concludes “…but for practical purposes the Atlantic slave trade…besides causing the death of perhaps thirty to forty million others in slave raids, (death marches from the interior to the coast), coffles and barracoons…what it had produced in Africa was nothing but misery, stagnation, and social chaos.” Even so, before the eighteenth century no such human creature named or known as an African American existed anywhere in the world. After nearly four centuries of West African slave trading, it created an entirely new African prototype race. Permanent forced removal from the continent of Africa, New World miscegenation and cultural regeneration produced a new first of its kind African known today as the African American. Thus, aside from skin color and place of origin these new Africans are unconditionally American.

Posts: 142 | Registered: September 14, 2002

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