BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY AFRICAN INVOLVEMENT IN THE SLAVE TRADE
The recent furor about Clinton's apology for the slave trade raised by conservatives highlights an issue of interest to all of us concerned about understanding the slave trade. Conservatives have only recently discovered African complicity, but comments from the House about the role of "Ugandan chieftains" in selling slaves, show us that this theme will be with us for a while.
The question of complicity is raised by political people in the context of a larger question which most of us who have introduced the slave trade to students have discovered. Most Americans continue to believe, and Clinton's apology aligns slightly with this, that Africans were captured by amphibious attacks on their coast by European and American ships. At best, this was managed by what might be called the "Roots scenario" as shown in the television mini-series, in which Europeans manage to get the cooperation of some Africans in their plans to kidnap their fellows for enslavement. Thus Kunta Kinte is shown being netted by a group of Africans working under the direction of an American factor. As I suggested in my review of the film "Amistad" for _History Today_, this scenario is likely to be invoked even by the capture sequence of Cinque in that film (though no Europeans are shown in the sequence), because it is linked to the elaborate stone castle-fortress of Lomboko elsewhere in the film. Even if the complicity is extended further up the social ladder, to political leaders, they tend to be of the Abolitionists' image: drunken, venal, coarse and very much selling out to the intentions of the Europeans who manage and run the trade. They are well summed-up indeed, by the scornful and demeaning term "chieftains", with its implications of pettiness and primitivity.
Of course, there is nothing about reality in all this, as most of us know. But students are often shocked when they see that African elite participation was much deeper and much less outer-directed than the popular scenario suggests. The present reaction to Clinton's apology is part of an unfolding of that shock, as scholars and journalists have jointly reached a wider public with news of the role of African elites in the slave trade. The reaction as we now see it is still not good history, but it brings us a new set of problems. In the _New York Times_ "Week in Review" section this past Sunday, Howard French describes "huge razzias" conducted by coastal tribes to gather slaves, and while the last part of that article comes closer to what historians would accept, I think it is balefully reductionist as he has stated it. (The World: The Atlantic Slave Trade; On Both Sides, Reason for Remorse by Howard W. French, The New York Times, April 5, 1998)For an Africanist the problem with these scenarios is that one is hard pressed to make them fit into African history. Indeed they are not historical at all, but theoretical, like French's razzias, and are never linked to specific events or patterns of events, like wars, rivalries, diplomacy, etc. For about 8 years I have served as consultant to the playwright Ione for her play "Njinga, the Queen King". In this capacity, I have met with general public audiences to talk about Njinga on quite a few occasions, to provide the historian's view of Njinga to go with her image in the play. Needless to say, Njinga was, like most African leaders, involved in the slave trade. Her first hostile encounter with the Portuguese authorities after she came to rule Ndongo in 1624 was a dispute over the seizure of a group of slaves she had sent to the market to be sold. She unhesitatingly sold the captives of her wars to Portuguese and Dutch merchants on all sides. In making presentations I don't highlight these elements of her reign, because I find her more interesting, and even heroic, for her struggle against Portuguese domination of Ndongo, against the anti-female elements in that country, her capacity as general, and her adhering to her principles (even if they are those of an aristocracy). Capturing people and selling slaves was a general part of life in that area at that time, just like taking taxes or forcing labor from subjects was a part of life in the pre-industrial world.
Audiences, however, often ask about Njinga as a "slave trader", and when I am unable to answer honestly that Njinga sought to suppress the slave trade or wanted to free the enslaved, the response has either been a sort of cynical snicker along the lines of "those Africans were in it up their eyeballs, too", to charges that I have distorted the history and denied Njinga her role as proto-Abolitionist. Many are genuinely concerned about this and I have been questioned closely about this both publicly and privately in these sessions.
What I have said about Njinga applies just as much to virtually the entire African elite of Atlantic Africa. They were appalled when they learned that Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century saw them as simply the African end of the European run- and directed-slave trade, sort of collaborators and local agents. Certainly one is really hard pressed to reinterpret all of Atlantic African warfare as simply slave collecting enterprises, as Howard French seems prepared to do. Since Njinga fought the Portuguese tooth and nail (even as she sold them slaves, occasionally, I have to speculate, captured from their own armies or their own territories), she in particular can hardly be seen as a collaborator of the usual sort.
Unfortunately they, and we are caught in an emotion charged polemic, not amongst ourselves as Africanists, but in our dialogue with the public. When participation in the slave trade becomes a moral touchstone by which the African elite and decision making class is measured, most of us agree that they are seriously compromised. Yet I at least am not at all comfortable with simply consigning them to the drunken collaborators of Abolitionist literature, or as those who have seen Tom Feelings' evocative drawings of the slave trade know, the stone-hearted sell-outs that one can't help but see in his images of African political authorities as they watch the slaves sold on the beaches.
We cannot easily change what political leaders or the media decide to do, but we can approach this through our role as teachers at all levels. We need to present African history in this era as historical in its own right, and not just as "the era of the slave trade". It is distressing to me to see that in so many world history textbooks the 16-18th century is so described, and often the complexities of African history are reduced to their role in the slave trade. We also need to make it clear that the victims of the slave trade descended from definable historical events and that they have a place in the history of Africa. I have tried to begin this in a forthcoming (July?) article in the _William and Mary Quarterly_ in which I explore the wars in Angola that led to the enslavement of those famous "20 and odd Negroes" who were brought to Virginia in 1619--as the "founding fathers/mothers of African America". In teaching my African survey, I start this period by a systematic examination of Africa constitutional history and inter-state relations before going on to the slave trade in hopes that these linkages will be made. Sometimes they are, often they are not.
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