Heated controversies over the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American studies and “The 1619 Project” generally airbrush from history the complicity of Africans in selling their own into slavery on an industrial scale with the same profit motive as white slave purchasers. Which race stands on a high moral ground?
"It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside," reports researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. Based on her studies, Perbi relates that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.
As reported by the BBC, Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes that my great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings.
"He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me. Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria.
People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather. They loaded and offloaded ships and supplied the foreigners with food and other provisions. They negotiated prices for slaves from the hinterlands, then collected royalties from both the sellers and buyers.
In sum, for every white buyer of an African slave there was a black African seller. Is the buyer more morally culpable than the seller?
Was the international slave trade pure evil making blacks worse off than if they had remained in Africa? Black Washington Post journalist, Keith Richburg, writes in his book, Out of America; A Black Man Confronts Africa, after witnessing grisly chronic strife, torture, and murder on the Continent where Black Power reigns, “I am quietly celebrating the passage of my ancestor who made it out [enslaved]…Had my ancestor not made it out of there…maybe I would have been one of those bodies, arms and legs bound together, washing over the waterfall in Tanzania. Or maybe my son would have been set ablaze by soldiers. Or I would be limping now from the torture I received in some rancid police cell.”
Liberia, which was colonized by former American slaves, exhibits the following racism in its 1986 Constitution (Article 27): “All persons who, on the coming into force of this Constitution were lawfully citizens of Liberia shall continue to be Liberian citizens. In order to preserve, foster and maintain the positive Liberian culture, values and character, only persons who are Negroes or of Negro descent shall qualify by birth or by naturalization to be citizens of Liberia.”
Whites were not the only slaveholders in America. Free blacks were too, raising doubt as to whether the institution was less race-based and more economic.
Free black people in America bought and sold other black people, at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. Historian Carter G. Woodson asks whether free blacks purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did, or bought them to protect them from the cruelties of slavery. Maybe the motives of free blacks varied. The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin argues, "The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property, but also acknowledges, "There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."
Scholar R. Halliburton shows that free black people owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery." He reports that some free blacks fought for the Confederacy.
None of this is to deny the nauseating magnitude of white racism and participation in slavery, the slave trade, and thousands of black lynchings. Slaveowner Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: and that his justice cannot sleep forever. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s malevolent Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not hyperbole or exaggeration. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Tawny maintained in Dred Scott v. Sanford that both free and enslaved blacks had no rights which whites were required to respect.
The lamp of experience reveals that all races at all times exhibit a propensity towards racism. Tribalism is in the DNA. No race or ethnicity occupies a moral high ground. With due humility, we should individually and collectively resolve to fight against that propensity with color-blind laws and to forge personal relations based exclusively on character and accomplishments. To the extent African American studies or The 1619 Project neglect to foster these anti-racist ends, to that extent they are deficient.
"It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside"
History claims this was all done with violence.
Because surely none were tricked or duped to board the ships right?
I disagree with the “all slaves were captured with violence” trope, as I do not believe violence was the only method used to fill slave ships.
Consider this realistic possibility:
The ships in the Atlantic slave triangle hauled slaves from Africa to the Caribbean markets.
After offloading slaves, the ships were loaded with molasses and headed north to New Amsterdam where the molasses was distilled into rum.
Much of this rum was loaded onto the ships which sailed to Africa where the rum was “traded” for slaves.
It’s very possible there were drinking establishments in African ports where the slavees drank rum spiked with opium and woke up a day later chained in the hold of a ship.
Kidnapping people and forcing them onto ships is as old as the shipping business.
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Shanghaied
verb (used with object), shang·haied, shang·hai·ing.Nautical.
“to enroll or obtain (a sailor) for the crew of a ship by unscrupulous means, as by force or the use of liquor or drugs.”
Shanghaiing or crimping is the practice of kidnapping people to serve as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. Those engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps. The related term press gang refers specifically to impressment practices in Great Britain’s Royal Navy.
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Seems to me, that loading a ship full of rum/opiate incapacitated humans would be far more preferable to having to deal with getting hundreds of extremely resistant people aboard ship in an timely and orderly manner.
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Edit add: History and historians seem to have memory holed what all that rum may have been used for.
Jes sain.