African Voices of the Global Past

1500 to the Present

Trevor R. Getz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429982132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

This book focuses on retelling many of the important episodes in the global past (c.1500–present) from African points of view. It discusses the events and trends of global significance: the Atlantic slave system, the industrial revolution, World Wars I and II, and decolonization.

1

Naming and Framing a Crime Against Humanity

African Voices of the Transatlantic Slave System, ca.1500–1900

Kwasi Konadu

GLOBAL CONTEXT

The purpose of this chapter is to enlarge our understanding of Africa in the era of the transatlantic slave system, to draw attention to African experiences during that period, and, finally, to explore how Africans themselves interpreted the process of transatlantic slaving through their own ways of making sense of the world. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, this global system of commerce reached its height in the eighteenth century, having grown out of Africa’s earlier connections with the globe through long-standing trans-Saharan, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean trade.¹ Owing to the endurance of Africa’s historic relations with Eurasia through these trade networks, transatlantic commerce and human trafficking would surpass rather than replace them, even as the global economy gradually shifted from the Indian Ocean world in the east to the Atlantic Ocean world in the Western Hemisphere.

Since the beginnings of the transatlantic slave system in the fifteenth century, enslavement has been the focus of an enormous number of books, pamphlets, and articles, making it a topic that college students in African or African American history courses anticipate and to which African (American) history is often reduced. Yet, despite this mountain of “slave trade” literature, a cruel irony of the transatlantic system is that its documentation tells us very little about those who suffered the most—the Africans. Thus my aim is to reveal in those documents of repression the humanity of the people being repressed. While we have a far greater quantity of sources and therefore know much more about African lives under the transatlantic system than about the enslavement of Africans across the Sahara desert or the Indian Ocean, excavating those lives is not an easy task. Indeed, the sheer terror and violence of the transatlantic system not only attacked the bodies and humanity of Africans caught in its grasp, it also transformed these individuals in terms of the numbers representing them etched on ledgers and in log books, thereby subjecting them to the violence of abstraction.

Where can we search for Africans’ perspectives and accounts of their experiences in this system? While much can be learned about African lives from the numeric data and observations recorded by European slaving companies and their agents, we must move beyond the statistics that silenced African voices during the transatlantic era, for the silences of the past continue to stubbornly shape our present understandings about racism, pervasive stereotypes about Africa and Africans and those in its diasporas, and the meaning of the transatlantic slave system as a crime against African humanity. A synthesis such as this chapter, which looks at central themes in the African experience of the transatlantic slave system, cannot fully address these important contemporary issues. However, as an examination of transatlantic slaving through African eyes and experiences, it can provide an integral perspective on these issues and on the study of the transatlantic slave system itself.

Naming and Framing a Crime Against Humanity

The historical events discussed in this chapter are usually referred to as the “Atlantic slave trade” or “African slave trade.” I have instead chosen to use the phrase “transatlantic slave system” to emphasize the systemic reach of transatlantic slaving, which extended well beyond commerce, encompassing the culture and ecology of African communities as well. The naming of this historical process is not a purely academic issue. Many African societies have long known what western scholars have begun to suspect: that words themselves have power, and that their meaning is situational. In other words, names and labels can affect how we perceive a person, place, or historical process.

The first word we must examine in the name of this set of experiences is “slave.” For most of us, the first image that comes to mind when we hear or read this term is that of an enslaved African. Indeed, many of us still view Africans principally as (former) “slaves,” rather than as humans first. Historically, however, the word “slave” derives from the Greek term sklavos (referring to the large number of Slavic peoples under captivity) and the Latin sclavus (meaning both “Slav” [Slavic] and “slave”). Our own racialized contemporary vision of the slave as African is packed with more than five centuries of indelible images very different from those of the Greeks or Romans: “blackness” as a synonym for “Africans” and as the demonic opposite of a Judeo-Christian “whiteness,” and pejorative ideas of Africans and their worldwide descendants as barbarous, idolatrous, and without beauty and intelligence. It is only recently that some scholars have begun to define these humans under captivity as “enslaved Africans”—a phrase that more accurately underscores their condition within the transatlantic slave system than does the crude and intellectually violent word “slaves."

My decision to use the phrase “transatlantic slave system” rather than the more commonly employed “slave trade,” “African slave trade,” and even “transatlantic slave trade” is also important. For one thing, the term “trade” embedded in each of these labels conceals the violence of the system: the raids, captures, escapes, and uprisings, the incarcerations at coastal ports, the languishing of men, women, and children in the holds of ships, the disease, suffering and death on those one-way Atlantic crossings, commodification, the lives of laboring. The term “trade” conjures up an image of an exchange of commodities for other commodities or capital, and little of this straightforward arithmetic occurred, though it was certainly a part of the process of converting Africans into property or chattel. Moreover, combining either “slave” or “African” with “trade” only leads us once again into the trap of equating “slave” with “African,” making them interchangeable terms with equivalent meanings. Nor is the use of “African” strictly accurate. So much of the trafficking in enslaved Africans revolved around European capital, and within this system African labor created a great deal of wealth and industries for the benefit of European and neo-European societies (i.e., the colonies and then, later, the nations established by Europeans in the Americas). Thus some critics might suggest that we refer instead to “European slave trade.” That argument does have weight and can be applied in many cases, but it is similarly insufficient. Substituting one homogenization (i.e., “Africans sold other Africans”) for another (i.e., “Europeans bought and enslaved Africans”) does little to get the full story right. For example, this simplification would make it difficult to understand the experiences of powerful merchants of mixed African and European parentage and of both genders who were active players in the transatlantic slave system but, according to their own accounts, were neither “African” nor “European.”²

There is one additional danger of homogenizing and oversimplifying this system as African. For far too long, the sound bite that “Africans” sold or enslaved other “Africans”—or, Africans sold their “brothers and sisters”—has rolled almost effortlessly off the tongues of scholars, students, and the general public. In most historical instances, members of distinct and sometimes partnering African societies, even those linked by clan affiliations, viewed others not as “Africans” (in the sense of a shared, continental identity) but, rather, as specific cultural groups—that is, as individuals of “foreign” or captive origins, criminals, war captives, and vulnerable people who could become enslaved. To cast a wide net of inhumanity upon all Africans by suggesting that “Africans sold Africans” reaffirms the violence of homogenization and reduces historical processes that shifted according to time, place, and people to a simple matter-of-fact statement. In much the same way that Christian Europeans sold their war captives to Muslims and did not see this transaction as putting their “countrymen” into slavery, some Africans exchanged members of other groups without viewing those destined for export as fellow “Africans.” In cases involving the kidnapping and pawning of kin on account of debt, the kidnapped or pawned individual was usually seized by force and without the consent of the debtor; sometimes, the debtor (usually a male) would also be seized, put in chains, and exported from his homeland. It should be noted that the institution of pawning (using valuables or individuals as collateral for credit and the establishment of trust) contributed only a small number of captive Africans to the transatlantic system inasmuch as pawns, in the form of gold or humans, guaranteed a loan and theoretically prevented one from being arbitrarily seized and sold on account of a defaulting debtor. In many of the slaving regions in Africa, however, there were few valuables (in the eyes of Europeans) other than people, and European merchants and their agents almost always preferred to trade in humans. In short, the mechanisms through which Africans found themselves as captives defy homogenization and should temper our urge to reduce the matter of transatlantic slaving to African depravity.

How we define a subject such as international slaving and thus frame it is a crucial part of the process by which we restore the humanity not only of those millions of Africans who violently died under its systemic weight but also of their descendants who still suffer in a racialized global order made possible in part by the transatlantic slave system. Indeed, one meaningful way to hold accountable the transatlantic slave system—including its institutional and individual beneficiaries—for its crimes against African humanity is to tell its human story on both sides of the Atlantic. For we now know quite a bit about the intricacies of the transatlantic slave system.

However, we know comparatively little about the enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas and those who remained in Africa and in some state of captivity. In Africa and in the Americas, those who were literate or became so under captivity left us a few autobiographical accounts of their experiences (whereas many of the untapped sources for the era of the transatlantic slave system remain archived in African and African diasporic art, song, ritual, and memory). Accordingly, the next section of this chapter surveys the experiences of those enslaved Africans, bringing out patterns and overarching themes across wide geographical areas while providing specifics that make those patterns and themes more tangible.

AFRICAN EXPERIENCES

The Origins of the Transatlantic Slave System

The transatlantic slave system was an outgrowth and expansion of prior commercial systems centered on the Mediterranean region from the Atlantic to western Asia. These systems connected Europe, western and southern Asia, and northeast and North Africa, including those areas of interior Africa where captives were carried across the Sahara by Arab-Muslim merchants to coastal ports. By the early thirteenth century, Italian (specifically Genoese and Venetian) merchants had already established slaving ports using captive “Slavs” and other peoples to produce sugar for export within a commercial system that stretched from the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, and to the Black Sea (in and around the Crimean peninsula). On the Atlantic end of this network the Iberian nations of Portugal and Spain, after the former and then the latter rose from under Arab-African Islamic rule, were aided by the Italian model of plantation slavery and soon extended the network to islands off the northwest and west central African coast in the 1400s. Portugal and Spain dominated the transatlantic slave system until the mid-seventeenth century, and Britain and Portugal would continue that dominance until the early nineteenth century, when the British made international slavery illegal. The Portuguese and Spaniards would control the trafficking in captive Africans until Cuba and Brazil abolished the system of transatlantic slaving in 1886 and 1888, respectively.

The Reconquista—the centuries-long Christian retaking of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic control—set the stage for the transatlantic slave system. Through this process, the Portuguese expelled their Muslim overlords almost two centuries sooner than the Spaniards, acquired some essential nautical knowledge and technologies through Muslim scholars (who obtained their know-how from as far as China), added cannons to their vessels, and established plantations off the coasts of western Africa (e.g., Madeira islands and São Tomé) while raiding African communities for captives. By the fifteenth century, these African captives were increasingly replacing the “Slavs” and other captives in Portugal, Spain, and France. These early African captives were victims of Portuguese slaving voyages as well as of Arab slaving across the Sahara and through north African ports in Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. This Africanization of the trade in enslaved humans reached a new level in the late fifteenth century when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople (what is now Istanbul, capital of present-day Turkey) and diverted the flow of eastern Mediterranean and Black sea captives, including Christian Europeans sold by their countrymen, from the northern Mediterranean to the lands of Islam. The production of Christian Europe’s sugar by enslaved labor and the sources of such labor then shifted west toward the Atlantic, eventually stretching from northwest to west central Africa in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In the 1440s, the first recorded group of African captives from the West African region of Senegambia reached the capital of Portugal. Upon arrival, naked and terrified, they were paraded through the streets of Lisbon as a “barbaric” spectacle to be gawked at by onlookers. A century later, enslaved Africans were commonplace in Portugal. Captive Africans in Lisbon, one of the largest cities in sixteenth-century Europe, are estimated to have accounted for 10 percent of that city’s population. The first enslaved Africans destined for the Americas left from such cities as Lisbon and Seville, Spain. Once in the Americas, their skills and labor were utilized on plantations, in mining operations, and at urban enslavement sites. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans had almost fully replaced enslaved Amerindians (from various societies) and indentured white laborers (many of whom became planters) as the primary source of labor in the Americas for the production and exportation of sugar, rum, molasses, tobacco, coffee, cotton, indigo, precious metals and minerals, luxury items, and, indeed, some of the very irons used in their physical bondage. These so-called saltwater Africans brought with them not only their experience with large-scale agriculture (especially root crops and rice) and their iron-working and textile skills but also some immunity against certain parasitic diseases, such as malaria. With only a small number of exceptions, these captive Africans did not return to their homelands to recount their experiences or observations. Theirs was a oneway voyage—first as captives, then as commodities packed below and above slave vessels’ decks, and finally as valuable yet often uncontrollable property.

Experiencing the “Middle Passage”

As noted, sources providing African perspectives on the Atlantic crossing from Africa to the Americas are very few in number. Africans traveled this “middle passage” on vessels that made multiple crossings, each time adding another thick layer of blood, sweat, urine, excrement, uneaten food, and death to the lower decks. The upper decks of these vessels were also encrusted with similar matter resulting from the floggings of captives who refused to dance, jump, or sing. Ultimately, they served as platforms from which some captives jumped or were forcibly thrown overboard. In The Slave Ship: A Human History, maritime historian Marcus Rediker describes the sheer violence and terror on board the slave vessel, at once a machine of death, a social institution, and a vehicle that prepared the enslaved for the continued terror to be experienced once their sea-bound journey ended. His apt summation of the slave ship’s preparatory role is worth quoting at length.

The slave ship had not only delivered millions of [African] people to slavery, it had prepared them for it. Literal preparation included readying the bodies for sale by the crew: shaving and cutting the hair of the men, using caustics to hide sores, dying gray hair black, and rubbing down torsos with palm oil. Preparations also included subjection to the discipline of enslavement. Captives experienced the “white master” and his unchecked power and terror, as well as that of his “overseers,” the mate, boatswain, or sailor. They experienced t...