African Kings and Black Slaves

Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Herman L. Bennett

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812295498
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler.In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

CHAPTER 1

Liberalism

In 1852, eight years before assuming the coveted position as clerk of the Privy Council, the Englishman Sir Arthur Helps published a two-volume history, The Conquerors of the New World and Their Bondsmen: Being a Narrative of the Principal Events Which Led to Negro Slavery in the West Indies and America. These books, the product of research in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid, constituted Helps’s inaugural tome on Spanish America. Nineteen years later, he had published five additional books, totaling nine volumes, on the early history of Spanish America and its Spanish protagonists, including The Spanish Conquest in America, and Its Relation to the History of Slavery and the Government of Colonies (4 vols., 1855, 1857–1861); The Life of Las Casas, the Apostle of the Indians (1868); The Life of Columbus (1869); The Life of Pizarro (1869); and The Life of Hernando Cortés (1871). In the nineteenth century, only the American William H. Prescott, among non-Iberian and non-Spanish American writers, rivaled Helps in producing Iberian and Spanish American historiography, the latest installment of the Anglo-imperial library.¹ Though both authors addressed the same subject—New World conquests—their focus differed. Prescott explored how the Renaissance monarchy affected Spanish expansion, culminating in the conquest of the Americas. Spaniards and Indians—at the exclusion of Africans—inhabited Prescott’s histories. Helps employed a broader canvas and insisted that the earlier Iberian encounter with Africa, including the history of slavery, figured in the formation and governance of the New World. Acknowledging that slavery “lacks a dramatic interest,” Helps observed how “it has no thread to run upon like the account of any man’s life, or the history of a nation. The story of slavery is fragmentary, confused; in a different state of progress in different parts of the world at the same time, and deficient in distinct epochs to be illustrated by great adventures. Moreover, people think that they have already heard about it; which is not so.”²

To observe that “the story of slavery” exists “in a different state of progress in different parts of the world at the same time” reads at once as a self-congratulatory nod to British liberalism and as a critique of existing slaving empires and nations. By 1852, Britain had suppressed its own slave trade (1807), emancipated the enslaved throughout most of its empire (1833), and for much of the nineteenth-century led a crusade against human trafficking. By the mid-nineteenth century, most European nations had capitulated to British diplomatic demands, allowing triumphant English liberals to lament slavery’s existence, if not expansion, in the hands of African and Arab despots. Helps’s musings, along with the countless expeditionary reports, travel accounts, and histories written by other European authors, fueled the English appetite for encroachment on African and Arab sovereignty—the reign of illiberal tyrants, as they saw it—so as to suppress slave trading and slavery, which, by the mid-nineteenth century, Western writers had defined exclusively as the black man’s burden. From liberalism’s triumphant perch, one could discern in Helps’s writings the conflation of historiography with ideology. His was a history of slavery that inveighed against human bondage and in doing so called for the benevolence of imperial intervention.

In a sense, Helps strikes a familiar chord: the critique of the “chattel principle” bequeathed by the liberal world order.³ He offers an outline of European expansion, but one in which slavery figures as “a much more momentous question” necessitating “a history of its own.” Writing at British liberalism’s apogee, Helps did not explicitly acknowledge colonial slavery’s elemental role in imperial Britain’s formation. He transposed that relationship to the Iberian past, thus exonerating both English liberalism and imperial Britain. By doing so, he invoked an earlier imperial formation with unquestionableties to slavery. Helps did, however, underscore how the slave trade’s ascendancy and, more important, its demise resided in English hands. Conceived in this manner, the slave trade and slavery represented an English story before descending into the domain of despots and tyrants. Subscribing to this fiction, Western scholars and theorists have overlooked slavery’s earlier relationship to early modern imperial governance.

Helps alludes to this connection in his initial exploration of Spanish history, The Conquerors of the New World and Their Bondsmen; but in the subsequent and expanded version that draws on the same material, The Spanish Conquest in America and Its Relation to the History of Slavery and the Government of Colonies, Helps explicitly demonstrates how Iberian expansion and encounters with Africans united slavery and colonial governance—the process of subjecting and ruling peoples. While the title The Spanish Conquest in America ostensibly situates the history in the New World, Helps devotes considerable attention to the African past, notably to the iconic events that framed the Iberian-African encounters during the “age of discovery.” To view these descriptions of the initial century of contact as a representation of European hegemony presaging liberalism’s ascendancy misses the point. The expeditions under Prince Henry’s patronage, the inaugural encounter with black Africans, the acts of enslavement, Cadamosto’s voyage, the foundation of El Mina, and the assassination of Prince Bemoin—once well-known imperial dramas that fueled the imagination of Western schoolchildren and with which today’s imperial historians still remain familiar (and which figure in this project)—illuminate the relationship between slavery and governance in a distinct historical moment in which African sovereignty and the European recognition thereof was unquestioned.

Helps clearly offers a more nuanced narrative of the African-European encounter, which in the liberal imaginary typically conflated historical agency with Europe’s inhabitants. Reflecting the tenor and ambiguity of the Iberian sources, Helps conveys some of the complexity that shaped African polities and the dynamism of their rulers. Though framed in the genre of romance, Helps narrates how heroic African kings and tragic black princes, courtly pageantry, royal processions, and valiant foes played leading roles in the encounter with Europeans. By doing so, he draws on well-worn sources and canonical events of the early modern period, familiar episodes and historical figures around which this book also takes shape. In Helps’s narration of the past, the iconic and the familiar convey a history that yielded insight into a previous era that his and now our present leave largely unacknowledged. Equating this past in relation to the earliest moments of the African-European encounter with “old slavery,” Helps declares,

The peculiar phase of slavery that will be brought forward in this history is not the first and most natural one, in which the slave was merely the captive in war, “the fruit of the spear,” as he has figuratively been called who lived in the house of his conqueror, and laboured at this hands. This system culminated amongst the Romans; partook of the fortunes of the Empire; was gradually modified by Christianity and advancing civilization; declined by slow and almost imperceptible degrees into serfage and vassalage; and was extinct, or nearly so when the second period was marked by a commercial character. The slave was no longer an accident of war. He had become the object of war. He was no longer a mere accidental subject of barter. He was to be sought for, to be hunted out, to be produced; and this change accordingly gave rise to a new branch of commerce. Slavery became at once a much more momentous question than it ever had been and thenceforth, indeed, claims for itself a history of its own.⁴

Building on the histories of a previous generation of liberal thinkers, including the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, Helps conveys how commercial imperatives—not chivalry, honor, or Christianization—drove European expansion and determined the nature of colonial rule. In this telling of the New World epic, European motivation resided in acquisition, commerce, and profit. The same held true for the latest incarnation of slavery. But then Helps cautions the reader from viewing “the history of slavery” as “merely an account of commercial greediness and reckless cruelty carried to the uttermost.”⁵

Even as he configures the link between African slavery and New World conquests through a politics of “dramatic interest”—as opposed to a stark focus on market phenomena, trade, and the making of chattel—Helps still narrates a liberal story that simultaneously delineates the transitory components of the early African-European encounter distinguishing between “old” and “modern” slavery. By acknowledging the “history of slavery,” Helps offers us a sighting of a lost moment—events, experiences, histories, and texts—that feature in what follows. Here the focus does not reside in some ancient tradition or what Helps variously labeled the “first,” “natural,” or “old” slavery. Instead, Helps gestures to an interstitial moment situated precariously between that “peculiar phase of slavery.” Ill defined, “this system” emerges in the vortex of a shifting chronology that at once “culminated,” “was gradually modified,” “declined,” and finally “was extinct, or nearly so.” Indeed, we may want to read his tentative, if not halting, attempts to describe the antecedents of his present—a past that is not synonymous with antiquity—as already privileging a secular liberal worldview that disavowed an earlier Christian discursive formation. Though the liberal imagination is not the central plot of the succeeding story, as the silhouette through which we narrate the history of the slave trade and slavery, it casts a formidable shadow over historical memory and must be engaged critically if we are to develop a new interpretation.⁶

Indeed, it is important to ask why this emphasis on representation might matter. Simply put, histories of the African past and its diaspora refract how we narrate the European past. From this perspective, the history of the West is cast as foundational in the formation of the African diaspora, and, in turn, the emergent African past is inextricably linked to a nascent Europe. The European story that liberal writers like Helps crafted still enjoys a dominant role in how subsequent scholars configure the history of slavery and, by implication, Europe’s relationship to Africa and Africans. The resulting idea of Europe frames the history of slavery so thoroughly that any engagement with the African past exists in a dialectic relationship with prevailing representation of Europe. Obviously, the specificity of the European past matters. To acknowledge as much requires scholars of the African past or the African diaspora to wield an equally discerning historical sensibility in their rendering of Europe as we now expect from our engagements with Africa.⁷ Stated differently, might we suspect a misaligned representation of the fifteenth-century past if scholars configured Europe as a secular entity in which the logic of capitalism stands ascendant in its initial encounter with Africa? What such a static configuration of Europe implies for histories of the European encounter with Africans cannot be overstated.

Though the African past and even the African diaspora, as a formation engendered by European expansion, have always manifested a degree of autonomy, much that we know about Africa and Africans relies on the configuration of the European past. In recent years, no field of study has done more to acknowledge this dynamic of interpolation than postcolonial scholarship.⁸ As critique, epistemological intervention, and history writing, postcolonial scholarship has questioned the assumptions that naturalize Europe as the universal subject of history. Here the critique has largely focused on the eighteenth century and beyond, a period when Britain and France played leading roles invariably encapsulating the European experience. For this reason, postcolonial criticism offers a challenge to the world that liberalism invented. This critique, as scholars of Latin America have noted, focuses principally on English and French experiences with the larger world, thereby coming at the expense of earlier colonial histories that precede the eighteenth-century inventions of Europe and the European past.⁹ Helps and his contemporaries crafted this liberal order that sublimates for a singular European past. An unquestionably liberal Europe, therefore, frames the history of Europe and its expansion. Traditions, experiences, and histories that precede the advent of liberalism are often rendered merely as earlier versions of the same.

What this has meant for a framing of earlier histories has preoccupied some scholars, but this critique has not made significant inroads into the earliest histories of European expansion or, for that matter, into representations of the slave trade. The Europe that frames the history of these encounters is the ascendant, if not hegemonic, Europe of the late eighteenth century simply projected on an earlier setting. To acknowledge as much underscores the symbiosis shaping the formation of both Africa and Europe and positions this study of the African diaspora in the contested terrain of historical representation. By implication, the African diaspora—the momentous human dispersal of African peoples inaugurated during the fifteenth century and the subsequent Atlantic encounters that engendered both the destruction of social formations and the creation of profound social transformations—emerges as a constitutive element in the early formation of Europe, thus composing a defining feature of the modern world. In saying as much, it is also critical to discern a distinction between being a “feature” of the modern world and how contemporary scholarship interpolates the relationship between the African diaspora, the slave trade, and the modern.

It should be said that this project did not begin exclusively in the merchant ledgers, ship manifests, or royal tax records featured prominently in the slave trade archive. After the sighting of those initial letters, this project emerged through a steady engagement with the library of the “Black radical tradition,” most notably the writings of C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Walter Rodney.¹⁰ As intellectuals—colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial—they touched on the slave trade to comment on the related histories of colonial expansion and slavery, bringing to light distinctive dynamics in the overlapping African, European, and New World past.¹¹ They wrote compelling histories that also served as commentaries on the state and situation of the black world. In these narratives, I first witnessed history writing as critical engagement with the present. Even though I read these seminal works decades after they had been crafted, the urgency, political significance, and theoretical relevance still seemed vibrant. In these histories, the colonial experience took on meaning for the formation of various black and African worlds that to this day remains germane. Colonialism and its very elements—the slave trade, slavery, the structuring of difference and capitalism—mattered then and now. These narratives offered up histories of the modern world in which power played a dynamic role without obliterating the potential for change.¹² As classical materialists but also colonial subjects, these iconic figures of the “Black radical tradition” expressed an intimate familiarity with the history of late modern Europe that could be nuanced through an engagement with the early modern instantiation of imperial expansion in which the history of Spain and Portugal represented more than a long preface to the “real” colonial past. Perhaps we should approach this by asking a different question: how might we reconcile these disparate histories of Europe without simply viewing the three centuries before the advent of English and French capitalism merely as a long prehistory, extended detour, or ill-defined route ultimately not taken?¹³ As a scholar of Africa and Africans working on the Latin American past, it seemed natural that I found an opening through Walter Rodney’s A History of the Upper Guinea Coast.

A deeply nuanced study grounded in Portuguese archival sources dating back to the sixteenth century, Rodney’s book addressed many of the salient historiographical themes of the African past, including the issue of migrations and the spread of human civilization in West Africa, cultural diffusion, the basis of social differentiation, slavery and the slave trade, the formation of states and empires, the spread of Islam, and the arrival of the Europeans to include the advent of colonial rule. On the basis of its impeccable research, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast became a field-defining study in the fledgling historiography on Africa.¹⁴ Yet for Rodney, the stakes involved far more than scholarly debate. The history of the Upper Guinea coast presented an opening to comment on the postcolonial condition, particularly the role of African elites whose avarice fueled the slave trade, which in due course paved the way for European colonial domination. In drawing this conclusion about the past, Rodney simultaneously commented on the postcolonial present in both Africa and the Caribbean. Rodney wrote,

It is an obvious and well-recognized fact that the African chiefs and kings were actively engaged in partnership with the European slavers all along the coast, but the impression given of inter-tribal conflicts has usually seemed to outweigh that of internal struggles. . . . Tribal divisions were not, then, the most important. When the line of demarcation is clearly drawn between the agents and the victims of slaving as...