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James L. Akins
From: "bph@iserv.net" " James L. Akins" 8-APR-1998
06:45:07.17
While reviewing the John Thornton excerpt
and his references to "Njinga the Queen King" and the house
conservatives' interpretation of the African complicity in the slave
trade, I was reminded of an incident that became the cornerstone of my
introduction to the legal system. While attempting to defend my actions
in traffic court by stating to the court that I was simply doing what
every other driver at that particular intersection was doing, in that
case ignoring a caution sign, I was reprimanded by the judge and told,
in no uncertain terms, that the fact that others were doing something
wrong was not a defense for my actions. I just wonder if the
conservatives expounding this doctrine of African complicity plan to use
it to explain or defend the American institution of slavery. Or better
yet, is this the reason they use to eliminate any justification for an
apology from Clinton?
JLA
From: Robert
P. Forbes "robert.forbes@yale.edu" "Robert P.
Forbes" 9-APR-1998 17:05:06.46
Another remarkable dimension of American
slavery, to add to Paul Finkelman's: the behavior of slaveholders who
fathered slaves, "kept them enslaved, and enslaved their children
and grandchildren," and in some cases sold them.
RPF
Visiting Assistant Professor Department
of History Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06459
The case against Henry Louis Gates.
It seems to me that Gates' pain about the
Trans-Atlantic slavery have twisted his objectives as film-maker and
narrator. We all understand pain and suffering related to slavery, but
it is not acceptable to present negative personal and a-historical
opinions as if they are fact in material that pretends to be scholarly.
It seems to me that Gates has crafted his own attack on Afrocentric
views of the greatness of Africa. It seems to me that the Gates' video
attempts to paint a picture of an imaginary divide between African
Americans and African views of the Continent and its role in history. As
an African American, this offends me.
(full text at http://www.westafricareview.com/war/vol1.2/mikell.html)
Very many commentators have remarked that Gates
is deafeningly silent on the role of Europeans in the slave trade, on
both the western and eastern coastlines of Africa. For many people, this
is the ONE factor which, above all else, compromises Gates' intention to
provoke Africans and African-Americans to dialogue on the role of
Africans in the slave trade. Additionally, there is the problem
associated with the insistence of the African respondents that Gates
selects for the episodes on the transatlantic slave trade that the West
African slave-raiding and slave-dealing chiefs were equal partners to
the European slave traders. This is a minority view among professional
Africanist historians, black and white; the least Gates could have done
is feature scholars who represent a different view of the relative roles
and rates of profit accumulated by Africans and Europeans in this trade
in human cargoes. Finally, there is the fact that beyond provoking an
African and African-American dialogue on African participation in the
slave trade, the focus on African complicity in the transatlantic slave
trade and the Arab-dominated slave trade on the Indian ocean serves
Gates ultimately as illustrations of a thesis that violence and cruelty
were pervasive in the African past.
(Full text: http://www.westafricareview.com/war/vol1.2/jeyifo1.html)
The defence
Asante and Benin. The source of the statement
about the slave trade that there would have been no slave trade in these
countries without the complicity and collaboration of the kings (and
their representatives) in Asante and Dahomey was not me, but Dr. Akosua
Perbi, a Ghanaian historian. This is indeed a vexed and painful
issue. I know that it was, and remains, a painful issue for me. How I
envy my African friends' easy accessibility to their people's languages
and cultures! How much I lament all that our ancestors suffered to
survive the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow racism and
segregation. But don't ask me, a descendant of slaves, to avoid
addressing this complex issue, which disturbs so many of us so deeply
simply because it is so confusing, so troubling, so anguishing. No one I
interviewed thought my questions inappropriate or felt that I wanted to
make them fell guilty. I don't believe guilt to be heritable. I merely
wanted to bring a dialogue into the open between Africans and African
Americans that has long been simmering beneath the surface. We all feel
discomfort in discussing the contributory role of African hierarchies in
the slave trade. If "Wonders" succeeds in opening this deeply
buried matter to sober reflection, then the series will have made an
important contribution. Need it be said that to acknowledge that
Africans participated in the slave trade along with Europeans is not to
exclude the horrible crimes of the latter?
(Full text: http://www.westafricareview.com/war/vol1.2/gates.html)
Statements in support of Gates
MORE CONTRIBUTIONS
H-NET List for African History and Culture
[H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Sun, 21 Nov 1999
From: Kenneth Wilburn <wilburnk@mail.ecu.edu>
H-Africa has created a thread on Gates'
"Wonders," and it is up and running on our threads page:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/threads/index.html
Let the page load completely; then click
on "Videos/Film;" and finally scroll down to
"Wonders".
John Hunwick makes a plea for introducing some substance into the debates . . .
Ibrahim Sundiata, Howard University, on the slave trade, Wonders of the African World
The following message is cross-posted from
H-Africa, which is moderated by Kathryn Green <kgreen@csusb.edu
<mailto:kgreen@csusb.edu>>
Sundiata on the slave trade, Wonders of the African World
Thu 13-01-00
From: Ibrahim
Sundiata, Howard University
<isundiata@Howard.edu <mailto:isundiata@Howard.edu>>
The discussion over "The Wonders of the African World" has
produced a vigorous and, perhaps, much needed debate. Having
finally seen the entire film series and having bought the accompanying
book, I have a few thoughts on one issue dealt with in both the text and
in the film - Slavery.
"What is Africa to me"? This too oft quoted line by a
New World Black man still interrogates. To many the continent
signifies as the home of the Black Race, the iconic antipode of Europe,
the home of the White. Indeed, Africa in the American popular
perception continues to be either an Edenic Mother/Fatherland or the
barbarous home of famine, disease and civil war. Two constructs
-"The Image of Africa" and "The Image of Slavery"-
have molded, and continue to mold, the Black Diaspora.
"Wonders of the African World" gingerly attempts to walk
the line between the two.
We may begin by asking: What is the "essential" relationship
to ancestral Africa? We do know, of course, that, from the
fifteenth century onward, millions of forced migrants left the
African continent to people both of the Americas and the islands of the
Caribbean. At embarkation, captured women and men were
phenotypically and culturally African, but much has happened since then.
Yet, Africa continues to operate as a fixed point, the
loadstone of ethnic identity, an identity often analyzed so as to
diffuse issues of hybridization and creolization. Whether the
locus of collective origin is in ancient Egypt or among the Yoruba, a
core Africanity is posited because societal constructs so clearly set
off the "Black" community from the "White," in
a Manichaean worldview which governs everything from politics to the
music industry.
In early 1998, President Bill Clinton visited Africa. To many, the
trip was a triumphal one, focused on trade, international security and
the ties that bind Africa and African Americans. Howard French, an
African-American writer in the New York Times mused over whether the
United States should apologize for the Atlantic Slave Trade. He noted
that "In the end, appropriately solemn Mr. Clinton stopped
short of an outright apology for America's part in the slave trade,
finding other ways to express his regret as he focused on the
future." When the president did express regret, he spoke at
school in Uganda. The act was perhaps unintentionally symbolic,
the equivalent of apologizing for the Irish Potato Famine in Slovakia.
Interestingly, nothing was said of contemporary bondage across the
border in neighboring Sudan.
The silence reflects the vagaries of the last century's abolitionist
debates. Commenting on President Clinton's decision to express
official regret for the historic slave trade, French mentioned what we
may call The Slaver's Canard: "Weren't Africans engaging in
slavery themselves well before the first Europeans came and carried off
their first human cargoes? Didn't African chiefs themselves
conduct...slaving raids on neighboring tribes and march their harvest to
the shores for sale."? The charge is an old one.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, defenders of Atlantic slavery
maintained that Africa itself was rife with slavery; Europeans only took
away the surplus produced by semi-permanent warfare. Nineteenth
century abolitionists countered by painting an image of a bucolic
Africa in which slaves were part of the family, a status hardly
comparable to chattel status in the American South.
From the other end of the political spectrum, polemicists continued and
continue to hammer away at the particular evil of "African
slavery." For instance, the conservative ideologue Dinesh
D'Souza decries what he perceives as liberal attempts to "downplay
African slavery." He notes that "Any claims of the
benign quality of African slavery are hard to square with such reports
as slaves being tortured at the discretion of their owners, or executed
en masse to publicly commemorate the deaths of the kings of Dahomey. . .
"
Given the geographical size of Africa and the number and complexity of
societies found there, any broad generalization is bound to be false.
One could argue that there is no benign slavery. Some time
ago, in comparing slavery in the Americas, the anthropologist Marvin
Harris, comparing slavery in the United States and Latin America,
discounted the "Myth of the Kindly Master," in which
"Latin" slavery was envisioned as somehow innately less
harsh and burdensome than the Anglo-Saxon variety. In the Harris
thesis, if some African societies seemed to offer slaves more
leeway than others, it is because their intensity of economic production
was less. It would be very hard to argue that the slave salt
miners of Taodeni or the laborers in the Asante gold mines participated
in any form of "familial" slavery. Even when the kinship
idiom is used, we must realize that folks can be awfully hard on their
kin (for example, Roman fathers had the legal right to kill or sell
their spouses and children). Also, gender cannot be overlooked.
The majority of slaves in Africa were women and in many places the
major agriculturalists. Their status put them at a complex juncture;
under patriarchy all women are subordinate, but some are more
subordinate than others.
If Africa is simply the metonym for "Black Man's Land," a
place without nations, ethnicities or languages, the charge of slavery
and slaving is devastating. Zora Neale Hurston lamented,
"But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had
sold me...My own people had exterminated whole nations and torn families
apart for profit before the strangers got their chance at a cut."
Richard Wright was bedeviled by similar thoughts.
"Had some of my ancestors," he mused, "sold their
relatives to white men?" The writer wondered:
"What would my feelings be when I looked into the black face of an
African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great-grandfather had sold
my great-great-great-grandfather into slavery?" Skip Gates
continues in the same vein: "The image of slavery we had when
I was a kid was that the Europeans showed up with these fish nets and
swept all the Africans away." He is startled: "Rubbish.
It's like they went to a shopping mall. Without the Africans
there wouldn't have been a slave trade."
The indictment is particularly blistering:
. . . for African Americans the most painful-truth concerning the
extraordinary complex phenomenon that was the African slave trade is the
role of black Africans themselves in its origins, its operation, and its
perpetuation. It was an uneasiness and anger about this truth that
fueled Richard Wright's barely concealed contempt for his Ghanaian
kinsman in Black Power and that led many African Americans to view their
New World culture as sui generis, connected only tenuously to its
African antecedents, if at all. Western images of African
barbarism and savagery, of course, did not endear us to our native land
[sic]. But for many of my countrymen, the African role in the
slave trade of other Africans is both a horrific surprise and the
ultimate betrayal, something akin to fratricide and sororicide.
Imagine the impact of a revelation that Sephardic Jews had served
as the middlemen in the capture or incarceration of Askenazi Jews during
the Holocaust, and you can perhaps begin to understand Richard Wright's
disgust.
This raises the question of what a "brother" and a
"kinsman" is. If a continent is the "Nation,"
an equivalent would be to view the Holocaust as a Mittel-Europaische
family feud of particular ferocity -- Europeans exterminating
their own people, while in league with an alien race at the other
end of the world. Indeed, thousands of Askenazim did die at the
hands of their Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic neighbors. And,
strangely, the Germans killed a far greater percentage of their European
Jewish captives than they did of their North and West African prisoners
of war. Although some nineteenth century thinkers may have seen
Jews and Arabs as "Orientals" sharing a bundle of common
characteristics, only the most Utopian of present-day prognosticators
would predict the rise of a political "Pan Semitism" in the
Middle East. The comparisons of Jews and Africans is a strained
one. Kwame Appiah notes "that Judaism - the religion and the
wider body of Jewish practice through which the various communities of
the Diaspora have defined themselves allow for a cultural conception of
Jewish identity that cannot be made plausible in the case of Pan
Africanism." Appiah points to "the way that the fifty or
so rather disparate African nationalities in our present world seem to
have met the nationalist impulses of many Africans, while Zionism has,
of necessity, been satisfied by the creation of a single state."
Unfortunately, in the popular American imagination, the fifty African
states remain an irrelevant hodgepodge. The continent remains
largely featureless; languages are dialects and ethnicities are tribes.
If Africa, three times the size of the United States and
containing 748 million people speaking some 1,500 languages, is reduced
to simply a mythic homeland, confusion is sure to follow. And
worse than confusion, a basic lack of understanding or sympathy for
Africans as they exist is bound to follow.
The image of slavery in Africa has historically stood as a distortion,
either a magnification or diminution of the image of American slavery.
TransAtlantic bondage is the absolute before which all other
manifestations are held to be relative. Slavery is the cause of
the essential national fissure. The national (white) image of the
institution has gone through various permutations, without questioning
basic assumptions. Early in the twentieth century Southern
historians like Ulrich B. Phillips painted a rosy picture of bondage in
Dixie; indeed, slavery was a benign "school" for blacks.
D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation contained images of both
"faithful darkies" and "ferocious bucks." The
popular image of kindly slavery perhaps reached its apogee in Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.
As the white vision of slavery changed, so did the black. The
African American view of slavery has changed drastically in the years
since emancipation. Various nineteenth-century black
thinkers, among them Martin Delany, Henry M. Turner, Alexander Crummell,
and Edward Blyden, saw the Middle Passage as providential, even if
highly painful. By the time of the Civil Rights Movement a
Providential Slavery had all but disappeared from most African American
discourse on slavery and the slave trade. The image of slavery emerged
not so much as a labor system, but as a systematic torture of millions
rooted in innate racial antagonism. In this scenario, sexual
exploitation and gross barbarity fueled by raging hatred characterized
everyday of slave existence. The plantation resembled not so much
Booker T. Washington's "school" as it did Stanley Elkins'
later comparison with a concentration camp.
An "Old Dixie Narrative" had emerged. Simply, stated
this view of history says: Slavery was confined to Dixie and slaves grew
cotton. Nowhere else in the history of humanity has slavery
existed and nowhere else were human beings chattel. In this
scenario, Africans were selected to be slaves because they were black.
Racism drove a slave trade and slavery which existed as the
ultimate form of psychosexual torture. The numbers immolated in
the horror of the "Middle Passage" and in the cotton fields
ran into the millions. At the popular level, the Old Dixie Narrative
floats in the American collective consciousness, even among those who
have never given it much thought.
For many African Americans, looking back through the prism of Jim
Crow and lynch law, a view of slavery as the ultimate horror provides
ample proof of the ultimate fixity of human nature. Racism was as
alive in fifteenth-century Lisbon as it was in nineteenth-century
Mobile. History is one long version of Up from Slavery and always
a struggle against the Manichean "Other." Blacks
remain the ultimate Outgroup, one which erases European division and
suffering. In the Old Dixie Narrative, there is agreement from
both sides of the racial divide that Blacks have always been drawers of
water and hewers of wood. Class is eternally "raced."
If slavery is about race, then Africans could not have engaged in a
slave traffic. Indeed, the charge itself is racial calumny.
However, a cautionary note was sounded long ago by the Trinidadian
historian Eric Williams. Best known for maintaining that white
humanitarianism did not abolish the slave trade, the scholar made a
subsidiary, and often overlooked, point: capitalism and slavery are no
great respecters of persons. Writing from beyond the confines of
the Dixie Narrative, he observed that "The `horrors' of the Middle
Passage have been exaggerated. For this the British abolitionists
are in large part responsible." Furthermore, "A
racial twist has ...been given to what is basically an economic
phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the
consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown,
white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan."
Slavery need not be raced. It could exist in ancient
Rome, medieval Kosovo, nineteenth-century Korea and in the Liberia of
the 1930s. Unfortunately, few could think in terms of C. L. R.
James dictum: "The race question is subsidiary to the class
question in politics....But to neglect the racial factor as merely
incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.
If we heed these caveats, we end up with somewhat different
conclusions than those contained in the "The Wonders of the African
World." Slavery, like marriage, is a fairly universal institution.
Most societies have had some form of it. Slavery, at base,
rests on the ability to coerce labor and/or sexual reproduction.
Probing for a peculiar "Black" guilt for slavery
is an ahistorical and presentist trap. We might as well ask why
the "brothers" have fought and killed each other in places as
disparate as Biafra and Rwanda. The answer is obvious. Africa is a
continent full of proud, diverse and often contentious peoples. It
also has social cleavages within societies, something a scholar like
Walter Rodney clearly recognized twenty years ago. Recently, Joe
Miller has pointed out that "Africa [still] looms integrally
in the background of African-American history as a unified ancestry
reflecting the racial sense of community forced by American prejudice on
African Americans. . ." The "Wonders of the
African World" did little to go beyond this view. The
positing of a Black "Volksgemeinschaft" is soothingly
mythopoeic, but it is not history. As Pearle-Alice Marsh,
executive director of the Africa Policy Information laments: "There
are millions of Americans who still think Africa is a country, not a
continent." Sadly, in spite of its kaleidoscopic race around the
continent, "Wonders of the African World" will do little to
change this perception.
King, Preston, On the Meaning and History of Slavery, in Tibbles, Anthony (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, HMSO, 1994
118 The question,
then, is not, broadly, whether there was slavery in West Africa, but
specificaly whether a system of chattel slavery was to be found there.
The short answer is 'no'. This answer may be given without qualification
for the fifteenth century, but not after we enter the nineteenth
century. Slavery was first introduced by force from European vessels
upon the tiny village states of the West African forest zone. These
states had, and could have, no sense of a common African identity - no
more than did Europeans among themselves. The Africans had petty wars
among themselves, which normally did not last long, nor do great damage,
simply because there were not the surpluses or resources to fuel them.
They did not raid one another for slaves because their
semi-subsistence economies were not yet elaborate enough to absorb and
discipline such labour. The original , small states of the West African
forest zone had no capacity to sustain chattel slavery.
121 Over the decades and centuries, African were
pulled more and more deeply into administering a system of kidnapping,
raids and war which proved systematically destructive of their
societies.
From: IN%"deal@Oswego.EDU"
" J.
Douglas Deal" 12-APR-1998 13:20:57.59
A very good point. I think the short
answer is that the notion that all Africans are alike (one people) *is*
the product of racist thought, though where and how it began to take
shape is still a matter of some controversy. My impression is that the
idea had little currency among Africans anywhere on or off the continent
until it became politically useful (e.g., in struggles against
colonialism and racism).
The notion that Europeans are one people
is, in a sense, also tied to racism, but here I am not thinking so much
of the racism that attended the establishing of plantation colonies
using African slave labor as of the older racism that accompanied the
expansion of "Frankish Europe" east of
the Elbe, along the Baltic littoral, into
the British Isles, in Iberia, and in the eastern Mediterranean from
about 1000 to 1350 AD. According to Robert Bartlett, in a very
interesting book (_The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and
Cultural Change 950-1350_ [Princeton, 1993]), argues that a kind of
homogenized European culture and identity did begin to take shape along
with expansion and colonization in peripheral regions. It resulted in
thinking that divided "us" (Europeans) from "them"
(the "others") in distinctly racial-cultural ways. Of course,
this European unity was fragile, and it was shattered (or just
weakened?) by the religious cleavages of the Reformation and
post-Reformation eras.
The idea of European (=white) unity then
re-emerged, in a legal sense, with the early statutes of the plantation
colonies that began distinguishing whites (literally) from
"Negroes" and other non-whites: in Virginia and Maryland, the
colonies I know best, this was in the 1670s-80s.
Doug Deal
History/SUNY-Oswego
H-NET List for African History and Culture
[H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999
From: Jean-Claude.Mporamazina@unctad.org
. . . No understandable reasons can
justify the fact that SOME AFRICAN RULERS sold their fellow Africans to
slavers. However, as Professor Mazrui rightly said, one should not
forget the fact that there were more Africans who suffered from slavery
of their parents than there were beneficiaries. These were not
democratic or some kind of participatory societies where rulers merely
apply policies accepted somehow by their people through their election
or through laws voted by their representatives. Africans are still
waiting for such a governing system to happen. If they had it, one could
then extend the blame to the average African.
However, maybe Gates could have done
justice to Africa by mentioning the few rulers . . . which resisted
slavery with some success.
H-NET List for African Literature and Cinema
[H-AFRLITCINE@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Forwarded by: Joanne Kendall <jkendall@fas.harvard.edu>
18-11-99
Wole Soyinka's Preliminary Translation of
Statement made by President
Mathieu Kerekou
Offered without comment to the
"Wonders" debaters:
The Head of State (of the Republic of
Benin) launched an appeal for a consciousness of our belonging to one
sole Africa, for African cooperation, in order to assist the youth in
finding a model.
The Head of State particularly insisted
on our duty towards Memory and, consequently, asked the forgiveness of
all Africans of the Diaspora, highlighting the responsibility of
Africans in the betrayal of the Black Race which he described as
shameful, as a crime against humanity, and abominable. He also
demonstrated how much interest he invested in the Colloque by insisting
on the integration of Africans of the Diaspora and their support in the
processes of African development.
For the Head of State, the Colloque is
essential in his eyes because he considers it capable of serving as a
prelude to the Grand International Conference of Forgiveness and
Reconciliation with the Diaspora on the eve of the year 2000. We
cannot enter the Third Millennium without reconciling with the Diaspora. Those who remained in
Africa have a duty to ask for forgiveness, concluded the Head of State.
And on this note, the Head of State declared open the work of the
Colloque.
Excerpt from the Rapport General. Actes
du Colloque International de Ouidah
(Republic of Benin) 26-30 April 1999 (Institut
du Developpement et d'changes Endogenes).