A Necessary Review of Africa’s Slave History

by Paul Chuks

deshawn wilson

In what is now a hit tweet circulating the ‘muskverse,’ a Nigerian X (formerly Twitter) influencer, from the perspective of red-pillism — a term popularized on social media which means an idea that despises ‘victim mentality’ or weakness, whether true or not — tweeted that ‘Blacks let go of racism and stop fighting for equality because our African ancestors had slaves equally as the whites and had a chance to lead the world economy with their labour force, but chose to be stupid about it.’ In responding to a tweet that chided him over that remark, he said, ‘The maid can never be equal in the house. We should accept our fate. Everybody in history had slaves, we didn’t just utilize our own.’ Another user added: ‘Our ancestors were dull and meek, that’s why they were invaded and the world doesn’t favour meek people.’ It sparked many other reactions, among them were ‘Africans and black people are still playing the victim, that’s why we won’t move forward;’ ‘It’s been 400 years, yet we are still crying, worse black people are claiming they built America and Europe. That’s a delusion.’ Consequently, ‘victim mentality’ became an epithet for those who tried elucidating the wrongness of that tweet.

These X posts are problematic in many different ways that don’t only highlight the dangers of ahistorical myths weathering down pop culture, but also accentuate the fallacy of presentism as truth and show the hollowness of the red-pill movement. The original poster flung out historical nuance thereby misrepresenting African culture, clothed the transatlantic slave trade with similar garment as indentured servitude — while simultaneously internalizing anti-black sentiment, and accepting it as ‘harsh reality’ in semblance to red-pill adherents.

Over time, the use of ‘slavery’ in discussing Africa’s political past has come under questioning. In 1985, author Anne Hilton provided evidence that the word ‘servant’ was altered to mean ‘traded slave.’ In 1989, applying more detailed linguistic data, historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina showed that in West Central Africa there was no word for slave. Vansina traced the origin of the word ‘pika,’ which originally meant servant, but took on the meaning of ‘traded slave.’

Who is understood as a slave? Richard Hillier, a professor of history, defined slavery as ‘a condition in which one human being was owned by another.’ At the centre of both definitions — and other accepted ones — is ‘human possession.’ The complete annihilation of human rights and total belonging to one person, who is often — as is the case of the transatlantic slave trade — of wealthier class, accentuated by skin colour. This sort of slavery never existed anywhere in Africa, pre-sixteenth century.

Scholars like Moses Finley define slavery with the binary of ‘slave society’ and ‘societies with slaves.’ In slave societies, enslaved people who constituted nothing less than 20 percent of the population were significant in economic production and were hugely important with respect to culture. Only five societies met this criteria: ancient Greece, Rome, the Caribbean, the United States and modern Brazil. These five examples proved different from societies with slaves because slavery did not shape other cultures to the same degree that it did in the five aforementioned societies.

If slavery did not exist as a word in any West African language, according to Jan Vansina, does this mean Africans never practised slavery? How did they float their economy? One is tempted to ask. In hindsight, this is what the continent’s political economy looked like: Africa was a vast continent with various empires that traded sugar, palm oil, salt, cocoa, coffee, clothing, pottery, iron crafts and other commodities among themselves. The structure of the continent’s pre-colonial economy was divided into four, namely: agricultural production, which involved localized farming among various ethnic groups on inherited lands; non-agricultural production involved fishing and hunting; mineral working, also known as iron smelting, metallurgy and craftsmanship like cloth weaving, pottery and textile production that attracted customers from as far as Timbuktu and Morocco.

The indication from the foregoing shows that the political economy of pre-colonial Africa thrived without the need for chattel-like slavery. It further provides clarity to the part of the tweet that claimed ‘our ancestors had slaves and didn’t utilize them but chose to be stupid about it.’ Slavery was not the chief ingredient needed for constructing a rich civilization, as the tweet suggested. People just assumed it was, since the Europeans succeeded in turning the human labour they kidnapped for 400 years into an enviable region that is, no doubt, among the wealthiest in our contemporary world. Language syncretism afforded the world the injustice of saying Africans enslaved each other when they meant indentured servitude. In most cases, servants enjoyed a great deal of liberty and could attain upward social mobility, as noted by historian Kenneth Onwuka Dike, who argued that servants were not oppressed and their children could integrate with those of the free. As early as the 1850s, T.J Hutchinson, the British consul to the Bight of Biafra, had stated that ‘in many of the palm oil trading rivers, slavery is purely mythical.’

The X posts facetiously doused the pain of Africans, both home and abroad, past and present, with a kind of guilt that is so inclement that it pretended to care about slavery but insulated the slave owners, criminalized the victims while undercutting their experiences. They assume, without nuance, that Africans participated in the slave trade and should also be held responsible for what happened. Granted that among every twelve, if lucky, few would be Judah, more if unlucky — as was the case during slave trade. Isn’t it logical not to elide the pain of the African ancestors in a facile charge of misdemeanour seeing that only a very minuscule percent of them transacted slaves with the Europeans? And many times under coercion? The Yorubas made rules that restricted them from enslaving each other, according to Dike. Yoruba empire rulers facilitating the slave trade to expand their empires is utterly untrue because the nearest port to them started exporting slaves in the late 1760s, years after the trade began, after their empires had peaked and were crumbling due to internal crisis. Prisoners of war who escaped death were then enslaved and sold to Brazilian and Spanish traders. Moreso, individuals sold from the popular Lagos port ended up in Cuba and north-eastern Brazil. When interviewed they revealed how they were enslaved as a result of war. For example, Lorenzo Clarke, whose Yorùbá name was documented as ‘Ocusona’ (Òkúsọn), described how he had been captured during a war between the native chiefs [when he] was brought from Lagos in the brig Negrito. In December 1832, a ship sauntered into Havana with over four hundred Lucumí Elló (Ộyó) people on board. British abolitionists documented Clarke’s story on his return trip to Lagos from Havana in the 1850s. While residing in Cuba, he claimed to have heard about the family that he left behind in Africa through some new slaves.

A lot has been said about Africans participating in the slave trade, thereby indicting them, but a little about their resistances and abolitionists which acquit them. Queen Nzinga, the famous abolitionist, rose to the oppression of her people by the Portuguese. After Bento Cardoso, commander-in-chief of the Portuguese army, commanded his people to seep into Angola and ally themselves with the chiefs, the onslaught of Angolans began. The process happened this way: every chief in the community was to be owned by a Portuguese agent, and was allotted a number of slaves they were to supply to their owner. Failing to supply that number, they themselves were enslaved. This increased the warfare between chiefdoms; every chief strove hard to meet their quota to avoid being enslaved. They raided each other’s territories. This action depleted Angola’s core community and weakened the King’s influence on his people. The onslaught was so severe that the Pope of Lisbon called for a peace treaty so it could stop. The peace treaty happened at Luanda in 1622. The black delegates were headed by Queen Nzinga while the Portuguese, the governor-general. Nzinga rolled out a beautifully decorated mat after entering the room and finding no chair reserved for her. They intended for whoever was representing the blacks to stand. At some point, some men knelt and laid their backs for her to sit on. She demanded a) the Portuguese evacuate Kabasa and all nearby fortifications b) they wage war against the Jagas since the Jagas joined in stoking conflict inside Angola c) all kings and chiefs who were vassals of the Portuguese were to regain freedom and continue in their tributary status. To accelerate the actualization of the treaty, she set free every Portuguese prisoner of war. Hard of hearing, the governor returned from Luanda and launched an attack in Congo which spread into Angola. At this point, she hadn’t become queen. She was the King’s sister but was able to gather a formidable force that fought back. In 1623, the King died. She immediately became Queen. To strengthen her force, she reached a pact with the Jagas whom she conditioned the Portuguese to fight, promising to marry one of their chiefs and adopt some of their specific customs she liked. However, in 1624 came her greatest act when she declared all of Angola a free country and declared all slaves forever free. She understood the Portuguese use of black troops against black people, so she planned with her soldiers to penetrate the Portuguese black armies by allowing themselves to be induced by the recruiting team. They successfully joined the force and scattered them. She conducted several pocket raids, stole their guns and defrayed them among her soldiers. Her force was further strengthened by other slaves who absconded slavery from other communities in the West-central region. The Portuguese, furious at this show, put a word out from Luanda, demanding every slave return to their ships, and chiefs, back to their roles. The ultimatum elapsed. War began. They declared her throne vacant, and captured her stronghold in the Cuanza river. She sidled into oblivion, deceiving the Portuguese that she was dead. They installed Aidi Kiluanji who was mocked by his people for working for the invaders instead of Nzinga. The Angolans remained strong, having not for once been tricked by the invaders. They receded their Western names like Nzinga who was christened “Ann” but dropped it immediately; she understood how Christianity was mobilized in exacting slavery. Her people knew she was somewhere underground, plotting, a guerilla war tactic that was hitherto in use anywhere. In 1627, she slinked back into Cuanza and recaptured it, putting the commander of the Portuguese soldier to flight. This war waged on for over forty years, amidst slinking in and out of oblivion, stomping the Portuguese soldiers everywhere around the West-central region. In 1663, she died. Although she never visibly returned to being Catholic, two priests were allowed to officiate her burial ceremony. It was never believed, even by contemporary Angolans, that she returned to the church, as it was not visible during her lifetime.

During the twilight of the slave trade, as Walter Hawthorne, a professor of history at Stanford University, wrote, nearly all enslaved Africans were grabbed during large-scale conflict concocted and stoked by the European invaders, which eventually made their once peaceful society collapse into a cesspool of war where every member was feverish upon encountering each other, fearing they’d be sold to the invaders. One of the tricks Europeans used to capture slaves was to create a situation where Africans were left with no option but to turn their brothers or friends into their hands or be kidnapped themselves. For example, among the Beafares of Guinea-Bissau this scenario manifested in this form: A man from Yokel — the interior that is now swollen with conflict stoked by the invaders — absconds into Guinea to survive the heavy melee. He meets a Beafare man already under the pressure of supplying his people to the Portuguese, who then shelters him for a few days, then pitches him the idea of joining his people in the slave ship parked at the port. There and then, if the Yokel man doesn’t suspect foul play, he is taken to the Portuguese and, in return, the Beafare man gets his freedom and even a gun. In this manner, many Yokel people were lured into slave ships. Sigismund Koelle, a German missionary, interviewed a group of formerly enslaved Africans in 1854 residing in Sierra Leone on how they got sold into slavery. By the end of his interview, he gleaned that 40 percent of them were sold this way, 25 percent were grabbed from war and 20 percent were sold by relatives or friends. The last unknown method of capturing Africans was called the ‘judicial system.’ A person or group of Africans is accused of murder, witchcraft or adultery, by some willing tools of the Portuguese. They are found guilty by an unfair trial and sentenced to slavery.

There are two sides of African history, namely the Eurocentric and Afrocentric. The Eurocentric history are lies that the Europeans wrote to justify their incursion into Africa. For example, Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher and historian, referred to Africa as the ‘land of childhood, which lying behind the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of night.’ Mungo Park is wildly said to have ‘discovered’ the River Niger. In the Afrocentric account of these botched stories, Africa had stalwart civilizations with proper governments that traded ivories, clothing textiles with neighbouring empires. With River Niger, Guinea and Sierra Leone named its upper course Joliba, “the great river.” Its middle they named Isa Eghirren, and Hausa people christened the lower stretch that emptied into the sea Kwara. Oya, it is called by the Yoruba; Orimili, meaning, “great water,” is how the Igbo know it. Isa Ber, “the big river,” the Tuaregs called it Egerew Nigerewen, “river of rivers” from which Mungo Park got the inspiration to christen it “Niger.” Mungo Park couldn’t have discovered the river.

In their Eurocentric documentation of Kongo, the Portuguese wrote that King Afonso, alongside his chiefs, sold slaves to them to sustain their diplomatic ties. Meanwhile in the Afrocentric account, King Afonso (1427–1526) signed a deal with them to trade ivories, golds and silvers. The traders who delivered the goods were then kidnapped and enslaved. There were compromised chiefs who picked up captives of their war with Central-Africans and sold them. It is important to note that Kongo had rules that barred them from selling or exchanging themselves for Portuguese gifts. In 1526, King Alfonso, the King of Kongo, wrote the Portuguese King a letter after noting that the number of Portuguese traders sauntering into Kongo, funneling goods, was swelling by the day and were selling them (the goods) to ‘unscrupulous Kongo noblemen’ who no longer relied on him to supply the imports. He nagged that some of his vassals were colluding with Portuguese traders to enslave his subjects, even ‘noblemen.’ In the letter, King Alfonso addressed the Kongolese who engaged in the dastardly act as ‘thieves’ and ‘men of bad conscience.’ He pointed fingers at the Portuguese for ‘grabbing our natives, sons and daughters of the land and sons of our noblemen and our vassals and our relatives.’

To argue, as some of them have, that the enslavement process was easy because Africans were naturally docile and meek, is to trade propaganda for historical facts. Never has it been easy to enslave a nomadic, hunter-gatherer, fishing society which many African societies were. The enslavement of Africans was familiarly mnemonic with the history of white Indians who were nomadic as well. Ergo, Europeans, when they met nomadic tribes, either exterminated them or laboured them to death. Neither group made effective slaves. It makes sense that the Haitian revolution of 1793, which consisted of 85 percent of trafficked Africans, single-handedly dealt a fatal blow to slavery with France, the highest importer of enslaved Africans into the New World. The Brits sent their greatest expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue, Haiti, to bring back slavery. They lost over 50,000 soldiers to both disease and brutality of the Haitian soldiers in that attempt. They quickly moved to abolish slavery. In 1842, indigenes in Calabar of present-day Nigeria sent a canoe to warn Commodore Raymond, a British naval officer, of the presence of French slavers and warships on their river bank, having learnt that slavery was internationally banned. It makes sense that Africans insurrected, killing their captors, capsizing ships, committing suicide, over 250 times during the trading, right from the port to the New World instead of becoming enslaved. A 1962 poem, ‘Middle Passage’ by American poet Robert Hayden, captures this reality:

voyage through death

to life upon these shores.

‘April 1800 —

Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.

Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter

to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.’ . . .

Voyage through death,

voyage whose chartings are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death

spreads outward from the hold,

where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,

life interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, the corpse of mercy rots with him, rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes. But, oh, the living look at you with human eyes whose suffering accuses you, whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark to strike you like a leper’s claw.

Asking Black people to retire from the struggle against racism and accept a non-human status in the name of swallowing ‘harsh reality’ is a ridiculous demand. It wholeheartedly accepts the propaganda infused in our colonial education as ‘reality’ and doggedly fights, though unconsciously, to retain it. It’s a form of racism laundering where white supremacist theories are clothed in intellectual garments and served to Black people who then don them. In this case, it takes the Nietzschean approach where a dichotomy between the weak (peasant) and strong (ubermensch) already exists, and the ubermensch, no matter how ill-gotten their wealth or power is, is better than the weak, the peasants who only but whine about the strong and wish to be them. Here, Black people are supposedly the peasants who were stupid not to have ‘utilized their slaves’ when they had them.

Having depicted the various methods used in capturing Africans in different parts of Africa and instances when Africans revolted against the slave trade, it is important to stop blaming our ancestors for the slave trade and address history how it should be addressed. The enslavement of over 12 million Africans for 400 years from their abode to a new place colder than they knew, while in chains, is a crime against humanity that we shouldn’t fiddle with. This explains why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and other pan-African intellectuals, didn’t blame Africans for selling their ancestors. They understood the role the invaders played throughout the process. Red-pillism masks noteworthy bodies of ideas that the world would do well to care for if only people would consent to acquaint themselves with actual history and rid themselves of their red-pill jargon. Our historians’ fixation on the ‘Africans also participated in the slave trade’ or ‘slavery was once universal’ farce is an intellectual iniquity they need to get rid of in respecting Africa.