04.25.10
Technology and what Dr.Henry Gates didn’t tell you about Africa’s involvement in the slave trade.
Back in 2007, I was attending my second National Educating Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta. I was a part of the Digital Equity Special Interest Group. The guest speaker was Dr. Sylvia Rousseau, Professor of Clinical Education; Rossier School of Education Ed.D., Pepperdine University, California. She remarked about the sordid history that we have with technology and how the arenas of technology and education have played host to the constructs of race, gender and class from the beginning. There has been a push for some time now to marginalize the struggles of African Americans. I posted to this blog a while back a GAO report on the condition and demise of black radio which is so important to the types of conversations that we have in our communities. Efforts were made in the late 1990’s to not only keep minority ownership at a minimum, but diminish the existing owners. Even when it was financially advantageous to sell stations to minority owners, Congress responded by eliminating the tax deferment for the buyers to further dissuade the selling of stations. One constantly hears the same rhetoric day in and day about excuses. Blacks need to stop making excuses for not achieving at higher levels in education and excuses in not becoming financially independent and stop depending on the government for what they should be able to do for themselves.
This attitude is in part what Kinder and Sears calls “Symbolic Racism” that somehow minorities break the moral code of white, protestant America and have become the symbols of laziness and immoral behavior. If they lived better, they could do better, essentially. This theme is constantly being broadcast in political forums especially as it relates to the school reform and achievement gap debates. The attitude of most reformers is that minority children just aren’t working hard enough and teachers are not doing enough to make it happen. The non-educational issues that surround and influence everything from behavior to assessments are irrelevant. So when I read the latest writings of Dr. Henry Louis Gates concerning whose to blame for slavery, I find myself not entirely in a state of disbelief. For everything that Dr. Gates proposes in his articles, he has to anchor with the reference to excuses as a means to marginalize factors that are not most apparent in order to make his case. Just as most of these school reformers who claim that they, and they alone truly love children. It’s sort the old Red Fox routine of “Who are you going to believe me or you own lying eyes?”
First, many true historians will tell you that slavery as it existed in those cultures at that time was far different from the chattel slavery on America. Even the term slave had a totally different meaning as it related to status, treatment and overall outcome of that person’s life. Chattel slavery would not dare to allow a “slave” to have status that the African slave had. Dr. Gates questions how the Europeans were able to access this human capital so easily if not by the willing hand of African tribes willing to sell their countrymen seeing that interior exploration of the country had not yet begun. In his article he stated,
“For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests…
Herbert J. Foster wrote an article in 1979 in The Journal of Black Studies titled” Partners or Captives in Commerce?: The Role of Africans in Slavery”. In it he references Basil Davidson who wrote about the distinctions between African and European/American slavery.”
Davidson writes,
“The slave was not an agricultural or an industrial laborer but a personal servant, who, when serving a wealthy master, enjoyed great advantages and social status…Europeans trading along the Guinea coast during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had to deal with men described as “slaves”; who were serving as agents of inland kings… Europeans found it difficult to understand how “slaves”-who, as they understood the term, were beneath contempt-could wield so much authority and command the consumption and disposal of so much wealth… Davidson also writes, “This was not slavery as Europeans understood the word: chattel slavery, the stripping from a man of all his rights and property-but serfdom, vassalship, ’domestic slavery’.”
How is this for irony? Foster also references Martin Robinson Delaney who was a Harvard-trained physician and explorer and was the first black to be commissioned by President Lincoln as a major in the army with field rank. He traveled to Africa between July of 1859 and August of 1860. In his book entitled,”Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party”, Delaney was quoted as saying,
“It is simply preposterous to talk about slavery, as that term is understood, either being legalized or existing in this part of Africa. It is nonsense. The system is a patriarchal one, there being no actual difference, socially between slaves (called by their protector sons or daughters) and the children of the person with whom they live. Such persons intermarry and frequently become the heads of state.”
Dr. Gates spotlights several kingdoms in West Africa who had a “considerable” role in the slave trade one of which was the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana. English explorer Robert Sutherland Rattray from his book, “Ashanti Law and Constitution” also referenced by Foster stated,
“A slave might marry; own property; himself own a slave; swear an oath; be a competent witness; and ultimately become heir to his master…. Such briefly were the rights of an Ashanti slave. They seem in many cases practically the ordinary privileges of an Ashanti free man…. An Ashanti slave in nine cases out of ten, possibly became an adopted member of the family, and in time his descendants so merged and intermarried with the owner’s kinsmen that only a few would know their origin.”
This is add more evidence to the fact that chattel slavery and the African system of slavery were two totally different constructs on many different levels. The parallels of African slave structure and European feudal systems, in my opinion, was an open door for the European exploitation of African nations. It is what they did with this open door, and what was used to keep the door open is the focal point of my post, technology. Foster believed that culturally both societies were equal when they met . It was the introduction of European technology that upset the balance of power in West Africa(Foster, 1979). The technology of firearms. Doesn’t this theme sound way too familiar? From guns to drugs to the digital divide, the use of new technology has had a devastating effect on certain societies. Foster goes on to reveal that the guns destabilized the balance of power in the African nations. The technology of firearms gave it’s possessor incredible power at that time. It meant bringing a gun to a knife fight, literally.
Guns were traded for slaves. Other tribes wanted this new technology and were willing to trade slaves for the guns. The introduction of this technology produced a desperation among the tribes to do whatever they had to for survive to stop involvement in the gun for slaves arrangement would have meant obliteration for your kingdom. Of course, they should take full responsibility for their actions, but I guess because they lack the moral fortitude to say no, they were willing to participate in the slave trade without prejudice as Dr. Gates and others would have us to believe. Europeans and African joint mercenary raids provided two things. A defeated enemy for the Africans and slaves for the Europeans to sell in the slave trade (Foster, 1979).
European machine technology allowed them to mass produce iron and textiles far better and faster than the Africans. This is what I think is the most devastating part of this trade. As the Europeans introduced these products to the Africans, it undermined their ability to produce them on their own. By trading slaves for these materials, the African nations began to see the erosion of these skills over time which would make them even that more dependent on the Europeans for survival. These skill sets were also interwoven into the fabric of the society as a whole, so what we begin to see is the destruction of the African culture on two fronts, the killing of the African people and the dismantling of the African culture. Another major problem for these types of arrangements is the dependency that both parties became locked into. Foster states that anywhere between 100,000 to 150000 guns were exported to Africa by the gun manufacturers with Africa not seeing any of the profit that would have grew the country, but instead created a economical and social deficit that is still seen today. The Europeans questioned the wisdom of arming the African people with so much weaponry, but they eventually got past there concerns due to the enormous profit and the threat of competition if they stopped (Davidson, 1961).
What Dr. Gates fails to mention is that many of the kings took a stand against the growing problem of guns for slaves and tried desperately to stop it. Foster again references Davidson in which King Affonso of the Congo wrote to John III of Portugal.
Affonso also complained that his country was being “utterly depopulated by thieves” and “men of evil con-science” who grab his people and cause them to be
sold … “it is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any trade in slaves nor market for slaves.”
King Agaja of Fon took a more direct approach by conquering the coastal kingdoms that were raiding his to stop the exporting of slaves (Foster, 1979).
My focus in this post was not to debate Dr. Gates but rather bring clarity to what was said. It is ever so important in this hour that we have information to make quality judgments. We have the internet. Use it to research and not just make Facebook and Twitter post, and if you do, make most of your postings something of substance.
References used in this post
FOSTER, H. J. (1976). “Partners or Captives in Commerce?: The Role of Africans in the Slave Trade”. Journal of Black Studies, 6, 421.
DAVIDSON, B. (1971) “Slaves or captives? Some notes on fantasy and fact,” in Nathan Huggins et al. (eds.) Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. Vol.
1. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
— (1966) A History of West Africa. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor.
— (1961) The African Slave Trade. Boston: Little, Brown.
DELANEY, M. R. (1861) Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party. New York: J. Hamilton.
RATTRAY, R. S. (1929) Ashanti Law and Constitution. London: Oxford Univ. Press.