Thread by @geonal

Did Africans sell Africans into the Slave Trade? #Slavery

This is what the @gwucolumbian says to exculpate White Depravity.

historynewsnetwork.org/article/41431

George Washington, First US president, was a slaveholder. As were the Columbians who founded Washington DC.

No one reasonable expects a University, named after George Washington, to keep history that unequivocally puts the White man at blame for #slavery.

Hence this excuse that "During this era, Africans and Europeans stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit".

Indeed, the first question off the top of the head is: so, when did these 'equals' in commerce and profit turn into full humans on one hand and 3/5ths of a human on the other?

Can you see the folly in this history? Westerners have never seen Africans as equals. And, in 1750?

There are several ways to decapitate this exculpatory nonsense by Western historians trying to whitewash the cruelty of slave-trading (which differs from slaveholding in significant ways).

1. The African economy.
2. African population and size of African tribes.
3. Archaeology.

4. Colonialism.
5. Trade records.
6. Oral literature and tradition.
7. Power, War and Peace in the African context.

First: By 1400s the African economy was almost entirely subsistence based. There were no plantations, no farms, no bridges, no factories, no real armies, nothing.

Food was wild fruit, tubers and meat from cattle or wild game.

Obviously, no one needed slaves to do anything.

#Slavery and slaveholding is an industrial concept. You need slaves to do hard work, such as porting goods from the interior to the ports, or mining gold or such endeavors.

But, a king who cannot dig a mine but needs gold would not employ foreigners in his mines. Basic politics.

We are conflating paid servants or craft apprentices with slaves. The king would deploy his best men as soldiers and miners, and compensate them well with food, wine, wives and settlement land to protect his fief.

Buying in slaves would expose it to espionage and sabotage.

Second: population and tribal power in the African jungle beset by pestilence and danger from wild animals, unfordable rivers, etc, was very limited.

Heck! Any historian who can explain why Africa has 1000 languages will soon note that people easily lost touch of each other.

e.g. by a man and woman eloping into the wilderness to found a new tribe; by excommunication, or by being cut off by nature, e.g. floods, etc. Losing touch meant establishing new and small clans which would basically lack the capacity to either enslave new people, or trade them.

It is these new small clans and tribes that would establish languages, tribal dialects, myths and tradition.

It was in their interest, for security and self preservation, to co-opt any new wanderers people as equals and confidants, by marriage rather than as slaves and inferiors

It is improbable that there were more than 100,000 people in the whole of Africa by the 1500s.

Divided into 1000 tribes, you are working around as few as 10 to 500 people per tribe who are internally very intimate, but delinked from other tribes by all sorts of barriers.

Indeed, just the sort of barriers that made trade of any sort impossible and or unviable without extreme expense and risk: tribal animosity, forbidding wildernesses, weather, large rivers, diseases and pestilences, myths and fearful misinformation, as well as abundant food.

Therefore, for an African tribe to sell slaves, it would have to thin up and divide itself into warriors to hunt and capture people of other tribes, to spend years walking to the coasts to deliver the slaves to the buyers, and to risk ambush while returning home with their gifts.

Such an endeavor could not be long successful; as slave-catchers themselves risked being captured and sold at a different port.

FACT that slaves could only be sold to buyers at ports or cities, means the buyers (Romans, Arabs, and other Europeans) initiated the demand.

The converse, and only reasonable support of pre-existent slave trade would be of slaves sold between African tribes: for example, Bantus enslaving Nilotes or Cushites, and vice versa. Or, highly established, rogue African slave traders hawking slaves in Europe and in Arabia

It is amazing how near-genetically pure African tribes were from each other. There are no Sudanese in Namibia, or Khoisan in Libya or Kikuyu in Senegal.

This does not support the theory of rampant tribal conquest or slave purchase. Because, with slave buying, comes mixed stock.

That these people are distinct in features, dialects and habitat (excepting the nomadic pastoralists), irrefutably destroys the myth of slave selling as a natural economic and social activity of the African tribe.

Indeed, the trading of slaves at ports proves external influence

That these people are distinct in features, dialects and habitat (excepting the nomadic pastoralists), irrefutably destroys the myth of slave selling as a natural economic and social activity of the African tribe.

Indeed, the trading of slaves at ports proves external influence

Third: Archaeology.
So, slave trading and slavery ended in the 1800s.

Just two hundred years ago. Too short a time to fully delete its evidence on a very slow-changing continent like Africa.

So, where are the hinterland slave markets of Central, Southern, Eastern Africa?

On every other continent, the evidence of #slavery is fully on display: through written and oral literature, civic history, economic segregation, incurable racism, regionalized poverty, social classes, institutional records, etc.

How did Africa hide all its disparities?

How has Africa erased all its own internal record of slave-trading?

Where are the outcasts of Africa? We have records of lepers, exiles, long-distance traders, pottery, caves, crops, art and craft tools, charms, cattle kraals, myths, gods, everything else except slaves? How!

We have pyramids, and mudhuts in Timbuktu. We have pottery, beadwork, swords, sickles, hides, tusks, rock art, totem poles, masks, religions, myths, herbs, seers, witchcraft, reed dances, leopard skins, horns and drinks, tattoos and ochre. Stone tools, etc but erased slave trade?

The continent where no effort has been made to force people to suppress this record ... It is the only continent WITHOUT discernible wealth disparities between former slavetraders and their slaves?

Equal poverty on a continent where every lighter-skinned foreigner is "superior"?

Which brings us to Colonialism.

First came the Romans, with their learning, horses and purchase of slaves.
Then came the Arabs, with Islam and enslavement by the sword.
Then came the Portuguese, with their gunpowder, guns and slave snatching.
Finally, the rest of Europe ...

Yet, somehow, the "Africans and their BUYERS stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit..."

How comes it that these rabid Africans never once enslaved the few Europeans to sell to other Africans, or to Arabs?

Did Africans capture any Arabs to sell to Rome?

In all instances, the Africans were captured (by cutlass, spear, lasso or gunfire) and sold to Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, Spaniards or Americans.

I would hazard to ask, did any money actually reach any African household for such a sale? What did the money buy or do? All lost?

Fifth, let's consider trade records:
So, the Europeans brought coins (in 1840, it couldn't all have been barter...) paid African slave sellers and took the slaves in return.

Does any single Western nation have any record of these cash transactions, and who was actually paid?

Indeed the deeper question is, what did the Africans use the coins to buy? Whom did they buy it from?

Because, coins must have returned into circulation at some point. These African sellers, did they ever get rich enough to buy boats and supply slaves abroad by themselves?

Indeed, can we prove that the Slaves delivered to port were not so sent under blackmail and threat of annihilation of the port cities by gun-wielding foreigners?

Because, if the sellers were from the interior, there must be coin treasure chests belonging to profitable sellers.

By the way, how can we even say that a buyer wielding a gun was an "equal companion in commerce and profit" to a nude, stick-carrying herdsman or feather-wearing, prayer-chanting village headman?

What is the likelihood that this "seller" was never paid, but told to run for life?

Africa's oral literature has very little in terms of people being bought and sold as chattels.

Dowry payment for brides and married women involves quite elaborate ceremonies almost universally among African cultures.

Surely, losing kin to slavery would be memorialized. No?

Finally, a review of Power, War, Peace and the African concept of wealth.

From the knowledge that African tribal populations were minuscule, and generally separated by natural forms like ridges, rivers and forests, Africans themselves were generally peaceable and unprovocative.

Their wars and altercations would be mere brawls, ending in each antagonist group choosing a divergent direction and striking out on their own.

Were a fight to end in the death of a person, cleansing ceremonies would be done, to appease the dead, and the land deserted as cursed.

It is therefore very striking that such small communities would routinely kill each other in savage orgies of violence, as Western historians and their surrogates would want to suggest, and in enslavement for trade.

Yet, families, clans and tribe were basic units of defence.

African chiefs, seers, prophets, etc were people of power, whose prestige was shown by how many offspring they bore, how many wives, how much cattle and other property they amassed. Even conquered tribes would be pacified by marriage to form a blood bond, and avoid conflicts.

It is antithetical to claim that African people, whose pride and prestige lay in their numbers and relationships, would somehow find pleasure in selling their tribesmen to foreigners, diminishing their own numbers and thus their power.

That is not reasonable at all.

I am certain that this thesis is a clear enough exposition to debunk the myth of Africans as free, competent and rogue sellers of other Africans into #slavery.

No, everyone. Slavery is purely a Western, classist notion that crept into Africa through bribes and then compulsion.