Slavery's Supply Side
“.…90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director, Hutchins Center for African and African American History, Harvard University, “Ending the Slavery-Blame Game,” New York Times, April 23, 2010
The simple answer is that black Africans did not sell “their own people” to white slavers. Any modern African history textbook highlights diversity as the essence of African societies and cultures. For example, Africa is one of the world’s most linguistically rich continents with about 2,000 indigenous languages, and the above question is like saying “Do you speak African?”
A more complex answer lies in African economic geography and history. Historian John Thornton documented how sub-Saharan Africa’s massive size but largely infertile soils made slaves the primary income-producing commodity. In this environment, extensive farming was critical—i.e., farming large and larger land areas was a principal means of increasing food production. This in turn demanded plentiful labor, free or otherwise. Slaves were thus valuable income-producers. Their owners, whether political entities or private entrepreneurs, sold slaves to each other and anyone else—Arabs, Europeans, Americans—for luxury and prestige items, thus increasing their social and political status.
The West African kingdom of Ashanti (or Asante, in modern Ghana) is a good example of this process. Ashanti had its roots in the 15th-16th century. New York University Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, a native of modern Ghana, noted that the founding and consolidation of West African states like Ashanti was based largely on “involuntary labor.” As the kingdom grew more powerful, the Ashanti royal family established a monopoly over the slave trade, furnishing about one million slaves to the New World in the 18th century alone.  |
| Captured Africans Taken to the Coast, Nigeria, 1853; (or), Liberia, 1840 http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/ |
Slavery was thus an integral part of sub-Saharan African societies for centuries before the launch of the trans-Atlantic trade. Hence, white Europeans and Americans found a ready supply of slaves when they arrived seeking New World plantation labor. To Africans, white slavers were just another bunch of buyers.
Whites were also subordinate partners in this process. Geographical, ecological, and political conditions allowed Africans to pull the strings here. Poor harbors and unnavigable rivers relegated buyers to the coast where they had to pay rent and taxes and give gifts to African political elites for the privilege of residence. White buyers lacked resistance to indigenous diseases like yellow fever and malaria. Mortality rates were very high: historian Philip Curtin estimated 25% of slave ship crews died on their first trip to Africa. West Africa became “the white man’s grave.” Powerful West African kingdoms—Asante, Dahomey, Benin, Oyo and smaller political entities —wanted no one, white or black, to usurp their slave-seller role.
Subordinate though they were, New World and European slavers could tap into Africa’s very old, well established, and complex slave-supply system. African military, organizational and commercial expertise facilitated the acquisition and transport of slaves from the West and Central African interior to coastal buyers—a journey that might involve caravans of hundreds (or more) slaves, over hundreds of miles, and weeks of travel under horrendous circumstances. For example, by the late 18th century at the trade’s height, 88,0000 slaves arrived in the New World annually. And this number represent 50-60% of those who survived the inland journey to the African coast and the dreaded “Middle Passage” to the New World.
Such conditions depended on African expertise in a wide range of areas. How to feed captives during this journey? How to negotiate tolls with African societies whose land these slave caravans traversed? How to establish credit and prices with buyers? How to manage other logistical issues, such as pre-planning arrival times and places? How to manage linguistic, social and cross-cultural issues between black sellers and white buyers? How to do this within the context of changing political and economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic?
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| Capture and Coffle of Enslaved Africans, Angola, 1786-87 http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/ |
In sum, this was not some “primitive” African undertaking. It was a well-oiled mechanism that provided some 11 million slaves to the New World. It required good race relations between African sellers and white buyers.
How prominent is this supply-side story in American popular culture? Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a glimpse in his PBS series “Wonders of the African World.” During a tour of southern Ghana’s Elmina slave holding pen (an “Auschwitz” in Gates’s words) the Ghanaian guide notes that Africans did the raiding and selling of the slaves who ended up in this hell hole. Gates then asks African American visitors about their reactions. “Were you surprised [to learn that]”? The response: “I was surprised to learn that Africans were willing participants in it….surprised and hurt and angry….I had a fantasy about them as ancestors, and your ancestors don’t sell you. That fantasy was blown away.”
Aside from such nuggets, slavery’s supply-side history barely makes it into American consciousness. Rather, films like “12 Years a Slave,” “The Butler” and “Roots” captivate American audiences. Gates’s series, let alone other academic contributions to this slice of African history, fail to seep into popular culture.
“So what?" one might ask. "After all, isn’t American racial history dominated by the slave trade’s horrendous demand-side and lingering after effects—Jim Crow, and racial discrimination, the on-going Civil Rights movement? Aren’t these the issues shaping American identities now?"
It matters very much. Ignoring slavery’s supply side is mental apartheid. It denies a crucial piece of African history and identity. Ignoring it means viewing slavery through melanin-tinted lenses, interpreting history, literally, as black and white. Ignoring it limits our understanding of the origin of racism—slavery’s legacy It strangles the dialogue on how to deal with it.
Most important, ignoring it prevents us from a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
