African Complicity in the Slave Trades and Its Lingering Effects. PART 1
The responsibility to nurture the population by the State is the basis of the numerous rights that people could claim in the State and their demands on the State.
The ideology that informed the [African] State and its policies included the cultivation of population growth by the integration of immigrants, war captives, and so on, on the grounds that “people shield the king or the community as the case may be”. In other words, more people meant more security and prosperity in all spheres – economic, military, and so on.
Among the Igbo, these ideas are expressed by the words uba mmadu ka (increase in population is a greater good; this is frequently expressed in a common personal name, usually shortened to Ubaka); and, Igwebuike (a multitude of united people is strength).
All these seem to be the basis of the “Nguni tradition” that provided some southern African states with the ideological basis for their refusal to engage in the slave trade. These were states that had the capacity to engage in the slave trade but refused to do so, on ideological grounds; they include but are not limited to many of the Nguni tribes, including the powerful Zulu, who held the Portuguese in contempt “because of their slave dealing at the [Delagoa] bay”.
In Igboland, there is the example of Obeledu, a town (village cluster and micro-state) in the Nri-Awka area, that refused to engage in plundering neighbouring communities in the nineteenth century at a “time when bandits were praised as heroes” (a good deal of which were part of the heydays of the slave trade in Igbo land):
Although it is not stated explicitly that Obeledu refused to participate in the slave raids and kidnapping, the statement above implies a collective refusal of such acts as pertain to slave raids and kidnapping for purposes of enslavement.
Communities that rejected the lure and lucre of the slave trade retained not simply the words that expressed pristine Africa’s values and ideological basis for anti-slavery, which could be found in many African communities, but more importantly the spirit and purpose of these words and the practical manifestations of the values they express.
Most of the states that participated in the slave trade succumbed to its enticements – it was largely a choice they made. It was a choice for many African communities, particularly, those African communities that lived upwards of some fifty kilometres from the Atlantic coast line. Note that European slave traders did not generally go beyond twenty miles or thirty kilometres from the coast in search of slaves and slave markets – African collaborator states and organizations managed the trade and supply chains from hundreds of kilometres inland.
The matter of the choice and power of Africans to control the trade and participation in it has been a matter of debate; however, evidences and objective considerations weigh in favour of the freedom and choice of Africans to engage or refrain from the trade. John Thornton writes in this regard that it is:
“Easy to see that this same trade, bad as it was at the regional level was controlled by the political and economic elite of Africa, and not by their European trading partners … African rulers generally controlled access to their coasts, and were able to prevent direct enslavement of their subjects and citizens by Europeans, except in Angola, where the Portuguese colony, founded in 1575, was often a center for Portuguese-led attacks that netted thousands of slaves. Even there, although direct attack accounted for a substantial quantity of enslaved people, there was always also a thriving business in buying slaves from African rulers and merchants from neighboring, independent kingdoms. Elsewhere along the African coast, the delivery of enslaved people to European shippers was an African business, managed by African commercial and political elites … European merchants or companies acquired their slaves by purchase from African buyers, usually with the active participation of African states, both as taxing agencies and in their own right as commercial sellers.”
In providing an explanation to the “giant paradox” of why the African elite allowed this to take place in spite of its obvious harm to Africans, he argued convincingly against the explanation that Africa participated in the slave trade on the basis of Africa’s relative industrial underdevelopment and consequent dependency on Europeans for their essential non-military goods.
He makes the case that the so-called dependency is incorrect because Europe was not more advanced industrially than Africa at that time (the pre-industrial times); Africa was even doing better in some areas and was providing for its needs.
There was also the argument that since Europeans supplied Africans with arms in exchange for slaves, the latter were soon locked in the so-called gun-slave cycle: states which refused to partake in slave trading became vulnerable to their neighbors who received guns – forcing those who refused to eventually join in.
Regarding the gun-slave cycle, Thornton showed that even the armies of African slave states did not depend strategically on guns in warfare – guns and European military supplies played only a peripheral role in African military equipment, tactics and strategies (I would say that this would be correct for many but not all of such states; European military supplies played more than a peripheral role in the Kingdom of Dahomey, it seems). Thus, we should not rule out completely a gun-slave cycle effect, in a limited way in some coastal areas as, for instance, in the Gold Coast, as Thorkild Hansen tries to show. On the whole, however, the two explanations are completely inadequate individually and together in accounting for the widespread participation of African states in the enslavement and trafficking of their own people internally and trans-continentally.
For Thornton, the explanation of this paradox lies “in Africa and in the politics of the trade rather than its economics”. And, we can get a clue from the mode of enslavement in the continent: war captives in open warfare which appear to account for about one-third of the total; punishment for crimes or offences (real or trumped up, in judicial processes that increasingly and dubiously handed out enslavement for offences, even minor ones) and indebtedness, which would account for about fifteen percent; raids, banditry and robbery (including especially kidnapping) which would account for about forty percent; and other modes that would account for about ten percent.
This went on in Africa because of the small size of African states; there were no huge territorial states in the manner of say the Roman Empire to offer security on a wide scale; so, the tiny states (some of them only village clusters or micro-states) fought, raided and enslaved one another as much as they could. Now, it is correct to say that a huge state would have provided a wide circle of security against enslavement on the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in which an estimated 11-20 million people were forcibly shipped to the New World from the 1500s to 1850. However, there is an alternative to this sort of political means to a wide circle of security in respect of enslavement, namely an ideological circle of security, especially when the political means fails. For instance, when the Roman Empire fell and was carved up by a number of Germanic tribes and local lords, only Christianity which discouraged the enslavement of at least Christians at that time, circumscribed and ultimately led to the prohibition of enslavement of Christians within the former Roman Empire and ultimately outside this territory in Western Europe. Western Europeans had to procure their slaves from the pagan lands to the east, from whence we get the tribal name “Slav”.
Islam also did a similar thing in Islamic lands, which led the people from those lands to search for slaves in sub-Saharan Africa and the trafficking of up to seventeen million African slaves, in some estimates, through the Arab slave routes across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean over a period of approximately 1,000 years (800/900 to 1900 AD).
An ideology can, however, do this if it has the sort of wide radius of consistency and beneficence (reasonability) that sponsors the building of strong brotherhood or sisterhood and a circle of non-aggression and trust on a wide scale across blood, clannish and tribal lines; that is, on the basis of secure universalistic lines. African religious ideologies mostly did not have such a character and thus could not play such a role to the extent that would have checkmated the slave trade on a wide scale.
On the contrary, African ideologies tended to justify, endorse and reinforce the slave trade. Africans in and through their ideologies appropriated the trade, sanctified it spiritually and morally, and incorporated it into African communities’ most hallowed religious rituals, making it part of the culture and traditions of African peoples and giving it ideological sanction. I refer here in particular to the use of gin, schnapps, and other imported spirits or hot drinks and tobacco in religious and solemn ceremonies of the indigenous religion and community life, including the religious and non-religious aspects of traditional wedding, burial and naming ceremonies in most African communities in West Africa and the Atlantic coast generally.
These practices, proudly but erroneously referred to as “tradition”, apparently go back to the era of the slave trade. They are items of the slave trade (products of European distilleries and the tobacco farms and factories of America and Europe); they are not indigenous products of the land; yet they have been elevated not only to the status of tradition but to the point of displacing the natural products of the land such as kola nuts and palm wine in some major solemn traditional ceremonies such as funerals, marriages, title-taking ceremonies – Nze na Ozo, kingship and chieftaincy initiation and installation ceremonies, for instance. All of these have important religious and spiritual dimensionsin which the ancestors and divinities of the land are offered these items.
To be continued…
Prof Joseph C. A. Agbakoba
