Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed and much accomplished literary analyst and pseudo-historian (see his several televisions specials centered on Oprah Winfrey), published a
fucked-up Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. He ostensibly wrote to discuss reparations related to slavery, but all he really did was provide a slightly more sophisticated recapitulation of the argument to which white people love to cling, "I never owned any slaves, and besides, they sold their own people into slavery." Fuck.
Reparations aside, this is just a bunch of bullshit. Whose work is he doing? I guess you gotta be of a particular mindset for Harvard to have you.
It's really hard to get into in a blog, but I really can't stress enough just how off-base he is with all of this. Did Africans sell other Africans into slavery? Yes.
Consider this - "African" is not an ethnicity. It is an identifier of the continent from which you come. It's like telling the Chinese and Indian governments that they should get along better, as they are the same people. No, no one would ever say that. But they both are countries in Asia. Also, Africa is not a country.
There are (were) so, so many ethnicities in the African continent. Gates mentions that "the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups." If fifty is a few, then there were obviously a lot more. And, keep in mind, that African slaves in the Atlantic world tended to come from West Africa, leaving so many more ethnicities unaccounted for. So if there are presumably hundreds of ethnicities on the continent, there is no selling of "their" or "your" people into slavery. They were selling other people into slavery, people to whom they had no more connection than Germans do with the French. Did people say that Europeans were slaughtering each other during WWI and WWII? No, of course they distinguished between them. It was not viewed as a civil war, nor is it today.
Was selling people into slavery fucked? Yup. The people who did it were garbage.
At the same time, as much as Gates tries to stealthily scuttle these arguments, it is a fact that the people running this trade in Africa were not aware of what slavery in the New World looked like, as there was nothing resembling it in Africa. "Slaves" in Africa had rights, were allowed families, did not have their status permanently, hopelessly inscribed upon them and often times would be integrated into the family/clan that had enslaved them. They also tended to be part of the spoils of war, not a commodity purchased at an auction house. Finally, slaves in African societies did not form the basis for the social and economic structures of those societies, like they did here.
Gates talking about "elite Africans" visiting Europe is a complete distraction from the discussion at hand. Firstly, the slavery we are discussing did not take place in Europe. African slaves, primarily, went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and America. Any talk about reparations, the supposed base for his article, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with slavery in Europe. It's about here, in the United States. It's about African slaves building the country, for free. It's about providing an otherwise impossible agricultural foundation for the country that allowed it to grow and prosper in bounds. It's about all that plantation labor down south and sending all those raw materials up north to be processed in those factories and sent all over the place for immense profits. The slave trade was European, but slavery, primarily, was not. And the slavery that did exist in Europe was decidedly not on the scale, ever, that it was in America. It was not the same thing. There are no rice plantations in England. Portugal does not have a long history as a cotton producing wonder.
And even if his claim is true, that Africans had witnessed slavery first-hand, so what? So what if a few Africans saw slavery first-hand. We are talking about hundreds of years and a whole lot of people being in charge of selling to Europeans. A few Africans seeing it is a piss in the ocean. What were they going to do, put it on Facebook?
There are a bunch of other things, like how Europeans played off different ethnicities against one another and provided some with guns, which allowed them to easily overpower and dominate nearby peoples of different ethnicities. As a result, the people under attack then had to acquire guns, which were only realistically available through Europeans, who were only really interested in slaves, not whatever things those particular people may have valued. As you can see, this would create a quickly worsening state of affairs that is a combination arms race/ransom/extortion situation. Europeans are good at that, provoking wars. And then they made sure that there were people in power in these societies who were very amenable to selling them people.
Finally, this discussion on culpability is fucking absurd for one reason - it rests on the premise that Europeans had no choice but to buy people and force them to work for free. Think about that.
If the Europeans who showed up looking to take slaves away weren't so fucking greedy and heartless, then those people in Africa who wished to sell other people into slavery wouldn't have been able to sell off a single person across the ocean in that middle passage hell. As though they created a market. As if, for countless centuries, there was just this teeming slave market on the western shores of the African continent waiting for buyers, until one day, the magnanimous Europeans came and saved their failed economic dream. Like they flew planes over Europe towing banners that said "AFRICAN SLAVES 2NITE - ALL U CAN BUY." No, Europeans came to them. And came, and came, and came, and came. For fuck's sake, this position almost pities the Europeans, like they were naive heroin addicts or something, victims of the African pusher.
Yes, some African people had responsibility for selling other African people into slavery. That's obvious. To act like their blame is equitable to that of European traders and buyers is truly insane and is nothing but a lie.
