The
Ideology of Racial Hiearchy and the Construction of the European
Slave Trade
By Molefi Kete Asante
(First
delivered in Lisbon, Portugal. December, 1998.
An International Conference Sponsored
by UNESCO)
Mr. President M'Bow, Dr. Doudou
Diene, Madame Coordinator Henriques, permit me in the name of
my ancestors and by the spirit of their legacies to simply say
that it is not racial difference that has been a problem in discovering
the ideological basis of the enslavement of Africans, but rather
the idea of racial hierarchy, developed, refined and disseminated
by Europeans who prosecuted the slave trade for three centuries.
All of us here are aware that the magnitude of the European forced
migration of enslaved Africans has no peer in history (Haywood,
l985). In its extraordinary reach into another continent and its
equally overcoming of horrendous obstacles on land and the high
seas, the European enterprise dwarfed all other examples of similar
social and economic constructions. The sea, more daunting in ways,
than the desert, made the journey far more perilous than any other
forced migration of peoples. Yet it is also true that the magnitude
of the so-called "trade" must be measured in terms of the multiplicity
of legacies, historical and contemporary, that it created. In
the wake of the most mammoth forced movement of people over a
period of centuries we see the very beginnings of the modern world,
and indeed, the post modern world, is in effect, a creation of
the same legacies (Tracy, l990).
In one instance the spread of
Africans and Europeans to continents other than Europe and Africa
helped to produce a world order that has reigned supreme in technology,
science, economics, law, and sociology for five hundred years.
It was, however, a racist construction created out of stolen land,
broken treaties, stolen labor and broken backs. Any interpretation
of the post modern views of the present world has to take into
consideration that the entire discourse on the fluidity of cultures,
the notion of subjective identities, the instability of social
and cultural space, and the interaction and interpenetration of
peoples is a direct result of the most massive forced movement
of people the world has ever known (Cohen, l982). It becomes impossible
to speak of the Americas or Caribbean without Africans or indeed
Europe without Africa. One cannot speak intelligently about Portugal
and its history without Brazil or without Angola and Mozambique;
this is an incredibly interconnected historical moment.
I am struck by two phenomena
of the late twentieth century: the survival of the African in
the West and the decline of the doctrine of white racial supremacy,
neither is yet a complete victory because Africans have not survived
equally well in all places, as this UNESCO project "The Route
of the Slaves" has shown, and the doctrine of white supremacy
is expressed everyday on the Internet and in private circles of
Europe and America. But the ultimate success of the African as
African in the West and the decline and elimination of any hint
of racial hierarchy will be one of the great achievements of contemporary
humanity. It is, of course, one of the fundamental thrusts of
the Afrocentric movement with which I am identified.
The Afrocentrist, in positioning
agency for African people, reasserts African humanity against
all objectifications. We are not on Europe's periphery; we are
ourselves historical beings and our engagement with Europe or
Europe's encounter with us must be seen in the light of Africa
before Europe (Asante, l990). This is why we cannot have a fruitful
discussion until we understand that no African slaves were removed
from Africa, only African people were removed. They were blacksmiths,
farmers, fishers, priests, members of royal families, musicians,
soldiers, and traders. They were captured against their wills
and then enslaved in the Caribbean and Americas.
There remains, however, one nagging
question, why were Africans the victims of the most massive enslavement
in history? It is a question not to be taken lightly when one
views the history of humanity. It was on the African continent
that humans originated and on the same continent that the most
majestic civilizations of antiquity arose in the Nile Valley (Diop,
l991). It was also in Africa that the first flourishing of religion
occurred and even the naming of the Gods was said to be an African
event (Herodotus, Book II). The mighty kingdoms of the West and
South developed and maintained themselves for centuries without
the presence of either Arabs or Europeans. So the question to
be asked is, why did Africans become the subjects of the European
Slave Trade?
When this question is asked a
variety of answers are given and each answer has a host of defenders.
In effect the answer to the question has been hopelessly problematized
to the extent that it will be difficult to arrive at an answer
satisfactory to everyone. Indeed a prominent answer with a vocal
cadre in America places the burden entirely on the victims themselves,
that is, that it was Africans who created the conditions of enslavement.
This falls into the category of blaming the victim much like the
person who beats a spouse and then claims that the spouse caused
the violence. Of course, some spouses may not be blameless, as
all Africans may not be, in the long engagement with the European
Slave Trade. Yet it is not correct to blame the actions of the
oppressor on the oppressed. No where in African history do I find
any example where slavery was the principal mode of production
of an African society. No such slave societies were created on
the continent and certainly no such societies where foreign labor
was imported for the purpose of enslavement and hence, production.
Africans had no global interest in the movement of African people
and saw in the `trade" no advantage of a strategic nature.
I believe that it is more beneficial
to seek the answers to the ideological foundations of slavey in
Europe itself. At least, it is in Europe where we discover the
first initiatives for the capture and use of Africans in the Americas
and the Caribbean. And here in Portugal we are near the beginning
of the puzzle itself. In an attempt to explain the relationship
of racism and economics to the motivation behind the enslavement
of Africans, scholars writing in English have concentrated on
two arguments and these arguments might be expanded as we continue
to see the unfolding of the "The Route of the Slaves Project."
I suspect that the documents in Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch
would extend our reach into the history of the phenomenon of slavery.
A First Thesis
Eric Williams, whose book, Capitalism
and Slavery, written in l944, argued that slavery was not
caused by racism but that racism was the consequence of African
slavery. This line of thinking has become one of the leading explanations
for the cause of slavery. It is fraught with many problems but
I believe it is necessary for me to explain the principal characteristics
of this argument before I offer my criticisms. For Williams, the
answer to the question of why the enslavement of Africans must
be found in economic rather than racial conditions. Starting from
the premise that the color of unfree labor had been consecutively
brown, white, and then black in the Caribbean, the economic argument,
as I am calling it, says that the first instance of slave trading
and slave labor involved the Indian, that is, the Native American.
According to this idea the Indians, that is, Native Americans
quickly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, an
insufficient diet, the white man's diseases, and an inability
to adjust to the white man's way of life. This idea was buttressed
by the often repeated position of the priest Bartholomes de Las
Casas' l518 petition from Hispaniola that permission be granted
to bring Africans, `a race robust for labor, instead of natives,
so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little
endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms." While
Spain attempted to restrict the enslavement of Indians to those
who rejected Christianity or to the Caribs who were considered
cannibals, in the end Spain found that one African was worth four
Indians. It is Williams' opinion that the New World, as he calls
it—but we know that such designation is a misnomer since it was
neither new nor were the ideas carried to the Americas new—demanded
robust laborers who could work in the cotton, tobacco and sugar
fields.
The economic argument contends
that the immediate successors to the Indians as slaves were the
whites as indentured servants, at least in the Caribbean. He cites
considerable evidence to suggest that white servants, who signed
contracts prior to departure to the Americas were indentured by
law, binding them to service for a stipulated time often in return
for their passage to the Caribbean or Americas. Since this thesis
is based on a economic understanding of history, that is, as a
mercantilist endeavor in which the leading economists were seeking
to lower the number of poor in Europe by emigration while at the
same time supplying labor for the new colonies. Between l654 and
1685 ten thousand indentured servants sailed just from Bristol
in England to the West Indies and Virginia. It is argued that
one sixth of the population of Virginia in l683 were white indentured
servants. Furthermore, during the 18th century two-thirds
of the immigrants to Pennsylvania were white servants and in one
period of four years 25,000 white indentured servants came to
Philadelphia from England. It is estimated that at the height
of the North American colonial period nearly a quarter of a million
whites were of the servant class and half of the English immigrants
were of this class (Williams, l944).
In pressing the case for the
economic basis of the enslavement of Africans, the economic proponents
show how the white servant class was augmented by criminals and
the poor. To supply the growing demand for labor in the Caribbean
and the Americas kidnapping was resorted to on the streets of
Bristol and London. The poor adults would be given whiskey and
children given sweets to entice them on board ships bound for
the new colonies. Many criminals found the transport ships refuges
from the arm of the law and thus safer than the streets of England
or Ireland. Convicts proved to be a steady source of white labor
for the colonies and the harsh capital laws of England drove many
criminals who had violated one of the three hundred capital offenses
to take a trip to the new lands. One could be hanged or transported
for picking a pocket of more than a shilling, for taking commercial
goods more than five shillings, for stealing a horse or a sheep,
or for burning stacks of corn. Indeed by l664 a proposal was made
to banish to the colonies all rogues, thieves, Roma, and vagrants.
By l745 transportation was the penalty for the theft of a silver
spoon and a gold watch.
There was, at least, in England
a proclivity for transportation whenever the society wanted to
rid itself of convicts and criminals. Without such characters
neither Australia nor North America would have received such regular
infusion of whites, and without such characters maybe our own
history as Africans would have been different. However, one cannot
speculate on what would have happened since the ones who sent
the convicts were the same ones who started the African trade.
Nevertheless, Eric Williams believed
that the transportation of these white convicts and criminals
and servants showed the process to be neither especially cruel
nor inhuman but a part of the age. In effect, everyone was doing
it and everyone thought it something to do. Of course the emigrants
were packed into ships like herrings, given about a meter and
a half in width and five meters in length for a bed, and treated
like common criminals during the crossing which was long, often
turbulent, with little good food, and lots of diseases. By l639
a Parliamentary petition described how seventy two servants had
been kept below deck of a ship for five and a half weeks among
horses. You can imagine the condition of the servants and the
horses after such a journey.
Although Williams sets up the
scenario that leads to an economic basis of the enslavement of
Africans he is not willing to go as far as some other writers
in drawing the parallel between the white servants and the enslaved
Africans. Indeed one could reasonably claim that in some American
colonies like Maryland and Pennsylvania the white servants were
said to be nearly chattel. But nearly chattel is not chattel.
The fact that their conditions were often horrible, even unspeakable,
does not lead to the conclusion that the white servants were chattel.
The white servants spent their time on the islands and in North
Americas grinding at the mills and attending to furnaces or digging
the earth with little food that they were used to and being bought,
sold, and traded among white planters, whipped at will, and sleeping
in places worse than hogs. Yet they were not slaves and their
conditions never approached dehumanization, that is, the idea
that they were not humans.
Williams concluded that the white
servant laid the basis for black enslavement because the planters
learned with the white servants what to do with the Africans.
According to this theory had it not been for the economic downturn
involved with the transportation of the white servants this process
would have continued indefinitely. It was only because the white
servants cost more than Africans, particularly since the white
servants could work only until their contracts were completed
and Africans could work a lifetime. Buying an African for life
cost the same as buying a white servant for ten years. This thesis
holds that the Africans were latecomers into a system already
established (See Manning, l990).
A Second Thesis
Now let me place beside this
thesis another that has been advanced as an alternative argument.
Its principal proponent writing in English may have been Winthrop
Jordan whose book, White Over Black, was a thorough expression
of the dual generation explantion for the enslavement of Africans.
I shall refer to it as the Social-Economic thesis because it contends
that there was an economic idea involved in the ideology behind
slavery but the societies from which the impetus for the enslavement
of Africans derived already had in them certain racist ideas that
could be developed into full blown ideological foundations by
the practice of slavery. The point to the Social-Economic thesis,
as a way of escaping the issue of which came first, the hen or
the egg, is that racism and slavery generated each other. While
Williams maintained that slavery was not born of racism but that
racism was the consequence of slavery, Jordan contends that one
should not argue whether slavery caused racism or vice versa but
rather that they seem to have generated each other, hustling the
African toward complete degradation.
In defending his simultaneous
invention of slavery and racism Jordan, like Williams, concentrates
on the English, establishing that they did not arrive on Africa's
west coast until nearly a century after the Portuguese. While
the Portuguese seemed to have come early to the twin sins of enslavement
and Christian conversion, Jordan argues that the English were
adventurous traders in the l550s with nothing more on their minds
than normal commerce. It would be the seventeenth century when
English sailors would seriously join in the slave trade. The first
permanent English settlement was at Kormantin in l631, but the
first Royal African Company would not be chartered until l670.
Consequently, it is Jordan's belief that Englishmen initially
met Africans as another sort of men, not as men to be enslaved.
It was true that Africans were black, African religion was not
Christian, and the African lifestyle was different from that of
England, but they were still human. Indeed the idea that Africans
were Moors was common in English literature. To separate the non-Muslim
Moors from other Moors the term BlackMoors was often used to describe
Africans of West Africa, but there was nothing particularly strange
in this form of contact with Africans. Nevertheless the word "black"
did hold special negative properties in the English language as
an opposition to the word "white" and latent within the English
was a cluster of perceptions about black and blackness that must
have colored their attitudes toward Africans (Hakluyt, l928).
Another factor that Jordan sees
as having an impact upon the interaction of Englishmen and Africans
was the Christian religion and while the English did not seem
to have the same zeal as the Portuguese and Spaniards in converting
the Africans to Christianity the religion played a part in their
eighteenth century reaction to Africans. They were conflicted,
according to Jordan, by the Christian idea of the oneness of mankind,
yet the English believed that Africans were different, heathen,
savage, and suffered from a fundamental defect which could not
be overcom. The English observers found the African so different
in habit, manners, dress, religion, and color that it became increasingly
possible for them to consider the African as a different species
of human, indeed, sub-human.
Jordan contends that the English
did not know what to make of the Arican in the sense that sometimes
they felt that the African was absurd in dress and personal etiquette
but quite capable in terms of government with kings, counselors,
generals, and other functionaries of government just like the
English. Jordan writes:
They knew perfectly well that
Negroes were men, yet they frequently descirbed the Africans as
"brutish" or "bestial" or "beastly." The hideous tortures, the
cannibalism, the rapacious warfare, the revolting diet seemed
somehow to place the Negro among the beasts. The circumstances
of the Englishman's confrontation with the Negro served to strenghten
this feeling. Slave traders in Africa handled Negroes the same
way men in England handled beasts, herding and examining and buying
(Jordan, l968).
Jordan thus concludes that the
enslavement of Africans and other forms of debasement coincided
in the English colonies of Virginia and Maryland with these negative
assessments of the character of African. perpetual service, the
core of enslavement. This convergence found its first full expression
in the l640s in the American colonies. Consequently the general
debasement of the African, permanent service, prejudice against
the religion, manners, and morals, of the African made it easier
for whites to see Africans as natural slaves. On the other hand
the condition of white servants improved. By the 1660s there were
protests against holding whites in bondage. The protests were
not against enslavement or servitude but against the idea that
whites should be held in servitude.
Jordan seems to indicate that
although he has identified the twinness of racism and the enslavement
of Africans he is not satisfied with the argument he has made.
Therefore, he tries again to identify specific elements in the
question of why the African was enslaved. He says that economics
is a clear factor and had there been no economic need, no persistent
demand for labor, then Africans would not have been brought to
the Americas. Secondly, Africa was relatively helpless in the
face of European aggression and war technology. But unlike Williams,
Jordan knows that these two factors alone cannot sustain an argument
for the concentrated focus on African enslavement.
It is here that Winthrop Jordan
undertands that something must have existed in the English attitudes
about Africans and indeed about Indians that produced the reaction
to these two peoples and therefore in this regard he anticipates
many disagreements with Eric Williams' assessment. But as I will
demonstrate the Social-Economic thesis has its problems as well.
The Economic Thesis Reviewed
It is my contention that the
impetus for the enslavement of the Indian, the white servant and
the African was all racist. The driving force for the capture,
enslavement, and brutalization of the brown and white people prior
to the enslavement of Africans was difference, mainly class but
also in terms of the Indians racial and color differences. The
eventual enslavement of Africans was based on color and racial
hierarchy. Difference had already been assumed based on physical
appearances.
Although Eric Williams argues
that slavery was not born of racism he is fundamentally in error
because of his understanding of racism of the time. The English
considered the Indians and the Irish of a different race than
themselves longs before they had expressed the same sentiments
about Africans. The idea of English as separate and better than
Indians and Irish was deeply implanted in the English attitudes
of race, class, and color by the time they came to the Americas
and Caribbean islands. It was racism that made Englishmen see
the Indians and the Irish servants as different and therefore
useful for enslavement. I would agree, however, that the capture
and entrapment of the poor whites of Bristol and London was due
largely class and economic factors. Yet it was racism, class and
color consciousness that demanded that whites be released from
this type of bondage and blacks remain it it.
Williams admits that popular
sentiment demanded African enslavement but not white enslavement.
I contend this was because slavery had a racial basis. When Williams
speaks of popular sentiment he is speaking about how whites viewed
the issue of enslaving whites. They never accepted white enslavement
but they were prepared to accept black enslavement because the
issue was racial in character. Africans were not considered equal
to whites and even though there were white servants the sentiment
of the white populations never approved of their enslavement.
The ideology of white racial
hierarchy had been introduced by numerous Europeans as a way of
explaining difference, even difference between Europeans, prior
to the height of the European Slave Trade. After the 18th
century the arguments were used to explain and justify the enslavement
of Africans but they had been planted in the European consciousness
as a matter of course.
Late in the 18th century,
at the University of Gottingen, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander
von Humboldt began to develop the racial hierarchical theories
that would catapult European thought into the next centuries as
the bedevillers of truth. The intention of the Humboldts and other
European writers and promoters was the creation of a world in
which the dominant motifs of thought and behavior would reflect
the European world. Not unlike the conquest in territory that
had begun in the l5th century, this information conquest would
prove to be just as important in the construction of the West.
So aggressive would these early
propaganda tycoons be in promoting their ideology that they would
not only conjoin it with enslavement of Africans, capitalism and
imperialism but would spread it to other parts of the world and
even convince many Africans and Asians that Europeans and European
culture were not only superior but were destined to be superior
by some Divine Providence. No explanation of the massive enslavement
of Africans can be made without reference to the project of white
racial hierarchy and the doctrine of white supremacy.
European scientists, scholars,
men and women of learning would propagate the most abhorrent nonsense
about race. So-called biologists, anthropologists, physiologists,
medical doctors would advance theories about brain size, genital
size, and head bones to demonstrate their points concerning white
supremacy. This would become the background for much of Western
theorizing about the world. Popular culture from coaches to cups,
from utensils to lamps, from theater plays to analytical essays
would be created reflecting white supremacy and the degradation
of the African. Furthermore, sermons preached proclaim a sort
of manifest destiny for the white race as priests and preachers
became the mighty arms of God in the conquest of the so-called
lower races.
Make no mistake, what we have
today in every sector: art, education, economics, law, medicine—is
the legacy of five hundred years of Western promotion of this
ideology of white European supremacy. It structures everything
we know about the European Slave Trade and it must not be ignored
by the scholars of the African world, even if Europe continues
to bury its head in the sand.
The Germans were not alone in
their proclamation of a white supremacy. While the von Humboldts
had suggested Aryans, Alpines, and Mediterraneans in that order,
others were more intent to make comparisons that underscored the
necessity of the European Slave Trade. In the Netherlands during
the l8th century, Peter Campier, (1722-1789) compared African
facial and skull measurements to monkeys and developed a racial
hierarchy in which he claimed the superiority of the European
form. In such a world it was possible for the European to assume
that any enslavement of Africans, indeed, the rape of African
women was not only beneficial to Africans but necessary for the
improvement of the race!
I am careful to say that racist
thinking was not the undertaking of every white writer. Actually,
racist ideology was formed by a narrow group of clergymen, philosophers,
curators, physicians, and scientists who lived on the salaries
of churches, museums and universities. As they came into contact
with Africans these became the spreaders, the evangelists of white
supremacy.
Of course, most of those who
wrote probably had never seen an African or been to Africa. And
those who had often formed their opinions before they ever encountered
Africa. Widely differing accounts of Africans often emerged from
white travellers to the continent. For example, Count Constantin
de Volney, a Frenchman, (l757-1820) travelled to Egypt, in the
18th century prior to the invasion of the French Army
and claimed in his book Ruins of Empire that Europe owed
its arts, civilizations, and sciences to Africans. "Just think
that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of
our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences,
and even the use of Speech!" But Volney was the exception in a
long line of racist thinkers.
Earlier, however, David Hume
in l748 had written "I am apt to suspect that the Negroes in general
are naturally inferior to whites. There has never been a civilized
nation of any other complexion than white."
George Cuvier, the Aristotle
of his age, the founder of geology, paleontology, and comparative
anatomy, wrote in his major l6 volume work, The Animal Kingdom,
in l812 that the "African is the most degraded of human races
and whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence
is no where great enough to arrive at regular governance." The
implication of this kind of thinking is that Africans are fit
for enslavement.
Georg Hegel, the greatest European
thinker of his century, wrote in l828 "Let us forget Africa never
to return to it for Africa is no part of the historical globe,
it is outside of history."
Louis Agassiz, the Harvard scholar,
said there has never been a regulated form of government in Africa.
Thomas Jeffereson, the second
American president and a slaveholder wrote "I advance it therefore,
as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct
race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to
the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on Virginia in l790.
It is duplicitous for us to deny
the duplicative nature of this racist reasoning. It was copied
and and used as a justificatory rhetoric of racial hierarchy and
subjugation of Africans. The reasoning was reinforced in every
operation of the European will against Africa.
One could go on with this list
with quotes from Arnold Toynbee, Voltaire, and others, but the
point to be made is that the leading opinion makers for a period
of several centuries believed in the categorical superiority of
the white race over the black. This line of thinking, however
painful at this era, must be explored to see the root causes of
human's inhumanity to other human.
I would like to make a third
point in reference to the Economic Thesis. However brutal the
white servant was treated, the white servant was not treated like
the enslaved African. They were never chattel in the sense that
they lost all ownership of themselves and their time. They were
not real estate and could look forward to eventual freedom. Unlike
the white servants the African in America and the Caribbean could
only see permanent enslavement. Nothing in the treatment of the
Indian or the white servant was ever in the same category as the
treatment of the African. Racism was at the door of the house
of African enslavement.
It is my belief that the expense
of purchasing Africans has not been shown to be cheaper than the
cost of capturing whites from the cities of England and Ireland.
The capture of Africans was a racist act. The argument that the
opening of the lands in the Americas and Caribbean to European
interest demanded labor and that labor was the reason for the
enslavement of Africans is only half correct. It is true that
labor was needed, but it did not have to be slave labor or forced
labor. Labor is not definitionally unfree. Furthermore, it did
not have to be African labor. In Spanish colonies the caste system
consistently and without variation placed Africans lowest in terms
of rights and privileges. In Portugal, Africans were captured
and brought to Lisbon prior to the voyages of Cristobal Colon.
Finally, the commonly held notion
that the Native American succumbed to the demands of labor in
the sun, an insufficient diet, white diseases, and an inability
to adjust to the European diet is an overly promoted, distorted,
and inexcusable promotion of racism against both the Native American
and the African people. In the first place, this notion assumes
that neither the Indian nor the African are human. The Indian
is weaker, somehow, than other humans, and the African is stronger,
somehow, than other humans. These other humans by which the Africans
and Indians are judged are whites. The sun in certain parts of
southern North America could be hotter than many places in Africa
and to conclude that Indians of North America or the Caribbean
could not adjust to the heat is like chasing a pink whale, a fantasy.
Furthermore, the diet of Native Americans was well established
before the Europeans arrived and it is not as if they had to depend
upon the foods prepared by whites. There is no sufficient evidence
for this legendary argument in any literature that I have read.
The notion of the strength of the African was a justification
for the massive importation of Africans into the European colonies
in the Americas and Caribbean.
The Social-Economic Thesis
Reviewed
In reference to the Social-Economic
Thesis I have a few remarks to make.
First, the prejudice against
Africans existed long before the actual enslavement of Africans
by Englishmen began. And those who use the dates of the English
enslavement of Africans as a starting point for their analysis
miss the entire earlier period of Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch
operations against Africa. We now know from scholars such as Martin
Bernal who wrote Black Athena that the so-called Aryan
thesis of history arose during the European Renaissance and maybe
even earlier. The Aryan thesis held that Europeans were the highest
form of men and that the greatest traditions of history in the
world were those of Europe, beginning with the Greeks. The fact
that this was myth did not dissuade the promoters of the thesis
from making the argument. Indeed one can see that blackness was
problematic for whites as early as Aristotle who wrote in Physiognomonica
that "the Egyptians and Ethiopians were cowards because they were
too black."
Secondly, Winthrop Jordan seems
to suggest that the English participation in the slave trade was
categorically different from that of the other European nations
since they did not hold the same views about Africans. However,
the English cannot cry innocent when they had the experience of
the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spaniards before them. The Portuguese
had begun in the 1400s to travel down the west coast of Africa,
moving from Ceuta which was captured in l415 around the coast,
and the first Africans brought to Lisbon as servants or "gifts"
came around 1444. There was no need for Africans as laborers in
the Americas at this time, Europe had not made the journey across
to the Americas. Indeed Europe was more intimate with Africa than
it was with America during this period. Since Portugal under Alfonso
Henriques had reconquered land in Baja from the Islamicized Africans
in 1139, Portugal had been the first European country to explore
Africa. Nevertheless, the English knew enough from the Portuguese
and the Dutch about Africa that the images of Africans were firmly
planted in the minds of the English prior to their own massive
involvement in the slave business during the Century of No
Mercy, the 18th century, when more than six million
Africans were forced from the continent, and millions more had
their lives disrupted in the continent. We know of course that
the first Africans brought to an English colony in North America
came aboard a Dutch ship. Yet in 1568, half a century before the
presence of Africans at the Jamestown, Virginia Colony, John Hawkins
had left Plymouth, England, with 150 sailor-soldiers for the purpose
of capturing Africans on the West African coast. Hawkins and his
men ran into some difficulty as African soldiers fought them along
the coast and many of his men were wounded, some dying ten days
after they had been shot by the arrows of the Africans. Hawkins
recounts, however, how he joined with a local king to defeat a
neighboring king in order to obtain captives, and another forty
five of his men were either hurt or killed.
I believe that the arguments
for African enslavement were refined during the brutal process
by Christians who needed justification but the attitudes behind
the arguments were pre-existent (Drake, 1987). To emphasize, It
is my position that the attitudes making African enslavement possible
existed prior to the actual taking of Africans from the continent
but that the refinement of the argument against Africans and for
the enslavement occurred during the long history of enslavement
in the Americas and Caribbean. Increasingly the Christian sentiment
of the settlers became disturbed by the practice of slavery and
consequently demanded new and more complex arguments to justify
an un-Christian practice.
While it is fashionable today
and perhaps scientifically correct to speak of race as a social
construction, it has not always been the case. For nearly five
hundred years European thinkers developed, and perfected in Europe
itself, and then disseminated to the rest of the world a notion
of race and inherent racial hierarchy that led to the enslavement
of millions of Africans. The "slave trade" was preeminently neither
a trade nor an activity initiated by the victims. It was not merely
a mechanism to answer the labor needs of the Americas and the
Caribbean but an example of deep moral and ethical failing that
relied upon the belief of white racial superiority to sustain
it. I do not know of any European nation to date to have sufficiently
responded to this crisis in the psychology of Europe. This is
the great failing of all discourse on Europe and Africa.
Sustained by an ideology of racial
hierarchy where the African was judged the categorical inferior
of the white person, the enslavement of Africans was fueled by
economics and racism. To this degree, I am more firmly in agreement
with Jordan's position than that taken by Eric Williams. However,
the ideology of racial hierarchy and white racial supremacy, indeed,
contaminated or influenced by the Christian idea of anti-heathenism,
meant that Africans were fair game to be worked to death.
What is clear is that the labor
loss to local African economies produced for European economies
a surplus of value distorting the historical and developmental
process for centuries. The ideology of racial hierarchy produced
outrages of medicine where Africans were said to need less food
than whites and outrages of shelter where Africans were thought
to be able to withstand the elements better than whites. Indeed
the dependence on Moleque, from eight to fifteen years
of age, as the majority of enslaved Africans from Angola in the
l9th century, meant that the outrages against African youth were
attacks on the humanity of Africans (See Joseph Miller in Northrup,
l994). Thus, in dealing with the question posed at the beginning
of this paper I am raising the issue of social and psychological
violence and dehumanization aimed at Africans. What some have
called a trade, trafico negreiro, comércio negreiro,
la traite négrière, and what Walter Rodney called
a social violence, I call a racial war prosecuted against presumed
inferiors to establish the idea of white supremacy in economics,
culture, religion, education, industry, politics, and culture
power, thus the enslavement of Africans must be seen in a larger
context of European domination where nothing was to prevent the
use of collective violence, enslavement, against Africans in order
for Europe to carry out its aims. Yet in the end we must declare
victory over racism, racial hierarchy and racialized histories
that seek to protect even now the racist project by denying its
base in the enslavement of Africans. May the African ancestors
always live and the historical essence of those under the Atlantic
join with our determination that their story and ours be told
forever.
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