"In a column in the NY Times, April 22, 2010, Gates wrote, “While we are all familiar with the role [in the slave trade] played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa.” He continues, “For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. …How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? 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.” For Frederick Douglas, America’s most famous black slave voice, the Africans who sold them off were savages: “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa… for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them” (Cited in Gates’s article). Gates could not let the bitterness he felt over this accusation of African complicity lie stagnant when he came to Africa to make his famous television series on Africa, “Wonders of the African World.” Instead, he asked in so many words, Why did you do it to us? And in his editorial in the NYTimes, he laid bare the grounds for the accusation: “For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept.” Despite such excuses as, “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries,” he stated, “the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.” Then he asks, rhetorically, “Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. …African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.”" - Professor Kenn Harrow guest blogs today on my blog. Long, fascinating read.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:38:10 +0000
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