Another Essay I Should Write

[minoanmiss]

I should research and write about...... the historical context surrounding African participation in the slave trade as enslavers and enslaved both.

Not least because otherwise I'm going to reach through my computer and strangle the next slavery-apologist who smugly states this fact as if it completely excuses all the horrors Europeans and European descendents in the 'New' World put their Africa-derived slaves through.

There would be a bit about how Africa has never been an undifferentiated blob of darkness, and about the sociopolitical situation in West Africa during those centuries, and about how European powers played African polities against each other to increase the numbers of slaves available and the reliability of supply.

And also, if I can manage to stop shaking with fury, a small logic puzzle. If Person A sells a working dog to Person B, expecting person B to employ the dog as a sheepherd or something, and Person B instead attaches the dog to a mill, never unchains it, barely feeds it, and beats it to make it run until it dies, we don't say that Person B is blameless for maltreating the dog because Person A sold it to them. So why is it supposed to make Europeans blameless for the horrors of slavery because they played Africans against each other to pay some for capturing others?

... or maybe I should watch more of the Olympics and read fewer Black History Month 'discussions' this month. *sigh*

Comments

[ororo]

Please do this. It needs to be done and done well and shouted from the rooftops.

[princessofgeeks]

ALL THE HUGS

[ex_flameandsong751]

I really wish people would stop with the "Africans enslaved each other, that excuses everything white people did" argument, it's just so... grrr. The analogy you made is spot on.

[oracne]

Maybe blockblockblockityblock some of those idiots?

[dine]

avoid the 'discussions' as much as you can - who wants your head to explode?

I think that essay would be important (and probably quite interesting) reading! I know that most of what one comes across leans pretty heavily upon the "other Africans sold them" narrative, without looking at what was going on politically there. your analogy is spot on

[amaebi]

Feeling you, hard.

I recently read a very good and ferocious book about US conservative Christian promotion of adoption and campaign against abortion rights. It was a very good book about awfully painful stuff. One of its points was that families in African and Asian countries got taken, because their cultural models for fostering involved temporariness during hard times, with continued family contact and return always on the table.

Which is a long way to say how right you are.

There have been many forms of unfree labour around the world and over time, but the Race slavery invented by Euro-colonists of the Americas was the most monstrous of an evil set.

[katarik]

God, comments like that just make me so screamingly furious. It's this utterly enraging refusal to acknowledge that the American chattel-style slavery was *so* new because it was built around this concept of race as a creation instead of the more standard prisoner of war slave, who wasn't subhuman, whose kids weren't inherently born into slavery -- but those people have never done any of the research into other histories of slavery, let alone the politics of Europeans and White Americans negotiating slave handling with Native American nations or other nations in West or Southern Africa.

The Roman Empire had slavery! IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THIS DID. Egypt had slavery! IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THIS DID. (You could make some arguments about Sparta, but while I am by no means a classical scholar, my understanding is that even Sparta didn't do like the USA did.)

[anna_wing]

Not that new, sadly, the Indian caste system still produces what amounts to hereditary slavery in some places. And yes, lower caste people are often seen and treated as sub-human.

It doesn't make historical New World slavery any better, but very few human evils are unique to one time and place...

[brooksmoses]

Also if one is trying to argue that something is less messed up because Sparta did it too, one is making a spectacularly bad argument.

[kore]

There would be a bit about how Africa has never been an undifferentiated blob of darkness

YES
THANK YOU

("The country of Africa" kasdfoiqwjkldasflk)

[xenacryst]

Gah, yes. Specific examples of multiple wrongs not making a right. But, but, but! I really really want my wrong to be right, so that means that anyone else being wrong must mean that I’m right! ::flames, side of face::

[cmcmck]

The complexities of the slave trade are many and local African power politics had a lot to do with it.

[minoanmiss]

The history of Sub-Saharan Africa we get in the US is very mangled and politicized because a lot of it is used as a justification for colonialism and slavery. "Africa was a barbaric place and better off under European rule" and "You were done a favor by being enslaved" are both things I've been flat out told during my expensive education.

[cmcmck]

Barbaric?

So medieval Mali, Great Zimbabwe and the kingdom of Kongo were barbaric?

Okay............................

[minoanmiss]

Now you see why I'm so angry. wry smile Yes, I was taught they were barbaric and not worthwhile. Everything I know about Sub-Saharan Africa I learned after the age of 18 by doing my own reading and talking to people.

[cmcmck]

I've a book on my reading list about the kingdoms of medieval West Africa which I'm very much looking forward to!

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177427/african-dominion

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for telling me about it :)

[cellio]

You're due a refund. :-(

People are real idiots sometimes. And then they open their mouths and show us.

[hitchhiker]

i would spread it far and wide if you wrote it!

[lunabee34]

*hugs*

[sabotabby]

Hugs. This is important nuance.

[used_songs]

There have been some amazing BHM videos up on TikTok by some really insightful creators who KNOW history and are good at making it accessible, and INVARIABLY there will be some tool in the comments dredging that excuse up. I just want to ask them "did you even watch the video?" but they're probably just searching the tags so they can come and make trouble in the comments.

[redbird]

I would be so tempted to say "yes, and? How does that excuse what happened to the enslaved people in the Americas?"

[clevermanka]

The way people think that's some sort of "gotcha." *headdesk* As you say, the logic isn't there! Also there were also white abolitionists in every country, too. Ugh. Bigots.

[cellio]

Argh, yes! Between the "all of Africa is the same" idiocy and the blame-shifting ("somebody from a competing tribe with similar skin color colluded so that makes it y'all's own fault"), I want to whack people with a clue-by-four, except it'd never work, and... argh.