May 6, 2010
Most critics of Henry Louis Gates’ recent New York Times Op-Ed (the ones that I read on the USAfricadialogue listserv, where I participated in the debate that it sparked) seem to be critiquing the essay he didn’t write. The accusations seem to range from “he didn’t discuss European culpability,” to “he did not acknowledge African victimhood,” to “he is minimizing and excusing Euro-American culpability.”
Most critics of Henry Louis Gates’ recent New York Times Op-Ed (the ones that I read on the USAfricadialogue listserv, where I participated in the debate that it sparked) seem to be critiquing the essay he didn’t write. The accusations seem to range from “he didn’t discuss European culpability,” to “he did not acknowledge African victimhood,” to “he is minimizing and excusing Euro-American culpability.”
We can forget about those who simply want to attack him on the flimsy speculation that “he is doing his sponsors’ bidding.” There is nothing academic, intellectual, or insightful in such a critique. It is as pedestrian as it is distracting and does not deserve a serious response.
Those who encase their critique in a lingering animus over Gates’ documentary, Wonders of the African World, have a legitimate grouse, but they are a little unfair to the man. They claim that Gates’ Op-Ed is a polemical continuation of an argument about white exculpation that began in Wonders. Context and precedence are important to any discussion, but they have to be contexts and precedents that actually exist. They don’t in this case, so I consider this critique misplaced if not malicious. Two reasons: first, to the extent that, even in Wonders, Gates never made a claim remotely excusing or minimizing European culpability, the polemical extension of the argument about “excusing or assuaging white guilt” to his Op-Ed is a stretch; second, the Op-Ed in question does not in any way excuse or minimize white culpability in the slave trade. There is simply no evidence in either work that Gates excuses or denies Euro-American slave trade culpability. NONE! The subject of white culpability is not his primary preoccupation in either work. Highlighting African culpability does not cancel out Euro-American culpability. This is not a zero-sum culpability game. And it is not, as some people allege, a “shifting of blame” from whites to Africans either. Rather, it is an argument for full accountability. It is an insistence that African and European actors in the slave trade accept responsibility for their roles regardless of their economic and political position in the world today.
Much of the anti-Gates critique therefore assaults a polemical straw man, an argument that Gates does not make, while conveniently ignoring or explaining away the one that he does make about African culpability. Gates did not set out to write an Op-Ed about white culpability, so to critique him on an absence, on a project he didn’t undertake, is unfair. It would be more productive to prod him to disclose his views on white culpability (through another Op-Ed perhaps), if we are in doubt as to where he stands on white culpability and reparations, than to take interpretive and extrapolative liberties with his current piece. Slavery is a complex issue and we must entertain the possibility that Gates or anyone else could hold complex views that may appear contradictory to those used to judging the whole from a part or those accustomed to simplistic consistencies.
Gates set out to argue only ONE point in the Op-Ed, which is that African involvement and culpability in the slave trade deserves the same attention as the familiar narratives of European participation. He believes that this point has not been written into histories of the slave trade. I don’t agree with him entirely on this point. He makes it sound like there is a conspiracy of silence, which there is not. Several recent studies of the Atlantic slave trade account to varying degrees for African agency in the trade. I do however believe that there is an epistemological/methodological hesitation to highlight the full extent of African participation and culpability in the slave trade. The ONE point that Gates set out to argue in the Op-Ed was argued brilliantly and persuasively. He relied in his argument on comprehensive, up-to-date databases on the slave trade—collations of a wide variety of sources on the trade—to make his point.
So, to advance a popular cliché in academe, let’s not crucify Gates for the book he did not write (which we perhaps wish he had written). Let’s wait until he writes that book before we pounce. The suspicion that Gates may harbor a broader anti-reparations agenda is not founded on anything he has published, although one recognizes the ideological anxiety that produces it. It is possible to argue for the full recognition of African culpability while making a claim for reparations and while believing in white accountability. The two views may not perfectly align in the ideological universe of pan-Africanists but they are not incompatible. Like Gates, I believe that African culpability deserves as much attention as white agency in the slave trade. But I also believe in reparations that are informed by fairly precise foundational distinctions and the accurate identification of culprit corporations and entities on the one hand and victims and descendants of victims on the other.
This emphasis on complexity and coexistence of complex viewpoints brings us to the op-ed as a genre of journalistic writing. Those who are faulting Gates for not emphasizing Euro-American culpability and for not sufficiently delineating African victimhood should recognize that, as a polemical practice, the Op-Ed does not encourage nuance, self-negation, and complicated analytical flourish. For reasons of space and editorial conformity, it, instead, encourages punchy, forceful, and clearly articulated argumentation. Its disciplinary encumbrances and protocols of expression demand that one does deliberate violence to nuance, caveats, and analytical modesty, and tentativeness, while disavowing analytically useful modifiers, and qualifiers. I write Op-Eds and I know the constraints that an Op-Ed writer labors under.
In fact, beyond the silences pointed out by critics (failure to account for African victimhood; failure to reinforce the familiar narrative of white culpability, etc), I can point to another serious omission from Gates’ Op-Ed: he does not give a visible analytical space to the many but often ignored documented instances of active African elite resistance to the slave trade (commoner resistance is a more familiar theme). Only recently, in 2003, Sylviane Diouf edited and published a fantastic volume on the subject (Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies). It is an established historical fact that some African kings even barred slave trading in their territories or turned abolitionists after initially profiting from the trade. There are other nuances that are missing from Gates’ piece. One could, among other complaints, fault Gates for not accounting for the ex-slaves from America, Britain, and the Caribbean who returned to Liberia and Sierra Leone and subjected African ethnic groups in the vicinity of their settlements to conditions analogous to slavery. But to heap these burdens on Gates’ brief Op-Ed is to either misunderstand the Op-Ed and its mission or to suggest that Gates should have written an academic article or book, in which a larger spatial latitude and a freer expressive conventions would enable him to, as it were, cover all bases, and account for all nuances, exceptions, and caveats of slave trade discourse. Perhaps, Gates should do this—should have done this. But to use this standard to critique an 850 word Op-Ed is unfair and unhelpful. And to fault Gates for not accounting for all the important details of the slave trade is to ask a writer to substitute his footnotes for his text or to ask a webmaster to swap the sidebars of his website with its main pages. It is like ignoring the text and focusing on the existent and omitted footnotes of a piece of writing.
Also unfair is to use an absence (failure to indict white villainy) to connect the NYT Op-Ed and Wonders. If there is any thread connecting Wonders to the Op-Ed, it is Gates’ insistence on the imperative of shedding as much light on African culpability as on Euro-American brutality. While some respondents have critiqued his equation of the two culpabilities, I haven’t seen any persuasive, factually animated argument refuting Gates’ contention that African participants in the slave trade were as involved, as active and proactive agents, as Europeans in the trade and that they deserve to bear as much culpability as European actors.
Although I agree with Gates that African groups (with the emphasis on groups) are as culpable as European slavers, I sympathize with Olabode Ibironke’s argument that; a) Africa was the ground zero of the trade and was thus a primary victim, and b) that all areas of Africa affected by the trade and all Africans in those areas (slaver and enslaved) eventually become victims—the notion of culpable victimhood. I have ideological sympathy with these arguments but I disagree slightly with them. Here is why. While Africa—certain parts of Africa (many parts of Africa have to be excluded from the Atlantic slave trade debate)—was indeed the ground zero of the trade and one could argue that its structural legacies made direct or vicarious victims of affected African peoples, groups, and regions, African slave trade actors cannot partake in this victimhood and have to theorized out of it. To the extent that many African profiteers of the slave trade were able to parlay profits and statuses derived from the trade into political and socio-economic investments in the subsequent periods of “Legitimate Trade,” colonialism, and in the current postcolony, they can by no means be described as victims, vicarious or otherwise, for they have used their genealogical connection to the profits and domination of the slave trade era to immunize themselves against the ravages and structural continuities of the slave trade’s legacies on the continent. Structural interpellations should not supplant individual and group culpability.
As I indicated before, my contention would complicate and perhaps delay reparations, as extensive research has to be done to make multi-layered distinctions between Africans who suffered and continue to suffer the consequences of the trade and those who were empowered by it. And this should not, of course, follow from a mere dichotomy between those who enslaved and those who were raided for slaves, although that would be a good starting point. There were in-between communities—neither slavers nor enslaved—who nonetheless were burdened by the trade either because they had to take in refugees, runaways, or lost trading opportunities, economic outlets and had to wrestle with the vicarious economic costs of instability. There are, I am sure, other variables and parameters to consider.
There is one other argument that relates to the one on “structural victimhood”: the “European guns” argument, which is advanced as a mitigating variable in claims about African culpability. I don’t agree with it because guns were extremely valuable political and economic instruments in precolonial Africa. They created as much wealth as they destroyed, if not more. They killed, maimed, and captured Africans, but they were also instruments for protecting accumulated licit and illicit wealth, trade, and economic opportunity. They also helped in conquests. Conquests brought territories, which meant booty in the short run and tribute in the long run. Guns intensified warfare, but they were also instruments of wealth creation.
Another argument that has emerged on the USAfricadialogue list in discussions of Gates’ Op-Ed is the one on slavery in precolonial Africa. The argument that there was no slavery in precolonial Africa is so worthless and escapist it should be denied the dignity of a response. The more serious claim that African polities were only selling convicts, outlaws, and war prisoners flies in the face of evidence of organized slave raids and, later, of wars launched solely for the purpose of producing captives for European slave ships. Even during the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which was slower, less intense, and less disruptive, not all captives were outlaws, criminals, and war prisoners. Some were snatched from their livelihoods and families and sold.
Understandably, today’s inheritors of the power and prestige of old, slave-trading polities would claim to have been exporting only outlaws and criminals. No kingdom or people would want to be inscribed in written history as one of the villains of the notorious Atlantic slave trade or smeared with the stigma of slave raiding. For this reason, the public oral scripts of African kingdoms in the post-slave trade era denies deliberate slave raiding or deliberate war-making for the purpose of slave production. The testimonies and accounts of these slave-trading polities are often tainted by today’s anti-slavery climate and by our evolving knowledge of the brutality of slavery as an institution. But if you listen hard, you will discover, depressingly, that some of these kingdoms’ esoteric narratives and oral traditions of past glories include heroic accounts of successful slave raids and slave-producing warfare. It takes methodological innovation and ethical sincerity to unearth and highlight these internal scripts. Only when the public and internal scripts are harmonized can we get at the true picture of African slavery and African participation in the Atlantic slave trade.
There is then a need to refuse to be seduced by the revisionist, morally conscious, and politically scripted oral testimonies of the descendants of African slavers. There is a concurrent need to extend our inquiry to the African polities and peoples that were raided for slaves—those treated as slave reservoirs and vulnerable Others deserving of enslavement and tribute exaction. The oral narratives and memories of these communities on slavery and the slave trade can depart dramatically from those of their former raiders—the powerful slave raiding polities. We need to ask the victims of slave raids if the raiders made a distinction between criminals, convicts, and outlaws when carting away men, women, and children. Did the raiders demand and inspect judicial records in the passion of the raids? What about those who were yanked from farms and other productive activities, those who were respectable members of their societies—were they, too, outlaws and did the raiders stop to check their criminal record?
Let us document the experiences of the victims and refuse to have our accounts of slavery and the slave trade skewed in favor of the self-serving narratives of the powerful slave-trading polities. A little bit of “history from below” would clarify the shortcomings of listening exclusively to those African groups and state entities that dealt with the Europeans—the active African participants.
Of course, we should also scrutinize the narratives of the victims, for there is now political capital (in many parts of Africa) in the claims of victimhood, resulting in a tendency for exaggeration and melodramatic discursive reenactments in the testimonies of former slave raid victims.
Because such narratives perform instrumental roles in claims of self-determination and sometimes anchor identity formation and assertion, we must be vigilant. Nonetheless, the narratives of raided polities and peoples would only enrich our repertoire of knowledge on slavery and the two slave trades—Saharan and Atlantic.
Another strain of the anti-Gates’ critique devolves rather predictably into a balance sheet analysis that seeks to posit Euro-American slave trade actors as bigger culprits based on their bigger share of slave trade profits. There are however two important points working against this argument. First, it is wrong and misleading to use absolute numbers in the profiteering calculus. You have to adjust for the size of the economy, the importance of slavery and the slave trade to the overall economy of the state, and then use the statistical outcome of this exercise to determine the percentage of the economy and overall productivity represented by or dependent on slavery and the slave trade. To put it quite simply, absolutes are misleading indicators of profiteering and economic benefits and thus poor guides to culpability. Absolute profit numbers have to be explained in the context of the overall economy. For many African slave trading states and kingdoms, slavery and the slave trade was an integral part of their economy for between 150-250 years. When one compares the centrality of the slave trade to the economies of these states and its centrality to the Euro-American economy, one can begin to sketch a fairly accurate comparison of benefits and benefits-based culpability. In this comparison, one should note that the bigger size and capital diversification of the Euro-American economy meant that, apart from the case of some areas (US South perhaps), the slave trade, despite yielding much more profits in Euro-America, may actually have constituted a smaller element in the overall economy than it did in the economies of individual African slave trading states and kingdoms. The second reason why the raw comparison of profit figures is a misleading indicator of culpability is that profit figures alone do not always account for the depth and reach of participation, as profitability could correlate negatively with the extent of participation.
Culpability should thus follow rightly from the extent of participation.
And on that score, I agree with Gates that African actors in the trade were as involved as their Euro-American counterparts and should thus be held morally culpable to the same degree.
The genealogy of “black on black” crime in certain corners of Africa is worth looking into, especially as Africans are today struggling to understand the brutality and rapacity that define the relationship of African political elites to their compatriots and their countries’ resources. Racial patriotism should not hinder a reasoned acknowledgement of intra-racial evils. There is no shame in such an acknowledgement.
Asians, Europeans, Amerindians, and Arabs also enslaved their kind.
Africa’s story is only a fairly localized subset of the human story, which is a story of both evil and good.
The author can be reached at [email protected]
We can forget about those who simply want to attack him on the flimsy speculation that “he is doing his sponsors’ bidding.” There is nothing academic, intellectual, or insightful in such a critique. It is as pedestrian as it is distracting and does not deserve a serious response.
Those who encase their critique in a lingering animus over Gates’ documentary, Wonders of the African World, have a legitimate grouse, but they are a little unfair to the man. They claim that Gates’ Op-Ed is a polemical continuation of an argument about white exculpation that began in Wonders. Context and precedence are important to any discussion, but they have to be contexts and precedents that actually exist. They don’t in this case, so I consider this critique misplaced if not malicious. Two reasons: first, to the extent that, even in Wonders, Gates never made a claim remotely excusing or minimizing European culpability, the polemical extension of the argument about “excusing or assuaging white guilt” to his Op-Ed is a stretch; second, the Op-Ed in question does not in any way excuse or minimize white culpability in the slave trade. There is simply no evidence in either work that Gates excuses or denies Euro-American slave trade culpability. NONE! The subject of white culpability is not his primary preoccupation in either work. Highlighting African culpability does not cancel out Euro-American culpability. This is not a zero-sum culpability game. And it is not, as some people allege, a “shifting of blame” from whites to Africans either. Rather, it is an argument for full accountability. It is an insistence that African and European actors in the slave trade accept responsibility for their roles regardless of their economic and political position in the world today.
Much of the anti-Gates critique therefore assaults a polemical straw man, an argument that Gates does not make, while conveniently ignoring or explaining away the one that he does make about African culpability. Gates did not set out to write an Op-Ed about white culpability, so to critique him on an absence, on a project he didn’t undertake, is unfair. It would be more productive to prod him to disclose his views on white culpability (through another Op-Ed perhaps), if we are in doubt as to where he stands on white culpability and reparations, than to take interpretive and extrapolative liberties with his current piece. Slavery is a complex issue and we must entertain the possibility that Gates or anyone else could hold complex views that may appear contradictory to those used to judging the whole from a part or those accustomed to simplistic consistencies.
Gates set out to argue only ONE point in the Op-Ed, which is that African involvement and culpability in the slave trade deserves the same attention as the familiar narratives of European participation. He believes that this point has not been written into histories of the slave trade. I don’t agree with him entirely on this point. He makes it sound like there is a conspiracy of silence, which there is not. Several recent studies of the Atlantic slave trade account to varying degrees for African agency in the trade. I do however believe that there is an epistemological/methodological hesitation to highlight the full extent of African participation and culpability in the slave trade. The ONE point that Gates set out to argue in the Op-Ed was argued brilliantly and persuasively. He relied in his argument on comprehensive, up-to-date databases on the slave trade—collations of a wide variety of sources on the trade—to make his point.
So, to advance a popular cliché in academe, let’s not crucify Gates for the book he did not write (which we perhaps wish he had written). Let’s wait until he writes that book before we pounce. The suspicion that Gates may harbor a broader anti-reparations agenda is not founded on anything he has published, although one recognizes the ideological anxiety that produces it. It is possible to argue for the full recognition of African culpability while making a claim for reparations and while believing in white accountability. The two views may not perfectly align in the ideological universe of pan-Africanists but they are not incompatible. Like Gates, I believe that African culpability deserves as much attention as white agency in the slave trade. But I also believe in reparations that are informed by fairly precise foundational distinctions and the accurate identification of culprit corporations and entities on the one hand and victims and descendants of victims on the other.
This emphasis on complexity and coexistence of complex viewpoints brings us to the op-ed as a genre of journalistic writing. Those who are faulting Gates for not emphasizing Euro-American culpability and for not sufficiently delineating African victimhood should recognize that, as a polemical practice, the Op-Ed does not encourage nuance, self-negation, and complicated analytical flourish. For reasons of space and editorial conformity, it, instead, encourages punchy, forceful, and clearly articulated argumentation. Its disciplinary encumbrances and protocols of expression demand that one does deliberate violence to nuance, caveats, and analytical modesty, and tentativeness, while disavowing analytically useful modifiers, and qualifiers. I write Op-Eds and I know the constraints that an Op-Ed writer labors under.
In fact, beyond the silences pointed out by critics (failure to account for African victimhood; failure to reinforce the familiar narrative of white culpability, etc), I can point to another serious omission from Gates’ Op-Ed: he does not give a visible analytical space to the many but often ignored documented instances of active African elite resistance to the slave trade (commoner resistance is a more familiar theme). Only recently, in 2003, Sylviane Diouf edited and published a fantastic volume on the subject (Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies). It is an established historical fact that some African kings even barred slave trading in their territories or turned abolitionists after initially profiting from the trade. There are other nuances that are missing from Gates’ piece. One could, among other complaints, fault Gates for not accounting for the ex-slaves from America, Britain, and the Caribbean who returned to Liberia and Sierra Leone and subjected African ethnic groups in the vicinity of their settlements to conditions analogous to slavery. But to heap these burdens on Gates’ brief Op-Ed is to either misunderstand the Op-Ed and its mission or to suggest that Gates should have written an academic article or book, in which a larger spatial latitude and a freer expressive conventions would enable him to, as it were, cover all bases, and account for all nuances, exceptions, and caveats of slave trade discourse. Perhaps, Gates should do this—should have done this. But to use this standard to critique an 850 word Op-Ed is unfair and unhelpful. And to fault Gates for not accounting for all the important details of the slave trade is to ask a writer to substitute his footnotes for his text or to ask a webmaster to swap the sidebars of his website with its main pages. It is like ignoring the text and focusing on the existent and omitted footnotes of a piece of writing.
Also unfair is to use an absence (failure to indict white villainy) to connect the NYT Op-Ed and Wonders. If there is any thread connecting Wonders to the Op-Ed, it is Gates’ insistence on the imperative of shedding as much light on African culpability as on Euro-American brutality. While some respondents have critiqued his equation of the two culpabilities, I haven’t seen any persuasive, factually animated argument refuting Gates’ contention that African participants in the slave trade were as involved, as active and proactive agents, as Europeans in the trade and that they deserve to bear as much culpability as European actors.
Although I agree with Gates that African groups (with the emphasis on groups) are as culpable as European slavers, I sympathize with Olabode Ibironke’s argument that; a) Africa was the ground zero of the trade and was thus a primary victim, and b) that all areas of Africa affected by the trade and all Africans in those areas (slaver and enslaved) eventually become victims—the notion of culpable victimhood. I have ideological sympathy with these arguments but I disagree slightly with them. Here is why. While Africa—certain parts of Africa (many parts of Africa have to be excluded from the Atlantic slave trade debate)—was indeed the ground zero of the trade and one could argue that its structural legacies made direct or vicarious victims of affected African peoples, groups, and regions, African slave trade actors cannot partake in this victimhood and have to theorized out of it. To the extent that many African profiteers of the slave trade were able to parlay profits and statuses derived from the trade into political and socio-economic investments in the subsequent periods of “Legitimate Trade,” colonialism, and in the current postcolony, they can by no means be described as victims, vicarious or otherwise, for they have used their genealogical connection to the profits and domination of the slave trade era to immunize themselves against the ravages and structural continuities of the slave trade’s legacies on the continent. Structural interpellations should not supplant individual and group culpability.
As I indicated before, my contention would complicate and perhaps delay reparations, as extensive research has to be done to make multi-layered distinctions between Africans who suffered and continue to suffer the consequences of the trade and those who were empowered by it. And this should not, of course, follow from a mere dichotomy between those who enslaved and those who were raided for slaves, although that would be a good starting point. There were in-between communities—neither slavers nor enslaved—who nonetheless were burdened by the trade either because they had to take in refugees, runaways, or lost trading opportunities, economic outlets and had to wrestle with the vicarious economic costs of instability. There are, I am sure, other variables and parameters to consider.
There is one other argument that relates to the one on “structural victimhood”: the “European guns” argument, which is advanced as a mitigating variable in claims about African culpability. I don’t agree with it because guns were extremely valuable political and economic instruments in precolonial Africa. They created as much wealth as they destroyed, if not more. They killed, maimed, and captured Africans, but they were also instruments for protecting accumulated licit and illicit wealth, trade, and economic opportunity. They also helped in conquests. Conquests brought territories, which meant booty in the short run and tribute in the long run. Guns intensified warfare, but they were also instruments of wealth creation.
Another argument that has emerged on the USAfricadialogue list in discussions of Gates’ Op-Ed is the one on slavery in precolonial Africa. The argument that there was no slavery in precolonial Africa is so worthless and escapist it should be denied the dignity of a response. The more serious claim that African polities were only selling convicts, outlaws, and war prisoners flies in the face of evidence of organized slave raids and, later, of wars launched solely for the purpose of producing captives for European slave ships. Even during the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which was slower, less intense, and less disruptive, not all captives were outlaws, criminals, and war prisoners. Some were snatched from their livelihoods and families and sold.
Understandably, today’s inheritors of the power and prestige of old, slave-trading polities would claim to have been exporting only outlaws and criminals. No kingdom or people would want to be inscribed in written history as one of the villains of the notorious Atlantic slave trade or smeared with the stigma of slave raiding. For this reason, the public oral scripts of African kingdoms in the post-slave trade era denies deliberate slave raiding or deliberate war-making for the purpose of slave production. The testimonies and accounts of these slave-trading polities are often tainted by today’s anti-slavery climate and by our evolving knowledge of the brutality of slavery as an institution. But if you listen hard, you will discover, depressingly, that some of these kingdoms’ esoteric narratives and oral traditions of past glories include heroic accounts of successful slave raids and slave-producing warfare. It takes methodological innovation and ethical sincerity to unearth and highlight these internal scripts. Only when the public and internal scripts are harmonized can we get at the true picture of African slavery and African participation in the Atlantic slave trade.
There is then a need to refuse to be seduced by the revisionist, morally conscious, and politically scripted oral testimonies of the descendants of African slavers. There is a concurrent need to extend our inquiry to the African polities and peoples that were raided for slaves—those treated as slave reservoirs and vulnerable Others deserving of enslavement and tribute exaction. The oral narratives and memories of these communities on slavery and the slave trade can depart dramatically from those of their former raiders—the powerful slave raiding polities. We need to ask the victims of slave raids if the raiders made a distinction between criminals, convicts, and outlaws when carting away men, women, and children. Did the raiders demand and inspect judicial records in the passion of the raids? What about those who were yanked from farms and other productive activities, those who were respectable members of their societies—were they, too, outlaws and did the raiders stop to check their criminal record?
Let us document the experiences of the victims and refuse to have our accounts of slavery and the slave trade skewed in favor of the self-serving narratives of the powerful slave-trading polities. A little bit of “history from below” would clarify the shortcomings of listening exclusively to those African groups and state entities that dealt with the Europeans—the active African participants.
Of course, we should also scrutinize the narratives of the victims, for there is now political capital (in many parts of Africa) in the claims of victimhood, resulting in a tendency for exaggeration and melodramatic discursive reenactments in the testimonies of former slave raid victims.
Because such narratives perform instrumental roles in claims of self-determination and sometimes anchor identity formation and assertion, we must be vigilant. Nonetheless, the narratives of raided polities and peoples would only enrich our repertoire of knowledge on slavery and the two slave trades—Saharan and Atlantic.
Another strain of the anti-Gates’ critique devolves rather predictably into a balance sheet analysis that seeks to posit Euro-American slave trade actors as bigger culprits based on their bigger share of slave trade profits. There are however two important points working against this argument. First, it is wrong and misleading to use absolute numbers in the profiteering calculus. You have to adjust for the size of the economy, the importance of slavery and the slave trade to the overall economy of the state, and then use the statistical outcome of this exercise to determine the percentage of the economy and overall productivity represented by or dependent on slavery and the slave trade. To put it quite simply, absolutes are misleading indicators of profiteering and economic benefits and thus poor guides to culpability. Absolute profit numbers have to be explained in the context of the overall economy. For many African slave trading states and kingdoms, slavery and the slave trade was an integral part of their economy for between 150-250 years. When one compares the centrality of the slave trade to the economies of these states and its centrality to the Euro-American economy, one can begin to sketch a fairly accurate comparison of benefits and benefits-based culpability. In this comparison, one should note that the bigger size and capital diversification of the Euro-American economy meant that, apart from the case of some areas (US South perhaps), the slave trade, despite yielding much more profits in Euro-America, may actually have constituted a smaller element in the overall economy than it did in the economies of individual African slave trading states and kingdoms. The second reason why the raw comparison of profit figures is a misleading indicator of culpability is that profit figures alone do not always account for the depth and reach of participation, as profitability could correlate negatively with the extent of participation.
Culpability should thus follow rightly from the extent of participation.
And on that score, I agree with Gates that African actors in the trade were as involved as their Euro-American counterparts and should thus be held morally culpable to the same degree.
The genealogy of “black on black” crime in certain corners of Africa is worth looking into, especially as Africans are today struggling to understand the brutality and rapacity that define the relationship of African political elites to their compatriots and their countries’ resources. Racial patriotism should not hinder a reasoned acknowledgement of intra-racial evils. There is no shame in such an acknowledgement.
Asians, Europeans, Amerindians, and Arabs also enslaved their kind.
Africa’s story is only a fairly localized subset of the human story, which is a story of both evil and good.
The author can be reached at [email protected]
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