** African history as part of world history - " Was built on gold, silver, and ivory.” The Africans themselves participated in the Atlantic African Black Slave trade has now become widely known!

Date:   6/23/2020 6:30:35 PM ( 4 y ago)

Initially, European interest in Africa was largely driven by gold, but with the development of New World plantation agriculture in the late sixteenth century, demand for African slaves rose dramatically, and it was these small kingdoms, constantly warring with one another, with stateless peoples, and with larger kingdoms, that became Europe’s biggest sources of chattel.

That Africans themselves participated in the Atlantic slave trade is by now widely known, and Green by no means skimps on the details. What is less well known in his account is the determined and resourceful ways that a number of major African states struggled to insulate themselves from the slave trade and resist Europe’s rising dominance.

The examples of such efforts range across kingdoms in present-day Ghana, Benin, and Congo that refused outright to sell slaves to Europeans (but sometimes purchased them from Europeans), and for a long time successfully fended off the newcomers’ efforts to gain access and control to other coveted resources, such as metals.

The story of the kingdom of Kongo is particularly instructive. Already an advanced state with elected kings at the time of the Portuguese arrival in the 1480s, Kongo quickly and fervently embraced Christianity, which had hitherto made little headway in West Africa.

In 1516 a Portuguese visitor wrote of the second Christian king of Kongo, Afonso I, “His [devotion to] Christianity is such that he seems to me not to be a man but rather an Angel that God has sent to this Kingdom so as to convert it.”

Kongo maintained ambassadors at the Vatican from the 1530s through the 1620s, but its relationship with Portugal broke down over the issue of slavery. As King Afonso complained in a letter to his Portuguese counterpart in 1526:

Many of our people, for the avid desire which they have for the merchandise and objects of [your] Kingdoms which your people bring here, and so as to satisfy their rampant appetites, steal many of our free and protected people. And it has happened many times that they have stolen nobles and the sons of nobles, and our own relatives, and have taken them to sell to the white men who are in our Kingdoms; and they take them hidden and others go by night, so as not to be discovered. And as soon as they are in the power of these white men they are at once branded with fire and clapped in irons.

Faced with Kongo’s resistance to expanding the slave trade, in 1575 Portugal founded a colony adjacent to the kingdom, at Luanda (now in Angola), which it used as a base to wage an aggressive destabilization campaign against its old partner. Kongo resisted the Portuguese doggedly, eventually turning to Holland as an ally, because that country was not yet engaged in slaving and was an enemy of the then unified kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.

The 1623 letter by Kongo’s King Pedro II initiating an alliance with Holland requested “four or five warships as well as five or six hundred soldiers” and promised to pay for “the ships and the salaries of the soldiers in gold, silver, and ivory.”

Holland soon entered into the proposed alliance, hoping that by cutting off the supply of slaves from this region, which alone supplied more than half of those sent to Brazil and the Spanish Indies, Brazil itself, a plantation society and at the time Portugal’s leading source of wealth, would become unreliable.

As a result of the alliance, Africa came to play a major part in the struggle for control over the South Atlantic during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), with Dutch warships being dispatched in 1624 and again in 1641—this time successfully helping Kongo drive off the Portuguese. Later, in 1648, blacks from Brazil were shipped across the Atlantic by Lisbon to restore its hold on Angola. Hegel may have been unaware of all of this, but here, without a doubt, was African history as world history.

What ultimately undid Kongo, the horrific demographic drain of the slave trade that followed its defeat by Portugal in 1665, was a vulnerability it shared with some of the other important late holdouts against European encroachment—powerful and sophisticated kingdoms like the Ashanti Empire and Benin—which was a loss of control over its money supply. In Kongo, a locally made cloth of high quality was the main traditional measure of value and means of exchange, alongside a type of seashell, the nzimbu, harvested along the nearby coast. The Dutch, discovering the local fixation on cloth, flooded the region with its early industrial textiles, wiping out the market for Kongo’s own manufacture. After they gained control of Luanda, the Portuguese similarly flooded the region with shells, both local ones and others imported from the Indian Ocean. Similar monetary catastrophes befell the few big surviving West African kingdoms—mostly as a result of the fall in the price of gold following New World discoveries of gold and silver.

“Inequality between West and West-Central Africa and the rest of the Western hemisphere arose from inequalities in the exchange of economic value,” Green writes. “For several centuries, Western African societies exported what we might call ‘hard currencies,’ especially gold; these were currencies that, on a global level, retained their value over time.” In return, Africans received cowries, copper, cloth, and iron, all things that declined in value over time. All the while, Africa was bled of its people, as slave labor was being put to productive use for the benefit of the West.

Green concludes his sprawling and nuanced look at the steady depletion of a continent with a powerful lament about the lack of academic interest in Africa’s precolonial eras:

The focus is on the present, and on the problems of the present, as it is in the overwhelming number of universities where African history is taught, from the UK and the US to Brazil. Where older African history is taught in the West, it is almost always as relates to slavery, repeating an old trope of primitivism and oppression. Yet African history is much more complex than this allows; and the root causes of many of the problems of the present lie precisely in this more distant past.

Howard W. French is a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of four books, ­including “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of ­Africa.” He is at work on a book about the role of Africa and Africans in the l­aunching of modernity. Follow him on Twitter: @hofrench.
Footnotes

The image of the black as a cannibal is one of the earliest stereotypes in the annals of the encounter between Europeans and Africans that began with the slave trade in the early fifteenth century. With no evidence, sea captains working for Portugal’s Prince Henry “the Navigator” lamented that Africans who fought back against their slaving raids ate any Europeans they captured. What few in the West have ever heard is that Africans in societies along the coast of their continent regarded the whites who came to their shores in search of slaves as themselves cannibals. How else, they wondered, to explain their persistent lust for human flesh?
For the importance of sub-Saharan African gold to the rise of the Arab world, see Timothy F. Garrard’s authoritative “Myth and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade,” Journal of African History, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1982).
The word “check” may come from the Arabic term sakk.
The word “Sudan” means “land of the blacks” in Arabic and has been used historically to refer to a broad east-west belt of the continent just below the Sahara Desert.

** This does not cover the African Slave trading done under Ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, nor the most recent Islamic conquests starting in the 800's!
Actually slavery {not just Blacks} have been a major part of world history almost since time began, existing on all continents!
For several thousand years! The above historical reference actually was very recent coming upon the world scene in the last few hundred years!

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