Africa: At the Center of History

As the new administration enters its third week, we are rapidly seeing changes coming at us from all angles. Sometimes they come so fast that it is difficult to keep up and every day becomes a battle for the heart and soul of our nation. One writer comes to mind in this constant battle against equality.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American sociologist and historian and a cofounder of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was fond of the Latin phrase Semper novi quid ex Africa (out of Africa, always something new). Although of Greek origin, the phrase is most often associated with the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, who included it in his Natural History of 77. For Pliny, Africa was a place of strange and unusual creatures. For Du Bois, however, the continent was most remarkable for its contributions to human development. From his publication of The Negro in 1915 until his death in 1963, in Ghana - where he was at work on an ambitious Encyclopedia Africana - he wrote against the conception of Africa as the place without history.

Du Bois’s project was twofold. He first sought to show that Africa did indeed have a history. Second, he aimed to explain how African achievements had been erased by the processes that produced European global dominance. The depiction of Africa as the place without history was the product rather than the cause of the enslavement and forced migration of over 12 million Africans, followed by the colonial conquest of the continent. In the course of this historical drama, color became in the world’s thought synonymous with inferiority, Negro lost its capitalization, and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.

This twofold pursuit was not unique to Du Bois. Beginning in the 19th century, African American intellectuals, understanding that their political fates were tied to depictions of Africa, had written counter-histories. They did so in fiction and poetry, by repurposing the colonial genre of the travel narrative, and by covering political developments on the continent in newspapers. Scholarly publications like The Journal of Negro History, founded in 1916 by the pioneering African American historian Carter G. Woodson, and black institutions like Howard University incubated the field of African studies.

Howard French’s Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War continues this intellectual tradition. He draws on his travels throughout the African continent and the wider Atlantic world and on extensive research in the primary sources and secondary literature to reconstruct Africa’s place in history.

Unlike Du Bois, who in The World and Africa argues that ancient Egypt is the African origin of human civilization, French starts in the 15th century, when new connections were formed among Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While Europeans are often the central actors in this story, Born in Blackness casts Africans on both sides of the Atlantic as the prime movers. Before the Atlantic slave trade, African societies shaped global commercial networks centered on gold and enjoyed political and economic parity with other states. In the age of the slave trade, African labor was of fundamental importance to the development of settler societies in the Americas and the broader global economy. Then, from the brutal conditions of chattel slavery, Africans universalized the idea of human emancipation, recast blackness as a political identity, and laid the foundations for Pan-Africanism.

French writes not only to correct the historical record but to urge readers to understand how their world has been made by Africa’s contributions. Born in Blackness is therefore an entry into a larger debate about how to reckon with the past. French seeks to provoke a full-scale reconsideration of who we are as Americans.

Yet the history recounted in Born in Blackness contains lessons for Africa and Europe as well. French addresses Americans, but his book views the history of slavery and race here as one episode in a global drama. What launches his story is not the settlement of the United States and the arrival of Africans on these shores, but the fateful encounters between Portuguese traders and African empires.

A focus on our own national myths obscures slavery’s international scale.

The 15th century was the Age of Discovery. In our standard account of the period, Africa was first and foremost a roadblock to Europeans searching for easy access to the spices and silks of Asia. Only later, according to this line of thinking, did Africa become important, as the supplier of the enslaved women and men whose labor sustained the plantation economies of the New World.

The region’s prominence was based on gold. In the 10th century the Ghana Empire came to be known as the “country of gold” throughout the Mediterranean because it controlled the entrepôts where gold from the south was traded for salt and other essential goods from the north. Mali, which succeeded Ghana in the 13th century, controlled the nexus of three important river valleys - Senegal, Gambia, and Niger - and had by the 14th Songhai, the Mali Empire built its power on trade in gold and slaves, whom it used as laborers but also sold in North Africa.

In 1324 Mansā Mūsā, the ruler of Mali, arrived in Cairo with a spectacle of largesse, cementing Mali’s association with gold and slavery. Mūsā traveled with a delegation of 60,000 people, including 12,000 slaves, each of whom reputedly carried a fan made of four pounds of gold. As impressive as the gold was, it was the number of slaves, that may have reinforced sub-Saharan Africa’s reputation through the Near East as an inexhaustible source of black bondsmen and women.

French, like Du Bois before him, seeks to refute the idea that first Arabs and then Europeans, rather than Africans, brought the continent into global commercial networks. But even as he shares in this vindicating project, French has a different aim. He argues that if we recognize the complex state formations and global connections that characterized West Africa in the 15th century, we can better understand the encounter between Europe and Africa. The inequalities we are so familiar with today were not preordained, they were produced through exploitation and extraction as old as the modern world.

Mansā Mūsā’s arrival in Cairo generated feverish efforts to locate and better understand his mysterious kingdom and its wealth. One of the most important surviving maps from the European Middle Ages, Catalan Atlas of 1375, identifies Mali and depicts its king as “unambiguously Black.” He is described as sovereign of the land of the negroes of Ghana, the richest and noblest of all the lands due to the abundance of gold that was extracted from his lands. His blackness, though prominently represented, did not obviate his parity with European sovereigns.

In the early 1440s Portugal occasionally raided the African coast for slaves to offset the cost of its search for gold. By 1448 Prince Henry ended the practice in order to establish diplomatic relations with African rulers. Gold from West Africa increased the availability of capital for new investments in the Iberian Peninsula and led to the creation of a new gold coin. These developments stimulated urbanization and social mobility across Europe.

Portugal’s monopoly on the gold trade in Gold Coast propelled Spain westward from Canary Islands in search of gold and silver. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the newly discovered lands of Africa and the Americas between Spain and Portugal; Spain was granted territories more than 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands except for Portuguese Brazil, and Portugal everything east. Portugal thereby relinquished control of much of the New World. Many historians have seen this as being to Portugal’s disadvantage.

The trade in gold launched an era of major economic expansion. But those shimmering riches did not compare to what lay ahead, when the prized commodity Africa offered was human beings. The transition to a period in which slave traffic dominated engagement between Europe and Africa was slow but consequential. It began when the Portuguese entered the inter-African trade in people, buying slaves from further down the coast in Benin to exchange with Akan communities for gold. Slavery had long supplied the Akans with laborers for agriculture, public works, and its military. They would typically be assimilated through manumission and marriage as a strategy of expanding the population. Before the introduction of Indian textiles into the African market, the goods the Portuguese offered were not coveted by the Akans; only slaves were.

Benin’s ruler soon ended the practice of selling war captives to Europeans, however, fearing that his power would be gradually eroded by the loss of people. This decision contributed to the emergence of the full-scale transatlantic slave trade.

Large-scale sugar production had already been introduced in the Canaries and Madeira. The transformation of sugar into a mass commodity went hand in hand with the chattelization of African women and men. Here was the model for the New World.

The rise of the plantation economy predicated on African slavery illuminates the double valence of French’s title, Born in Blackness. First, the new Atlantic economy set in motion the great divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. Slave labor supplied the sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and indigo that transformed European life. Sugar, which is high in calories, made it possible to feed more Europeans at lower cost. The wide availability of coffee facilitated the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, organized around the era’s new institution, the café. Slave-grown cotton fed the textile boom of the Industrial Revolution.

The Atlantic trade also reshaped the economies and politics of Europe. To purchase slaves, traders from imperial centers could not rely on the meager goods produced domestically and instead depended on suppliers across the European continent. As a result, trade with Africans stimulated circuits of exchange within Europe and helped propel European integration. And if European state-making depended on war-making, the Atlantic world gave Europe a bigger stage and greater resources for building stronger, more organized states.

As Europe’s fortunes rose, Africa’s declined. Rather than creating strong states in West Africa, the slave trade set into motion forces of heightened chaos and political destruction. Selling rivals and captured enemies into the trade became a costly and brutal means of self-preservation. Amid new waves of international displacement, African states developed larger militaries and expanded the practice of slavery.

Political destabilization coincided with economic dependence. When Dutch traders flooded Gold Coast with cheap, mass-produced foreign cloth, local textiles were largely squeezed out of the market, leaving Gold Coast more and more dependent on the export of raw natural resources. What had begun as a relationship of approximate parity, with African states possibly having the upper hand, shifted toward a steep trade imbalance. It favored the Europeans.

Perhaps the most consequential effect of the slave trade in Africa was the demographic and human catastrophe it unleashed. Along with the 12.5 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, another 6 million were trafficked to North Africa, the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean. Historians estimate that about 12 million died en route to the Americas, either on the Atlantic or on the journey from the interior to the coast. Even before the onset of the transatlantic slave trade, Africa was comparatively underpopulated due to higher death rates from tropical disease. The unprecedented movement of people during the Atlantic slave trade, however, exacerbated this problem. As Britain and other parts of Europe experienced a population boom, which accelerated economic growth, Africa experienced a decline.

As for the second meaning of the title Born in Blackness: the categories of Africa, African, and black as names for a political community did not precede the transatlantic slave trade but were invented during the experience of slavery. On the slave ships and plantations, enslaved Africans from diverse linguistic and ethnic communities forged solidarity and generated creole cultures. These connections spurred a tradition of black resistance.

This early Pan-Africanism revolved around new political identities and remarkable information networks that radiated from large port cities like Kingston and Havana, crisscrossed oceans, and traversed plantations. Word of the Haitian Revolution, for instance, traveled on what the historian Julius Scott called the “common wind” of these Atlantic circuits, inspiring uprisings. Future president John Adams marveled at the wonderful art of communicating that freed and enslaved black people cultivated among themselves.

French wrote Born in Blackness to counteract the symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africans’ contributions. In this he echoes Du Bois’s aim in The World and Africa to overcome the habit, long fostered, for forgetting and detracting from the thought and acts of the people of Africa.

Published the year of India’s independence and a decade before Ghana’s, The World and Africa was a historical reconstruction that looked toward a future of decolonization. He believed that, as Africans freed themselves from colonialism’s shackles, a truly universal humanism would be born.

In the absence of revolutionary possibility - or perhaps due to this absence - the writing of history has become the focus of intense political struggles. Many of these struggles have been less a search for usable pasts than an effort to expose the history of slavery and colonialism that has been hidden in plain sight. When Black Lives Matter protesters threw the statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbor and defaced statues in Belgium of King Leopold, who once owned the Congo as his personal territory, they were asserting that colonialism and slavery were not merely part of the past. They insisted on seeing these cruel forces at play in the present.

Born in Blackness is also part of this contemporary conjuncture and thus marks a new phase in the African American tradition of writing African history. It undoes the marginalization of Africa in our versions of the past and denaturalizes Africa’s contemporary inequalities. It asks what it would mean to memorialize the many forgotten instances of African agency and resistance.

Transforming the way we perceive ourselves as citizens of the most powerful country in the world, and transforming how we understand the part Africans played in building it, are necessary steps toward justice and equality.