- 6,420
- 15,517
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2004
This entry is especially lengthy. It is mostly focused on history and not economics or politics or the policy debates of the moment. In my next few columns I will get to that. This article covers a variety of things, it starts with a history of West Africa and moves to a history of Slavery and then moves to the way some scholars have missed the main lesson of slavery because they have an agenda and finally it ends with something making what is otherwise an article about history, relevant to some of the present day policy debates. It probably the equivalent to six or seven pages in a magazine so I suggest that if you read it, set aside a little bit of time, maybe get some coffee and if you please, would you kindly give me some feed back.
I look forward to debating with the smart folks on this board who will probably read my article but I would be much obliged if you could give some feed back on the style as well as the actual content. I have been giving some serious thought to a career as journalist and I am going to use my semi monthly column as a test of sorts as well as a way to entertain and maybe inform, a community that has done a good deal of both.
I was initially going to respond to someone's comments in a recent thread about slavery, where some people recited the narrative that never in history have white people been enslaved, let alone by non whites. That is not the case. Before 1700 any society that existed or had existed had slaves and had people from that society who were slaves. Even if an entire people were never conquered and enslaved, people within the society would almost always be sold as slaves in exchange for food during times of famine or to settle a debt. Because our society has, thankfully, come to the realization that slavery is evil, some non whites, when presented with this very fact, in essence the challenge to that narrative stating that slavery is a uniquely white sin, become upset when they should not become upset, they should feel empowered. The fact that non whites have conquered others, including whites, and enslaved them shows that we all have the same brains, the same brains with the same natural impulses, for better or for worse, we all have the same impulses and the same capacity for good and for evil with all of us. While the narrative that slavery is something done exclusively by whites to non whites makes non whites, especially blacks, seem noble it often times goes hand in glove with that other narrative that is also, unfortunately a part of the World view of far too many, that blacks are savages, noble savages perhaps but savages nonetheless.
Many blacks with whom I have studied or discussed history or current events, upon learning about just how much blacks conquered other blacks, how they struggled for political power within their own polities (palace murder and intrigue are not just the domain of Shakespeare, how they wanted to obtain as much wealth as possible and were capable of being overtaken by jealousy and vanity and rage, actually feel empowered because if their brains work exactly the same way Europeans brains do they must also posses all of the positive qualities contained in the brains of Whites, Asians and everyone else whose culture had obtained a higher level of technological sophistication.
Anyone who engages in modern scholarship of social science knows that African societies’ development was severally impeded by geography and that European, North African and Asian cultural development was accelerated by the forces of geography (read Guns, Germs and Steel for a very detailed but fun and enjoyable to read explanation of geography and how it shaped history). Considering that Eurasian culture was able to advance because Eurasian geography favored farming, specialization, literacy and the ability for crops and technology to move eastward and westward from its place of origin, any given society in Europe or Asia got the majority of its useful ideas from other parts of Eurasia.
With Eurasia being the first place where people farmed (owing to the fact that a majority of agriculturally useful plants are native to Eurasia and all but one of the 14 species of large mammals that can be domesticated are native to the land mass) as well its being a roughly 8,000 mile long and 800 mile wide zone of arable land, coastline, natural harbor and inlets and navigable rivers, ideas not only moves quickly but it was home to the majority of humanity. West African societies were almost entirely cut off from Eurasia and its pool of shared ideas, West Africa’s population comprising less than a twentieth of humanity, it is partially cut off from other West Africans and almost entirely cutoff from Eastern and Southern Africans, Western African societies nonetheless reached, on their own, sophisticated states, agriculture, mining and metal working that put them on par technologically with the Ancient Greeks and Romans in many respects.
While writing did not come to West Africa until it was introduced by foreigners (as was the way writing was obtained for all but three societies to have ever existed) there is no history of what undoubtly took place, an ethnic group or collection of similar ethnic groups, surrounded to the South and West by Ocean and constrained by the vast Desert to their North, expanded Eastward.
Without a written history, the series of conquests and displacement of Africans by other Africans is hard to precisely date and chronicle as is the case with Iron age conflicts in Europe and Asia. Luckily, Archeology and Particular distribution of linguistic and ethnic groups in Africa paint a picture of Iron age farming societies forging iron weapons, forming militia groups at minimum and more likely small armies and killing, enslaving and taking the land of the hunter-gather societies to the East and the South. These conquerors, collectively known as the Bantu, brought with them a common language and over time and through Africa's isolation inducing geographies hundreds of languages and dialects have emerged in a band that bends from the Ivory Coast, around the jungles, through Serengeti plains and down to much of Southern Africa.
This band avoids the dense jungles of the Congo, the Kalahari Desert and the Mediterranean climate on the tip of Africa. The shape of this empire of sorts was based whether or not the land could support their staple crops, yams and cassava and other starchy, energy rich tubers that allowed them the ability to become farmers. Those crops grow well on the savannah and require heavy monsoonal rain in order to thrive and the densest jungles, deserts and even semi arid climates are unsuitable for their crops. The Twi (known largely as pygmies) and the Khosan people (known widely as the bushmen of the Kalahari) look very different from the dark skinned Bantu people and speak completely unrelated languages. Both groups probably lived in a much larger area than they do today but by the time of European exploration and conquest those people had been confined to an forever associated with the Densest Jungles of the Congo and with the Driest portion of the Kalahari Desert. Testing of paternal lines and linguistic analysis show that in some areas Bantu blood and dialects, all originally from the Ivory Coast region, make up the population and languages as far south as South Africa, Shaka Zulu was Bantu for example and he lived in what is now South Africa and his iron weapons were as sharp and as deadly as the weapons welded by a Roman Legionnaire or a Greek Hoplite. In other places, the populations were mixed to a degree showing that some Bantu might have taken Twi and Khosan women as slaves and had children with them. Perhaps as far back as circa 1,000 BC, armies of ebony skinned explorers and conquerors did with their razor sharp and deadly Iqwah swords what pale skinned explorers and conquers did 25 centuries later in the Americas, found people on land they wanted and killed most, raped and mixed with some and pushed the rest into the land that was economically undesirable.
What all of this means is that when given the opportunity black people, African people will look to expand beyond their homeland, they will seek wealth, they will seek better opportunities, they were able to build an iron age society out of Mesolithic (nomadic hunters and gathers who worked with stone tools and had no knowledge of farming or metal working) on their own (something no other society can claim to have done) and they used their superior weapons granted to them by their own innovation and their force of number made possible by growing crops to and the ability to raise armies that can only happen with farming as farming is needed to have specialists who do not have to far and can train to fight and lead armies and collect taxes needed to build and maintain those forces under arms.
The image of Africans running with spears and with loin cloths from lions is simply not real, some time , perhaps around the time of Rome's founding there were Africans in loin cloths running but not from lions. they were running from two legged predators and instead fearing the tooth or claw or horn of an animal they feared the iron blade of the most fearsome animal of all. I think that the image of a Bantu warrior chasing down a Twi or Khosan man in order to kill him and to rape his wife and daughters and to enslave his sons, although brutal do much more to combat all of those ghosts of Blumenbach that haunt the collective psyche of even those who want to portray Africa in a positive way. If you want to give true dignity to people who had been conquered and subjugated by you or those like you by imagining the conquered as noble savages, or as simple yet vibrant people or the other condescending terms used by those sympathetic to African and other non Western nations.
Before moving into the broader issue of slavery, I will transition by mentioning a fact with which most of you who are still reading by this point are familiar. Africans enslaved other Africans and most slaves chained together and shipped like animal across the Middle Passage where actually captured by other Africans. Unfortunately this fact is usually used as an attempt to downplay the brutality of the slavery that existed within the "Triangle of Trade," or if not to minimize the intent is to spread the blame around and off of the white slave traders. Whether or not the slave trader captured the Africans or not changes nothing about the guilt or European slave traders and severity of the Middle Passage.
What ought to be changed by the reality of Africans being the primary catchers of slaves, is the perception of Europeans as omnipotent, Europeans from 1450 to 1850 were unable to break into the interior of Africa because they would be resisted by Iron weapons wielding warriors whose numbers could negate the slight advantage afforded to smooth bore, single shot muzzle loaded muskets. It would take Repeating rifles, Gatling guns and, most importantly the geographically induced isolation on the continental scale and political fragmentation on a local scale. Africa, all of it south of the Sahara was never able to form a nation state, there were some kingdom and some very rich men like Mansa Musa but without any powerful nation state, Africans were the vulnerable people, the people who were always enslaved. With the rise of Nation states in European, Africa was doomed to become the source of slaves for Europe and Middle East for several centuries but that was not always the case, in fact, for most of history there was slaver yand slaves were never taken from thousands of miles away from the places in which they would be enslaved.
Slavery was commonplace in ancient Europe, in the North and in the South, virtually all Greek and Roman philosophers considered slavery to be an unavoidable fact of life and most of those slaves were either conquered people from places like Iberia, Gaul, Southern Britannia ( what are now Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Switzerland, England and Wales), Greece, Anatolia (modern day turkey and at the time inhabited by people whom you would call white), Thrace and Dacia (modern day Romania) or the slaves were people who could not pay back debts so they enslaved other Italian/Romans as well.
In the middle ages, people like the Frisians specialized in capturing and selling slaves and the many Vikings found slave trading to be much more lucrative than raiding for gold and silver. The city of Dublin, for instance, grew into a major city primarily because it was the largest slave market in Europe, in chances of finding a black face or even a tan one among the merchandise of 9th century Dublin were nil. Europeans also captured Eastern Europeans and sold them as slaves within Europe and to the Muslim world so there has been a time when non whites owned whites as slaves and they treated them the same as whites treated non white slaves in the colonial Caribbean.
Turkish elites especially prized 10 to 14 year old boys ( which is odd because in most slave holding societies attractive adolescent females; skilled slaves, people like carpenters, stone masons, weavers, gladiators; literate slaves, roman and middle eastern aristocrats wanted to save money but with haggling and counting money considered undignified for their social rank educated slaves fetched a high price and finally male slaves, who were 16 to 25 good a higher price than younger male because they were at the beginning of their physical prime for manual labor. The word "Turk" has been, until very recently, strongly associated with forced sodomy of someone of the same gender. When those white slave boys where not being "given" another man's genitalia, they often times had their taken by blade so they could be Eunuchs in the harem of a rich man where he kept white women naked and at his sexual beck and call for all of her life until such time that she was too old for the man’s taste and would be sold to a brothel.
People like Barber pirates, from North Africa and Tartars from central Asia decided to cut out the European Middle man and do what White were never able to do in Sub Saharan Africa, sail to the coast of Northern Europe and land and capture slaves en masse and return to the Islamic World and sell these very pale white slaves from Ireland, Iceland and other Northern and Western European places to customers of all hues. Literally millions of Europeans were captured either by Barbary pirates, Arab pirates in the Mediterranean, Turks in South Eastern Europe and Central Asians and became slaves of non whites and even more Europeans have been slaves at the hand s of other Europeans.
Many scholars and people who read scholarly works want to make slavery synonymous or even exclusive to the last five centuries of European colonial history, because it was a time where Europeans primarily enslaved non Europeans (although Europeans still took other Europeans as slaves legally in Eastern Europe until the 19th century in some areas. In Czarist Russia, most people were serfs, which is virtually the same status as being a slave) and because the Europeans became the primary buyers of slaves, on balance during that time period.
I say “on balance
I look forward to debating with the smart folks on this board who will probably read my article but I would be much obliged if you could give some feed back on the style as well as the actual content. I have been giving some serious thought to a career as journalist and I am going to use my semi monthly column as a test of sorts as well as a way to entertain and maybe inform, a community that has done a good deal of both.
I was initially going to respond to someone's comments in a recent thread about slavery, where some people recited the narrative that never in history have white people been enslaved, let alone by non whites. That is not the case. Before 1700 any society that existed or had existed had slaves and had people from that society who were slaves. Even if an entire people were never conquered and enslaved, people within the society would almost always be sold as slaves in exchange for food during times of famine or to settle a debt. Because our society has, thankfully, come to the realization that slavery is evil, some non whites, when presented with this very fact, in essence the challenge to that narrative stating that slavery is a uniquely white sin, become upset when they should not become upset, they should feel empowered. The fact that non whites have conquered others, including whites, and enslaved them shows that we all have the same brains, the same brains with the same natural impulses, for better or for worse, we all have the same impulses and the same capacity for good and for evil with all of us. While the narrative that slavery is something done exclusively by whites to non whites makes non whites, especially blacks, seem noble it often times goes hand in glove with that other narrative that is also, unfortunately a part of the World view of far too many, that blacks are savages, noble savages perhaps but savages nonetheless.
Many blacks with whom I have studied or discussed history or current events, upon learning about just how much blacks conquered other blacks, how they struggled for political power within their own polities (palace murder and intrigue are not just the domain of Shakespeare, how they wanted to obtain as much wealth as possible and were capable of being overtaken by jealousy and vanity and rage, actually feel empowered because if their brains work exactly the same way Europeans brains do they must also posses all of the positive qualities contained in the brains of Whites, Asians and everyone else whose culture had obtained a higher level of technological sophistication.
Anyone who engages in modern scholarship of social science knows that African societies’ development was severally impeded by geography and that European, North African and Asian cultural development was accelerated by the forces of geography (read Guns, Germs and Steel for a very detailed but fun and enjoyable to read explanation of geography and how it shaped history). Considering that Eurasian culture was able to advance because Eurasian geography favored farming, specialization, literacy and the ability for crops and technology to move eastward and westward from its place of origin, any given society in Europe or Asia got the majority of its useful ideas from other parts of Eurasia.
With Eurasia being the first place where people farmed (owing to the fact that a majority of agriculturally useful plants are native to Eurasia and all but one of the 14 species of large mammals that can be domesticated are native to the land mass) as well its being a roughly 8,000 mile long and 800 mile wide zone of arable land, coastline, natural harbor and inlets and navigable rivers, ideas not only moves quickly but it was home to the majority of humanity. West African societies were almost entirely cut off from Eurasia and its pool of shared ideas, West Africa’s population comprising less than a twentieth of humanity, it is partially cut off from other West Africans and almost entirely cutoff from Eastern and Southern Africans, Western African societies nonetheless reached, on their own, sophisticated states, agriculture, mining and metal working that put them on par technologically with the Ancient Greeks and Romans in many respects.
While writing did not come to West Africa until it was introduced by foreigners (as was the way writing was obtained for all but three societies to have ever existed) there is no history of what undoubtly took place, an ethnic group or collection of similar ethnic groups, surrounded to the South and West by Ocean and constrained by the vast Desert to their North, expanded Eastward.
Without a written history, the series of conquests and displacement of Africans by other Africans is hard to precisely date and chronicle as is the case with Iron age conflicts in Europe and Asia. Luckily, Archeology and Particular distribution of linguistic and ethnic groups in Africa paint a picture of Iron age farming societies forging iron weapons, forming militia groups at minimum and more likely small armies and killing, enslaving and taking the land of the hunter-gather societies to the East and the South. These conquerors, collectively known as the Bantu, brought with them a common language and over time and through Africa's isolation inducing geographies hundreds of languages and dialects have emerged in a band that bends from the Ivory Coast, around the jungles, through Serengeti plains and down to much of Southern Africa.
This band avoids the dense jungles of the Congo, the Kalahari Desert and the Mediterranean climate on the tip of Africa. The shape of this empire of sorts was based whether or not the land could support their staple crops, yams and cassava and other starchy, energy rich tubers that allowed them the ability to become farmers. Those crops grow well on the savannah and require heavy monsoonal rain in order to thrive and the densest jungles, deserts and even semi arid climates are unsuitable for their crops. The Twi (known largely as pygmies) and the Khosan people (known widely as the bushmen of the Kalahari) look very different from the dark skinned Bantu people and speak completely unrelated languages. Both groups probably lived in a much larger area than they do today but by the time of European exploration and conquest those people had been confined to an forever associated with the Densest Jungles of the Congo and with the Driest portion of the Kalahari Desert. Testing of paternal lines and linguistic analysis show that in some areas Bantu blood and dialects, all originally from the Ivory Coast region, make up the population and languages as far south as South Africa, Shaka Zulu was Bantu for example and he lived in what is now South Africa and his iron weapons were as sharp and as deadly as the weapons welded by a Roman Legionnaire or a Greek Hoplite. In other places, the populations were mixed to a degree showing that some Bantu might have taken Twi and Khosan women as slaves and had children with them. Perhaps as far back as circa 1,000 BC, armies of ebony skinned explorers and conquerors did with their razor sharp and deadly Iqwah swords what pale skinned explorers and conquers did 25 centuries later in the Americas, found people on land they wanted and killed most, raped and mixed with some and pushed the rest into the land that was economically undesirable.
What all of this means is that when given the opportunity black people, African people will look to expand beyond their homeland, they will seek wealth, they will seek better opportunities, they were able to build an iron age society out of Mesolithic (nomadic hunters and gathers who worked with stone tools and had no knowledge of farming or metal working) on their own (something no other society can claim to have done) and they used their superior weapons granted to them by their own innovation and their force of number made possible by growing crops to and the ability to raise armies that can only happen with farming as farming is needed to have specialists who do not have to far and can train to fight and lead armies and collect taxes needed to build and maintain those forces under arms.
The image of Africans running with spears and with loin cloths from lions is simply not real, some time , perhaps around the time of Rome's founding there were Africans in loin cloths running but not from lions. they were running from two legged predators and instead fearing the tooth or claw or horn of an animal they feared the iron blade of the most fearsome animal of all. I think that the image of a Bantu warrior chasing down a Twi or Khosan man in order to kill him and to rape his wife and daughters and to enslave his sons, although brutal do much more to combat all of those ghosts of Blumenbach that haunt the collective psyche of even those who want to portray Africa in a positive way. If you want to give true dignity to people who had been conquered and subjugated by you or those like you by imagining the conquered as noble savages, or as simple yet vibrant people or the other condescending terms used by those sympathetic to African and other non Western nations.
Before moving into the broader issue of slavery, I will transition by mentioning a fact with which most of you who are still reading by this point are familiar. Africans enslaved other Africans and most slaves chained together and shipped like animal across the Middle Passage where actually captured by other Africans. Unfortunately this fact is usually used as an attempt to downplay the brutality of the slavery that existed within the "Triangle of Trade," or if not to minimize the intent is to spread the blame around and off of the white slave traders. Whether or not the slave trader captured the Africans or not changes nothing about the guilt or European slave traders and severity of the Middle Passage.
What ought to be changed by the reality of Africans being the primary catchers of slaves, is the perception of Europeans as omnipotent, Europeans from 1450 to 1850 were unable to break into the interior of Africa because they would be resisted by Iron weapons wielding warriors whose numbers could negate the slight advantage afforded to smooth bore, single shot muzzle loaded muskets. It would take Repeating rifles, Gatling guns and, most importantly the geographically induced isolation on the continental scale and political fragmentation on a local scale. Africa, all of it south of the Sahara was never able to form a nation state, there were some kingdom and some very rich men like Mansa Musa but without any powerful nation state, Africans were the vulnerable people, the people who were always enslaved. With the rise of Nation states in European, Africa was doomed to become the source of slaves for Europe and Middle East for several centuries but that was not always the case, in fact, for most of history there was slaver yand slaves were never taken from thousands of miles away from the places in which they would be enslaved.
Slavery was commonplace in ancient Europe, in the North and in the South, virtually all Greek and Roman philosophers considered slavery to be an unavoidable fact of life and most of those slaves were either conquered people from places like Iberia, Gaul, Southern Britannia ( what are now Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Switzerland, England and Wales), Greece, Anatolia (modern day turkey and at the time inhabited by people whom you would call white), Thrace and Dacia (modern day Romania) or the slaves were people who could not pay back debts so they enslaved other Italian/Romans as well.
In the middle ages, people like the Frisians specialized in capturing and selling slaves and the many Vikings found slave trading to be much more lucrative than raiding for gold and silver. The city of Dublin, for instance, grew into a major city primarily because it was the largest slave market in Europe, in chances of finding a black face or even a tan one among the merchandise of 9th century Dublin were nil. Europeans also captured Eastern Europeans and sold them as slaves within Europe and to the Muslim world so there has been a time when non whites owned whites as slaves and they treated them the same as whites treated non white slaves in the colonial Caribbean.
Turkish elites especially prized 10 to 14 year old boys ( which is odd because in most slave holding societies attractive adolescent females; skilled slaves, people like carpenters, stone masons, weavers, gladiators; literate slaves, roman and middle eastern aristocrats wanted to save money but with haggling and counting money considered undignified for their social rank educated slaves fetched a high price and finally male slaves, who were 16 to 25 good a higher price than younger male because they were at the beginning of their physical prime for manual labor. The word "Turk" has been, until very recently, strongly associated with forced sodomy of someone of the same gender. When those white slave boys where not being "given" another man's genitalia, they often times had their taken by blade so they could be Eunuchs in the harem of a rich man where he kept white women naked and at his sexual beck and call for all of her life until such time that she was too old for the man’s taste and would be sold to a brothel.
People like Barber pirates, from North Africa and Tartars from central Asia decided to cut out the European Middle man and do what White were never able to do in Sub Saharan Africa, sail to the coast of Northern Europe and land and capture slaves en masse and return to the Islamic World and sell these very pale white slaves from Ireland, Iceland and other Northern and Western European places to customers of all hues. Literally millions of Europeans were captured either by Barbary pirates, Arab pirates in the Mediterranean, Turks in South Eastern Europe and Central Asians and became slaves of non whites and even more Europeans have been slaves at the hand s of other Europeans.
Many scholars and people who read scholarly works want to make slavery synonymous or even exclusive to the last five centuries of European colonial history, because it was a time where Europeans primarily enslaved non Europeans (although Europeans still took other Europeans as slaves legally in Eastern Europe until the 19th century in some areas. In Czarist Russia, most people were serfs, which is virtually the same status as being a slave) and because the Europeans became the primary buyers of slaves, on balance during that time period.
I say “on balance
