West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery
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West Africa Review (2000) ISSN: 1525-4488 Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery |
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Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah
Who deserves an apology for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Skip Gates, in his Wonders of the African World video series makes some Africans apologize to him, thus demonstrating his belief that continental Africans need to apologize to descendants of slaves in the Diaspora. President Mathieu Kérékou of the Republic of Benin echoed a similar belief by asking for a conference where continental Africans would apologize to Diaspora Africans for slavery.1 I’m not sure whom the president was speaking for, and whether he was offering to convene such a meeting. In my view, continental and Diaspora Africans have never been enemies and have always worked together for the glory of Africa, and history is rich in examples, Nkrumah to DuBois, Randall Robinson to Moshood Abiola. However, we need conferences, in Africa and abroad, to reconcile our understanding of past events and to ensure that no one sells the African agenda to the highest bidder. Yet, apology will not end the debate and misunderstanding about Atlantic Slave Trade. We need to know whether Africans advertised to Europe that they were slavers, and invited Europeans to buy slaves, or Europeans had their own plan, and enticed uninformed, militarily weaker Africans, to choose between Cane and Carrot, to sell their own brothers and sisters. We need to know whether no African resisted the idea of his own people sold across the ocean. We must know what happened to King Jaja of Opobo and his contemporaries, and whether there was truly no African resistance to slave trade.
Now, who would apologize to continental Africans who lost their brothers and sisters to slavery, to the wife whose husband was sold away and forcefully removed to European and American plantations? To those whose cousins, aunts and nephews were massacred and dumped in oceans for ocean animals to eat. Who would apologize to people whose aso ara “cloths covering their bodies” were forcefully removed and left naked, and their homes, nations and continent, in perpetual hunger for development. If all Africans brought to the New Worlds remained and tilled lands and farmed rivers back home in their ancestral origins, Africa might be better than it is today.
In many spots in “Wonders,” Skip Gates presents many slippery arguments to support his view that Africans practiced, and still practices, their own “terrible slavery”. He interviews some Africans to support his views. In several instances during the interviews, Gates fails to realize that communication practically breaks down between him and his interviewees. For example, he asks one Oumar, “It [slavery] is not illegal?” Oumar responds that it is “traditional”. Gates does not caution himself on whether he has gone too far in defining this specific relationship between the worker and the employer as between slave and the white slave owner in America before abolition. Some songs I have heard in Nigeria which were recently recounted for me perhaps shows how a Yoruba person would have interpreted what Gates calls “slave” and “slave master” episode:
Maso’ga di lebira Olohun, Gbogbo ohun ti n bami lookanje Ko bami so d’erin Koja s’ope.
Gbogbo eni tin wa’se jeki won ri’se. Gbogbo eni ti o ri’se saanu funwon. Gbogbo nto mbami lokan je Ninu odun tawa yi je o ni’yanju.2
Oh God) don’t make a master becomes a laborer All what makes me sad Let it make me laugh Let me be grateful (to you).
All those searching for jobs, let them have jobs. All those who don’t get jobs, help them. All what makes be sad This year that we are solve them for me (Oh God!).
Even when Oumar uses such words as “friend,” “permission,” “payment” in the process of explaining the nature of this servitude, it does not occur to Gates to check his own preconceived view. Would anyone ever described a slave master as, or compared him to, a slave’s “friend”? Did the European slave master ever allow his slave to earn money for him-/herself by taking on other employment? When was a slave ever paid for his/her labor by a slave master? No, Gates is on the offensive, and seems to be saying, “these people [Africans] are by nature slave hawkers, what morality have they to ask for reparations from the Europeans and the Americans?!” Well, let us examine a portion of Gates conversation with Oumar:
(Gates starts this portion by introducing some natives as dark-skinned slaves, and others as light-skinned masters. This was at Mopti, a market town between Bamako and Timbuktu).Gates: (Pointing at a native) So, he’s from Timbuktu? Oumar: (After inquiring from the person concerned) Timbuktu. Gates: But, how come, Oumar, how come he looks different from him? Oumar: No, he’s Bella, things like that Gates: Is he a slave? Oumar: Yeah Gates: Yeah, I see. So, this man owns him? Oumar: Like that Gates: So, he’s born into slavery? Oumar: Exactly. From father to son, to big father. Gates: It’s not illegal? Oumar: It is traditional. Gates: Tradition. Oumar: Yeah, it’s tradition. Gates: Hun. My great grand father was a slave. Oumar: Now, you, in America, is finish for that. But for this people, it is traditional. Every thing he have to do [that] he have to go to ask a friend, he have to ask him. He have to say do that, things like that. Gates: Does he pay him? Oumar: He pays him too. Gates: He pays him too. But this man if he wanted to quit and work on the river, he couldn’t do that unless he says “yes”? Oumar: Sometimes he can say “yes”, sometime he can so “no’. Gates: And the Bella people, no rebellion? They never want to fight the Tuareg? Oumar: They like it. Gates: (smiles) Yeah, they used to say that about Black American slaves too.3
No right thinking person will condone any practice anywhere that subjects anyone to socioeconomic domination, and I personally condemn any situation in Africa that makes some people lords and some serfs. However, Gates does not seem to want to examine the true situation here. He forces words into Oumar’s mouth, and coats the native’s responses in his own biased colors. In all instances cited above, it is Gates, and not Oumar, who suggests that someone is a slave, and the other is a master. Oumar’s level of understanding of the English language can be judged from the grammatical and phonological correctness of his responses. Yet, Oumar most likely knows the English word “slave” but chooses to use the indigenous language word for lineage or language group to describe every person he identifies for Gates in the video. Yet, in the book that accompanies the video, Gates interprets a dialogue similar (perhaps the same as above) with Oumar about the Tuareg and the Mella as follows:
The man was a Tuareg, dressed in their traditional white gown with a bold indigo turban. With him was another man, very dark, dressed in an indigo gown, who performed all the menial tasks for the Tuareg tradesman. When we had passed them, Oumar told me that the Bella man was a slave. The word “slave” is not used but is the only one that accurately describes the traditional relationship between these two peoples. (p. 119)
Gates sounds really determined to give biased meanings to anything Oumar says. Oumar’s frequent addition of “things like that”, to his responses to Gates shows that he is not about to accept many of Gates’s translations of his speeches. I am particularly impressed that on the contrary, Oumar answers Gates’ questions only after first confirming from those natives actually concerned.
I grew up constantly hearing a powerful Yoruba adage in my multicultural, multiethnic Ilorin: eniyan l’aso, humans are cloths unto one another. This saying, from the repertoire of Yoruba cultural expressions, can be very extensive, and the core meaning would be that people are there to defend each other, to be their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and that humans are more important to themselves than money is to them. Basically eniyan l’aso is a Yoruba philosophy which clearly denotes that Yoruba people would rather have people around themselves than accept money from a highest bidder. My thesis is not to negate the theory of a willing horse in Africans, or specifically among the Yorubas during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Rather it is to establish that there is nothing inherent in Yoruba culture that people should sell their own people for money and materials. I like to further Joseph E. Inikori’s opinion4 that “conditions” were created by Europeans for the crudest act of trading in human beings and for transporting “captured and bought people” across the Atlantic in the most inhuman conditions possible.
Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans. Let me go once again to Yoruba rhetoric. Eni to l’eru lo l’eru, eni leru lo l’eru. “To whomever belongs the ‘slave,’ belongs the slave’s properties, and whomever has slave’s properties has the ‘slave.’”. T’aa ba ran ni ni’se eru afi t’omo jee. “When a person is sent on an errand that portrays him/her as a ’slave’, he or she should deliver it as a freeborn.” It is not yet time or place to analyze every phonemic, morphological and syntactic structures of these Yoruba adages, neither do I need now explain what socio-cultural meanings they give. What is crucial for the purpose of this discussion is that Yoruba has a word, eru, often wrongly translated as equivalent to the English word “slave,” by many contemproary Yoruba scholars. As Toyin Falola once said, eru is not always the same as “slave”,5 neither is a person called eru mi “my eru” the same as way an American white slave owner would call “my slave”. O s’eru sinmi, means, “he/she served me”, or, O s’eru sinle baba re, he/she served his/her country, as in the case of the one year national youth service program in Nigeria. Eru Anabi, follower of Anabi (Falola). The question we must ask is whether the Yoruba culture at any time saw eru as less human as Black slaves were treated in Europe. Since historians have repeatedly reminded us that Europeans practiced slavery of their own before they enslaved Africans, we may also want to ask, did Europeans treat European slaves as less human as they treated Black slaves? Did any non-Europeans create any “condition” for Europeans to be shipped abroad? How many of them were massacred as Blacks were? How many got thrown into the Atlantic Ocean, beheaded like chickens! Where on earth were European slaves taken and maltreated in such devastating degrees as Blacks were?
The philosophy of eniyan (enia) l’aso would prove that Africans (or Yoruba people) who captured opponents during inter- ethnic wars, used them to boost their own population. Some powerful warriors married female captors, and other captors served their masters in various economic and cultural capacities. Without doubt, this attitude is terrible and degrading of their fellow human beings, but it is far less callous than the European slavers’ subjugation of Africans. African practice of servitude is not reason enough to initiate or justify the Atlantic Slave Trade. The farms worked, and the economies developed by the indigenous African labor were Africa’s. Descendants of hitherto laborers have become political leaders in many parts of Africa. If our searchlights are sharp enough we will find among contemporary African presidents some whose foreparents were domestic farm workers.
When Africans practiced indigenous servitude, I’m not sure the African master had manufactured chains and padlocks to further dehumanize fellow Africans. Part of the “conditions” Europeans created for the Atlantic Slave Trade was the importation of chains, padlocks, guns, and various crude gadgets to Africa, and the obvious demonstration of their uses to the Africans. If the account we heard about how Europeans dehumanized King Jaja of Opobo were true, if the story about how they subjugated the proud Kingdom of the Benin people was anything to learn from, Africans had to cooperate when Europeans came to them with carrots asking to ship away fellow Africans. For after carrots would have come heavy canes.
Let us take a brief time to peruse this Yoruba anecdote: O nwa owo lo, o waa pade iyi l’ona. Bi o ba ri owo ohun kini iwo yo fira? “You set off on a journey in search of money, and right on your way, you met prestige/honor. If you had eventually got the money what would you have bought with it?” I am not so sure that the Yoruba people, and indeed Africans, had particular yearnings for materials such that they would be all out to sell their own people for devastation. Of course, the Sese Sekos, the Abachas and the Babangidas of this “neocolonial” generation proved particularly carnivorous. Oral traditions show that good name, prestige and honor were more a preoccupation to them than money, and honor came when they were generous to their own people, when they spent for their people’s welfare, and served them selflessly, not when they sold their brothers and sisters to the highest bidder.
Yes, let’s turn one of the Yoruba adages I cited in this paper upside down (isn’t the issue at stake itself ’upside down’?): Won ran Oba n’ise eru, Oba je’se bi eru, the King was sent a message as a slave, he delivered it as a slave. Yes, African Kings and Chiefs were slaves in the hands of the White slavery mongers. As Wole Soyinka suggested in his recent “Intervention”,6 we should not sympathize with the African King- collaborators. We should not speculate either about what could have happened to them had they refused to collaborate with the Slavers. Yes, the Kings should have resisted, and history would have judged them brave warriors? How has history judged King Jaja of Opobo who said “to hell” to the slavers and the colonialists? How did it judge the Benin King, the Chiefs and the masses who insisted that the British must respect their culture and protocol? Yes, the same history and historians today say they deserve no reparations! Did the Europeans enslave King Jaja and the King of Benin, or did they leave them in their kingly robes? How can we understand what informed those Kings’ choices for resistance? How sincere are we when we hail or condemn African Kings and Chiefs either way? Has whatever decision they made nullify the genocide of the Atlantic Slave Trade? Can we discuss Atlantic Slave Trade outside racial reasons? Will it be wrong to say that racism (the belief that Blacks are sub- humans) was at the root of how Europeans prosecuted the trade?
In Ali Mazrui’s recent posting,7 he made references to a respected Nigerian historian’s assertion that African Chiefs were forced into the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mazrui’s lines were interesting:
The formulation is mine, but the logic is what professor Ajayi has brought into the debate. African Chiefs were BLACKMAILED (or WHITEMAILED) into becoming slavers for the white man. Since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was DEMAND- DRIVEN, and the demand was in the West, Africans were forced into collaboration. Often literally at the point of a gun.
The “carrot or cane” policy of White slavers cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand whenever Africans’ participation in Atlantic Slave Trade is discussed. Yet, I might be among the first to agree that African Chiefs should have chosen to receive the White man’s cane and resisted him to the last. But, would it be the Kings alone that would have been maimed and or put into slavery? Perhaps the entire continent and the black race would have been forced into captivity. No, no speculation.
I think history has proved that a choice to resist European domination may be practicable in African-European’s dealings today--despite neo-colonialism. It could have been suicidal for Africans to dare the white man even before mid twentieth century. I need not repeat the many examples that we already know, and really, I don’t want to speculate!
It seems to me that Africans compete well, sometimes even imitate the White man in many areas, but have refused to degenerate to the level of callousness of the white executors of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
“No scientific discussion can take place if scientific terms mean different things in different regions.”
- Joseph E. Inikori
I am often amused to hear this Yoruba adage, B’Oyinbo mu tii maa m’ekoogbona. Omi gbona kan naa lajo n mu. “If the White man drinks tea, I’ll drink Ekoogbona--hot corn-drink. We both drink hot water/liquid.” It is with this popular saying that I like to return to my previous discussion on the terminology used for the English word “slave” in some African languages, especially the Yoruba language. The eru (there’s another word: iwofa) tradition among the Yoruba is basically a tradition of servitude. Eru is simply a servant. Serf is far better a translation of eru than “Slave”. Eru Oba, King’s servant. The Yoruba persons compete so well with the Europeans and easily locate equivalent cultural element from their locality as shown in the Ilorin Yoruba humorous adage. However, never do the Yoruba people, and indeed no African culture to my knowledge, ever even thought of, let alone actually competed with the brutish British and American slavery traditions. Although there was, and still is, Ekoogbona for the tea the English presented to them, never did Africans practiced a debasement of humanity as slavery was. There is no word, apology to the Whorfians, in the thoughts of the Yoruba people (Africans) for slavery!
Among the Hausa people, Yoruba neighbors spread in many areas of West Africa, modern writers often use for “slave” bawa, or baiwa. Like eru, bawa simply means servant, not slave. Many contemporary Hausa scholars have used bauta for slavery. However, bauta in Hausa gangariya, deep-rooted Hausa, is worship or service, and many will say, na bautawa Allah, “I worshiped God.” Na bauta wa sarki, “I served the king!” Na bauta maka can even be extended to mean “I served/respected you”. Perhaps Eru Oba will be the same as Dogarin Sarkin in Hausa, or bawan sarki. Because of the importance of the “service” meaning of the word bawa, many Hausa people today answer to the name Bawa. I don’t think any person will like to be called “slave”, in terms of the Atlantic Slave. Uncle Toms won’t use the word “Slave” as a first name. Cato, Dr. Gaines’s house slave in The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom (1858) by William Wells Brown, proved at the end of the day, that he would rather answer to a name of freedom.
My American students would forever ask me why Elesin Oba, the King’s Horseman in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), was treated with reverence and cultural dignity, when, in fact, he was only a servant, an eru, to the king and was meant to “die” because the King “died”. I would always reply that Elesin Oba was not a slave, that as a servant of the King and the community, he did not, at any time, lose his status as a human being, and that an Elesin actually won greater glory by the share importance of the service of saving human lives and ensuring community harmony through his committing death to accompany the Kabiyesi, King. As Olori Elesin, leader of all King’s Horsemen, his position attracted more honor to him. Certainly no Elesin Oba would ever cease to be regarded as a human being, even if he is terribly disadvantaged in any matter.
Anyone who still hasn’t got it that race made the big difference in the execution of the Atlantic Slave Trade should read (or cause to be read to him/her) Soyinka’s poem, “Telephone Conversation”, as evidence of a not too distant past. And I’ll be aback if he or she continues to limit his/her polemics on demeaning the African Chiefs, instead of understanding their predicament. The European slavers did not see Africans as human beings. The darkness of Africans’ skins was what, to them, defined Africans, not the lightness of Africans’ palms. I think if argument for reparation is based on racism alone, it’ll still be genuine. The French on overpowering the English dined with the English, encouraged their own princes and princesses to marry British princes and princesses, and the Romans did not chain the Greeks to trees, or pack them like sardines across oceans and seas. The European Slavers considered that subdued Africans weren’t human beings, thus they justified perpetuating anything and everything evil on them.
Yes, we need more studies into the kinds of eru traditions in Africa. We need Metalanguage scholars (the Awobuluyis, the Bamgboses, and the Dalhatu Muhammads in Nigeria) to get equivalents for some foreign words.
Brown, William Wells. The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom. Black Theatre USA. New York: The Free Press, 1974.
Gates, Henry Louis. “Wonders of the African World.” PBS Home Video. Wall to Wall Television, 1999.
---. Wonders of the African World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Mazrui, Ali. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. (Also in Video).
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Soyinka, Wole. “Telephone Conversation.” A Selection of African Poetry. Introduced an annotated by K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent. Longman, 1976, 116-9.
© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center
Citation Format
Na’Allah, Abdul- Rasheed. (2000). Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery. West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.24].