by CAameronDuodo
In recent discussions of the Atlantic slave trade that I
have come across, many writers, including some Africans, have defended the
whites who carried out the trade and blamed African kings and chiefs for having
“sold their own people” to the whites. Or at the very least, they have tended
to apportion equal blame to both sides.
Now, it is absolutely true that some African kings and
chiefs do bear a large measure of responsibility for the slave trade. The
point, though, is this: Why and how did they become part of such a heinous
trade?
The single most important – and also, alas, the most
overlooked – causative factor is the gun. Once African tribes
that formerly fought with bows and arrows or spears were introduced to the
devastating nature of the gun, that was “game ended”.
Apart from directly hiring their own mercenary armies to go
into the interior of Africa to kidnap slaves and pressgang them into the
purpose-built slave forts, all the European slavers – who came to Africa with
ships ready-made to carry slaves, as well as ready-made manacles, leg and neck
irons and the chains necessary to chain-gang them – did was to go to Tribe A
and say to its leaders, “Look, we only came here to buy your gold – as we’ve
been doing for years.
“But Tribe B has sent secret emissaries to us, asking us to
sell guns to it. Now, we know that you are their immediate target, having
fought them in terrible wars not so long ago. So, because of our friendship for
you, we have told them we have no guns. For now.”
Then Tribe A would respond – as expected: “But suppose they
go to the Dutch/French/Spanish/Portuguese/English (as the case may be)?” Upon
which the European slaver would say: “Yes, we’ve thought of that. Well, we
can’t stand by and see your people massacred. We can help you defend
yourselves.”
TRIBE A: “But we have no gold at the moment to buy guns from
you!”
SLAVER: “Oh, don’t worry. We trust you. Listen – capture as
many people as you can, OK? Don’t kill your war captives. We shall take the war
captives – men, women, healthy children – as payment for the guns we supply
you.”
This psychological manipulation, repeated and repeated over
some 300-400 years, is to a large part, what caused the African kings and
chiefs to become inextricably involved in the slave trade.
As late as 1901, because of the bad history that existed
between the tribes of Ghana, the king of my own Akyem
tribe took part in a war against Asante – on the side
of the British!
Eventually, of course, as corruption set in (like in other
trades) the pretext of “self-defence” or “pre-emptive
strike” disappeared and the “raiding” of “enemy tribes” purely for slaves,
became common-place.
This is the cause of so much of the ethnic hostility that
exists in Africa today, and which makes modern African
nations find it difficult to establish stable polities. The people’s collective
memory does not make for an amnesiac disregard of the terrible realities of the
past.
The British and other Europeans thought they could, in a
moment of contrite reawakening, wipe the slate clean with a “constitution” or
an “order-in-council” or two, written for a conglomeration of tribes now
suddenly considered as a single “nation”.
Rwanda
proved in 1994 what a terrible toll the memory of the past is capable of
exacting today. Africans have been reaping the deadly harvest of a past that
was forced upon them for profit by Europeans.
Denuded of able-bodied persons, Africans were then struck a
third blow through colonisation.
These things did happen, but when Africans talk of them,
they are accused of embracing “victimhood”.
# Duodo is the former editor of
the Ghana
edition of Drum. He is a novelist and playwright and lives in London.
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