Better As Slaves?

Some things are best left un-responded to and some things need to have a response made. So I interrupt my reading and work to respond to a claim made by a Gerald Schoenewolf that

"It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was
still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as
savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first
enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those
brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways
better off than they had been in Africa."


Now under most circumstances I would have ignored this as a case of Silly-Ass-White-Man(tm) speak except for a very important fact: Many Africans in America think along very similar lines. Therefore I need to address this particular point. Now there are various ways of looking at the above statement. The author could mean a couple of things but in general the statement above implies one or all of the following hypotheses:

1) At the time of enslavement, African life was materially worse off than the situation in which they would have found themselves wherever they did in their lifetime.

2) Africans in America, due to slavery were saved from savagery and brought to the light of Christian civilization.

3) Because of slavery, Africans of the diaspora were spared from the current tragedies of Africa and therefore are better off.

Interestingly, related to this topic I was thinking about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and the push to find a cure for malaria. While everyone is falling over themselves to congratulate Mr. Gates I could not help but think of how, if Africa had not been exploited as it was, there probably would have been a cure already and Africans would not need a handout now. But that is getting ahead of myself here.

Lets deal with hypothesis number one. Hugh Thomas author of The Slave Trade writes:

As befitted an imperial people, the Songhai used gold for money, though without any inscriptions; elsewhere, cloth (in Timbuktu, the turquidi cloth of the Hausa city of Kano), bars of salt, cattle, dates, and millet were employed as substitutes. Horses had been bred for hundreds of years; they were to be seen in West Africa as early as the tenth century A.D. Cities on the Niger such as Segum KanKan, Timbuktu, and Djene, as well as Gao, numbered over ten thousand in 1440, some being perhaps as large as thirty thousand. The Hausa cities of Katsina and Kano, on its high rock, had perhaps a hundred thousand each, Other settlements had ben established along the edge of the forest in the south, such as Bono-Mansu and Kong. All had substantial markets, even if the houses and mosques were mud built.

The smelting Iron and steel in West Africa was similar to that in Europe in the thirteenth century, before the advent of power driven by the waterwheel. Senegambia had iron and copper industries, and the quality of African steel approached that of Toledo before the fifteenth century. These metals equipped most African households with knives, spears, axes, and hoes. Goldsmithery was of a high quality: "The thread and texture of their hatbands and chainings is so fine that...our ablest European artists would find it difficult to imitate them" a Dutch captain wrote in 1700. It is true that West Africans did not have wheeled vehicles, but those were still rare in Europe. Nor did they use horses for carrying goods long distances, since they were vulnerable to the tsetse fly in the forests near the coast. But it would be false to depict West Africa, at the moment of it's contact with Portugal, and Europe, as lived in by primitive peoples. In many respects, they were at a higher level than those whom the Spaniards and Portuguese would soon meet in the New World.

In stark contrast, if we exclude the horrors of the middle passage, Colonial America and the Caribbean was no where near the level of advancement that the Africans had previously lived. By all measures slavery in the Americas was a huge step backwards in civilization for the African at that time. It is evident that with the occasional exception of literacy and certain architecture developed in Europe (due to the climate of that area of the world), the African, as admitted by early European explorers, was every much the equal to the European. Thus instead of slavery being of great benefit to the African it is demonstrable that it was not only bad for the victim, but also bad for those Africans who cooperated in the enslavement of African.

Hypothesis number two can only be taken seriously if you actually believe that African religions are inherently inferior to Judaism, Islam and Christianity though in this case the argument would be Judaism and Christianity. Of course from my previous posts I don't hold such an opinion.

The last hypothesis is the one that most people have in mind when this subject comes up. I find that we need to ask a question when such sentiments are aired:

Would Africa developed into the place it is now if contact with the European had not gone the way it did?

See the problem most people have is that they think that Africa is the way it is because they believe the non-sense that I quoted at the beginning of this post. Having smashed that idea with facts we know that Africa was not a place of savages roaming the jungle but rather a place of technology, arts, commerce, philosophy, etc. Therefore it is highly probable that had the Atlantic Slave Trade not occurred, had colonialism not occurred with it's attendant murder of millions of natives and the establishment of corrupt governments set up to facilitate the extraction of raw materials to the "mother countries" Africa would be a far different place than it is now. Hence it is arguable that, along with those Africans who cooperated with the European, that it was the European that was uncivilized and largely responsible for Africa's current crisis. That Africans descended from the slave trade are arguably "better off" than those in say, Darfur, is not indicative of the "goodness" of Europe and America, but rather a simple accident of history given that if one is of African descent odds are against you being in the US. Similarly a Jew being born in America rather than living in Nazi Germany is just as "lucky" isn't he?


So when Gerald Schoenewolf writes:

But if one even begins to say these things one is quickly shouted down as though one were a complete madman.

Yes of course one would be shouted down because one would be a complete ignorant ass to make the statement immediately preceding this quote. Of course the reason why he could even make the statement is due to most peoples sheer ignorance of African history prior to slavery. And that's why. Sometimes. Some things need to be responded to.

Technorati Tags: Africa, critique