IV. THE AFRICAN PAST REVISITED

WE INSTINCTIVELY ASSUME THAT WHITES DOMINATE THE AFRICAN PAST

This work, for example, shows slaves being led toward a white dealer. Omitted, Dahomey's ritual decapitation of slaves, and the mass sacrifice of captives to keep local producers from buying them.*

*When the British blocked the port to keep slave-ships from sailing, the king found himself with 300 captives to maintain. Rather than sell them to palm oil producers who would use them as laborers, increase their revenues and defy him, he had 300 captives decapitated in a massive human sacrifice (in 1853).

-- Analyzed by the late anthropologist Claude Meillassoux,

Ostentation, destruction, reproduction , "Économies et sociétés," 1968, II, 4, pp. 760-766.

     The Transatlantic Slave Trade through the Eyes of an African Artist at the Abomey palace in Benin, 2022 / zoom

If you click "African slave trades images" on the web, you will find dozens of pictures dealing with the Atlantic slave trade, a few with the trade to North Africa but except for lines of captives who could be going anywhere, almost none within Africa itself.

Even illustrations of the Atlantic slave trade emphasize whites: 

     The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840 / zoom

A dead captive lies in the center, but the light shines on the white doctor, the master, a man branding a woman and a spectator with his back turned. A young woman is the only slave whose features are clear, plus a bare breast to suggest eroticism.

Written history makes the same assumption.

• This map of 2001 titled "the great sectors of the slave trade" shows only the Atlantic coast, omitting North African and local markets:

Zoom 

• Even when North African markets are mentioned, local ones are not: Raids "supply not only the trans-Atlantic trade but also the merchants of Tunisia, Morocco and elsewhere" (italics added). 

-- Introduction by Paul Lovejoy, 
« Hugh Clapperton and the Interior of Africa, 

documents of a second expedition 1825-1827 », 2005.

• "The Atlantic trade was the form of slavery that indisputably contributed most to the present situation of Africa. It permanently weakened the continent, led to its colonisation by the Europeans in the nineteenth century, and engendered the racism and contempt from which Africans still suffer."

-- La dimension africaine de la traite des noirs by M. Bokolo, 1998 

 in the esteemed French monthly "Le Monde diplomatique:" / zoom

Economic explanations of the African past show the same myopia:

• "Decline" followed a time of greatness when empires stretched across much of the savannah. Its causes were European: the fall of the price of gold due to the influx  via Spain from South America and mainly, the population loss, devastation and insecurity the Atlantic slave trade brought.

• Pockets of prosperity suggest "stability," or changelessness: If whites do not provoke change, there isn't any.

Emphasis on the West determines the topics usually chosen...

• The colonial conquest or resistance to it, the Atlantic slave trade and trade with the outside world.

• States or populations that are relatively familiar: There are many more studies the forest regions of  West Africa than on the savannah, where Europeans did not go. As well, most African scholars concentrate on the areas from which they come, which because of the European presence is usually the coast.  

Instead of viewing Africa as savannah and forest, we separate "West Africa" and treat it as a whole. Because it is a bulge on our maps? 

The light green band is the savannah.

Climate zones, web map (now gone) used on these pages for its clarity.

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Collating economic data for the entire Sudanic Belt from medieval times to the colonial conquest shows, on the contrary, neither decline or stability but steady growth. 

Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the Years 1849–1855 by Heinrich Barth, 1855

Explorers' accounts, a fundamental source.  

That growth becomes explosive when between 1850 and about 1870, the end of the Atlantic slave trade weakens kingdoms dependent on it. Then independent producers blow them away and replace them with  powerful theocracies based on slave-based production for expanding markets.  

That start leads to revising African history

 and to comparisons with France 

that show how the same causes bring the same effects.

End of this introduction.

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Next,
IV.1. 

The choice of a backwater