IV. THE AFRICAN PAST REVISITED

AN ECONOMIC APPROACH CHANGES OUR VIEW OF THE  AFRICAN PAST

It is assumed that the Atlantic slave trade brought depopulation, devastation, insecurity and "decline," or in places of prosperity, "stability." But if one examines economic data for records of the savannah that stretches south of the Sahara over the continent, from the Middle Ages to the colonial conquest of about 1900, one comes to an opposition conclusion: that growth was steady and after about 1850, explosive.

That difference had two causes. First, slave captures mainly affected societies based on subsistence agriculture, which were not part of commercial systems. Their destruction either had no effect on the latter, or encouraged them by clearing land and providing serfs or slaves for profit-oriented estates.

Second, the Atlantic slave trade created or strengthened kingdoms that hampered the independent commercial forces just mentioned. That trade's end, which took place with ups and downs from the early 19th century to the 1870's, weakened those states. Long-distance traders or producers of grain for the growing markets led millennial movements that populations disoriented by economic change backed, swept those states away. They replaced them with theocracies based on intensive slave labor, obtained by raids that were much more extensive and ferocious than those of the past, because they could absorb workers without limit.  

Those new societies were insuperable barriers to colonialist economic control. That explains why as soon as their military hold was secure the colonialists freed the slaves —  that is, eliminated the labor force.

The barriers to European economic domination collapsed. The producers were forced to work the fields themselves. Their descendants still do.

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This chapter ends with the messianic Muslim raiders who by raiding and enslaving "infidels" created the plantations that by a cruelty similar to that of the American South, blocked Western economic control. 

The archives omit raiders whom the French do not confront, and historians avoid a subject that makes Blacks as ferocious as whites.     

      Samory Touré, the intrepid warrior  / zoom

Vidéos follow historians who weather African or Western stress military resistance to European conquest, eliminating the importance of local slave raiding and captive labor. 

By showing the impact of economic growth on societies based on unmechanized agriculture, the next pages also suggest insights that apply universally.

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In brief

• A past where whites' dominance is taken for granted

• Choosing a backwater  

• Cycles of growth, violence and new authority

• Destabilized crowds sweep the Sahel

• Back to Djimini: violence reappears

• Producers win, then crumble

• African Islam, a non-Western topic? 

• Africans take center stage

   

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Next,
IV.1.

A past where whites' dominance is taken for granted