4.1. THE BELIEF THAT WHITES DOMINATE THE AFRICAN PAST

THIS WORK SHOWS SLAVES IN DAHOMEY, A SLAVE-TRADING KINGDOM IN WHAT IS NOW BENIN, BEING LED TOWARD A WHITE DEALER 

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

Omitted, the ritual decapitation of slaves and mass sacrifice of captives to keep independent producers from buying them:

     Sacrifice humain au Dahomey en 1863, "Le Tour du Monde"

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 king sits under a parasol, a symbol of power. The people behind him cheer each time the executioner raises a head.

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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. Almost no pictures show the slave trade operating wholly within sub-Saharan Africa.

Even illustrations of the Atlantic trade, where one would think Blacks would dominate, artists 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, 
in « 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 have a similar, pro-Western slant:

• "Decline" followed a time of greatness when empires stretched across the savannah. Its causes were European: the fall of the price of gold due to bringing it in from South America, and mainly, the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade.

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

It determines what topics and places are usually chosen:

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

• Places that are relatively familiar: The coast was much more accessible to Europeans, and attracts most attention. African scholars, who usually come from the coast, tend to concentrate first on the societies they know.  

• The savannah's 19th-century theocracies are an exception: We will come to them.

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? 

Web map (now gone) used on these pages for its clarity.

Climate zones: The light green band is the savannah.

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In fact, economic data for the entire savannah from medieval times to the colonial conquest of the end of the 19th century shows 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.  

After about 1850 it even becomes explosive. because the end of the Atlantic slave trade weakens kingdoms whose revenues came at least in part from slave exports. 

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Next,

4.2.

Choosing a backwater