4.1. A PAST WHERE WHITES' DOMINANCE IS TAKEN FOR GRANTED

THIS TAPESTRY SHOWS A LARGE WHITE DEALER ACCEPTING SLAVES FROM A MUCH SMALLER BLACK 

They should be of the same size, because without African cooperation the Atlantic slave trade would have been impossible. 

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

The evocation follows popular art in Dahomey, a slave-selling kingdom in what is now Benin.

*    *

If you click "African slave trades images" on the web, you will find dozens of pictures dealing with the Atlantic slave trade and a few with the trade to North Africa. Almost no pictures show the slave trade operating wholly within sub-Saharan Africa itself, or 

Even illustrations of the Atlantic trade, where one would think Blacks would dominate, 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." (Underlining added) 

-- 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 the flooding of that 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.

That bias 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, also called "Sudanic Belt."

*      *

Accounts from earliest records to the colonial conquest for all the savannah and part of the forest, are the main source here.

 

Pages from the narrative of Heinrich Barth, 1855

YouTube account of stay in Niger / zoom

Heinrich Barth's account 

of his travels in the Sahara

and much of the savannah (in 1850-1855)

is exceptionally detailed and thoughtful. 

Intellectual and learned, he engaged in long discussions with erudite Muslims in Arabic, Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri ; kindly, he gave treats to a beloved camel; not racist, he found dark skin "almost essential to female beauty."

He died in 1865, aged only 44, from an infection contracted during his travels.

His account is readable on the web: Here is volume II.

*     *

Accounts had never been read from one end of the savannah to the other.

They lead to  

this different point of view. 

*    *    *

Next,

4.2.

The choice of a backwater