9 reasons why Henry Louis Gates Jr. is wrong about slavery

Gates's framing of slavery is problematic for many reasons. I will put aside the question of reparations and focus primarily on the supply side of the equation rather than the demand side. I think the number of supply side critiques has diminished as they have lost traction in recent years. kzs

For additional critiques of the Gates essay see:

• Gates lets US (whites) off hook
• Omidele
• Problemchylde
• All Guilt is not equal
• The academic hit-man

Elmina Castle/Dungeon in Cape Coast, Ghana

1. complicity could, in some instances, reflect limited options against superior external forces. Elmina, the very first castle/slave dungeon constructed on the west coast of Africa, was imposed on the local Fante people by the Portuguese. Thus unequal power is evident early on. Not only that, the Portuguese set sail with edicts or papal bulls from the Pope authorizing the colonization and enslavement of the entire planet.

2. complicity and victimization were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Even those Africans who collaborated willingly could themselves become enslaved. Europeans slavers were never vulnerable to such consequences. This happened with the Asante (Ashanti) and the Akwamu people of what we now call Ghana. (sidenote: this means that Gates and the rest of us will likely have some ancestors who were active participants in the slave trade) Black elites did not have the power to enslave even the lowliest white person (caveat #1- there are one or two isolated instances of Africans enslaving individual euros during the transatlantic slave trade; caveat # 2- Euros were enslaved by Moors, some of whom were black, but thats a different story and a different slave route).The precarious position of African collaborators vis-à-vis their European and/or Euro-American counterparts makes highly suspect the arguments of Africanist scholars such as John Thornton (cited in the Gates essay) who uses the red herring, “agency,” to assert that Africans were equally accountable for the slave trade.

3. scholars have been slow to analyze African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; unnuanced assertions of collaboration tend to reinforce the false notion that African resistance was a non-factor in this historical event.

4. in most cases African participation in the slave trade represented the particular interests of the elites and/or slave brokers of any given African society. In the instance of the transatlantic slave trade, “rulers and subjects,” the scholar John Iliffe affirms, “had sharply divergent interests.” Gates does talk about African elites but he fails to mention the divergent interests of African elites versus ordinary Africans.

Triangular Trade: Africa --> Americas --> Europe

5. the interests of Euro-westerners were represented at each of the three vertices of the triangular circuit (Europe, the New World, Africa); African interests were only represented at one vertex (Africa).  This 3:1 ratio was constant, or nearly so, for the duration of the slave trade and suggests that the slave trade was dominated by the interests of European and Euro-Americans, not Africans.

6. the destabilizing impact (see Two Thousand Seasons) of the far older trans-Saharan slave trade is, to date, woefully understudied. The massive involuntary movement of enslaved Africans across the Sahara and Indian Ocean most likely stimulated migrations of Africans escaping Islamicization and subsequent cycles of socio-political instability. This instability might have enhanced the efficacy of Euro-western divide-and-conquer tactics.

7. Gates's claim that African elites routinely traveled abroad to survey the demand side of the slave trade would be comical were the topic not so important. This is clearly his very clumsy effort to prove that African elites and European traders had a shared knowledge of slavery outcomes.

8. Gates conveniently ignores the fact that the British abolished the slave trade only to resurface as major colonizers. Slavery and colonialism are two sides of the same white supremacist coin.

9. The slave trade underdeveloped Africa, but it was the jump off for the Industrial Revolution.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

Cambridge, Mass.

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Read more @ Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Slavery Blame-Game - NYTimes.com

Pics: Elmina

tags: henry louis gates jr, slavery