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Academic Questions / Summer 2005

The Atlantic Slave TradeThe Full Story

Sheldon M. Stern
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, 1927

Teaching and Learning about the Atlantic Slave Trade lavery and the slave trade: these are words that conjure up visceral feelings of revulsion and shame. Human bondage can be traced back to all the earliest civilizationsregardless of region, race, or religionand still survives today. Several years ago I talked with a historian who was faced with the task of speaking to elementary school teachers about how to teach the history of slavery to young children. She was uncertain whether it could it be done without traumatizing these youngsters. On the other hand, she was convinced that silence was not an option. Her dilemma resonated with me on many levels. I had taught African-American history at two colleges from 1968 to 1977, and even with much more mature students some of the facts about American slavery were so appalling that merely mentioning them in the classroom was shocking and painful. Those facts are incontrovertible: for nearly two and a half centuries the overwhelming majority of black people in America were classified as chattel slaves (marketable property), denied the most basic human rights, and often treated with appalling contempt and crueltyas documented in graphic detail in slave narratives and other historical sources on the peculiar institution.1 After the abolition of slavery, black Americans had to endure a century of segregation; the poverty and exploitation of share-cropping and peonage; organized terror from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan; decades of lynching and racist-inspired riots; and racial barriers that thwarted the chance to earn a decent living, get an education, shop or eat in a public facility, and even vote. Not until the passage of civil rights and voting legislation in the mid1960s did

Sheldon M. Stern taught African-American history for a decade before serving as historian at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum from 1977 through 1999. He designed the museums first civil rights exhibit and was later the first historian to listen to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis tapes. Dr. Stern has dedicated this essay to Paul A. Gagnon (19252005) in recognition of that distinguished educators conviction that the substantive and truthful teaching of history is essential to the future of American democracy. Dr. Stern is author of Averting the Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003) and The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005) in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.

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black Americans finally achieve full legal equality and the opportunity to think of themselves, at long last, as African-Americans. The eradication of racism, of course, remains an unfinished chapter in the story of American democracy. Today, nearly four decades after I first taught African-American history, scholarship on slavery has blossomed and a vast new literature on how blacks in America survived, coped, and resisted during more than 250 years of slavery has been thoroughly integrated into U.S. history textbooks and curricula. The old history, much like the antebellum abolitionists themselves, stressed the cruelty of slavery, but often dismissed blacks as passive victims with no history of their own. For example, a popular 1950 textbook by two Pulitzer Prizewinning historians concluded, As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its peculiar institution.2 This demeaning perspective was also propagated by slaveholders and their apologists and later perpetuated by biased historians. Today, no teacher would survive a single day in an American high school or college trying to teach such rubbish. Notwithstanding this great step forward, I eventually became aware of a troubling gap in the way American schools teach the history of slavery. In hundreds of visits to high school classrooms during the 1990s in my capacity as historian and director of the American History Project for High School Students at the John F. Kennedy Library, I was repeatedly dismayed to learn that many students (and some teachers) believed that slavery existed only in the British North American colonieslater the United Statesfrom the early 1600s to 1865. They had no idea that the Islamic slave trade had thrived since the eighth century and that millions of Africans had been captured for sale to Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the Ottoman Empire.3 Likewise, they did not know that at least 90 percent of the slaves in the Atlantic trade from Africa to the Americas were sold in the Caribbean or South America. The British colonies that became the United States imported no more than 8 percent. Brazil alone imported over six times the number of Africans sold in the British American colonies and didnt abolish slavery until a quarter century after emancipation in the United States.4 In 2003, sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, I conducted a comprehensive review of the historical content, sequential development, and balance in state U.S. history standards.5 I found that the 49 standards (48 states and Washington, D.C., have standards) accurately reflect the last 40 years of historic change in our understanding of American slavery. A few states are somewhat evasive about the pivotal role of slavery in their own history, but, with minor exceptions, the story of American slavery is covered in remarkable detail. However, my research for the Fordham Foundation study compounded my earlier dismay by exposing a striking fact: not one of the forty-nine U.S. history standards explores the decisive role Africans played in establishing and

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supporting the Atlantic slave trade. For example, the Virginia standards cover the characteristics of West African societies (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) and their interactions with traders.6 The Ohio standards cite the forced relocation and enslavement of Africans, 7 and Arizona is one of very few states that even mentions the slave trade within Africa. But there is nothing to suggest that these states, or any others, deal directly and honestly with such interactions or forced relocation and enslavement. In other words, without extracurricular sources, American students will graduate from high school completely uninformed that the Atlantic slave trade had been a shared enterprise: During this era, Africans and Europeans stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit. Kings exchanged respectful letters across color lines and addressed each other as colleagues. Natives of the two continents were tied into a common economy.8 Nigeria, by contrast, which lost many of its inhabitants to the slave trade, but profited from it as well,9 uses a textbook written by Nigerians that explicitly addresses its own role in the Atlantic slave trade:
Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior. . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by the British in the early nineteenth century] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.10

Samuel Sulemana Fuseini, a Ghanaian politician and educator, has acknowledged that his Asante ancestors also accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves. Likewise, Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has written: I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.11 In 2000, at a ceremony attended by delegates from several European countries and the United States, officials from Benin publicized President Mathieu Kerekous apology for his countrys role in selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders.12 We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation, said Luc Gnacadja, Benins minister of environment and housing.13 Cyrille Oguin, Benins ambassador to the United States, acknowledged, We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.14 A year later, Senegals president Abdoulaye Wade, himself the descendant of generations of slave-owning [and slave-trading] African kings, urged Europeans, Americans, and Africans to acknowledge publicly and teach openly about their shared responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade.15 Wades remarks came

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months after the release of Adanggaman, by Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan Mbala, the first African film to look at African involvement in the slave trade with the West. Its up to us, MBala insisted, to talk about slavery, open the wounds of what weve always hidden and stop being puerile when we put responsibility on others. . . . In our own oral tradition, slavery is left out purposefully because Africans are ashamed when we confront slavery. Lets wake up and look at ourselves through our own image.16 It is simply true, declared Da Bourdia Leon of Burkina Fasos Ministry of Culture and Art, We need this kind of film to show our children this part of our history, that it happened among us. Although I feel sad, I think it is good that this kind of thing is being told today.17 Modern scholarship seems to have reached a consensus: that while Europeans may have occasionally seized Africans, the vast majority of those shipped to the Americas18 had been captured or kidnapped by African dealers. The idea of European responsibility for disrupting an Eden-like continent rests on promoting the false impressions that Europeans had themselves gone ashore to kidnap Africas people. . . . Africans had themselves captured and sold nearly all the people that Europeans had bought as slaves along the coast.19 In short, virtually all Africans brought forcibly to the Western Hemisphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been enslaved long before they left Africa. The idea of sole European and American responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade gained particular currency, especially in American schools, after the enormously popular 1977 television mini-series based on Alex Haleys bestseller, Roots: The Saga of an American Family.20 The main character, Kunta Kinte, is brutally kidnapped by white men and sold to white slave traders. Kinte reacts to his capture with disbelief and tries to shake off his shacklesas if he has no idea what they are. He appears to have never heard of abduction and enslavement. In fact, slavery had existed in Africa for many centuries, and the transSaharan and East African slave trades had been a fact of life since the Islamic invasions of the eighth century. Millions of black-skinned inhabitants of the regions south of the great African desert had been captured by Africans and sold into slavery in the Muslim-Arab worldalthough many in the trans-Saharan trade died on the terrible marches across the desert. The threat of being kidnapped and enslaved would have been a very real fear to any healthy African well before Kintes time.21 As a comprehensive guide to world slavery concludes:
The source of most of the slaves entering the Sahara was violent capture. However, the captors were usually not Arab or Berber warriors but rather Sudanic state elites who sold their booty to caravan merchants. . . . [T]he violence encouraged by slaved [religious wars] in West Africa raiding created a climate that encouraged jiha (long before they were common in other parts of the Islamic world), rather than that Islam had any significant role in bringing about the Saharan slave

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system. . . . The Atlantic slave trade constituted both an extension and a reorientation of a well-established commercial pattern.22

In sharp contrast to the Roots myth, several television productions of the last decade have acknowledged that slavery and the slave trade were well-established in Africa long before European involvement, for example, Africans in America (PBS, 1998), Wonders of the African World (PBS, 1999), and The African Trade (History Channel International, 2000). The African Trade begins with the visit by a group of African-Americans to the infamous slave castle and Door of No Return on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. Appalled by the cruelties of the Europeans, the narrator relates, the visitors become curious as to how Africans fell into their hands. Their African guide admits that this history is difficult to tell and hard to believe but pulls no punches on African complicity in kidnapping and selling millions of Kunta Kintes: All the tribes were involved in the slave tradeno exemptions. The African-Americans are physically and emotionally staggered: So we really cant blame the Europeans, one declares, We sold our own. It takes two. Another visitor declares, Thats rightmoney and greed. The program concludes that white guilt can never be erasedbut also cautions that it is equally important to remember that black participation lets no one off the hook.23 The historical record, as documented in the Africans in America television series and its companion book, is clear and incontrovertible:
The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa. . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property. . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africas coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessaryperhaps even desirablefact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise. . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland.24

Enslavement in Africa was an utterly traumatic process, in which individuals were snatched from their homes and their kindred amid scenes of horror and violence, and carried away into the unknown.25 Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the seastill chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captorsbefore they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader.26 The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or instantly beheaded by the African traders in sight of the [slave ships] captain if they could not be sold.27 A seventeenth-century French slave trader observed,

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The kings are so absolute, that upon any slight pretense of offenses committed by their subjects, they order them to be sold for slaves, without regard for rank, or possession. . . . Some slaves are also brought to these Blacks, from very remote inland countries, by way of trade, and sold for things of very inconsiderable value; but these slaves are generally poor and weak, by reason of the barbarous usage they have had in traveling so far, being continuously beaten, and almost famishd; so inhuman are the Blacks to one another . . . as may be seen by the scabs and wounds on the bodies of many of them when sold to us.28

Of course, the even more horrific barbarism and inhumanity of the middle passagethe voyage of a slave ship from Africa to the Western Hemisphere still lay before those who had survived the forced trek to the coast. These thoroughly documented facts are readily accessible on African-American history websites:
[European slave] traders could not have been successful without the formation of a relationship with the Africans who provided them with other Africans to enslave. African captors kidnapped their countrymen and brought them to slave factories on the west coast of Africa. The journey was long and it is estimated that of the 20 million slaves, half did not make it to the coast. Captured Africans could spend as little as a few weeks and up to a year in a factory. [Coastal slave trading forts were sometimes called factories because slave dealers agents were known as factors.] In return for providing cargo to the slavers, African kidnappers received guns, textiles, iron bars, and other products.29

The Slave Coast factories were actually under the dominance of the local African rulers who deliberately haggled and drew out the negotiations to get better prices.30 The trade accentuated African autocracy because the wealth from selling slaves tended to concentrate in the hands of African rulers. Their control of the trade enriched the kings and made them more powerful as they secured guns and as goods piled up in their warehouses.31 The slave trade in Africa was principally the business of kings, rich men, and prime merchants.32 Why It Is Essential to Understand and Teach the Whole Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade The following examples, all from 1998 or after, suggest that a convergence of guilt, shame, ignorance, denial, and evasion is undermining an unprecedented opportunity to discuss and teach the complete history of the Atlantic slave trade. In addition, the failure to educate all Americans, especially students, about this critical chapter in our countrys past is generating long-term divisive civic consequences for American politics and democracy. The aforementioned PBS television series and companion book, Africans in America: Americas Journey through Slavery, researched and produced by WGBHBoston, candidly acknowledge that Africans were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade: The sad irony of blacks selling blacks never slowed the African

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merchants determination to do business with Europeans, since tribal distinctions meant much more than racial ones.33 The series and book introduce Olaudah Equiano, one of 10 million to 12 million Africans sold to Europeans by men whose faces mirrored his own.34 Equiano was kidnapped by Africans, sold to one African master after another, and exposed to a bewildering and completely alien variety of African languages and cultures. He encountered Europeans for the first time seven months later, when he was finally sold on the slave coast.35 The Africans in America Teachers Guide, on the contrary, was written by a group of teachers with no connection to the scholars and experts responsible for the television series and was printed before filming was finished. The guide, unlike the series and companion book, persistently suppresses or manipulates the historical record. How did Africans end up in the hands of European slave merchants on Africas Slave Coast? The Teachers Guide says only that Africans were abducted from their homelands.36 The guide urges teachers to look at a map of Africa, find Olaudah Equianos home (present-day Nigeria). Have students brainstorm a list of words that they think describe life in that part of Africa in the 17th century (e.g., family life, religion, economy).37 Slavery certainly belongs on the list as wellsince slavery is the crucial element in Equianos personal account of his life in that part of Africa in the 17th century. But the authors of the Teachers Guide fail to mention slaverysuggesting that Africans had no knowledge or experience of it before the arrival of Europeans. The guide also recommends using such questions as: Who profited from slavery? and Who was dependent on slavery? but the material on the slave trade and slavery in the guide does not include any historical evidence that would enable students to answer these questions accurately or truthfully. The guide instead directs teachers to ask, What factors made it possible for Europeans to enslave Africans? without ever mentioning the most important factorthe partnership with African kings, chiefs, and slave dealers.38 About a year after the appearance of the Teachers Guide for Africans in America, I participated in the charter renewal process for a Boston-area charter school including observing history classes and reading student papers. One student essay purported to describe the arrival of English ships on the Ghana coast:
We were greeted by people with dark complexions, the captain recalled, who ran to us as we got off the ships. They offered us food and drinks. One of the people offered us a place to stay. We accepted and thanked them. That night the captain observed, So far all I know is that in this place called Ghana people work hard and they work together. They share chores equally. Captain, a crew member suggested, we should enslave these people. Look how hard they work. We could use them to serve us then take their gold. The captain replied, You have a point there. Okay, lets do it. Tomorrow we enslave them. The next day the captain announced, People of Ghana, you are now our slaves! and his crew attacked the surprised villagers and brought them aboard our ship.39

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The history teacher, a recent Harvard graduate, may or may not have known that this history class essay was essentially fiction, but she wrote on the last pagethis is a great paper. Also in 1999, Colonial Williamsburg, the popular Revolutionary-era tourist village, launched a new program, Enslaving Virginia, that one journalist reported, uncovers the ugly story of human suffering beneath the glossy tale of heroic patriots. The program used realistic, first-person portrayals of slavery, where costumed actors play slaves and slave owners and visitorsparticularly childrenoften find themselves unexpectedly drawn into the plot. Skits about whipping a slave for trying to run away and tearing apart black families by selling children or parents have evoked strong emotions from both blacks and whites visiting the park. White visitors have been moved to tears, have attacked the actors playing the slave owners and have even apologized [to the black actors] for being white and for the things their ancestors have done to the slaves. Black visitors, on the other hand, often declared that such incidents were familiar: These are stories that have been passed down to me. I know it well. Lots of white people dont know these stories. The details arent taught in the schools. You cant read it in a book.40 In fact, this information is prominently featured in textbooks, state curricula, and historical studies of every kind. It seems, nonetheless, that these visitors to Williamsburg never learned anything about the slave trade in Africa in which millions of African families were destroyed over several centuries in a joint effort to enrich African, European, and eventually American slave traders. If the visitors did know the full truth, would this knowledge alter the expressions of group guilt and innocence aroused by the skits? During the same year, I served on a committee discussing revisions in the Massachusetts history standards. After I casually mentioned that the Atlantic slave trade depended heavily on African participation, two panel members, both teachers, responded firmly, I dont believe that. I cited several historical sources and insisted that we were discussing history not religion; history rests on facts and evidence rather than faith and belief. They replied that my remarks were offensive and barely spoke to me again during the remaining committee meetings. The whole truth about African involvement in the slave trade is also commonly evaded in mainstream American journalism. In 2000, Washington Post investigative reporter Douglas Farah visited approximately 30 African slave castles on the coast of Ghana that once warehoused millions of Africans sold into slavery after being captured as slaves in West Africa between the early 1500s and the 1850s. Farah says nothing, however, about how and by whom these Africans were captured and sold into slavery. Farah talked with an African-American visitor from Atlanta who was overwhelmed with emotions. It is all so much more real when you see this, he said, insisting that his pilgrimage

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to the slave castles was something I had to do. Farah reports that Elmina castle in Ghana was captured by Dutch troops in 1636 with the help of local tribes, who believed the Dutch promises that they would not trade in slaves in effect promoting the false belief that Africans were opposed to slavery or did not participate in the trading of slaves. Indeed, after noting that white people as well as Africans and African-Americans were visiting these historical sites, the visitor from Atlanta concluded, In the 1960s, we always said that history is not just for the oppressed but for the oppressor.41 The article never mentions that Africans had captured and sold many millions of their own people in the lucrative trade in slaves from the early Middle Ages through the Atlantic slave trade. That same year, an African-American television news reporter from the San Francisco Bay area also wrote about a recent visit to the Gold Coast of Ghana. As an American descendant of slaves, Rene Kemp believed this was likely where my family history begins. Her itinerary included a stop at Asin-Manso, the place where . . . captives had their last formal bath in the Nan Kasuo or Slave River before the torturous overland journey to the slave holding quarters in the cities of Cape Coast and Elmina. There she met a young mother who pointed to a grove of trees near the river, Many people died there when they were taken from their tribes. They are buried over there. In fact, Kemp adds, its a mass grave, and to this day it is taboo to farm there. She later arrived at a coastal slave castle and toured the dark, acrid dungeons where captives ate and slept in their own bodily wastes for up to three months. Finally, at the Door of No Return, Kemp understood with a rush of sadness exactly how I have come to be an African in America. Kemp, nonetheless, never mentions that the captives brought to the slave coast had first been kidnapped and brutalized by African slavers, who later sold the survivors to the white slavers who consigned them to the even greater horrors of the slave castles and the middle passage. The exclusion of these facts makes the subtitle of the article rather ironic: An African-American Woman Unravels the Mystery of Her Ancestors.42 In 2001, I attended an exhibit on African-American history at a Massachusetts historical site that included a large mid-eighteenth century drawing of a scene on the African slave coast. In the center of the drawing is a small table at which several white men are sitting. The artist drew the scene from behind the seated men, thereby highlighting a group of magnificently dressed Africans wearing jewelry and plumage and carrying ceremonial lances, who are standing and facing the table. Most of the picture, however, portrays terrified African men, women, and children in chains, shackles, and yokes, anxiously watching the meeting at the table. Their guards, armed with whips, spears, knives, and guns, are also Africans. The grandees in front of the table are clearly negotiating to sell their captives and one is shown making an offer by holding up his hand with several fingers raised. Some visitors declared emo-

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tionally that the drawing dramatically exposed European and American culpability for violently kidnapping millions of Africans who later suffered the terrors of the middle passage. In short, they saw what they expected to see, and what they had very likely been taught to seeand blocked out the truth before their eyes. Several months after completing the aforementioned Fordham Foundation study of state U.S. history standards, I received a call from a curriculum specialist who was extremely pleased that his state had earned one of the highest scores in the nation. During our conversation, in which he invoked his scholarly credentials by assuring me that his doctorate was in history, not education, he invited me to participate in the ongoing process of revising his states standards. I eventually submitted several pages of recommendations and later participated in two days of meetings. Several months later, when I received the final version of the proposed revisions, I noticed that my most important suggestionthat the standards should address the full history of the Atlantic slave tradehad failed to make the final cut. When we subsequently spoke on the phone, I asked about that crucial point and he answered candidly, I cant do that. I understood what he was trying to tell me and dropped the subject. Finally, as previously discussed, if there is almost nothing in the state U.S. history standards to educate American students about the full story of the Atlantic slave trade, standard texts may not serve them much better. Consider, for example, the account of the slave trade in John Hope Franklins From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, the most widely read study of AfricanAmerican history ever written. First published in 1947 and now in its eighth edition,43 this influential text promotes a common misconception about African slaverythat it was ancient and widespread, but essentially benign:
[S]laves were chattel property, but in practice they often became trusted associates of their masters and enjoyed virtual freedom. Some, however, were sold and exported from the country while others were sacrificed by kings in the worship of their royal ancestors. The children of slaves could not be sold and thus constituted an integral and inalienable part of the family property. Enjoying such security it was not uncommon for the children of slaves to be favored with manumission at the hands of their masters.44

Most modern scholarship, however, disputes the conventional wisdom that African slavery was mild in contrast to eighteenthand nineteenth-century slavery in the Americas. The severity of slavery in the West is judged by the degree to which individuals achieved a measure of personal freedom. But, Africa was dominated by a communal ethos in which,
personal autonomy, for most individuals [was viewed] as vulnerability. [Instead, security was defined by] . . . subordination within communities integrated around hierarchies of many sortspatriarchal control of women, patronage of clients by

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the wealthy, and ranking by age. . . . Slaves dependence on a single individual in an otherwise communal environment created a totality of control that exposed them to personal domination in Africa as extreme as what characterized slavery anywhere in the world. . . . [S]laves there were vulnerable, not because they lacked rights, but because they had lost access to anyone morally obligated to defend them. Honor in Africa derived from ancestry, and slaves were dishonored because they utterly lacked recognized parentage and kin. . . . For slaves, the loss of the intense bond of community that prevailed in Africa was as traumatic as their uprooting itself. Even a few miles seemed very far from home, and even neighbors seemed much unlike the home community. Slavery in Africa thus possessed all the disabilities accepted as defining the institution elsewhere, though in ways that reflected distinctively communal, local African values of self and status. . . . The roots of this stereotype [of benign African slavery reflects] . . . a tendency among descendants of Africans in the American diaspora to romanticize a distant ancestral homeland. . . . The historical experience of most Africans with slavery was [actually] more diverse, humiliating, and disabling.45

In any case, Africa is far too large and diverse a continent to be pigeonholed by over-generalizing its historical experience of slavery:
Africa as a social construction was a European rather than an African concept. Europeans sailed to Africa to find outsiders and subsumed them all under the name African. African slave-traders also traded in outsiders. . . . The critical difference was that in the slave trade era, the conception of an insider within Africa was more likely to be limited to kin in a limited geographic area. In Europe, insider status, at least on the slavery issue, was accorded to all Europeans. In no case did an African group define the concept in terms of all peoples living in subSaharan Africa.46

There was neither consistency nor uniformity in African slavery. In Central Africa, slavery was not an important institution in many precolonial communities.47 But, in Malawi, slaves were excluded from local kinship networks, defined as nonhuman beings, and barred from participation in the communitys public rituals as well as key branches of agricultural production.48 In East Africa, from 1600 to 1800, Africans experienced both ends of the spectrum of servilityfrom dependency to chattel slavery.49 In West Africa, some slaves lived in the masters compound, worked alongside his family, and often ate with them.50 Slave status often disappeared in one to three generations. But, in the more rigorous and harsh slave modes of production, where slave majorities could be as high as 75 percent, most slaves lived separately from their masters and worked in groups. . . . Manumission was limited and work was carefully regulated.51 As one scholar summed it up, evidence from one end of the continent to the other agrees that the captured or bought slave, male or female, juvenile or adult, was a person entirely without rights, who could be put to any kind of work, punished at will, killed as a sacrificial victim or sold as a chattel either inside or outside the community.52 In any

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case, there was no monolithic African slavery and the evolution of African slave systems [italics added] is a subject that needs further study.53 Students reading the section on the slave trade in John Hope Franklins book could, therefore, easily fail to understand the complexity, diversity, and severity of slavery in Africa. But, even more important, they would remain almost entirely uninformed about essential historical facts and details on the nature and scope of African participation in the Atlantic slave trade. For example, readers are told:54
Once coastal trading posts or factories had been established, and the more the better, trading could proceed. There is no reference to the fact that African kings often rented land to European traders for constructing slave factories. Slave traders established contacts with the natives who assisted in securing the desired slaves and African chiefs appointed a caboceer who assumed the responsibility of gathering up the natives to be sold. If the natives merely assisted the slave traders, who was actually responsible for gathering up and securing these people for African slave merchants? European slave traders often had to wait for weeks before slaves were rounded up and the interior frequently had to be scoured and much coercion used to secure enough slaves to meet the demands of the traders. How exactly were these victims rounded-up and how was this coercion carried out? African raiders often surrounded a village before sunrise, attacked and seized as many prisoners as possible, and burned the village to the ground. Those lucky enough to escape and make their way back to their devastated villages found their families and kinship groups shattered.55 The trading proceeded apace once the captives had been brought before the trader for inspection. How did these captives, especially from the African interior, get to the slave coast where they could be inspected and purchased by European and, later, American slave dealers? From Slavery to Freedom refers to the great numbers that must have been killed while resisting capture, [and] the additional numbers that died during the middle passage. However, the book does not discuss the deaths of captives driven to the slave coast by their African abductorsin which scholars estimate that abuse, starvation, and disease took as many as ten million liveslikely more than died in the appalling and unspeakable conditions of the middle passage. The encouragement which Europeans gave [Africans] to fight among themselves with explosive weapons donated by the Europeans, further debilitated them and removed the last vestige of opportunity to recover from the body blow which the slave trade dealt them. However, this evasive conclusion is not substantiated by the historical record:

Even at the Atlantic coast, therefore, the slave trade was no novelty. . . . Even at the height of the Atlantic trade, most slaves originated as [slaving] war captives, and it is striking how seldom it seems to have been the Europeans who called the tune. . . . More often it would seem that the causes of warfare were essentially local, and that the wars would have occurred even had there been no ocean trade to carry away the captives. In general, the Europeans had to conduct their business according to the opportunities offered by a complex and highly changeable pat-

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tern of inter-ethnic relations, and to shift their bases to and fro as local events might dictate.56

In short, students cannot hope to understand the Atlantic trade unless they know about the African trade from which it arose.57 Some kings and chiefs did resist seizing slaves, but From Slavery to Freedom never unequivocally acknowledges that the rulers of Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar were experienced slave dealers, ready to provide human cargo for the new Atlantic trade and eager to share in the profits. Ironically, as a result of this collaboration between Europeans and Africans,
Before the colonial period, no organized indigenous [African] opposition to slavery arose. . . . The abolition movement in Africa was instead associated with the colonial administrations and fortified by the public outcry against slavery in metropolitan countries. Nonetheless, these colonial administrations had to be careful. Aggressive anti-slavery activity [in Africa] ran the risk of alienating powerful indigenous elites, whose cooperation immensely simplified the colonial task of governance.58

Overcoming the Legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade What exactly is going on in the examples discussed in the previous section? The question, of course, is easier to ask than to answer. Nonetheless, as already suggested, it seems clear that we are dealing with the divisive combination of guilt, shame, ignorance, denial, and evasionhardly a promising formula for fully understanding our history and preserving and nurturing our common democratic values. These examples highlight the fact that the failure to educate all Americans about the whole story of the Atlantic slave trade continues to divide our nation and undermine our civic unity and belief in the historical legitimacy of our democratic institutions. Education in a democracy cannot promote ignorance or half-truths about crucial issues without transforming the ideal of e pluribus unumone from manyinto the discordant reality of many from one. The history of the slave trade proves that everyone participated and everyone profitedwhites and blacks; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Latin Americans. Once we recognize the shared responsibility for sustaining and profiting from the Atlantic slave trade, we can turn our attention to what we must do together today to eradicate its corrosive legacy. However, candid discussions of our shared history and common future are still impeded by the widely held misconception that Europeans and Americans bear sole responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. In 2003, for example, a lawyer representing African-American plaintiffs in the legal battle for reparations for American slavery declared, The real legacy of our nations slave past is something most Americans seek to deny or repress. . . . Our suits merely expose the tip of the iceberg. We havent come close to telling the whole story because its too painful to admit.59 A year later, Ruth Simmons, the first African-American president of Brown University, ap-

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pointed a commission to study the role that wealth from the slave trade may have played in the founding of the university. Many alumni and students, she reported, have been offended by our unwillingness to confront our past in an honest and forthright manner.60 Several American cities have also passed laws requiring businesses to examine their past and own up to any history of profiting from slavery.61 All three cases promote the same misleading and divisive premisethat only white Americans have failed to confront the complete history of the slave trade and its consequences. Repressing history that is too painful to admit, failing to confront our past in an honest and forthright manner, and not owning up to profiting from slavery is clearly a two-way street. For example, a prominent newspaper columnist argued in late 1999 that Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal had been one of the pivotal figures of the [last] millennium because he had subsidized mid-fifteenth-century slave raids in Africa: During the next decade, thousands of Africans were enslaved, and the Atlantic slave trade, the foundation for the economic might enjoyed 550 years later by Europe and the United States, was begun.62 One would never guess from this indictment that Africans had owned and exploited slaves, and had profited for centuries from kidnapping and trading millions of Africans in the trans-Saharan and East African slave markets, long before the Portuguese began to export slaves from the continent. . . . Portugals slave traders began, in large measure, as middlemen in an African trade . . . and there is blame to be placed, in Africa and outside it.63 The king of Benin, for example, later joined by other rulers on Africas west coast, accumulated vast wealth by selling slaves to the Portuguese. The kings ambassador to Lisbon was received with honors and returned home in a Portuguese royal vessel.64 The capture and sale to Europeans and Americans of millions of Africans in Africa by Africans was indisputably critical in facilitating the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Even current scholarly works on American slavery sometimes fail to make unambiguously clear that the Atlantic slave trade was rooted in cooperation between Europeans and Africans. Harvard historian Jill Lepore, for example, concludes her riveting study of the 1741 New York City slave conspiracy hysteria with an account of the 2003 public reburial of the remains of 408 slaves. She reports that an African-American woman in the crowd was angered that school children had not been given the day off to witness this event. No, she declared, they won again. They dont want us to know this, one man interjectedcapturing the suspicious and furious mood of the crowd. Together they walked, Lepore recalled, complaining of the final conspiracy, the conspiracy of history. Lepore also quotes the anguished words of an older black woman, They will not rest, they will not rest, until we are repaid! All eyes turned to her. They owe us! she called. They owe us! They owe us! And the crowd hollered back: Reparations! . . . Reparations NOW! Lepore muses

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about a string of beads found around the waist of a woman identified simply as Burial 340. Glass beads like these were manufactured, she reveals, in Venice and Amsterdam and traded . . . by [European] slave merchants to slave vendors in Africa. Lepore, unfortunately, never explicitly identifies these slave vendors as Africans. How many in that New York City crowd knew the whole truth about the Atlantic slave trade? Clearly, only the full and honest truth about this terrible chapter in our history could assuage the suspicion, fury, and alienation so evident that day.65 The most effective way to put this tragic, shared legacy behind us and move forward as one nation, fully educated about one of the greatest calamities in human history, is to confront and teach the whole story of the Atlantic slave trade without hiding behind guilt, shame, denial, evasion, or half-truths. No one is well served when old myths of African barbarism are replaced by new myths of African innocence.66 The New York Historical Society, for example, recently opened the largest public exhibit (nine galleries) in its two-century history, Slavery in New York: A Landmark Exhibition. The exhibit aims to lift the cover off of one of the nations best-kept secrets: New Yorks critical role as the center of the early American slave trade and accurately stresses that millions of Africans were kidnapped and forced into the harrowing Middle Passage.67 The exhibit also rightly emphasizes that the Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history and that twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas.68 Nonetheless, despite promising that the exhibits will be uncompromising in their dedication to historical accuracy, in order to uncover what has too long been hidden in our past, the online tour and exhibition fail to explore the extensive collaboration between Europeans, Africans, and eventually Americans (including New Yorkers) in sustaining and profiting from the Atlantic slave trade. Visitors to the exhibit can view an introductory film that briefly mentions that slavery existed in Africa for centuries and that chiefs measured their wealth in slaves and sold them to Europeans. However, general viewers, especially students, will almost certainly leave the exhibition with little or no understanding that the Atlantic slave trade had been a joint enterprise in which African suppliers and European dealers worked and profited together essentially as equals. This omission is particularly egregious in the online questions provided on the exhibit website to guide parents in discussing this difficult and unsettling material with their children. It is impossible to understand how such an incomplete, misleading, and divisive representation of this terrible history can, as the exhibit website claims, help us find the resources to continue our long national experiment with liberty. Also in New York, the state legislature recently enacted a bill directing the governor to appoint a commission to investigate whether the physical and psychological terrorism against Africans in the slave trade is adequately taught in schools and textbooks.69 This tendentious language strongly suggests that

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the full story of European, African, and American collaboration in the Atlantic slave trade will most likely be covered up in the state-sponsored educational programs . . . [and] training for teachers the panel is expected to recommend. There are, however, some encouraging signs. Compare, for example, the disingenuous discussion of the Atlantic slave trade in the previously discussed Africans in America Teachers Guide to this straightforward and honest account in a recent college textbook co-authored by three African-American historians:
European[s] and [the] white Americans who succeeded them did not capture and enslave people themselves. Instead they purchased slaves from African traders. . . . [African rulers] restricted the Europeans to a few points on the coast, while the kingdoms raided the interior to supply the Europeans with slaves. . . . The European traders provided the aggressors with firearms, but they did not instigate the wars. Instead they used the wars to enrich themselves. Sometimes African armies enslaved the inhabitants of conquered towns and villages. At other times, raiding parties captured isolated families or kidnapped individuals. As warfare spread to the interior, captives had to march for hundreds of miles to the coast where European traders awaited them. The raiders tied the captives together with rope or secured them with wooden yokes around their necks. It was a shocking experience, and many captives died from hunger, exhaustion, and exposure during the journey. Others killed themselves rather than submit to their fate, and the captors killed those who resisted.70

The textbook also cites the lament of an eighteenth-century African captive: I must own to the shame of my own countrymen that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by [those of] my own complexion.71 The authors even include a half-page illustration of the forced marches to the slave coast. In this late-eighteenth-century drawing, the caption reads, African slave traders conduct a group of bound captives from the interior of Africa toward European trading posts.72 A high school version of this textbook has been prepared for a new required course on African-American history in Philadelphia high schools. All the material cited above has been retained in the concise edition. Philadelphia high school students will have the opportunity to learn the whole truth about the Atlantic slave trade.73 Only the whole truth can free us all from the burden of our shared and tragic past and reinvigorate our mutual commitment to an even more democratic future. As Martin Luther King, Jr. dared to dream at the 1963 March on Washington, we can then join hands and affirm together in the words of a great African-American spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last. Notes
1. The term peculiar institution became popular in the United States during the antebellum era, when the gradual abolition of slavery in the North made human bondage peculiar to the Southnot because slavery was uniquely American.

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 521. The Islamic states later enslaved Europeans as well. See Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islams One Million White Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004). Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 374. Sheldon M. Stern, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card (Washington, D.C., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003). This report is available for downloading at www.edexcellence.net. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 67. Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team, Africans in America: Americas Journey through Slavery (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 7. Michael Omolewa, Certificate History of Nigeria (Lagos, Nigeria: Longman Group, 1991), 96103, cited in Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, History Lessons: How Textbooks around the World Portray U.S. History (New York: New Press, 2004), 79. Ibid., 7983. Johnson, et al., Africans in America, 23; Howard W. French, On Slavery, Africans Say the Guilt Is Theirs, Too, New York Times, 27 December 1994, A4. Benin Apologizes for Role in Slave Trade, Boston Globe, 19 April 2000. Ibid. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 June 2003. Ellen Knickmeyer, Senegals President Rejects Idea of Slavery Reparations, Boston Globe, 30 August 2001, A27. Brahima Ouadraego, African Film Depicts Blacks Enslaving Blacks, Boston Globe, 4 March 2001. The film won a grand prize at the film festival in Amiens, France, in November 2000. Loren King, A Disturbing Look at Betrayals of Slaves, Boston Globe, 21 September 2001, C7. Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller, eds., MacMillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 34. Ibid., 37. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976). A Tenth-Century Slaving Venture, Description of East Africa (1178), and From the Travels of Ibn Battuta, in Junius P. Rodriguez, Chronology of World Slavery (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 39597. See also, Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 2850, 36770. For evidence that elements of the trans-Saharan slave trade persist to this day, see www.anti-slavery.org. The 1994 National Standards for United States History bolstered the Roots myth by extolling the fourteenth-century King of Mali, Mansa Musa, for his wealth amassed from trading gold and salt and his great pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, without mentioning that the king also traded slaves and brought thousands of his own slaves on this famous hajj (4445). Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 36971. See also Ronald Segal, Islams Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). The African Trade, History Channel International, 2000. Johnson, et al., Africans in America, 2, 5, 7; Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 37075. Roland Oliver, The African Experience (Great Britain: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), 135. Johnson, et al., Africans in America, 7, 6970. Ibid., Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 34. John Barbot, Description of the African Slave Trade (1682), in Rodriguez, Chronology of World Slavery, 41213. The Middle Passage: The Atlantic Slave Trade, under African-American History, at About.com. See http://www.afroamhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa080601a.htm.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Edgar A. Toppin, A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528 (New York: David McKay Co., 1971), 2530. Ibid. Barbot, Description of African Slave Trade, in Rodriguez, Chronology of World Slavery, 412. Johnson et al., Africans in America 65. Ibid., 60. To read Equianos story in full, see Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2004). Africans in America: Americas Journey through Slavery: Teachers Guide (Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1998), 39. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3, 9. See also Sheldon M. Stern, It Will Be a Shame If Teachers Follow This Dishonest Guide, The Textbook Letter (September-October 1998): 911. Charter school student, Exploration of the Land of Gold, 13 January 1999 history paper. Eun Lee Koh, Exposing Another Side of Slavery, Boston Globe, 17 July 1999. Douglas Farah, West Africas Castles of Misery: Slaverys Original Holding Houses Draw American Progeny, Boston Globe, 30 July 2000, A16. Rene Kemp, Appointment in Ghana: An African-American Woman Unravels the Mystery of Her Ancestors, Modern Maturity (July-August 2000): 17, 2122, 2829. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro-Americans (New York: Knopf, 1947). From Slavery to Freedom has been coauthored by Alfred A. Moss, Jr. since the sixth edition, published in 1988, and the subtitle has been changed to A History of AfricanAmericans since the seventh edition, published in 1994. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 1920. This assessment is essentially identical in earlier editions. See, for example, the third edition (Knopf, 1967), 31. Finkelman and Miller, Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 29. Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 372. Ibid., 3738. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Oliver, African Experience, 136. Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 35. These bulleted citations are from the third edition of Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 4259. Some of these passages are slightly revised in the coauthored seventh edition, 3342. Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 34. Oliver, African Experience, 141, 143. For a different view of the European-African partnership in the Atlantic slave trade, see Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Jonathan Burack, How Textbooks Obscure and Distort the History of Slavery, The Textbook Letter (November-December 1992): 1 Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, 1. Lori Rotenberk, A Stern Judge Presides as Reparations Fight Begins, Boston Globe, August 24, 2003, A17. Ruth J. Simmons, Facing Up to Our Ties to Slavery, Boston Globe, 28 April 2004, A13. Council Approves Slavery Disclosure Bill, 18 March 2005, at www.kyw.com. Derrick Z. Jackson, Prince Henry the Navigator, Boston Globe, 20 December 1999, A21. K. Anthony Appiah, Africa: The Hidden History, New York Review of Books, 17 December 1998, 7172. Michael Crowder, The Story of Nigeria (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 69.

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65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005), 22832; see also Tatsha Robertson, Colonial African-American Remains Reburied, Boston Globe, 3 October 2003, A1, 5. Burack, History of Slavery, 3. Invitation and 6 October 2005 press preview of Slavery in New York: A Landmark Exhibition at the New York Historical Society. Citations from online tour of Slavery in New York: A Landmark Exhibition at the New York Historical Society. See www.nyhistory.org. New York State Legislature Again Delves into Racism Lessons in Schools, Newsday, 11 August 2005. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The African-American Odyssey, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), 27, 30. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 32. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, African-American History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), 3749.

for reasoned scholarship in a free society The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an organization of professors, graduate students, college administrators, independent scholars, and trustees committed to rational discourse as the foundation of academic life in a free and democratic society. The NAS works to enrich the substance and strengthen the integrity of scholarship and teaching, persuaded that only through an informed understanding of the Western intellectual heritage and the realities of the contemporary world, can citizen and scholar be equipped to sustain our civilizations achievements. In light of these objectives, the NAS is deeply concerned about the widening currency within the academy of perspectives that reflexively denigrate the values and institutions of our society. Because such tendencies are often dogmatic in character, and indifferent to both logic and evidence, they also tend to undermine the basis for coherent scholarly dialogue. Recognizing the significance of this problem, the NAS encourages a renewed assertiveness among academics who value reason and an open intellectual 1ife.