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Abstract:
This article addresses the issue of African agency—that is, the active involvement by some of continental Africa’s indigenous inhabitants, i.e., members of various ethnic, religious, and cultural communities—in aiding and abetting the European slave traders during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era (1440-1886). They committed innumerable acts of kidnapping on their neighbors with whom they cohabited the sub-Saharan regions of the African continent: western, central, and to a lesser extent, eastern. There exist in some current societies memories of their past enslaving activities for which they have created various ceremonies to atone for their ancestors' predacious practices.Many of the abducted unfortunates, besides being incorporated into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, were sold into other slavery systems as well, i.e., the Trans-Saharan, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the ubiquitous internal networks for which there is a dearth of verifiable documentation translated into English. This lack of written records reflecting the numbers of humans absorbed into these systems means that there will never be an accurate accounting; however the European slave-ship captains maintained fairly good ship -logs of their slave purchases for the duration of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade system era, deficient in some aspects, they nevertheless provide a general picture of the enterprise from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.
But I must own, to the shame…of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery…
Ottobah Quobona Cugoano,
Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species
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Introduction:
This article addresses the issue of African agency—that is, the active involvementby some of continental Africa’s indigenous inhabitants, i.e., members of various ethnic,religious, and cultural communities—in aiding and abetting the European slave traders during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era (1440-1886). They committed innumerable acts of kidnapping on their neighbors with whom they cohabited the sub-Saharan regions of the African continent: western, central, and to a lesser extent, eastern. Many of the abducted unfortunates, besides being incorporated into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, were sold into other slavery systems as well, i.e., the Trans-Saharan, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the ubiquitous internal networks for which there is a dearth of verifiable documentation translated into English. Fortunately the European slave-ship captains maintained fairly good ship-logs of their slave purchases for the duration of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era. Their records have been examined, catalogued, and categorized by several notable African and Africanist historians and scholars who also uncovered contemporary first-person kidnap-victim narratives.
Despite these efforts to document kidnapping as a means by which millions of Africans were caught and delivered to prospective slave-buyers, it does not seem to have ever been considered anything more than a subcategory among the known methods of slave acquisition in Africa, and therefore not an important enough subject for independent investigation. This article will refer to these findings in order to present evidence that kidnapping, far from being an unimportant enslaving activity, contributed substantially to the human commodity commerce.
Africanist scholars John Thornton (1998) and Anne C. Bailey (2005) present contrasting views of African agency and differ in their conclusions in so far as the degree to which the African populations participated in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; however, they concur that there was African complicity with the European slave traders.
African Agency
That Europeans kidnapped Africans and enslaved them during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era is an issue that I will not challenge in this essay (Thompson 1987).However, I will show that the management and conduct of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the African side was not solely the province of great polities, monarchies, and nobilities,as suggested by Thornton; nor was the kidnapping of Africans confined to the Europeans in concert with African “rogue ne’er-do-wells,” as implied by Bailey, but was a lucrative enterprise in which Africans, irrespective of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, economic, or social considerations, participated in their fellow humans’ exploitation. The wealth-generating opportunities provided avenues to self-aggrandizement, perhaps the overarching reason for committing such abductions.
A word in widespread usage throughout the affected regions was “Panyaring,”coined from the Portuguese lexicon (apanhar), meaning “to catch, seize” (Shaw 2002), the connotation of which is kidnapping persons into slavery, a pervasive practice which “merchants and even priests officially denied” (Mannix and Cowley 1962). Of the various ways used to ensnare humans for sale during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era, kidnapping was extensive.
This phenomenon consisted of “tens of millions of specific and individual experiences of capture distributed in time and space” (Larson, 2000),which included the process of physical intimidation and brainwashing that resulted in profound transformations in how most of the captives’ bodies and spirits related to the lien and often hostile environments in which they existed, for their cultures along with their languages were forbidden to them, being replaced by their enslavers’ traditions and languages; utilitarian in design to render them malleable, compliant and subservient.
The effects of this programming, comprised of linguistic and cultural deprivation, enforced by unimaginable forms of brutality that included rape, murder, and torture, continue to manifest in the various societies and cultures where populations composed of violators and violated (which includes the offspring of miscegenation) precariously coexist, e.g., Brazil and the United States. The Africans captured in the several aforementioned regions were bought and sold in marketplaces that catered to local and international needs.
Slavery was virtually always initiated through violence that reduced the status of a person from a condition of freedom and citizenship to a condition of slavery. The most common type of violence has been warfare in which prisoners were enslaved. Variations in the organization of such violence—including raids whose purpose was to acquire slaves, banditry, and kidnapping—indicate that violent enslavement can be thought of as falling on a continuum from large-scale political action…to small-scale criminal activity, in which enslavement is the sole purpose of the action. Taken together, warfare, slave-raiding, and kidnapping have accounted for the vast majority of new slaves in history. (Lovejoy 1983).
The distinction between raiding and kidnapping appears to be, in a sense, arbitrary, for any unilateral, violent action that generates prisoners, separating them by force, and selling them into bondage qualifies as kidnapping in a broader sense (Patterson 1982). Although those who were bought and sold in African marketplaces never left the continent, they were incorporated into internal alien cultures, some of which had practiced forms of bondage, different from but just as oppressive as the European varieties, for hundreds of years.
Slavery was pervasive in Africa long before Arab and European traders arrived. Africans enslaved their fellow Africans throughout the continent… In Ghana, one third of the population was enslaved between 1076 and 1600…Mali was the greatest of the West African kingdoms…Large numbers of slaves were critical to support such a vast empire and were, along with gold, Mali’s most important export. (Watkins, 2001, 7-8) . . .
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