Brandon Brooks, an African-American and a 2017 graduate of the University of Virginia, now lives in Abuja, Nigeria, where he works in the international development field. Exposure to African perspectives has given him a different view of historical narratives that define the debate over race in the United States.
He recalls being shocked by a sentiment expressed by a first-generation American of African descent several years ago: ““I’m just glad my ancestors never allowed themselves to be taken as slaves.”
In an op-ed published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch today, Brooks writes proudly of ancestors of those whom we today call African-Americans in resisting slavery, whether by hurling themselves from slave ships crossing the Atlantic, evading slave catchers to reach freedom in northern states, or rising in open revolt, as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner did. (If he had had more space, he could have noted the many other ways in which slaves resisted or asserted their freedom — by striking and killing overseers or masters, committing suicide and infanticide, roaming freely from plantation to plantation under the cover of night’s darkness, escaping to English warships during the War of 1812, and the like.)
But Brooks also notes a gaping hole in the debate over the historical blame for the tragedy of slavery — the role played by the Africans themselves.
Black Americans were by no means the sole victims of slavery. Congolese historian Elikia M’Bokolo suggests as many as 9 million slaves were transported north from the continent’s interior as part of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, some going as far as Persia and India. The rulers of the Bornu and Sokoto caliphates, both located in present-day Nigeria, regularly enslaved non-Muslims, while in the Kingdom of the Kongo local rulers took men, women, and children as prizes of war and forced them to work on vast plantations. Much like their southern white counterparts, elites in these societies recognized slavery as an easy means of securing greater status, wealth, and labor. Slavery was never quite as peculiar as many have made it out to be.
Yet this aspect of the global slave trade is largely overlooked in our social discourse, and attempts to raise broader awareness of this issue have not always been positively received. …
Faced with the prospect of confronting a topic as painful and disturbing as the history of slavery, it is simply easier to ignore historical evidence that is unpleasing to hear. To put it another away, downplaying Africans’ role in supporting the slave trade is the logical equivalent of Southern conservatives contending that states’ rights was the underlying cause of the United States Civil War. (See my previous post about Corey Stewart’s interpretation of the Civil War. — JAB) Both viewpoints are intended to avoid harsh realities, be it that one’s ancestors were complicit in one of the most atrocious crimes known to mankind or the fact that some people of color, driven by avarice and bigotry, had played a critical role in sustaining the institution.
Here’s what I would say to those who dwell on historical grievances to support racial identity politics: While we are to some degree defined by our ancestry, we are not our ancestors. We are not to blame for the misdeeds of our ancestors. We are responsible for our deeds and misdeeds. History is full of cruelty and injustice inflicted by one group upon another. The great accomplishment of the United States is for diverse peoples to see themselves as Americans imbued with rights as individuals, not rights belonging to racial and ethnic groups. It has been a long, hard journey getting from the Medieval concept of the “rights of Englishmen” to the Enlightenment concept of rights inherent to all, and we’ve had a lot of ugly and tragic history to surmount. But we’re almost there. Let us not relapse.
