Also… thanks for this post. It was extremely emotionally touching.

Thirdly, I want to interject that slavery honestly is not over. In fact, the price of a slave is very low today, given the high numbers of desperate people living on the planet, so much so that slaves are often treated as very, very disposable in the “unseen” underworld of human trafficking. Let’s not congratulate ourselves that highly visible slavery has been stopped so that the underworld can step in. Slavery in sex work, and domestic work, is still a big problem in the west, and in third world nations slavery for very dangerous physical labor is still going strong.

“Slavery” in the area now known as Nigeria and indeed most of Africa resembled the servant system of Europe in the middle ages (i.e. one family might serve a higher class family for multiple generations).

People entered into slavery mainly if there was a mini-war and their town was captured then some people from that town might be taken to the victors and become servants. In our system the masters did just as much work as the “slaves” and “slaves were not maltreated, flogged or anything like that. Also “slaves” were not discriminated against. They could eat the same food as their masters from the same pot, they had the same accommodations, etc. They were not treated like animals as was done in America and slaves could rise in the community like everyone else. The only exceptions were that slaves could not take certain titles and they could not inherit from their master’s family. They could be given gifts like plots of land, houses, wives, etc but in a clear-cut inheritance case where the master died they could not inherit.

Another way people became slaves were people who had committed taboos. For example, in my ethnic group (Igbo) people that committed murder were exiled, bestiality, killing sacred animals and cutting down sacred trees, that kind of thing. Mostly people would be exiled for a number of years but if the crime was especially heinous then such a person would be sold into slavery. According to our traditional rules (Igbo) girls must never be sold into slavery.

Of course there were also royal slaves/servants. It was not uncommon for kings and queens to give slaves to visiting Europeans as a sign of friendship.

Either way I am just giving you examples of how people came to be slaves (on the African side). Now I will admit, on the coast, there was a particular woman (I forget her name) who was notorious for selling slaves to the Europeans but as far as our history goes, besides that particular woman in the Lagos area and of course those slaves that were initially given from royal houses there really were not any people that were selling people into slavery.

Now as for the Europeans, they were actively involved in kidnapping people and putting them on ships, either by force (guns) or by trickery. For example, in Igboland long before the first white people stepped foot in the Nigeria area, there was a famous oracle called The Long Juju. This oracle was pretty much obeyed without question and people used to travel insane distances just to consult the Long Juju with their most serious problems. Now my grandmother told me that her grandmother narrowly escaped being enslaved because a summons arrived at her village from The Long Juju asking that her village send fifty of its strongest and healthiest young men and young women to The Long Juju. Like I said in those days nobody questioned such a great oracle, or the priestess of a god or that kind of thing so of course they were sent and my grandmother’s grandmother was among them.

They were ambushed by white men on the way and most of them were captured and taken away as slaves. My great-great-great grandmother escaped with a couple of other people and warned the rest of the village that the Long Juju summons was a trick so the men in the village went to war and lost because the Europeans had guns and THEY TOO were taken as slaves.

I’m just saying. Yeah, maybe one or two Africans sold slaves, but it wasn’t a concerted effort by even a group of Africans to betray and sell their fellow people. On top of that there were people that betrayed others to save themselves but at the end of the day the vast majority of the enslavement was carried out by the Europeans.

There were a lot of Africans that gave servants to the Europeans because they didn’t know how different the European culture was from theirs. Indentured servitude in Africa (at least in West Africa and particularly Nigeria) has never been done on the basis of hate. We had a very stratified society before the Europeans came and it was more on the basis of class and wealth as opposed to the European model of declaring themselves the Chosen Ones and everyone else a sub-human barbarian. (I’m not saying all Europeans are this way, I’m just saying the Europeans of the time AND the Arabs of the time – because the Arabs enslaved Africans too – were).

There were many Africans that were positively horrified when news of what the those that were taken away had to endure. A lot of whites now try to claim that it was Africans doing the selling and the Europeans were just passive benefactors of the Africans’ determination to sell off their people. This is extremely untrue.

We know what happened. It happened on our shores and it ripped our families apart. So many of us have grandparents and great grand parents that told stories of their brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, fathers, mothers, that went to the farm or went to the stream or went to the market and were never seen again. There are so many people that went on journeys to see family in far away towns that never came back because they were kidnapped. Those stories are scattered all over the south of Nigeria. And the Europeans didn’t discriminate. They took the high and the low. There were kings that fell victim to European slavery, there were queens, there were princes and princesses, chiefs, priests, priestesses, doctors, musicians,hunters, artists, dancers, wrestlers, warriors, the list goes on. Those people were highly placed in society, you think anyone could have sold them? You think anyone could have just walked up and sold a whole KING?

I understand that whites are weary of being blamed for slavery but to deny the truth is deeply wrong. Sure we all need to move on eventually but trying to downplay the effects of slavery and the role of your ancestors in something so devastating that they orchestrated is unfair. It is unfair to those that are now trapped on the other side of the world with no way of ever knowing their history and it is unfair to those that stayed up countless nights on my side of the world searching the horizon for loved ones that would never come back.

Individually and collectively, these three historians wrote about (and documented meticulously) how utterly enthusiastic many West African kings were to participate in the rush to provide Europeans with the bodies of their own people for profit; how they would set fire to their own villages, then station soldiers at pre-arranged exits to capture the fleeing, terrorized children, women and men and march them off in chains to waiting slaver ships moored off the Coast(s).

They report how, late in the slave trade, during the early nineteenth century, certain members of this or that African monarch’s court began to realize dire and unforeseen consequences of feeding Europe’s demand for more and more slaves. Some of these former “yes-men” with bad consciences wrote desperate letters to their European business partners begging them to stop the trade in black bodies, because they couldn’t convince their own king to do so, and their villages were so depleted of people lost to slavery that there weren’t enough of them left to harvest their crops, and starvation was rampant.

Elsewhere, they tell the story of how certain tribes seeking to cut the losses to slavery from their own tribes went to war against other tribes to capture their people and sell them to the Europeans.

There is much, much more of this, obviously, and it gets progressively, sickeningly and disgustingly worse, believe me. Not one of these careful and studious historians denies the fact that Europeans saw a good thing in Africa and that they went for it like gangbusters. However, I think my point is obvious, isn’t it? Trade in slaves was one of the earliest forms of commerce and continues to be, from prehistoric times to the here and now. And the slave trade would have languished, if not dried up altogether, without the willful, and at times gleeful participation of many African rulers.

The hell that African people have caught the world over as result of the slave trade is a curse that our ancestors put on their descendants by their decision to profit from the sale of the bodies of their own flesh and blood. We are paying for their corrupt, callous thinking and actions. I don’t think it’s going to last forever, but that depends on how much of the truth we as a people can stand, and how we deal with it.

Of course, it’s possible to dismiss all this using various lines of defense such as, “You can’t believe everything you read,” or, “White people are self-serving and would never fully admit to their complicity in the trade,” and so forth and so on. I won’t argue about this with anyone, here, in this blog, or in any other venue. I’d like to, of course, but I won’t.

My Sister Renee…and those of you who are moved in your hearts and souls by the horrible suffering of our slave ancestors, please, please, please don’t think I am attempting to discredit, invalidate, condescend to, or trivialize the true and real sorrow and pain you experience when you meditate on colossal impact the “Black” slave trade has had on our people. Please don’t think that, because that’s not at all why I posted this. All I am trying to say is that the roots of our suffering involve terribly fateful decisions made by people who were not thinking about the future. That’s what got us into trouble, but we can change that. It’s our responsiblity to clean up this horrible legacy by owning up, and then building up.

I’m sorry if the length of this post is problematic for anyone.

Most Sincerely & Very Respectfully to All,
STUART