By John Amoda

OUR new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from Eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.

Through the work of Professor Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data along with the tracing of Blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests is giving us a faster understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore the untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romantized version that our ancestors were kidnapped unawares by evil White men like Kunta Kinte was in Roots.

The truth, however, is much more complex: Slavery was business, highly organised and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike”.
It is in reducing slavery to commerce involving European buyers and African sellers that Professor Gates got lost among the trees. Not knowing the expanse of the forest, Professor Gates forgot an elementary fact of this commerce, namely the whole reason for Gates’ interest in the matter, the demand for labour to occupy and develop European settler colonies in the conquered lands of the New World and the Caribbean. Gates focus is mainly on the supply side of the commerce with scant attention to the demand side.

According to Gates, the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866. This figure presumably are for those who arrived in the New World. When the numbers that died in the Atlantic crossing; in the forts from where those waiting to be shipped were held; when those who died in the journeys from the interior to the coastal forts and those that died in the process of capture are added to those who arrived and were sold to the ultimate buyers, then Africa’s loss of population could be in the neighborhood of 36 to 40 million, using the same Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database directed by the historian David Eltis. Such a loss of population, in Africa as a whole and among the societies of the 50 ethnic groups cited by Gates had structural implications of long-run significance that explains the importance of the reparation question.

I argue that Gates argument suffers in its logic from his reducing the Transatlantic relocation of captive Africans to the trade between African sellers and European buyers. The question that must be addressed is when did this Transatlantic relocation become a business highly organised? The provisional answer that itself needs to be appreciated is when there was continuous and programmed demand for this “peculiar commodity”. It follows that where demand is continuous supply must also be continuous and the process of meeting the routinised demand must itself be regular.

Thus, it is demand that drove the Transatlantic Relocation of African captive for their enslavement in the New World. This is one correction to be made in the light of this strong statement by Gates:
“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 trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred”. This is a supply side only argument. Supply was a response to demand. There is no instance in which Africans initiated the transaction called the slave trade; willing or not, those that Gates called the African elites were responding to expressed demands.

It was not Africans that designed and manufactured ships for this transaction; it was not Africans that manufactured what they received in exchange for “selling their brothers” in the Triangular Trade that began with ‘slave ships’ from Bristol, Liverpool, etc, laden with items of trade, including the most important, guns; and procured the ‘captives’ in chains in Africa and transported the same for auctioning in the New World; and the ships laden with slave produced commodities to meet the ‘mother country’ demands for New World commodities were also British businesses.

In this Triangular Trade that linked Western Europe to Africa and the New World, the sellers and buyers of captive Africans were “middle men”. The engine room of this “sordid” transaction was European businesses backed by their governments; hence the origin of the Triangular Trade was Europe and its final destination was also Europe.

More importantly in this game of opportunity trade is the misnomer of describing this Transatlantic Relocation of African Captives. Trade involves commodities and the translocation process did not transform captives into traded commodities. The pictures in text books depict captives chained hand, feet and neck and driven from the interior to the coasts. The forts that are such tourist attractions like those in Senegal’s Goree Island were constructed to secure in chains those who arrived in chains.