In this sensational book, Born in Blackness, Howard French, distinguished American journalist turned academic, has upended the historical orthodoxy of several centuries with a richly researched and compelling account of how Africa, and enslaved Africans, are the real source of Europe’s centuries of Enlightenment and modernity.
Detailed stories of Africa’s complex societies ruined, millions of Black men, women and children dehumanised by unspeakable cruelty, the insatiable greed of Portuguese, English, French, Dutch and Spanish slave traders, merchants and fortune hunters in sugar, cotton and tobacco prison colonies, makes painful, but also compulsive reading. Europe’s long erasure is irrefutably challenged.
This book has been ten years in the making, but coincidentally it is published in a moment when the zeitgeist is ripe for it. Its critical reception has been not only deeply respectful reviews, but concrete responses: in the US an invitation to address a university history class, overnight transformed into an address to the entire university; one man in Nigeria who ordered 1,200copies.
Victoria Brittain: Your book’s central bold theme is rewriting world history from the 15thcentury to the Second World War by placing Africa, and Africans, at the core of the building of the global capitalist economy. Can you give us the background to taking on such a huge, ambitious project immersing yourself in rare archives across continents to reveal African slavery as the lynchpin of modernity.
Howard W. French: A number of threads came together to push me in the direction of this research, and finally, bring me to commit to writing this book. The first of them involves family history. I am an African American, with ancestors who were enslaved on both sides of my family. The story that I know of this history that is most powerful and most directly relevant to this book goes back to the early history of the United States and involves a friend and political ally of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president. Jefferson famously had children by an enslaved woman who was his property, and there is a remarkably similar story in my own bloodline via my mother. The ancestor in question, a woman named Priscilla, bore a child by her owner who was the governor of Virginia, James Barbour. Her mixed-race children fought a prolonged and dogged struggle to preserve themselves from enslavement and to eventually obtain land in Virginia, and their fight has been at the heart of family discussions in my family throughout my life. Trying to understand slavery and resistance both as an intellectual exercise and as a matter of lived human experience has been with me all along.
The second big thread relates to my professional experience as a journalist. During my career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, I worked very widely in the Atlantic world, which is the stage for my book’s narrative. This included two lengthy stints working and living in West and Central Africa, years of work in the Caribbean and Latin America, and also explorations of the American South, and of Europe. I speak several of the languages that are key to this global history, including English, French and Spanish, as well as Portuguese, which I can stumble around in, but also read.
The final thread worth mentioning is the last 11 years of my work overseas with the Times, I was based in East Asia; first in Japan and then in China. This experience was an eye-opener for me in many ways, but most relevant is that the question of how the West rose, and managed to temporarily eclipse Asia in terms of wealth and power, is a topic very close to the surface in East Asia, and even in India. My previous book, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power was largely a work of history, and in part, an exploration of this question. During the research for that book, I read deeply into the history of Portuguese navigation in the 15th and 16th centuries, and I was stunned to come across details, including contemporaneous accounts, of how the Portuguese had spent decades prioritizing maritime exploration of Africa prior to their push into Asia.
“Why had I never been taught this?”
Why, I wondered, as a well-read and reasonably well-educated person had I never been taught this? In fact, these accounts fundamentally undermine and contradict the pervasive conventional narrative that we all have of modernity having been born out of a European obsession with reaching Asia by sea. Africa, according to this standard telling of history, was without inherent interest and represented little more than an obstacle. Constructing a story line like this was the first act in a centuries-long project of erasure of Africa and Africans in our shared story of modernity.
Victoria Brittain: Gold drew Portugal to West Africa in the later part of the 15th century. Could you start by talking about Elmina, the fort in today’s Ghana which the Portuguese built in 1482, and the pattern of gold trading relations with local African leaders here in the century or so before gold trading was eclipsed by the trading of Black people?
Howard W. French: Portugal was driven to explore the coast of West Africa in the early decades of the 15th century following the spread of word into Europe of a major geopolitical gambit by a leader of the Malian empire early in the previous century to bolster West African ties with the Muslim Arab world, and in particular with the Mamluk Dynasty in Egypt. The Malian leader, Mansa Musa, travelled 3,500 miles overland to Cairo with an enormous entourage bearing 18tons of gold, which he distributed in acts of extraordinary patronage and generosity. This depressed the price of gold on Mediterranean markets for many years, and accounts of Malian wealth spread quickly into Europe, where mapmakers busied themselves trying to locate Musa’s kingdom. In the early 15th century, the young and poor Aviz Dynasty of Portugal became obsessed with finding this source of gold and establishing trade with West Africa as a way to flourish and secure its rule against other Iberian crowns that coveted Portuguese territory.
Elmina, the first fortified outpost
The early Portuguese maritime explorations of the 15th century found little gold, and in order to support the cost of its ocean ventures began to launch military raids on vulnerable populations along the West African coast, carrying off the unfortunate people they were able to capture, to Portugal, where they were sold into slavery both there and in Spain. Over time, though, the Portuguese began to encounter more and more highly organized societies in West Africa, and soon understood that they did not have the means to conquer them. Also, they began to suffer unsustainable rates of casualties in launching coastal raids.
In a turnabout in strategy the Portuguese began to prioritize diplomacy and trade with the better organized societies they were encountering. Elmina was not the first place that this happened, but Elmina became an extraordinarily important site in the transition to modernity for a variety of reasons, and in a negotiation between local rulers and the Portuguese saw the construction of the first fortified European outpost in the tropics. Through the trade in gold there, Elmina soon went on to become the source of perhaps as much as a quarter of Portugal’s entire crown revenue in the next two to three decades. Well into the 1600s, Portugal’s strategy in West and Central Africa was based on diplomacy and trade, and indeed for much of this time the trade in enslaved human beings was much less important than the trade in gold and in other goods.
The most impressive diplomacy of all was established during this era with the remarkably sophisticated Kingdom of Kongo, which underwent a very rapid and entirely voluntary adoption of Christianity and of Portuguese as the language of the court. Kongo sent many of the children of its elite to schools in Europe. In some cases, Kongolese worked in Portugal in high government positions. It had priests ordained by the Vatican, including an archbishop. And Kongo eventually sent diplomats as far afield as Brazil.
Victoria Brittain: Could you say more about how these highly developed African relations with Europe developed, and saw Portugal transformed by African wealth? In particular tell us about your discoveries of the Kingdom of Kongo and its Christian kings and their letters to King Joao 111 of Portugal in 1526 revealing the clash of values over slavery and materialism.
Howard W. French: The relationship between Kongo and Portugal eventually broke down over the issue of slavery. Kongo had initially been willing to sell enslaved Africans to the Portuguese and others. In their conception, and according to their law, commerce in slaves was meant to be limited to captives from other societies against which the Kongolese fought wars, or in some cases, Kongolese criminals. With the conversion of Brazil into a chattel plantation society in the 1500s, though, Portuguese demand for enslaved Africans rapidly grew in intensity, and Portuguese traders in Central Africa began setting themselves up in local markets to pay for captives among the Kongolese themselves. This led to the extraordinary exchange of correspondence between the sovereigns of Kongo and Portugal in which the ruler of Kongo, Afonso wrote to his counterpart in Lisbon King Joao, asking that he stop this illegal trade.
Here is an extract from that letter:
And this harm come to us at such cost that the said merchants take our countrymen the sons of our land and the sons of our noblemen every day, as well as our vassals and parents, because the thieves and men of bad conscience captivate them with a desire to have the things and goods of this Kingdom of which they are greedy, they seize and sell them in such a way, Sir, that because of this corruption and licentiousness, our land is being all but depopulated, which would not be good to you not to your service, Your Highness. And to avoid all of this in our Kingdom we don’t need more priest [or] more people to teach in our schools, nor even more goods, except for wine and flour for the holy sacrament, because what we ask of Your Highness is to help and favor us in this matter by telling your factors to not bring merchants or goods here, because our will is that in this Kingdom there be no slave trade nor [any] outlet for it.
Victoria Brittain: Elmina was again a key site in the story when in 1637 the Dutch seized the fort, defeating Portugal, and it became a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. Can you describe the magnitude of that transformation for the continent?
Howard W. French: An important thing to understand about the mass commerce into bondage of human beings across the Atlantic that we speak of in a telegraphic and somewhat sanitized way as the slave trade is that it took root at different times in different places in Africa. The coast of present-day Ghana, where Elmina is, was not an early site of mass human trafficking. Well before Ghana became a leading source of enslaved peoples who were put to work in the prison labour camps of the New World that we sanitize by calling them “plantations”, Upper Guinea, meaning coastal Guinea, Guinea Bissau and surrounding areas, Central Africa and parts of the Nigerian coast had been the leading sources of captives.
Naval wars “badly overlooked”
Elmina and the Ghana coast came to the fore in the latter half of the 17th century, during a period of great intensification of the traffic in human beings from Africa. Not by coincidence, this period, this coincides with the moment when England (subsequently Britain) became the leading European slave trading power. Between 1660 and 1713, a time of rapid overall growth in European shipments of the enslaved to the New World, England alone trafficked 560,000 Africans into western slavery. Historians have called the 13 year period within this time span, from 1700 to 1713 the “Slave Rush”, because of its special intensity. During this time alone, 119,552 captives were shipped to prison labour camps from Elmina and other trafficking centers on the Gold Coast (Ghana) to grow sugar and other commodities in the Americas.
Victoria Brittain: Could you outline the scope of the naval wars of Portugal, Holland, France, Spain and Britain for three centuries in competition for slaves? And also describe how European leaders and traders enthusiastically followed the pattern of slave plantations of sugar set by Portugal in tiny Sao Tome and extended the system to the Caribbean and as far as Brazil.
Howard W. French: These wars fall into three different categories, all badly overlooked in the standard accounts we have of the making of the modern world. The first of these has been almost entirely unknown except among a small circle of historians in recent times, and that involves the struggle between Portugal and Spain over control of the enormous gold trade that Portugal established at Elmina (in present-day Ghana) after 1471. Once the Spanish learned of the extent of Portugal’s new trade in gold, they immediately set out to seize control of it. This culminated in 1478 in the first major intra-European naval battle outside the waters of Europe, when Isabella’s Spain (Castille) sent a convoy of 35 ships to lay claim to the Elmina trade. Taking advantage of intelligence reports, however, a smaller but heavily armed Portuguese squadron lay in ambush for the Spanish along the West African coast and defeated their rivals decisively.
The second type of warfare worth considering here was a gigantic contest that unfolded between the Dutch and the unified crowns of Spain and Portugal for what amounted to control of the entire South Atlantic, and along with it control of the immensely lucrative sugar industry of Brazil, and of the trade in enslaved Africans that powered it. The Dutch and Spanish fought a seesaw battle for control of Brazil between 1580 and 1640, and one of the most intriguing chapters in this struggle involved an alliance between the Dutch and Kingdom of Kongo, which was proposed by the latter in 1623, in order to evict the hated Portuguese from Central Africa and end Lisbon’s high-volume trade in human beings from that region.
“Kongo had a keen state of awareness of the intricacies of European politics”
My book includes many examples of Africa’s so-called agency in shaping world history, but this is one of the most impressive in my opinion. Kongo had a keen state of awareness of the intricacies of European politics and the capacity to mount an extraordinary diplomatic gambit pitting one European power against another. Unfortunately for Kongo, when Portugal recovered its independence from Spain, the Dutch suddenly changed course, no longer feeling the need to work with Kongo to fight Lisbon as a way of weakening Spain. What is even worse is that the Dutch themselves steadily became bigger players in the Atlantic slave trade.
The final example involves the Caribbean, where the record shows extraordinarily large deployments of ships by Britain, France and also Spain for control of the lucrative plantation colonies. In just one of three deployments, led by the admiral Edward Vernon in 1741, Britain lost 22,000 men to yellow fever and malaria, and despite such casualty rates, which exclude combat, Britain and France continually invested enormously in naval warfare in the Caribbean. This is historically interesting for many reasons, not least that a great deal of ink and academic energy was expended in the West in attempts to refute the arguments first advanced by the Trinidadian scholar and statesman, Eric Williams, in the 1930s that the wealth of the West Indies both from sugar and from the slave trade itself was of primary economic importance to Europe in this age. Decades of fevered denialism ensued, and no one has ever offered a convincing argument for why the leading powers of Europe were willing to expend so much blood and treasure for control of the Caribbean in this age for any other reason than immense profit. Another great intellectual from the Caribbean, C.L.R. James, of course, identified the true motivation when he wrote in his book The Black Jacobins that Saint Domingue (Hispaniola) alone, which later became Haiti, a country freed by the victorious uprising of enslaved people in 1804, had once supplied two-thirds of France’s entire overseas trade.
Victoria Brittain: Can you estimate the numbers of African slaves – those transported, and those who died at sea? Can you tally also those killed in Africa in the intra-tribal wars you describe, as encouraged by the Dutch, and by the trading patterns which included guns for Africans?
Howard W. French: Twelve and half million enslaved Africans were landed alive at ports in the so-called New World over the long duration of Europe’s long commerce in Africans. Estimates of casualties prior to landing in slave markets vary widely. Somewhere between 15 and 25percent of the enslaved people who were shipped died at sea before reaching the Americas. Many more died in the holding pens, or barracoons, as they were called, where captive Africans were detained along the coast prior to being embarked on slaving vessels.
“The violence stoked by this business reached deep into the continent”
Another enormous, but ultimately impossible to precisely determine, number of people died on African soil in the warfare and chaos that the Europeans deliberately stoked in Africa by using guns and access to prestige goods to pit one group against another in order to keep the human pipeline full. The violence and insecurity stoked by this business reached deep into the continent, and huge numbers of people disappeared mysteriously, having been seized by slave bounty hunters in the interior. The historian Joseph Miller attempted to estimate the toll in this way, saying that in the region of Central Africa, for example, the hypothetically average farming village would lose between one and two of its twenty or so young men to kidnappers in the course of each agricultural cycle. Almost no family or small circle of acquaintances was spared.
Victoria Brittain: The slave numbers are so immense it is hard to relate to them, but you give stories which invite the reader’s imagination to really engage. Could you give us a flavour?
Howard W. French: In 1627, the English ship named the William and John, bearing the men who would become the first permanent European settlers on the island of Barbados—and men who would grow immensely rich as pioneers in the sugar business there—attacked a Portuguese-flagged vessel they encountered while en route to Barbados. During this attack they seized ten Africans, whom the Portuguese had probably brought from Angola for sale into the New World trade in slaves. I’ve often thought about the terror and puzzlement that these African captives must have experienced. They would become the first enslaved Africans on Barbados, an island that generated more wealth for England through the production of sugar on the industrial prison camps that we prettify by calling them plantations, than Spain obtained from all of the silver and gold their galleons carted across the ocean from Bolivia and Mexico. In trying to imagine what must have been going through their minds, I write that the Africans seized by the English from the Portuguese that day were almost certainly at sea for the first time in their lives. They would have had no understanding of why they had been trafficked and placed in chains, where they were going, what kind of fate awaited them at their unknown destination, or why two different tribes of white people had fought such a vicious battle at sea for control of them. Many millions more, of course, would follow them in this terrifying passage into the unknown, their stories forever lost.
Victoria Brittain: Resistance, can you talk about this? You write about many kinds of resistance in different places and different eras, including ones, like suicide, which I knew nothing of. Resistance seems missing, minimised or erased as a key theme through the history of slavery –until Haiti, the richest colony in history, and site of a successful revolution. Can you talk about that too?
Howard W. French: One of the most insidious and pervasive ideas about slavery is that many Black people were content with their condition. These notions were perpetuated by slave owners, writers and intellectuals in every European imperial power that engaged in the slave trade and the plantation agriculture that it spawned. This isn’t a matter of the distant past, either. As recently as 1989, Daniel Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress in the US wrote a high school history textbook in which he said that many enslaved people were happy with their station in life. The fact is that Africans resisted enslavement at every phase of the trade, from those who fought, fled or rebelled against their capture on Africa soil, to those who rose up in shipboard revolts or committed suicide at sea, or conspired and mounted countless uprisings in New World prison labour camps, or resisted in other ways, from running away to simply slackening their efforts in the field.
Victoria Brittain: You refer to early Pan-Africanism in relation to creole ideology in Haiti and the revolts on the southern US plantations of tobacco and cotton –could you expand on that thought?
Howard W. French: Pan Africanism was born of enslavement and revolt. In my book, I call the first major act of Pan Africanism a revolt which took place against enslavement by Europeans on the island of Sao Tome, even before the trans Atlantic slave trade was established. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in their midst, starting in fifteenth century, nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa did Africans have any kind of abstract or synthetic notion of themselves as Africans. A notion like that had no meaning in a cultural landscape where everyone, friend or foe, relative or stranger, was Black. Only slowly and very gradually did the violence of the slave trade begin to create a consciousness of race as we understand it today.
Labour camps, “first crucible” of Pan Africanism
The first true and deep commonly held sense of Africanness and indeed, as I argue, of Pan Africanism, arose in the crucible of the prison labour camp, when Black people from varied horizons and different language groups came together to plot the overthrow of the Europeans who controlled them. Haiti is, of course, the most famous instance of this. The Africans brought there by France to be worked to death overcame their disparate origins in various parts of Africa and the Caribbean to defeat the three greatest imperial powers of the age in pursuit of their freedom, Spain, England and France, successively. I call the enslaved people in Saint Domingue (Haiti) of that era Africans, because the typical life expectancy of someone who was landed on the island in chains to grow sugar or coffee was a mere 5-7 years. This means that the Black people who defeated Europe’s armies were still culturally African. As people brought there from Angola, Kongo, Ghana and Nigeria, their victory was a Pan African victory.
Victoria Brittain: In many parts of the book you have written of strategies of dehumanising Africans in the terrible norms of slave owning, of the demographic assault on the Continent, and also of cultural norms broken and trust between people destroyed. Can you talk about these profound issues?
Howard W. French: There is no doubt that Africans participated on African soil in the slave trade. This simple fact is often wielded as a facile exculpatory argument for those who would like to diminish the moral horror that attaches to the foundation of the West. By the West, to be precise, I mean Western Europe and the Americas, whose economic viability and mise en valeur were solidly and inescapably premised on the rank dehumanization and exploitation of millions of people on the basis of their race.
Let us be clear, as my book argues, there would have been no West, and no European divergence from other parts of the world in terms of wealth and power without the violent expropriation of African labour on an immense scale. How big? Prior to 1820, four times more people were brought across the Atlantic from Africa than from Europe.
It must also be said that the institution of slavery as practiced by Africans was very different from the model perpetrated upon Africans by Europeans. It was, of course, not race based. It was not perpetual and trans-generational, as enslavement always was in the New World. It seldom involved grinding the life out of people, meaning working them to death. These are among the dehumanizing hallmarks of what is known as chattel slavery. The focus on intra-African slavery was typically on the rapid assimilation of people captured in war against rival societies.
“war makes gold scarce, but negroes plenty”
In order to ensure a steady supply of slaves from Africa, the Europeans quickly settled upon tactics that were aimed at perpetuating conflict between Africans cloth, alcohol, guns. The Dutch, for example, had a saying that went “war makes gold scarce, but negroes plenty”. This reflects the rapidly shifting economic emphasis of Europeans along the West African coast in the early 17th century, when commerce in human beings from Africa became more lucrative than an earlier commerce in gold. Sowing conflict and disorder in the region became a key strategy for sustaining a high volume of captives and displaced people who could be sold into the so-called slave trade. I argue that this had profound lasting effects on Africa itself, breaking down homegrown political institutions, distorting and ultimately destroying local economies, and finally, undermining social trust among Africans in ways that some social scientists I quote from feel still can be measured now.
One must also somehow reckon with the sheer demographic impact of this commerce in African human beings, the so-called slaves. Africa probably lost between 20-30 millions peoples to this trade. Only 12.5 million are known to have been landed on the shores of the New World, but the remainder, far less readily accounted for, would have died in the violence chaos stoked by the trade, or perished at sea. The numbers should be measured against the 100-million estimated population of the continent as a whole in the 18th century, which was the peak period of this human trafficking.
Victoria Brittain: To move away from the book for a moment: you’ve been teaching journalism for 15 years at Colombia school of Journalism in New York. How do you feel about the current world of journalism your students are entering?
Howard W. French: Journalism as an industry has been engaged in a chaotic and uncertain period of reinvention for over a decade now. The most important thing I can say quickly is that the media is far more democratic than it was in the old print-only days, when the number of publications was far fewer and their circulations were much more limited. Power was very concentrated in that era. The breadth of the industry is far greater now. The barriers to entry are far lower, both for those who seek to publish and those who seek to write. On the other hand, it is far harder to make a living, either as a publisher, or as a reporter or writer publishing one’s work on the web.
Victoria Brittain: Lastly, your book seems a perfect fit for the zeitgeist of the moment, especially among a young generation in the West and very widely in the global South. Are you optimistic that the long Western erasure of slavery and its immense consequences through the centuries into today, is finally meeting the challenges which will deeply affect our societies’ understanding of the past? An end to erasure?
Howard W. French: My book grows out of life experience in the fullest sense, involving both family history and the pathways of my careers, which gave me the opportunity to get to know so much of the Atlantic World up close. I started reading for the purposes of this book a decade ago. So, in most ways, the landing of Born in Blackness into this particular zeitgeist is a coincidence. Having said that, I think that the field of debate, discussion and education about the past is really opening up to what were once called in ungainly fashion subaltern perspectives. Social changes like these move in waves, with each big move forward prompting a backlash. We are experiencing that now in the United States and in Europe to a significant extent.
In my country of birth that means having state legislatures, for example, ban books from schools that purvey what these conservative politicians consider to be perspectives that deconstruct conventional narratives about how the United States took shape and became affluent and powerful. These politicians are particularly eager to silence voices that look critically at race, and specifically at the exploitation and suppression of people brought here from Africa, as well as their descendants. I have confidence, though, that efforts like mine to reckon much more fully with this history will be taken up by others, and that the project to construct a less hagiographic, or put slightly differently, a more accurate and inclusive story of our origins, will continue.
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