The Black Roots of Slavery

Michael P. Tremoglie

FrontPageMagazine.com | June 7, 2001

"SO WE REALLY can't blame the Europeans--we sold ourselves, " said the African-American tourist to his African guide.

"It takes two," replied the guide. "Greed! Money!"

"Greed," echoed the tourist.

This conversation was from a 1998 episode of The History Channel concerning the African slave trade.

The common version of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the version taught in school and popularized by the TV miniseries Roots is not true. This version had Europeans invading inland Africa, capturing Africans, enslaving them and spiriting them off to the Americas. This version is more fiction than fact--a fact well known by many African-Americans. I recall a magazine article, written some years ago by an African journalist, in which he tells of members of black organizations in Harlem inveighing against the Africans who enslaved them.

Rarely, if ever, did Europeans travel to the African inland. Maps from the period indicate that Europeans knew nothing of the African interior. Before the trans-Atlantic trade, there was a thriving trans-Saharan slave trade. Slave trading was an entrenched institution in Africa, well before the arrival of the Europeans. This I learned from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Of course none of this will be found in the mainstream media or in Hollywood. What you will find is the leftist anti-American version, which portrays slavery as an invention of white Europeans who invade Africa and abscond with slaves. However, the African slave trade more resembled a Venetian trading expedition than a Viking raid.

The slave trade was an economic partnership initially between Arabs and Africans. It was later the Europeans entered the market. There is documentary evidence to indicate that the relationship between the African slave sellers and their European customers was quite collegial. Even to the extent that the offspring of African sellers were taken to England and America to be educated there and returned home.

The slave trade with the Europeans was so profitable for African nations that when Britain abolished the trade in 1807, many African nations protested. The Chief of the Ashanti nation wanted to know "if the slave trade was so good before why is it so bad now?"

African women also were involved in the business. One, Fenda Lawrence, operated a slave trading business on an island in the Gambia River. She later traveled to the colony of Georgia with an affidavit according her the rights of a free person.

There were many free blacks in the American colonies. They were enfranchised and as early as 1641, Mathias De Sousa, were elected to legislatures. These free blacks owned slaves--some for philanthropic reasons, as Carter G. Woodson suggests. However as John Hope Franklin wrote, "...free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."

The census of 1830 lists 965 free black slave owners in Louisiana, owning 4,206 slaves. The state of South Carolina, lists 464 free blacks owning 2,715 slaves. How ironic it is that so many blacks owned so many slaves in South Carolina. Yet, no one seemed to mention this during the flag controversy.

Some blacks served in the Confederate army, which is another omission in our popular culture. The movie Glory did not happen to mention that blacks served in the Confederate army. It did give the impression that the black soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts were former slaves-- which was not true.

Unfortunately the average American is unaware of these historical facts. Yet despite leftist academicians the true history is being told--mostly by African and African-American political leaders, historians, and journalists.

In 1998, President Clinton visited Uganda and offered an apology to Africans for slavery. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni replied, " African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today."

Just within the past few months African Director Roger Ngoan M'Bala, from Cote d 'Ivoire, made a movie Adanggaman that delves into the origin of the African
slave trade. The movie seems to be shown everywhere except the United States. Predictably M'Bala is being criticized as absolving whites from guilt. What M'Bala is really doing is revealing that there is enough guilt to go around for everybody.

Before Congress votes for reparations let them vote when all the facts are known-not just the facts that those politicians, lawyers, and " community activists " who exploit the issue for their own personal gain want known.