I would be the first one to agree with you, Damani, about the horrors of slavery in the Americas, and the comparatively humane nature of slavery as it was generally practiced in various African societies. I think it would be naive, however, to suggest that African slavery was so mild and compassionate that it didn’t deserve the name of slavery.

My expertise is not in traditional forms of slavery in African societies. I have focused most of my attention on slavery in New England. But I think there are useful parallels between the two situations.

People have often assumed that slavery in New England was mild and humane, compared with slavery in the American South. They have had no basis for doing so, but that didn’t stop the myth from spreading and being taken as absolute truth. In fact, however, New England slavery was in many ways as brutal as southern slavery, and where conditions were, in some ways, not as harsh, they were still remarkably inhumane.

Everything I have read about African slavery suggests that it varied widely across time and place, rarely reaching the level of inhumane efficiency of slavery in the New World, but with ample cruelties in evidence in the historical record.

You ask for sources about the cruelties of African slavery. You might look, for instance, at James Searing’s “West African slavery and Atlantic commerce: the Senegal River Valley, 1700-1860,” in which he describes the horrors of slave raids and the violence endured by slaves in West Africa. Daniel Mannix wrote extensively about the nature of slavery in the trading societies of Africa, documenting large populations of people born into slavery and treated as chattel, to be owned, bought and sold. Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, meanwhile, have shown that while the transatlantic slave trade vastly changed the extent of slave trading in West Africa, it merely amplified existing features of indigenous slavery, including commodification.

(Again, I’m not arguing that slavery in Africa and the Americas was similar, or that the two systems were morally equivalent. This is purely about whether African slavery was so different that African societies can’t be viewed as having any responsibility for enslaving and selling their fellow human beings, because they couldn’t have suspected that they would be treated inappropriately.)

So I think the question remains: what point are you driving at?

If you are suggesting that the transatlantic slave trade brought millions of people into a worse form of slavery than was known in Africa, then you haven’t received any disagreement from me, or from Professor Gates.

If, however, you’re suggesting that African societies shouldn’t be viewed as complicit in the slave trade because they couldn’t have suspected just how bad conditions were for those transported across the Middle Passage … well, then I’m stumped.

You have rejected one argument that Professor Gates offered, that knowledge of conditions for slaves in the Americas did filter back to African trading societies. You’ve indicated that you’re skeptical, and I can certainly respect that. Gates was only able to make that point briefly on the op-ed page, but he did cite several specifics, such as an incident as early as 1604, in which a prominent official from Kongo clearly obtained first-hand knowledge of slavery in Brazil.

However, I don’t believe we can dismiss African complicity simply by questioning the knowledge of these societies about conditions in the Americas. African societies engaged in the slave trade most certainly did know what slavery was, even if conditions varied from society to society and continent to continent. They were used to holding human beings in bondage and, in many cases, treating them as chattel. Moreover, they are the ones who enslaved those destined for the Middle Passage, often force-marching them across long distances, treating them with cruelty, and selling them into appalling conditions at European slave forts in plain sight of Africans.

If some Africans did not have a full understanding of what was happening to slaves in the Americas, that may well affect their degree of responsibility for what was happening. The same can be said for, let’s say, those in New England, or elsewhere in the United States, in the antebellum period. American citizens profited handsomely from southern slavery, and yet they may have been ignorant of conditions for slaves in the South. Does this make them less complicit than southern plantation owners and foremen? I could agree with that. Does it mean they weren’t complicit at all? I would say not, since they knew that people were being exploited as slaves for their economic well-being, and they took advantage of that fact, without seeking to know more about what that enslavement involved.

A negro man who says his name is Josiah, that he belongs to Mr. John Martin, living in Louisiana, twenty miles below Natchez. Josiah is five feet eight inches high, heavy built, copper colour; his back very much scarred with the whip, and branded on the thigh and hips in three or four places thus:’J.M.’ The rim of his right ear has been bitten or cut off. He is about 31 years of age.
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- (4) St. Louis Gazette (6th November, 1845)

A wealthy man here had a boy named Reuben, almost white, whom he caused to be branded in the face with the words; ‘A slave for life.’
Were they crippled to prevent them from running away?
- http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=16&categoryName=Physical%20Punishment,%20Rebellion,%20Running%20Away&theRecord=25&recordCount=87
Were children “sold” away from their parents?
Were they worked from ‘can’t see’ to ‘can’t see’?
- From the South Carolina Slave Code, Section XLIV: 15 hours in 24 hours, from the 25th day of March to the 25th day of September,…14 hours in 24 hours, from the 25th day of September to the 25th day of March;
- To strip me naked – to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence. My mistress often robbed me too of the hours that belong to sleep. She used to sit up very late, frequently even until morning; and I had then to stand at a bench and wash during the greater part of the night, or pick wool and cotton; and often I have dropped down overcome by sleep and fatigue, till roused from a state of stupor by the whip, and forced to start up to my tasks. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
Were they beaten badly, sometimes on a whim?
- http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=16&categoryName=Physical%20Punishment,%20Rebellion,%20Running%20Away&theRecord=38&recordCount=87
- Mr. Gooch had a female slave about eighteen years old, who also had been a domestic slave, and through not being able to fulfill her task, had run away; which slave he was at this time punishing for that offence. On the third day, he chained me to this female slave, with a large chain of 40 lbs. weight round the neck. It was most harrowing to my feelings thus to be chained to a young female slave, for whom I would rather have suffered a hundred lashes than she should have been thus treated. He kept me chained to her during the week, and repeatedly flogged us both while thus chained together, and forced us to keep up with the other slaves, although retarded by the heavy weight of the log-chain.

A large farmer, Colonel M’Quiller, in Cashaw County, South Carolina, was in the habit of driving nails into a hogshead so as to leave the point of the nail just protruding in the inside of the cask. Into this he used to put his slaves for punishment, and roll them down a very long and steep hill. I have heard from several slaves, though I had no means of ascertaining the truth of the statement, that in this way he killed six or seven of his slaves. This plan was first adopted by a Mr. Perry, who lived on the Catarba River, and has since been adopted by several planters.
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You tell me, James, am I uninformed about the cruelties dealt to slaves in traditional African societies? If so, sources, please.

There is a common argument against using the term “slave,” however. As a result, many of us make a conscious effort to use terms like “enslaved person,” instead, or at least to vary our language.

The argument is that using the noun “slave” is dehumanizing, suggesting that being a slave is what a person is, and perhaps that it is their natural condition. Using a descriptor like “enslaved,” on the other hand, suggests that enslavement is merely a condition in which some people found themselves, only part of who they were as human beings, and implies that they are not born slaves, but rather have been enslaved by someone.