Putting Africa at center stage
Review of Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World by Howard W. French
Howard W. French wishes to correct the impression, as popularly taught, that Africa was a backwater, an obstacle on the way to Asia, or was so underdeveloped that it was there to be exploited by Europeans. To do so, he sets out to prove that slavery was instrumental in the birth of “modernity”, a perspective that is slowly gaining recognition in academia and popular narratives. More broadly, his book is a call to recognize the contribution of black culture to western civilization.
According to French, the story begins before the Portuguese created the slave trade. There were, he informs us, a number of rich civilizations in western Africa, one of which (the Mossi) was systematically mining gold for trade. It was the search for this gold, he argues, that was the original impulse for the Portuguese to explore the coast – not the spice trade. The reason for this was that, in the century after the Black Death, Europe had been struggling under shortages of both currency and manpower, inhibiting economic recovery. Once the Mossi’s gold was discovered, the Portuguese quickly moved in to trade for it. In the process, they also realized that the slavery trade was extremely lucrative, at first for laborers in Europe.
Beyond domestic workers, the Portuguese and Spanish were radically experimenting with farming models. They did so by depopulating the Canary and São Tomé Islands, then importing slaves to work on large-scale sugar farms. This represented the beginnings of the plantation system, in which slaves were forced to clear the land and then cultivate sugar cane. The work was so brutal and dehumanizing that the life expectancy of a plantation slave was 5-7 years. The sugar trade proved so incredibly profitable that it spurred the development of similar plantations in the Caribbean and in South America, with the North America soon following.
Needless to say, this created an incredible demand for slaves, requiring a complete reorganization of the African societies that would supply them. Judging the random kidnapping of people inefficient and dangerous, the Portuguese allied themselves with African chiefs and then marauding groups to traffic in the human commodity. Eventually, up to 12 million slaves made it alive to the new world and Europe, while up to 8 million died on the way. This means that up to 1/5 of the total population of Africa were directly taken into the slave trade, perhaps more.
French goes into great detail about how destructive this process was to the fabric of indigenous societies, some of which had previously converted to Catholicism. He finds the civilizing myth – the White Man’s Burden– as laughable as it is insulting. What colonization did, he argues, was to strangle local cultures and would eventually leave artificial states that were ill suited to development and independence.
That being said, French explains how the riches generated by the Atlantic trade routes were crucial to the development of the global economy, generating capital surpluses unprecedented in human history. The slave, he argues, was the key to all of this: it was their labor that produced the sugar and later cotton, hence slavery was integral, the sine qua non, to the appearance of modernism at this time.
This is the first big point that French wanted to get across and he does so effectively. Having researched economic history, this accords very precisely with my opinions as based on the evidence: slavery was the basic building block of early modern capitalism. In all probability, without slavery, capital for investment would not have accumulated in sufficient quantity for decades, if not centuries, for the industrial revolution to take place. We would not be where we are without it.
The rest of the book is about the consequences of slavery. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a mishmash, lamenting the violence and cruelty as well as presenting the many accomplishments of African Americans (military manpower that tipped the balance in the Civil War, then blues, jazz, etc.). I do not take issue with any of these notions, of course. The problem is that the book loses shape and focus after his principal point is made.
There are other problems with the book. French never defines what he means by modernism, but seems to assume that it has a lot of do with economic development. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I would have liked more. In addition, the tone of the book often devolves into having an ax to grind, i.e. he wants to tout the importance of Africa to the world as we know it today, almost like a laundry list. I fully agree with him, but the book presents many of its details in scattershot, indeed often I wondered why he was including that details that he chose.
Nonetheless, at its best, this is a wonderfully stimulating read. I have added about 10 books to my reading list. French offers a perspective of remarkable erudition, going in many directions that I plan to explore in further research. This is the best measure of a book’s success.
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