The Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão first made contact with the Kingdom of Kongo in west central Africa in 1483. Over the next few years, as diplomatic relations were established, Kongo nobles were brought back to Portugal for conversion to Christianity, then returned to their country. The Portuguese quickly came to depend on the kingdom for a large portion of their slave trade, and the Kongo elite sent envoys to the Vatican and numerous students to European capitals. After an initial period of remarkably equal exchanges, however, conflict arose over Portuguese efforts to undercut rules in Kongo aimed at limiting what was fast becoming a bottomless demand for slaves. In 1526, amid a series of written entreaties to Lisbon to respect these rules, Afonso, the ruler of Kongo, composed a striking complaint to his Portuguese counterpart: [...]
The disaster that the unbridled slave trade inflicted on Kongo is emblematic of slavery’s effects on the economic and political development of Africa as a whole. From the earliest times, the scarcest resource of African kingdoms had been people. Population growth in Africa was severely depressed compared to other parts of the world because of the many life-shortening diseases and parasites that were endemic to its tropical climate. Beyond Africa’s historic challenge of underpopulation, its vastness made it difficult for kingdoms to get people to settle in one place, especially against their will. Africans had always practiced slavery among themselves, but slaves were usually war captives and the victors typically sought to absorb them quickly, through marriage, military service, or the manumission of their children. Without such assimilation the risk of flight or rebellion was too great.
As the demand for bonded African labor skyrocketed in the early eighteenth century, European traders sold firearms in large numbers to well-organized African states like Dahomey and Oyo, transforming them into single-product economies, i.e., mass slave exporters. These powerful kingdoms, typically situated near the coast, mounted seasonal razzia, or raiding campaigns, initially against weaker neighboring peoples but eventually far inland. This turned much of tropical Africa into what the Yale political scientist James C. Scott has called “shatter zones”—inhospitable places where fragmented groups fled the predations of the more powerful: the remotest swamplands of today’s Central African Republic, the inaccessible buttes of Mali, and many other semidesert and forest zones. Economists like William Easterly and Nathan Nunn have argued that there is a strong correlation, even 150 years later, between areas where razzia were most intense and contemporary African poverty levels, a correlation they attribute in part to the persistence of social mistrust, which limits trade and undermines the development of a business culture. [...]
James does not practice outright denialism about European behavior in Africa. But at almost every significant turn in his account, which spans the five centuries from early modern European contacts with the continent to its decolonization beginning in the 1950s, he tends to downplay its ill effects on Africa and wonders aloud why, as he sees it, non-Europeans don’t get held up for comparable scrutiny. Wherever possible, he emphasizes principled motives, particularly as a way of distinguishing the actions of the British from those of their European counterparts. In doing so, he puts the reader in mind of other writers, for instance popularizers of United States history, who likewise emphasize past virtue and decry more critical assessments as unwarranted self-flagellation.[...]
It is certainly true that Western notions about the innate inferiority of Africans were used to justify both enslavement and colonization. But this sort of justification, in addition to being inadequate—deeming a people “inferior” does not provide the grounds for enslaving or murdering them—is based on a false premise, underexplored by James and many other historians. A more curious observer might have also noted that the monumental architecture of the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs gave no pause to Europeans and their designs of conquest. Early on, in any case, European explorers did encounter impressive signs of African achievement, from large and tidy cities to sublime art. They found precolonial African states that dominated entire subregions, controlled lucrative trade routes, and maintained elaborate structures of government. To take but one example, for six hundred years sophisticated kingdoms had succeeded one another astride the Niger River in the region of present-day Mali.
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