Born in Blackness|Howard W. French

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Just exactly how did pre-colonial Africa develop the world is the question Howard W. French sets out to answer in Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, a captivating, revelatory read that dismantles widely but erroneously held beliefs about the continent's relevance and influence prior to the arrival of Europeans and thereafter.

Drawing on observations gathered during personal trips, academic research and historical analyses, the academic and former New York Times' journalist asserts the unremarked and erased contributions Africa made to the world through trade, diplomatic missions and slave labour. For instance, he cites the ancient surviving city of Djenné in present-day Mali as one of many societies that flourished "hundreds of years before Arabs swept into North Africa in the 7th century" by trading commodities with its continental contemporaries, Timbuktu and Gao, as well as with China during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE to 220 CE) and Mediterranean Europe, as artifacts purport.

In the tenth century, an Arab geographer and chronicler described the extensive commerce between Berbers of North Africa and the Ghana Empire, whose emergence and prosperity rested vastly on its massive gold reserves and strategic control over trade routes. Fame of its wealth spread across North Africa, Mediterranean Europe and Yemen, earning the empire the nickname "country of gold." What's more, Arabia forged coins with gold derived from Sudan Africa, the region stretching from Ethiopia to the Atlantic Ocean, simplifying commerce in the region thanks to the near-unified currency, the gold dinar.

By the 13th century, rich city states and empires began expanding their sights towards the Atlantic in search of new trading routes and partners. For instance, the Mali Empire, an offshoot of the defeated Ghana Empire, strove to avoid its predecessor's fate by limiting its dependence on the Berber traders who acted as middlemen for its gold. With this view in mind, Mali's 14th century ruler, Abu Bakr II, set sail with 3,000 boats laden with men, gold and provision, never to return. His successor, Mansa Musa, would continue this quest on land in the opposite direction towards Egypt, where his lavish gifts of gold to peasants and royalty depreciated the price of the metal for a decade and inadvertently earned him and his realm a spot on Europe's medieval maps decades later. Musa's epoch-making pilgrimage to Mecca via Egypt set in motion Europe's search for "the source of West Africa's wealth in gold," with Portugal leading the charge. 

Summing up the intricacies and importance of Africa's gold to Europe's economy, French quotes a French historian, "Since the thirteenth century, the Magreb evidently played the role of the gold mine without which commerce in the Mediterranean and in the rich and powerful Levant would have ground to a halt, or at least been jeopardized."

During Mali's decline at the turn of the fourteenth century, mints across Europe closed down or halted production due to shortage of gold, causing a tectonic disruption that forced England to revert to trading by barter. It also didn't help that Europe suffered regular balance of payment issues stemming from limited demand for its goods in wealthier trade centres in Asia. Portugal's salt, wine and fish, for instance, encompassed the bulk of its exported products.

But all that would change with European incursion into Africa, starting with Portugal's capturing of the gold trading post of Ceuta in North Africa. Upon realising the terminal brought them no closer to controlling the trade, they ventured south of the continent. Meanwhile, rivalling Spain conquered the Canary Islands, which presaged Europe's grotesque empire building mission that manifested in the form of plantations, slavery, genocide, forced religious conversion and settler colonialism across the globe.

Visiting the Canary Islands, French notes the complete erasure of Spain's violent annexation and barbaric annihilation of its original inhabitants, writing: "Once Europeans had fully conquered the islands, the Canarian population and culture were wiped out with a rare thoroughness, a grim event that remains little recognized, least of all, I discovered, in the popular museum to [Christopher] Columbus."

Also unrecognised are the many battles fought by Canarians against European colonisers, a history unmentioned and unheralded much like the Haitian revolution against French rule that transpired three centuries after Canarians lost their war with the Spanish. 

Failing to snatch the Canary Islands from Spain, Portugal conquered the islands of Azores and Madeira. The latter became a lucrative sugar plantation, producing 70 tons of the sweet condiment per year with the help of slaves from the Canaries. What's more, Madeira's lush forests provided cheap wood to build ships used for launching slave raids along the coast of northwestern Africa.

“Once Europeans had fully conquered the islands, the Canarian population and culture were wiped out with a rare thoroughness, a grim event that remains little recognized, least of all, I discovered, in the popular museum to Columbus.”

On the back of cheap, abundant slave labour and rising demand for sugar, Portugal's moribund economy roared to life with the opening of new industries, a momentous fortune that would befall the British and French thanks to Barbados and Haiti, their respective sugar plantations in the Caribbean tended by enslaved Africans stolen from their homeland.  

"[Sugar] paved the way for caffeine-containing beverages like coffee [...] and tea… The availability of hot, sweetened, stimulating drinks gave birth to the first coffee shop, which opened its doors in Oxford in 1650."

With the opening of coffee shops across London, the recently invented newspaper found a home, heralding the civil engagement and critical thinking that characterised Europe's Enlightenment era.

While Portugal's quest for gold eventually brought it to the Gold Coast (present day Ghana), where it built the Elmina fort as a temporary storage area for the metal before transportation by sea, it was sugar that prodded its tentacles farther along Africa's coast in search of slaves to work on sugar plantations in Africa and, later, Brazil, Portugal's prized jewel. (Slaves transported to the Gold Coast from Angola and the Kongo augmented production in the gold mines there.)

"Framed in its simplest," French writes, "gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history's greatest human tolls."

Commerce with Africans pushed Portugal to open new trade routes in Northern Europe and Asia in search of coveted products, and proceeded as thus: Gold from the Gold Coast financed fabric, brasswares, guns and other goods imported by Portugal from India and beyond, which Africans coveted and purchased with gold, civet organs, pepper, human beings among other resources. Soon the law of demand and supply preferenced cheap labour, leading to rising regional instability wrought by frequent slave raids. To be sure, the ease with which Europeans carted human cargo from the kingdoms of Angola, Kongo, Dahomey, Benin, and the Bight of Biafra would have been impossible without assistance from Africans, whom French aptly describes as acting no different from Europeans who sold other Europeans as slaves despite sharing the same complexion.

"White-Arab and white-on-white slavery (mostly involving Slavs, a name that shares an obvious common root with the word "slave") had survived in Italy, southern France, and Iberia into the sixteenth century."

However, whatever similarities and differences that existed between both African and European slavery expanded broadly on the premise of skin pigmentation and laid the foundation for modern racism.

For a while, the kingdom of Kongo welcomed Portugal, sending noblemen to the country on what could be described as a cultural exchange. So close were the kingdoms that King Nzinga a Nkuwu addressed his Portuguese counterpart as "brother" in their correspondence. Notably, Kongo's elite's adoption of the Portuguese language resulted in one of the few written records of an African nation's pre-colonial history narrated by its own citizens.

“Framed in its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.”

Other instances of African agency holding the fort in their dealings with Europeans include Benin's shuttering its slave market due to loss of interest in Portuguese goods, and the decision of the Akan of the Gold Coast to buy back gold as reserve currency, making them a net importer of the metal.

Incidentally, enslaved Africans resisted their captivity in various forms, revolting at sea, escaping on land and forming protective communities as in the case of the maroons of Sao Tomé, Brazil and Jamaica, or taking their lives, an act of defiance that discouraged Europeans from seeking out slaves from Igboland. And despite the brutal clampdowns that followed, slave uprisings occasionally erupted across the New World.

The insatiable appetite for cheap labour, matched only by the hunger for profit, birthed new processes of increasing business bottom lines. On the island of Barbados, hard-nosed capitalism got its first peek in the curtailment of social services including food and clothing in a bid to cut costs, and in the strict emphasis on worker productivity boosted by the lash of the whip. In addition, chattel slavery led to new innovations in finance, where banks, financiers and regular individuals looking to turn a handsome profit began providing credit to planters to build bigger plantations and purchase equipment, with slaves leveraged as collateral against loans.

French buttresses this argument with a quote from American scholar W.E.B Du Bois' The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America in which he wrote, "It was black labor that established the modern world commerce which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves and was the primary cause of the prosperity of the first great commercial cities of our day."

Though history conveniently downplays and denies the far-reaching ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade on world affairs such as Haiti's indirect role in facilitating America's purchase of Louisiana from a defeated, cash-strapped France or its influence in ending transatlantic slavery, Born in Blackness does a compelling job of excavating this and other buried truths and deliberate omissions pertaining to Africa in piercingly clear and potently descriptive language. (Surprisingly, the book makes no mention of Belgium's King Leopold's homicidal reign over Kongo and how his parasitic exploitation of the land and its people enriched him and his kingdom.) But in weaving history with personal accounts of his visits to lands where slaves and colonisers once converged, French effectively solders centuries-old events to current affairs, revealing the continuous beckoning of the past's invisible hands to the present, be it in the demand for reparations by the formerly colonised or in the toppling of statues in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

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