Video on the Africans Who Sold Africans into Slavery

This comes from the SOE TV channel on YouTube. It’s a series of potted biographies of various African slavers though two of them were actually of mixed African-Portuguese extraction. Among them are King Guezo of Dahomey and Efunroye Tinobu, the notorious Nigerian female slaver who has a square and statue erected to her. The first person shown in the video, however, is an African prince, who was sent to Britain for his education in the 18th century. During the journey to the West Indies, however, he was enslaved, but word was managed to be passed to his father, who arranged for him to be freed and come to Britain. Once here, he studied in libraries before taking up slaving himself. To us in the 21st century, it’s almost incomprehensible how someone, who had been enslaved themselves, could go on to inflict this on others. But it was part, unfortunately, of the common mindset of slave societies. From the ancient world to the 19th century, slavery was so much a part of the contemporary cultural mindset that even those enslaved themselves saw nothing wrong with the institution. They just hated the fact that they personally were enslaved. The British colonial authorities at Sierra Leone several times had to launch searches to arrest ‘liberated Africans’, that is, former slaves who had been freed by the British navy and transported to the colony, who had seized other Africans to sell into slavery further south. I’m putting this up because, apart from being an important part of the slave trade, it’s an aspect I feel is being played down in order to put the blame for slavery solely on White Europeans and Americans.

Trailer for Historical Epic about African Queen and Her Female Warriors’ Resistance to European Conquest

I found this video for the forthcoming movie, The Woman King on YouTube yesterday. It seems to be about an African queen who trains her people and sets up an army of female warriors to fight back against the Europeans conquering Africa. I have a feeling that it might be based on real African history. There have been powerful queens, including one who seized power and ruled as a king. And the king of Dahomey had a regiment of female warriors, the famous amazons. There, I think, the relation to real history ends.

This film appears to be set in the 18th century from the European’s style of dress. The Europeans weren’t conquering and colonising Africa at this point in history. They couldn’t. Before the discovery of quinine as a treatment for malaria, Europeans were prevented from travelling further inland by the coastal swamps. Africa was also seen as too distant to be valuable as a colonial possession. There was some colonisation, such as by the Portuguese in what is now Mozambique and by the Dutch on the Cape of Good Hope, but that was about it. Sierra Leone was established by the Spanish, but later in the 18th century the British acquired it as a colony for freed slaves. But mostly Europeans were confined to ghetto-like enclaves in African towns and prevented from going any further into the continent and conquering it by powerful African kingdoms. Europeans wanted slaves and other African goods, like ivory, but they got these through trade with the Africans themselves. By and large Europeans didn’t go raiding for slaves. African chiefs, like King Guezo of Dahomey and others did. As for the amazons, they were also involved in slave raiding. A Black female historian, who presented a programme on them on the Beeb, said that the amazons couldn’t be regarded as feminist heroines. But this doesn’t seem to have stopped the makers of this movie.

This clearly follows the pattern set by Marvel’s Black Panther, which was about a Black superhero fighting for Black rights and against his evil rivals. This character was the king of the technologically advanced African kingdom of Wakanda. It was a piece of Afrofuturism, Black SF. Critically acclaimed and a success at the box office, this seems to have encouraged film makers to look for similar material. In this movie’s case, they found it in African history.

This is the type of film and TV production that annoys Simon Webb of History Debunked, who posts videos about the way such films and TV programmes falsify history to promote Blacks. He doesn’t seem to have noticed this one yet, but no doubt he will. But Hollywood and the media generally aren’t factually accurate. The constraints of writing a dramatic narrative work against that, whatever genre you’re pursuing. And so many of the great folk heroes celebrated in song, literature, film and TV series were in real life brutal thugs. A good example is Dick Turpin, who was actually a nasty piece of work far removed from the gallant, romantic hero of the myth. Will the film be a success? I don’t know. It’ll be popular in Africa, certainly, and among some Black Americans, but it might be too woke for a mainstream western audience. Only time will tell.

Radio 4 Programme Next Thursday on the Repatriation of Looted Museum Exhibits Following Black Lives Matter

The Radio Times also states that next Thursday on Radio 4 at 11.30 am there’s a documentary on the debate about the repatriation of looted African artefacts now on display in British museums. The blurb for it on page 125 of the Radio Times runs

In the wake of protesters in Bristol pulling down a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, Gary Younge talks to museum curators as they review what is on display.

There’s an additional piece by Simon O’Hagan on the previous page, 124, which adds

Museums might be closed, but curators are keeping busy reassessing what they have on display – minds focused by the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June. In the words of one curator, “in Britain you’re never more than 150 miles rom a looted African object.”

Presented by Gary Younge, who discovers that when the public is re-admitted to museums after lockdown, there is a distinct possibility that some display cases may have notable absences.

The debate over the return of looted and seized objects to indigenous communities around the world has been going on for several decades. Much of it is about the display of human remains. A few years ago a series about the British Museum showed that august institution repatriating a set of indigenous Australian burials to Tasmanian people from which they were seized. It’s not just African and indigenous peoples demanding that their ancestors and their property should be returned. The Greeks have famously been demanding the return of the Elgin Marbles for decades, if not since they very moment Lord Elgin collected them in the 19th century. In very many cases, I don’t doubt that the moral argument is with those demanding their return, and that it’s the right thing to do.

The mention of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol adds a dimension that complicates the issue. The repatriation of these objects is supposed to be about modern, western museums correcting the moral injustices of an imperial past. But many of the looted objects themselves are the products of slaving societies, and were seized by British forces during wars fought to extirpate the slave trade.

The Benin Bronzes are case in point. These are superbly sculpted bronze heads, which were made as part of shrines to the chief’s oba. Literally meaning ‘right arm’, the word also denotes his spiritual power, rather like the numa of the pagan Roman emperors. However, Benin, then Dahomey, was a major centre of the African slave trade. It had a plantation economy centred on cotton production like the American Deep South, and was a major exporter. So much so that the British launched a war against them from 1850 to 1852 after their king, Guezo, refused to give it up and continued trading. The bronzes were seized by the victorious British forces.

Nobody was talking about their repatriation until the 1980s, when ‘African radical’ and the highly controversial leader of Brent council, Bernie Grant, demanded their return. I’ve no doubt that Grant was motivated by genuine indignation about the humiliation of an African nation by the British empire. But there is an irony here in that such a very outspoken opponent of anti-Black racism should have been seeking to return objects that had been taken as part of military action against an African slave state. And one that had absolutely no qualms, and grew rich, from enslaving the ancestors of Black Brits, West Indians and Americans like Grant.

Ditto with some of the objects that may have been returned to Ethiopia. A year or so ago the I reported that a particularly holy cross belonging to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which had been seized by the British army in the 19th century, had also been repatriated to its country of origin. I wondered if the relic had also been looted in a similar campaign launched in that century to stop Abyssinian slave-raiding across the border into Sudan and what is now Kenya. If so, then it could be argued that it should not be repatriated, as it was a legitimate spoil in a war the British were justified in waging.

And let’s not be under any illusion that the African slaving nations wouldn’t also have enslaved the British servicemen they fought. One of the documents I found cataloguing the materials on slavery in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol was a parliamentary blue book on the British action against the African slavers in Lagos. One of the chiefs involved stated that if he won, he was going to shave the head of the British commander and make him carry his palanquin. Which sounds very much like a declaration that he intended to enslave him.

I think the area of the repatriation of objects looted from Africa is much more complicated morally than is being discussed and presented, and that African involvement in and culpability for the slave trade is being quietly glossed over in order to present a cosy, straightforward narrative of imperial aggression and guilt.