Sunday, May 25, 2014

Blacks In the Slave Trade: It's Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

History News Network reports on black people involved in the slave trade:
A year later, Senegal’s president Abdoulaye Wade, “himself the descendant of generations of slave-owning [and slave-trading] African kings,” urged Europeans, Americans, and Africans to acknowledge publicly and teach openly about their shared responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade. Wade’s remarks came months after the release of Adanggaman, by Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M’bala, “the first African film to look at African involvement in the slave trade with the West.” “It’s up to us,” M’Bala insisted, “to talk about slavery, open the wounds of what we’ve always hidden and stop being puerile when we put responsibility on others . . . . In our own oral tradition, slavery is left out purposefully because Africans are ashamed when we confront slavery. Let’s wake up and look at ourselves through our own image.” “It is simply true,” declared Da Bourdia Leon of Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Culture and Art, “We need this kind of film to show our children this part of our history, that it happened among us. Although I feel sad, I think it is good that this kind of thing is being told today.”

Several television productions of the last decade have acknowledged these facts: Africans in America (PBS, 1998), Wonders of the African World (PBS, 1999), and The African Trade (History Channel International, 2000). The latter begins with the visit by a group of African-Americans to the infamous slave castle and Door of No Return on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. “Appalled by the cruelties of the Europeans,” the narrator relates, “the visitors become curious as to how Africans fell into their hands.” Their African guide admits that “this history is difficult to tell and hard to believe” but pulls no punches about African complicity in kidnapping and selling millions of African people: “All the tribes were involved in the slave trade—no exemptions.” The African-Americans were staggered: “So we really can’t blame the Europeans,” one declares, “We sold our own. It takes two.” Another visitor declares, “That’s right—money and greed.” The program concludes that “white guilt can never be erased”—but cautions that it is also important to remember that “black participation lets no one off the hook.”

Just a reminder to those who think only white people were involved in slavery.