March 30, 2014

Dear Sir,

I read with interest Khalid Wasi’s letter to the Editor, as recently published in your newspaper. I found the piece at once fascinating and in some ways quite sad; in that once again Mr Wasi, a black Bermudian, can hardly disguise his unbridled glee in denigrating black Bermudians under the guise of lecturing us with his brand of faux enlightenment. But it was his claim — one which conforms with the views of white supremacists I might add, both in Bermuda and beyond — that it was Africans who enslaved or sold Africans to the various European national trading entities involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that piqued my interest. This claim of course is usually asserted to absolve or at least mitigate the role that Western nations involved in the trade had in terms of responsibility for the “holocaust” which ensued during this period.

The question that arises however which is central to Mr Wasi’s view, is whether his assertion is correct or factual? Did Africans enslave Africans in the context of the aforementioned trade which existed from the 16th though to the 19th Century? Or is Mr Wasi’s assertion simplistic, essentially off base and one whose primary objective is designed to offer a false moral equivalency were none is warranted or justified in order to obviate Western culpability?

A noted African Professor of history, Dr Akurang-Parry had the following to say on the topic, and I offer it here for your reader’s consideration:

“The viewpoint that Africans enslaved Africans is obfuscating if not troubling. The deployment of ‘African’ in African history tends to coalesce into obscurantist constructions of identities that allow scholars, for instance, to subtly call into question the humanity of ‘all’ Africans. Whenever Asante rulers sold non-Asante’s into slavery, they did not construct it in terms of Africans selling fellow Africans. They saw the victims for what they were, for instance, as Akuapems, without categorising them as fellow Africans. Equally, when Christian Scandinavians and Russians sold war captives to the Islamic people of the Abbasid Empire, they didn’t think that they were placing fellow Europeans into slavery. The lazy categorising homogenises Africans and has become a part of the methodology of African history, not surprisingly, the Western media’s cottage industry on Africa has tapped into it to frame Africans in inchoate generalities allowing the media to describe local crisis in one African state as an “African” problem.

Moreover, and to reinforce what I think is the professor’s main point is that very few, if any Africans during that period considered themselves “African” or even would have noted the fact they lived on what is now known as the African continent. They were Mende or Yoruba, Songhai, Akan perhaps, but Africans? I’m afraid not.

In many respects, the concept of “Africa”, particular in its Pan-African context, which transcended tribal identities, had its genesis in large part in this hemisphere among the leaders and thinkers among the enslaved and free ancestors of people like Mr Wasi who were seeking to rebuild a sense of identity and agency when all other forms of it had been figuratively and literally stripped from them by the brutal and dehumanising conditions that they endured in these slave holding societies.

Did many of these essentially coastal kingdoms collaborate with the various Western Europeans trading powers and trade in slaves taken or captured from rival kingdoms? Undoubtedly, the answer was yes. But new evidence from indigenous sources such as that provided by Dr Akurang Parry and others are revealing the extent to which Western trading powers played — beginning with the Portuguese — in fostering the many wars for example that facilitated the procurement of slaves from the interior. It is now coming to light that the dominant role of Western trading powers in relation to the coastal kingdoms was far more insidious and determinative than current Western narratives on this issue would suggest from at least the 1700s as the balance of power continued to shift in favour of the West.

ROLFE COMMISSIONG, MP