The Read: Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Black Atlantic

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

Before I get started on Bennett’s book, an aside: I had meant to finally write about Marlon James’ novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf but I just could not figure out what to say about it. I’ve never been more stumped about my own reaction to a book: I was very drawn into it and wanted it to work, and yet I was also repelled by it and found it often very unpleasant. I went looking for reviews to see what others had made of it, and the writer and critic Amar El-Mohtar summed up my own feelings perfectly, so much so that I felt I had nothing else to say.

So onward to African Kings and Black Slaves.

Why did I get this book?

The scholarly literature on West and Central Africa in the development of the early Atlantic world (between about 1350 and 1600 CE), as well as during the period from about 700 CE to 1300 CE that preceded that time, has improved so dramatically from when I began my scholarly career. There was a time where in terms of assigning work on that early period that was good for my undergraduates (e.g., both accessible and discussable), I had to stick to Nehemia Levtzion, Walter Rodney’s book on the Upper Slave Coast, and George E. Brooks’ Landlords and Strangers and a handful of journal articles. Now I have a really rich choice of compelling readings that are shaping some interesting historiographical debates for the future. Bennett’s is one of the latest books I’ve picked up within this literature.

Is it what I thought it was?

Actually, not entirely. That’s not a problem exactly but it goes off in a direction I didn’t expect.

What continuing uses might I have for it?

Still weighing whether to slot it in to a syllabus for this fall. It has some very interesting things to say about West African elites in the early development of the slave trade, but I think it might take too much time in a survey class to read it with sufficient detailed attention. (France Ntloedibe has a good review in the African Historical Review that matches Bennett up with recent work by Colleen Kriger and Finn Fuglestad that would make for a good two weeks of reading in an upper-level undergraduate course focused on the the historiography surrounding African participation in the Atlantic slave trade.)

It’s certainly helpful to me as I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my class.

Chapter 1, “Liberalism”, also provided me with an immensely useful reading of the role of agency in debates over Africans in the Atlantic world, with a very sharp critique of John Thornton’s work in particular. I’m reworking my own introduction to a manuscript right now to make use of Bennett’s argument.

Also to my surprise, Chapter Two weighs heavily conceptually on research I’m working on right now that is focused on the Cold War era.

Quotes

“The European story that liberal writers like Helps crafted still enjoys a dominant role in how subsequent scholars configure the history of slavery and, by implication, Europe’s relationship to Africa and Africans. The resulting idea of Europe frames the history of slavery so thoroughly that any engagement with the African past exists in a dialectic relationship with prevailing representation of Europe.”

“The Europe that frames the history of these encounters [in the early Atlantic world] is the ascendant, if not hegemonic, Europe of the late eighteenth century simply projected onto an earlier setting.”

“Intent on vindicating the African past—an impulse prompted by liberal historiography—Thornton ascribed Africans agency while illustrating little awareness as to why Rodney, as a critic of liberalism, assumed as much. Africa and Africans positions all Africans—not solely the elites, rulers, despots and tyrants—as agents of the slave trade. In bestowing agency onto Africans rather than assuming its existence, Thornton crafted a simplified African past for American consumption…By insinuating liberal causality and an ill-defined African agency, Thornton flattened a layered political history, which Rodney had built around elites, power, political authority, and sovereignty.”

“This book highlights the staging of lordship, the ceremonies and pomp expressive of early modern practices of sovereignty, in which Africans figured. Here the mystery of power, authority, and rule resided in rituals and rites. Generally overlooked in secular conceptions of power (state as opposed to sovereign power) that since the eighteenth century, have framed representations of the African-European encounter, the scholars that do focus on these rituals and rites generally reduce them to cultural traditions.”

Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints

It’s not surprising given Bennett’s previous work on Africans in Mexico that he takes a keen interest in re-situating early Spanish imperialism into the context of West Africa—of making West Africa site within Spanish envisionings of empire.

That thought opens up a bit of what I found surprising and at times slightly confounding in the book. It begins with a very sharp and on-point critique of the moves made by Thornton and other scholars to “restore agency” to Africans in the context of the making of the Atlantic world and similarly with an argument that early Atlantic Africa is habitually read by historians through the lens of an Anglocentric and 18th Century context, rather than in terms of contact between Iberians and a very particular set of coastal and hinterland African polities that was in many respects nothing like the 18th Century context that dominates the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade. I completely agree with both points, and on the latter, Bennett is part of a fast-emerging new historiographical consensus that also includes the work of Toby Green (and draws on George Brooks’ earlier monographs as well).

But I was also struggling to fully process Bennett’s thinking about the way Europe’s historiography overshadows this early period. His riposte to Thornton is basically two-fold: first, that Thornton doesn’t differentiate (as Walter Rodney did) between the participation of West and Central African political elites in early Atlantic trade, including in slaves, and a more generalized “African agency”. Second, that Thornton’s move keeps us from a more specified, contextual anatomization of the interactions between Iberian and West African sociopolitical structures in shaping the early Atlantic.

That seems right, but Bennett then doesn’t do what I expected him to do, which is to try and give the reader some sense of the historical specificity and trajectory of the West African societies involved in early Atlantic encounters, to try and get those societies out of the shadows cast by European narratives and conceptual frameworks. What I think he does instead is to insist that the 18th Century context that liberal historiographies use to interpret the slave trade misses the degree to which Iberians conceptualized West African elites and rulers as “equal sovereigns” within the Iberian understanding of 15th Century sovereignty.

That too I am convinced of, but much of the rest of the book is largely an exegesis of how things looked to the Spanish and the Portuguese, not to various diverse West Africans (both diverse in terms of the range of languages, cultures and major sociopolitical structures and in terms of relative social status within their own societies). Which is, I think, what a historian like Thornton was trying to get away from with his own insistence on “African agency”—that in order to understand African societies and actors in the making of the African world, some effort had to be made to ask “and how did they conceptualize themselves? How did they see Europeans? What did they think ‘slavery’ was?”

I took Bennett to heading towards trying to answer those questions in a different way, closer to Rodney’s work, but he really doesn’t. In fact, it seems to me that by Chapter Five, he’s indirectly arguing that the Iberian framing of African elites as equal sovereigns had been accepted by and incorporated into fairly plastic and accommodating visions of power held by those elites. That’s not necessarily wrong but it feels like there’s some missing steps. (Ntloedibe’s review, I think, makes a similar point about Bennett’s book.)

The missing steps I think are made pretty well in Toby Green’s book on the early Atlantic slave trade, where he backs up a long ways and spends considerable time fleshing out Rodney’s arguments about the “Mane invasions”, Brooks’ “landlord-stranger” relations and about Senegambia prior to early Portuguese contact. It’s a bit odd, given the possible convergences and reinforcing thoughts, that Bennett only cites Green once, in an odd footnote that characterizes his book as an example of “postcolonial thought”.

But I end up convinced nevertheless, as I am by other recent work in this area of specialization, that a modern Anglophone historian like myself is just fundamentally not positioned to understand early Atlantic Africa well at all—that to do it right involves knowing far more about early modern Europe period and Iberia in particular.

Bennett doesn’t address this point, but this last thought also reinforces my growing sense that even the 18th Century into the early 19th Century is due for a major historiographical revision. The disastrous violence of the Atlantic slave trade in that era and the ways in which the theology and ideology of white supremacy tried to deploy the history of Atlantic Africa as its alibi and shield against liberalism and abolitionism has meant that we have often blurred our understanding of the specificity of participation in and resistance to the Atlantic slave trade at its height. In particular, I’m struck that we project the knowing ignorance of late-19th Century European imperialists about African societies backward into the Atlantic slave trade, whereas I think the story from the early period described by Bennett into the early 19th Century is of Europeans who knew quite a lot about coastal and immediately hinterland West African societies—at least all the things that needed to be known to carry out trade and negotiations. The invention of Africa as “blank darkness” by Europeans was not status quo ignorance; it was an aggressive process of erasing existing knowledge in order to reinvent Africans as “primitive subjects” with no history.

The other thing about Bennett that I do like which is shared in a lot of the most recent work (again, going back to Rodney and Brooks) is the way that it suggests a comprehensive realignment of the moral discourse around causality and blame. Not “Africans did it to themselves” or “Europeans did it to entirely passive and innocent African victims”, but elites, rulers, lords, merchants, nobles did it to the people they enslaved—a process which was a major source of racial hierarchy in the present, which has had generalized consequences.. That has continuing value in the present as a conceptual frame, particularly in reference to reparations, apologies, and understandings of responsibility.