The Read: Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I have always appreciated French’s reporting from sub-Saharan Africa (which is a pretty unusual feeling about mainstream American reportage if you’re an Africanist). More importantly, I wanted to evaluate this book for possible use in my West African survey course.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It’s a very able, accessible synthesis of the existing historiography, including recent work by Toby Green, Michael Gomez and other historians.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m still mulling over whether to use it for the course. I think if I do, what I’m going to do with it is use it as the first pass on the arc of the course (which covers West Africa from about 700 CE to 1800 CE, focusing substantially on the transformations of the region from its incorporation into an Atlantic world) and then go back and work with the more detailed or specific historiography. The last time I taught it, I used Toby Green’s Fistful of Shells as the major text and that worked somewhat well, but it might help a lot to have French instead as the source of a top-level narrative that primes students to read the more detailed scholarship and to see how this history matters into the present.
Quotes
“The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of ‘darkest’ West Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the coastline of West Africa.”
“It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”
“As much as this book is a story of classical military struggle for control of the richest plantation lands and the most prolific sources of slaves, and of the economic miracles they produced at different stages of this history, is is also an account of another kind of conflict altogether, both unconventional and ceaseless: a war on Blacks themselves. It is one that very conservatively speaking continued at least until the end of Jim Crow in America, where this book concludes. This involved the consistent pursuit of strategies to beat Africans into submission, enslave one another, to recruit Blacks as proxies and auxiliaries, whether to secure territories from native populations of the New World or joust with European rivals in the Americas. To say this is not to deprive Africans of agency, a question that will be taken up at length in these pages.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
French can’t quite get away from making Africa important in the rise of the modern world via Europe and to some extent from a European perspective. I understand what he’s doing—the book is extremely openly addressed to the common curricular presentation of world history and European history found in secondary education in the United States and sometimes even now in introductory global or European surveys of the early modern era. He’s trying to correct much of what Americans know about Africa in relationship to the rise of the West. But this does mean that what West African societies were to each other before 1500 or so becomes a somewhat vestigal issue. It also means to some extent that French doesn’t fully even do what Toby Green and other scholars have been trying to do to resituate the first century or so of relations between Portugal and Senegambia as a somewhat different kind of interaction than what followed with a very different kind of distribution of relative power between all the interacting parties—despite French’s nod to “African agency” in the introduction, even in the early part of the book he’s got Portugal as an agentive, intentional actor whose tactics from the outset aim for a progressively more and more coherent kind of domination over African trading partners. He definitely works to trouble that interpretation, clearly influenced by Green (who French cites in his acknowledgements as having been a great help during the writing of the book) but the effort is inconsistently successful. I don’t think that’s on French alone: I think we’re all struggling to talk about the disjunctures between the first century of Atlantic Africa and the 1700s in a way that also acknowledges the continuities. There’s a few chapters in the first third of the book that are really effective in communicating where the synthesis is at—for example, acknowledging the immediate shift in Portuguese thinking as actual rather than imagined contacts with West African societies required treating those societies as relative peers—but I think somehow it doesn’t end up creating an overall revision that amounts to an African- or diasporically-centered history. Deep down, this is still a story of “imposition-response”, where Europe acts and Africans are acted upon. Maybe that’s simply because that’s the way it was, but I feel as if there’s some other longue-duree synthesis that might aim for a different target, perhaps one that radically resituates the way that African societies matter from the perspective of the present away from whether they contributed to the making of modernity. On some level, I really hate that as the yardstick of value—there should be (and are) ways to say “this history matters” even when you’re talking about places that really can’t be said to be centrally important to the creation of global modernity (in any sense of that vexed word).
Another way that the book seems like an interesting marker of historiographical transition is how it tries to integrate West and Central African history with the history of Atlantic societies more generally—something that a wide range of scholars like Randy Sparks, Ana Lucia Araujo, Michael Gomez, and others have been working at steadily in new ways in the last decade. I think it’s mostly successful in this, and it’s a sign of how the historiography has moved along from an era where Americanists and Africanists operated in isolation from one another, separated by the high walls of Cold War area studies and by the dominant influence of a generation of Anglo-American white scholars. It’s my major misgiving about using the book in my course, though, which shows you that some of the geographic boundaries still structure our work as scholars and teachers; e.g., I feel the compulsion to get my students to pay attention to West Africa for and of itself rather than West Africa as an object of distant, cursory and vaguely hortatory attention that is imagined mostly as a background to understanding the African diaspora, which is the way that I sometimes think African history gets envisioned within some Black Studies frameworks. I’m just afraid that if we start off a West Africa survey with a book where a fair number of chapters are focused substantially on the Americas, we’ll reproduce that kind of conversation, but on the other hand, French’s book doesn’t read coherently if you just skip those chapters.
On the other hand, I would be happy to have a single-book synthesis that fits Kongo into the picture, because over the years I’ve trimmed that out of previous versions of the survey simply because doing Kongo justice at the same length as Oyo, Igbo/Calabar, Asante/Fante , Mali, Songhay, Dahomey and Senegambia just feels too difficult—I don’t have enough weeks.
French does a terrific job in effectively and consistently explaining to his audience why this history matters and in underlining his own astonishment that it hasn’t mattered more to general knowledge about the modern world. “How is it that this story has gone for so long being so seldom examined or told?”, he asks about Portugal’s early acquisition of gold and other valuable commodities from West African trading partners.
There’s a very clear chapter-length explanation of “wealth in persons” as different from “wealth in things”, a key concept that I often struggle to communicate effectively to my students.
On balance, I think I’m likely to go ahead with a plan to use the book as a two-week entry point to the rest of the course and then spend the subsequent weeks tracking back into more detailed scholarship and primary material to cover some of this history a second time. I’m grateful to French for writing it, and I really hope it has an impact on secondary school history and introductory college-level surveys in those states in the US where teaching anything but happy-happy white people are great! history is still allowed. The states where the White Curtain is coming down and the Ministries of Truth are busy churning out propaganda for history courses aren’t going to be affected by this kind of synthesis, obviously, but there’s nothing that anybody could write that could single-handedly get through that wall.