Since moving back to Atlanta, I finially had the chance to check out the Africa Channel. It has quickly become one of my favorites because I really love learning about other cultures.

This weekend featured a short documentary that talked a little bit about children who live out on the street in South Africa. As you would expect, the stories were very heart-gripping. Kids as young as 12 talked about how sniffing glue often helped ease some of the pain of living a life that consisted of prostitution, crime, poverty, parent abuse, etc.

I think what troubled me the most wasn’t just the messed up lives of these children, but how this White filmmaker proceed to link what was going on in the lives of these kids to what Europeans did to that country many decades ago. Now don’t get me wrong, the way Europeans ravaged that country and its indigenous cultures is just beyond excusable. But there was just something in me that just became fed up with this consistent one-sided portrayal of both the origins of slavery and its effects on the people of African decent. Even here in America, we only hear about the White contribution to the institution of slavery when in reality, it only made up a fraction of the global slave trade that had been going on way before Whites entered the African continent. Whites did in fact play an active role in the slave trade, and there is no escaping that historical fact. But to edit history in a way that practically erases the entire truth about slavery is not only dishonesty, but plain self-deception.

Historian Sheldon M. Stern has written several times about the complete history of the African slave trade. Here is just an excerpt of one of his articles.

However, confronting the history of the Atlantic slave trade requires more than a sentence acknowledging that the Amistad prisoners “had been captured in Africa by Africans who sold them to European slave traders.” Website readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been, as affirmed by the PBS Africans in America series, a joint venture: “During this era, Africans and Europeans stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit. Kings exchanged respectful letters across color lines and addressed each other as colleagues. Natives of the two continents were tied into a common economy.”

Incomplete depictions of the Atlantic slave trade are, in fact, quite common. My 2003 study of 49 state U.S. history standards revealed that not one of these guides to classroom content even mentioned the key role of Africans in supplying the Atlantic slave trade In Africa itself, however, the slave trade is remembered quite differently. Nigerians, for example, explicitly teach about their own role in the trade:

Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.

In Ghana, politician and educator Samuel Sulemana Fuseini has acknowledged that his Asante ancestors accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves. Likewise, Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has written: “I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.”

Stern later quotes Ivory Coast film director Roger Gnoan M’bala, who created a film (Adanggaman) whose theme centered around how Africans sold each other into slavery.

“It’s up to us…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.”

One more excerpt from the article.

“Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans “never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the sea”—still chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captors—before they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader. The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or “instantly beheaded” by the African traders “in sight of the [slave ship] captain” if they could not be sold. Of course, the even more horrific and inhuman middle passage—the voyage of a European (and later American) slave ship from Africa to the Western Hemisphere—still lay before those who had survived the forced trek to the coast.

The first video below is an 11 minute presentation that provides the historical account of the global African slave trade. In this clip, you will hear the host mentioning “the film”. The film he is referring to is Adanggaman. The trailer for that movie is the second clip.

It’s Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

This is the movie he kept referring to.

Adanggaman trailer from Fabrica on Vimeo.

I think the reason why I personally have become adamant about the full telling of the African slave trade is because I want to dispel this widely accepted myth that the African people were so weak that Europeans were able to simply march in and take over with little resistance. The African continent was known for its military strength. The Zulus and Ashanti (for example) proved to be formidable foes against invading European armies. As Black Americans, we oftentimes boast on the historical strength of the African people. But it seems that we are oftentimes quick to minimize that historical fact by telling and retelling an abbreviated account of the African slave trade. Ultimately, it was greed that broke the backbone of the African continent. Greed from non-African countries and powerful African rulers that sold their own to them.