|
Books by Clarence J. Munford
Production relations, class and Black liberation: A
Marxist perspective in Afro-American studies
(1978)
The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the
French West Indies 1625-1715
(1991)
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996)
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality
(2003)
* * * *
*
Atlantic
Slave Traffic
An Uneven Development of African Societies
By Clarence J. Munford The slave-selling political formation
accentuated the uneven development of African societies, and
uneven development, in turn, was a fillip for the Atlantic slave
traffic. Hierarchically organized societies preponderated over
less hierarchical commonweals in battlefield discipline and
tactics. This superiority enabled slave-catching polities to
invade and regularly prune nearby "slave raiding
warrens" inhabited by weaker, less socially-divided tribes.
The swap of human beings for firearms triggered an arms race,
stimulating the formation of yet more slave-selling states. The
character of warfare changed as victory came to mean a
successful manhunt.
 |
By ca. 1700 both kinship and the coastal
political economy had been restructured to facilitate large
scale export of captives. A huge victimized periphery took shape
in the middle of the continent, peopled with loosely organized
groups, vulnerable to attack and abduction. The sale of human
beings consolidated the social domination of aristocrats,
widening the gap between the rulers and the ruled. This was
mainly because a deliberate European policy of selection was at
work. The white customers dealt only through the local elites,
ensuring the latter a near-monopoly of European trade
commodities, particularly of the means of repression--firearms. |
For generations now publicists and the visual
media have felt the need to downplay the African ravages of the
Atlantic Slave Trade. The longest lasting genocide in the annals
of modern history has been sadly minimized. In immolating
Africa, the slave trade was a main means by which the capitalist
mode of production was implanted in the Western
Hemisphere.
|
Forcibly integrated as a slave labor
reserve in the new internationalist capitalist colonial
system, the Black continent was forced to pay a kind of
surtax in blood which weakened political structures as a
prologue to the coming imperialist conquest of the
nineteenth century. The drain began the fateful lag in
socioeconomic development that is the legacy of African
countries today. Organic development of the continent
was disrupted.
The Atlantic Slave Trade generated a huge parasitical
infrastructure. The trade's pattern skewed the family
profile, sundered kinship relations, crippled monogamous
customs, dramatized upper-class polygyny, strengthened
patriarchy, and lowered the status of women in society.
It even confused the demographic picture. The
captive-selling deformation exacerbated existing class
and pre-class antagonisms. Slaving concentrated wealth
(of sorts) at one pole in Africa, and poverty and
servitude at the other. By the mid-seventeenth century
slaving had become the prime causal factor of political
life along the western shoreline. |
 |
The political gap between Europe and Africa
widened to the latter's disadvantage. Customary law and its
administration were systematically corrupted to make enslavement
the penalty for nearly every offense. Warfare to take
commodity-prisoners became a primary socioeconomic category of
African political economy. The homeland of the Black man fell
prey to an every-man-for-himself psychosis. Inevitably the level
of civilization and culture declined. In the end, the
deportation of common people by the ruling classes, and the
resistance of the victims, became pre-colonial Africa's foremost
expression of social conflict.
During the Middle Passage itself, the trauma
entailed racial discrimination as the ultimate indignity of
deportation and enslavement in the New World. The African was
transformed into a thing and depersonalized by stigmatizing the
color of African skin. In answer, the urge to rebel was
internalized by the mass of captives and nurtured collectively during the Middle Passage.
Along the littoral, farm produce and
handicraft were diverted to victual slave ships, generating a
pre-colonial "spin-off economy" of sorts. Afloat, the
slaving vessel was a charnel house cum torture chamber cum
brothel. Systematic rape occurred on every slaver carrying
African female captives. On a slave ship the African woman was a
mere object of copulation. The lack of hygiene bred disease.
Middle Passage conditions also fostered the sadism of captains and crews who
derived pathological pleasure from extreme cruelty to Africans.
Source: Dr. Munford's series -- TO CHANGE
OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD * * * *
*
updated 12 April
2008 |
