So-Called Indigenous Slavery: West African Historiography and the Limits of Interpretation

Sara-Maria Sorentino (bio)

Abstract

This essay explores the mobilization of so-called “indigenous slavery” in the historiography of slavery in West Africa in order to expose the limits of historiographical interpretation and the tensions between black studies and African studies, which are here constituted around a shared negativity. This discussion provides some context for the debates of historians Walter Rodney and J.D. Fage, while also bringing these concerns into explicit conversation with a line of thought in radical black studies, namely Afro-pessimism. Considering indigenous slavery through the critical analytic of Afro-pessimism exposes the role of the paradigm of racial slavery in determining how slavery comes to be understood in relation to nation building in Africa, with Ghana serving as a particular example.

Had Rawlings asked, ‘Are we yet free?’ most Ghanaians would have answered with a resounding, ‘No.’ This ‘no’ resonated on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the reminder of what abolition and decolonization had failed to deliver. This ‘no’ was the language we shared, and within it resided a promise of affiliation better than that of brothers and sisters.(Hartman 172)

In an early essay, W.E.B. Du Bois provides a useful chiasmic formulation for the rebounding effect of slavery: “Instead of man-hunting being an incident of tribal wars, war became the incident of man-hunting” (254). This formulation points to an unresolved difficulty in the historiography of slavery—that of its so-called “indigenous” precursors. Did slavery in Africa exist prior to its transatlantic iteration? If so, what was its character or essence? The answer to the first question has been a resounding yes, if by existence we mean something approximating human ownership. But what that ownership means, and what its implications are for the racialized form that has become slavery’s synonym, is less than clear. Of course, apologist assumptions, extending from the slave traders and theologians of early modernity to the historiographers and ideologues of the present, excavate a prior, nearly naturalized African slavery in order to rationalize (or at least causally explain) slavery’s global expansion. In the 1960s and 70s, Walter Rodney intervened in this circular logic, repurposing and vivifying dependency theory to argue that what had been pathologized as a pervasive domestic slave trade internal to West Africa—slaving figured as an indigenous African mode of being—can be better understood as amplified, if not directly produced in its character, by the methods and metaphysics of trans-Atlantic traffic: the international demand for slaves had long wrecked the coast, moving both inward and radiating out. For Rodney, slavery was “the first stage of the colonial domination of Africa by Europeans” (West Africa 21), and it marked the initiation of a world-system overwhelmingly violent in scope.

My argument builds from and elaborates a critical black internationalist engagement with the centrality of racial slavery—an intellectual genealogy often lost to the historiography of slavery in Africa, which instead interprets Rodney’s interventions almost singularly in relation to British historian J.D. Fage. Fage is an appropriate enough foil, opposing Rodney by representing racial slavery as the continuation of an indigenous pattern of enslavement, one that, it might be added, did not radically alter the trajectory of African social-political systems. In these cross-hairs are compounded a series of assumptions pertaining to the political-economic function of slavery and the activity of its agents but that, when read with the longer theoretical-political commitments of black internationalism, trouble its general conditions of interpretation.

In reconsidering how indigenous slavery brings the past to bear on the present, this essay engages an apparent aporia between black studies, African studies, and, in a minor refrain, indigenous studies. From one angle, slavery has been subject to a disappearing trick, hidden in the folds of the colonial, decolonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial. Instead of orchestrating slavery’s reappearance, I am interested in the impact of its absence and the difficulty of its thought—its pre-conditionality. Indigenous slavery, as a problem-field, continuously resurrects a minimal kernel of doubt concerning the form and function of slavery in the political imaginary—a problem exacerbated by the apparent difficulty with discussing slavery in African studies, on the one hand, and the supposedly lopsided over-proliferation of concern with slavery in black studies, on the other. Both perspectives, paradoxically, might be marred by “a global tendency to talk away from slavery and its afterlife in the historic instance” (Sexton, “Affirmation” 101). Indigenous slavery also marks the fault where blackness delinks from indigeneity or becomes affixed to it, as racial slavery represents both a break from pre-colonial African (slaving) cultural practices and the deculturation of diasporic blackness. The opposition between Rodney and Fage—between dependency and agency, between radical breaks and constitutive causes—continues to inform the ocean of disorientation that dictates the diaspora’s origin and the disciplining difference whose currents still constitute it.

To elaborate this problematic, wherein slavery (and the political culture it supports and sustains) is rendered either ahistoric or so fundamentally new that any connection to a world before it dissolves, my reading of “indigenous slavery” is informed by Afro-pessimism, insofar as its critical analytic is interested in shoring up, from within the wake, as it were, how racial slavery produces radically new concepts of political-ontological organization: the antagonism between the human and the slave. Despite the heterodoxy of Afro-pessimist itineraries, the intervention of political ontology draws them together; slavery’s collision with race forms the passageway to the modern world and does so by generating this world’s ordering principles—its metaphysical orientation to space, time, and subjectivity. While indigenous slavery might offer itself as the prehistory of the human-slave antagonism, the (ever-receding) material that precipitated slavery as we now desire to know it, is also, I argue, a test case for the difficulty of returning to a past, mapping a geography, or unifying around a culture, especially when available methods of analysis and modes of approach are imbricated in (if not coterminous with) the trans-Atlantic trade. What P. Khalil Saucier writes of ethnography doubles for historiography: “The grammar of violence that goes unspoken in the description of ‘how’ race and racism works by ethnographers betrays its aim: to not expose the nature of race and racism, because its existence is testimony to that fact” (52–53). Afro-pessimism might be another name for the risk of exposure.

This essay represents an overture toward such exposure, staging an encounter that considers the historiography of West African slavery, in its elisions and obsessions, as a genre that invests in anti-blackness and makes durable a dissemination of slavery’s ontological traffic. If racial slavery writes itself by wresting away the possibility of native status, indigenous slavery tethers Africanity and blackness to an immemorial form of violence in order to explain its impossible cause. The role of indigenous slavery in this reversal is catalytic; it reinscribes slaving both as originary and as the historical-logical precursor to the violence of colonialism and capitalism. As a catalyst, indigenous slavery works to organize time (the contextual and ahistoric), space (diaspora and dispersal), subjectivity (agency and collusion), and (international) memory. In refracting diaspora, abolition, and reparations through a political ontological intervention, I make a case for how 1) the debates over the relative significance of indigenous slavery (a repression of a wider web of black internationalism) have presaged the form of current conversations in black studies; 2) Afro-pessimism’s conceptual resources have been articulated, in part, in the distorted influence of these debates; and 3) Afro-pessimism, far from avoiding the scene of African historiography, provides a response syncretic to political and cultural negotiations of method and meaning-making. These moves are made with close attention to the historiography of slavery in West Africa, and in Ghana more centrally, where indirect rule superseded the logic of the settler colony.

Ahistoric Time

Like the Marxist distinction between formal and real subsumption, racial slavery’s revalorization of the world accesses local avenues of discrete meaning-making (culture, ethnicity, servitude, power) and cannibalizes them in service of an emergent system of being. The pages of historiography are dotted with the remnants of slavery’s transformation. Akosua Perbi, for instance, asserts that “The European presence on the coast definitely influenced the indigenous institution of slavery” (26), citing the proliferation of war and the sale of people as well as “greater brutality and harshness” (66), and Babacar M’Baye exposes the emergence of a “unique and rigid concept of bondage” not dependent on religious conversion (608). Such sea changes are immanent to historical descriptions of slavery in Africa, but these transformations are rarely themselves thematized. Instead, the frame of time-space is given as the ground upon which indigenous (or African) slave-systems can be compared and contextualized relative to racial (or trans-Atlantic) slavery.

From this orientation, historiography charges the analytic of racial slavery with conceptual bleeding, making impossible a clear-eyed investigation of other times and spaces. Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers open their influential volume Slavery in Africa with the claim that “Any discussion of African ‘slavery’ in English is necessarily bedeviled by the fact that the word conjures up definite images in the Western mind. Anglo-Americans visualize slavery as they believed it was practised on the plantations of the Southern U.S. and the British Caribbean” (3). This conflation is especially accented, argues Frederick Cooper, in the tradition of Africanists who “regard the social norms governing slaves’ roles as cultural givens rather than as part of historical processes” (111). If the slave role is falsely given, even abstracted into an “epiphenomenon—a universal tragedy oblivious, with the exception of its volume, to historical specificity” (Bennett 47), the labor of historical reconstruction should be akin to a procedure of re-phenomenalization: to access phenomena as part of ongoing historical processes, find the particular buried in the universal, and reintegrate these granular details in their proper contexts, such that slavery as universal form would find itself elaborated by different times and spaces. Historiography, however, does not have internal tools to address how the universal slave figure remains stubbornly fixed to Africa; instead, it conceptualizes indigenous slave practices as transplanted, modified, and perfected in Africa and only later manipulated by proto-capitalists in the Mediterranean and the Americas (insofar as the invention of race is supposed to extend the already existing practice). Indigenous slavery becomes the developmental and anagogical synecdoche of slavery writ large and not, as Kopytoff and Miers worry, the other way around.

Both Rodney and Fage share the concern that the generic “slave” misleads. For Fage, indigenous slavery is bedeviled by “the indiscriminate use of the single word ‘slave’ to cover a number of social and economic conditions” (History 92). Rodney writes that early Africanist Captain R. S. Rattray himself “ended by referring to the ‘so-called “slaves,'” noting that “though perhaps the label ‘domestic slave’ is meant to express this idea, it carries with it the same associations with the Americas which the pro-slavery interests were at pains to evoke” (“African Slavery” 440). Indigenous slavery is always recovering from the charge of its “so-called” character—its actual life presumably obscured by the faulty transmission of oral histories and its retrieval limited to linguistic traces and the lingering possibility that contemporary forms of slavery are its remnant.¹

Rattray records ɔdɔnkɔ, the Akan term for “bought person,” as one of five operative categorizations of “slave” (the others being akoa “servant,” awowa “pawn,” domum “war captive,” and akyere “sacrificial person”). “Slave,” in this minor tradition in historiography, was not generalized, and chattel slavery indicated only one of a range of conditions. Although akoa “is now often somewhat loosely applied by interpreters to mean ‘slave’ in the degrading European sense,” Rattray writes, akoa “to the African mind meant originally nothing worse than that condition of voluntary and essential servitude in which every man and woman stood in relation to some other person or group” (34). In such a spectrum of dependency, the akoa had rights not unlike “the ordinary privileges of any Ashanti free man, with whom … his position did not seem to compare so unfavourably” (42). While this position, more proximate to limited servitude, has been used to excuse an originary African slavery, it also does rhetorical work to specify what, precisely, the upheaval of racial slavery represented, including inducing the conceptual generalization of slavery.

Perbi draws from Rattray’s colonial-era reading to disarticulate further how chattel slavery was not essential to those long-standing Ghanain practices in which “the slave was regarded as a human being and was entitled to certain rights and privileges” (4). These rights and privileges included the right to food, clothing, and shelter; protection from discipline and execution; and integration into new societies through marriage, adoption, and naming (112–18). Contrary to colonial-inflected doxa that continues to conflate social status with political positionality, an available reading of West African historiography expresses much more flexibility between ascribed and acquired status. Indeed, in places like south-west Ghana, slaves’ ascension to political office means that “partially unfree origins are often a preferential condition in the politics of succession” (Valsecchi 42). These alternatives open a different narrative: indigenous slavery included practices of deculturation and depoliticization but became, through strategies of incorporation, a structure of re-indigenization and affirmation of degrees of political capacity.² Racial slavery, meanwhile, indexed the total revocation of access to indigenous or political claims. How and why, then, has the generic slave been used to link practices that may be better thought as disparate?

If indigenous slavery reveals the political crisis of its category, we can understand the “false” abstractions of the slave to be the project of the present. One of Rodney’s enduring lessons is that the exposure of “writing of the type which justifies the trade in slaves … as racist bourgeois propaganda” is not merely a task for history “but of present-day liberation struggle in Africa” (How Europe 103). Fage does recognize that the position that “both slavery and trading in slaves were already deeply rooted in West African society, was of course a view propagated by the European slave-traders, especially perhaps when the morality of their business was being questioned” and he even nods to ways spectacularizing deep-rooted slavery formed “a principal moral justification for European colonization” (“Slavery” 393). Despite these concessions, Fage insists that foreign trade “across the Sahara or over the seas” should be considered “no more than a stimulus to essentially indigenous processes” (“Slaves” 289). As such, the difficult question of “how much the categories used by the European observers correspond to an African reality, and how much they owe to preconceptions derived from a common European inheritance,” does not raise to the level of challenging the fantasy of indigeneity’s links to slaveness (295). When Fage is framed as the counterpoint to Rodney, the apparent onus confronting Fage and reverberating across historiographical perspectives becomes merely that of modulating cause and effect. Absent is consideration into how the ahistorical abstraction of “slave” relayed by racial slavery makes insight into past modes of slavery tenuous at best and might itself be inextricable from the production of racial slavery.

Articulating this historiographical dilemma, Achille Mbembe argues that “the slave trade had ramifications that remain unknown to us” (On the Postcolony 13). Following Mbembe, we can discern how slavery produces the conditions of its unknowing and its reproduction. The indigeneity of slavery cultivates freedom as a geographical and racial flight from the determinations of Africa, such that “the slave trade and colonialism echoed one another with the lingering doubt of the very possibility of self-government” (13). When, for example, Ethiopia and Liberia were singled out in a 1925 memorandum from the International Labor Organization as the sole continued purveyors of slavery, the assertion was that “where European powers exercise control of the administration of the territory, the slave trade and large scale raids have diminished and have become practically impossible” (qtd. in Getachew 59). With slavery made indigenous to Africa, “black sovereignty” becomes a threat to freedom and continued domination is ideologically justified. In other words, “the charge of slavery became the idiom through which black self-government would be undermined” (Getachew 59). Blackness doesn’t just represent vulnerability to slaveness; it collides with slaveness insofar as Africa is posed as originally self-enslaving. Africa’s consignment to a negative capacity for self-determination indicates how critiques of colonialism continue to carry with them slavery’s material-symbolic mode of organization. Racial slavery realizes itself in the way it organizes the past, carrying slavery’s indigenous provenance with it to explain away its continued presence. Thinking through how indigeneity has been compressed into service of the generic slave and its attendant modes of domination (and indeed written out of Africanity altogether) opens at minimum the possibility for imagining indigeneity and freedom otherwise.

The problematic of political subjectivity, of who has access to freedom and how this access shapes not only perceptions of space and time but the materialization of space and time, indents the legacy of the Rodney-Fage debate and radiates outward in a series of methodological imperatives for the historiography of slavery. The best historians recognize that categories are both constructed and relational. Paul Lovejoy, for instance, argues that indigenous slavery is “an analytical convenience that should not be construed as an indication that African slavery developed in isolation” (“Indigenous African Slavery” 25). Although sympathetic to Rodney, Lovejoy understands him to share with Fage the conceit that both indigenous and racial slavery are “static” (26). Wrapping this criticism of stasis into one of “ahistorical” representations, Lovejoy charges that “the gap that is created in this way is in fact wider than the ocean that separated the slave institutions in their American and African settings” (27). A similar criticism has been levelled against Afro-pessimism as a “totalizing interpretation of black experience,” “bound to this historically specific context, all the while disavowing that specificity” (Kauanui 262). This critical conceit—that ahistoricism is a problem of bad intellectual practice—fails to address the materiality of the ahistoric. Despite attempts to historicize the relationship between indigenous and racial slavery, “the dialectical relationship of masters and slaves, ruling classes and kinship groups, remains ‘frozen in time'” (Cooper 10). How can we account for the seeming inevitability of this freezing?

I am not here talking of the standard story in which African historiography becomes mired in limitations of recognizable archival sources, most of which originate after the abolition of slavery. Interpretations of slavery routinely quibble over how to access and evaluate the past, but because these positions presuppose the past as metaphysical resource, even if barred or lost, they also implicitly introduce the problem that the past is not past at all, which is to say it continues into the present, as well as the more arresting insight that the past is all there is. If it is the case that enslavement in Africa is eternal, no account of history could be possible. With this auto-enslavement, African history, as such, is stalled, hypostasized. Its only value would be the use we make of it in our continued fascination with its failings. Let us not forget that this methodological problem corresponds to the racist Hegelian conceit that shapes Africa’s lack of historical movement.³ But while both traditional African historiography and Afro-pessimist theorizations have been accused of ahistoricism, this charge misses the injection of an element of ahistoricism by racial slavery into the wheels of history. Mudimbe argues that “the episteme of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … invented the concept of a static and prehistoric tradition” (189). This episteme was preconditioned with ontological significance and sustained by political practice, effecting how Africa is thought and, partially, how its systems come to be organized and its ontologies sorted. With its violent dramas of scale and abstraction, racial slavery seems to put indigenous slavery into relief. It creates the frozen master-slave structure that Afro-pessimism calls the human-slave antagonism. This antagonism, when identified and unleashed into workings of intellectual-political practice, rearticulates the historiography of slavery—and its assumptions of time, scale, and being—into a problem that actively participates in what it seeks to undo.⁴ Afro-pessimism, I argue, maintains this problem as its horizon.

The historiography of slavery’s larger frame can account for transformations in “the process of enslavement, the mechanism of slave distribution, and the role of slaves in the social formation” (Lovejoy, Transformations 281), but it cannot account for changes in methods and metaphysics and it cannot identify how racial slavery radicalizes the frame. What we will see critiqued in Afro-pessimism as “ontological absolutism” (Kauanui 263) could instead be conceived as a method of inquiry that has the advantage of recognizing the force of historical universals: the myth of slavery qua universality is one of slavery’s products. Slavery traffics in this myth; its capacity to circulate depends on it, draws its strength from it. Contending with Rodney’s assertion that “slavery as a mode of production was not present in any African society” requires an inversion of priorities: “One of the paradoxes in studying this early period of African history is that it cannot be fully comprehended without first deepening our knowledge of the world at large, and yet the true picture of the complexities of the development of man and society can only be drawn after intensive study of the long-neglected African continent” (How Europe 69). The next section tarries here—between “the world at large” and “the long-neglected continent.”

Dispersed Space

Afro-pessimism echoes Rodney’s emancipatory geography of blackness—”black struggle must be universalized wherever black people happen to be” (Rodney, “Black Scholar Interviews” 39)—insofar as it emancipates black struggle from geographical constraint without erasing geographical meaning and measure. From this perspective, black struggle engages blackness through negative space, not to be filled fully with cultural substance or transnational translations, but instead exposing the violent site where tradition breaks and culture is made to meld to being. As Frantz Fanon writes: “Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro” (173). It is in the shadow of this Fanonian formulation that Frank B. Wilderson III argues, “The Black’s moment of recognition by the Other is always already ‘Blackness,’ upon which supplements are lavished—American, Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the supplements are superfluous rather than substantive, they don’t unblacken” (“Biko” 98). Although the connection between Fanon and Wilderson has been well established,⁵ the lines that connect broader currents of black internationalism to this ostensibly newer articulation of black studies remain curiously untraced. We can consider, as a prelude to such a project, the overlap between Wilderson’s contention that “Africa has always been a big slave estate. That has been and still is the global consensus” (“‘Inside-Outside'” 9) and George Padmore’s claim that “In Africa, in America, in the West Indies, in South and Central America—to be Black is to be a slave. Despised, humiliated, denied justice and human rights in every walk of life” (qtd. in Edwards 279).⁶ What V.Y. Mudimbe has famously addressed as the “invention of Africa” is here illuminated as the abstraction of slaveness-as-blackness, indexing a meta-philosophical overlap of concerns long threading West African political consciousness with global freight.

Though this essay may be a plea to the contrary, it is true that Afro-pessimism has not been taken up directly by the historiography of slavery or by scholars in West Africa (though it has made waves in South Africa and Zimbabwe). Afro-pessimism does, however, share a namesake with a tendency much derided by African social and political theory. This other Afropessimism is an umbrella used to designate non-reflective, defeatist theoretical temperaments and policies that recycle eternal Africa images into the deadlock of a “culture of poverty.”⁷ These are discourses that, as we will see, a burgeoning Ghanaian national memory sought to avoid, discourses into which indigenous slavery sneaks as a signal flare for African pathology. Doomed by inheritance, “condemned in social theory only as the sign of a lack” (Mbembe, On the Postcolony 8), Africa becomes a place-name barred from self-determination. Insofar as developmentalism thrives on positivism, this nominal gathering of propositions reproduces the problem it identifies: as an “invented ideology” (Momoh 34), its circular reasoning condemns Africa to the pure production of its own lack. Non-regressive movement would come only from those that recognize this circuit as an untenable ideological deadlock. The negative identification and appraisal of Afro-pessimist sensibilities is meant, by contrast, to jumpstart a decided movement beyond the aporetic African recidivism that would revert to centralizing slavery-as-cause.

For Greg Thomas, contemporary Afro-pessimism is but “Afro-pessimism (2.0).” With the rebuttal that “Africa and Africans bear no naturally condemned status in this world” (284), this 2.0 is derided for its continued naturalization of African negativity. Both iterations of Afropessimism—the one named by its critics as a foreclosure at the register of policy and the other critically claimed as a political-philosophical opening—are, purportedly, invested in the same inertia. The emancipatory alternative to pessimistic reprieves would be to uncover (or simply stylize) positive performances with enough power to combat parasitic dark continent tropes. Other than mirrored names, however, the two Afro-pessimisms share no common body of literature and would be considered autonomous by most standards of disciplinary and discursive lineage. The contingency of their common denomination doesn’t mean they are wholly unrelated: both are compelled to return to lack and both ultimately have their roots in the ways Africa and enslavement are jointly apprehended, including the apprehension of an originary enslaving African culture. But unlike the policy-oriented caricatures of Africa, the Afropessimism of this focus has little interest in developmental futurity. It registers a different order of concern, which is 1) genealogical—how and why blackness became connected with lack; 2) methodological—how to approach the history of negativity; and 3) ethical-political—is negativity something to abhor or does it have its own resources? To these questions comes the speculative innovation of political ontology, in order to interrogate how blackness appears to have emerged, calcified, as negative capacity. In its most abstract terms, Wilderson writes, “slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness” (“‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World'”). Attentive to a consumptive global anti-blackness, Afro-pessimism the critical analytic shares more with the spirit that has problematized the obsession with African incapacity, insofar as it is interested in articulating the conditions of possibility for Africa’s invention. Instead of avoiding the negative, however, Afro-pessimism asks what is gained by employing it, excavating its history, sharpening its explosive and world-ending edge.

Critics turn from this opening to craft Afro-pessimism as a culprit in a double sense, arguing that it not only traffics like its nominal twin in a negative Africa but also absents Africa, in citation and substance, from the conversation altogether. Its US-centered interest, detractors note, spuriously compels it to extrapolate “the particularity of the experiences of African peoples in North America to make a universal argument” (Kauanui 262).⁸ If it is true that certain Afropessimist reading lists do not substantively include African scholarship, as Thomas claims, this does not mean that its wider referential web isn’t concerned with African or Atlantic history. It also does not follow that “there is little if any Africa to this discourse at all, its nominal Afrohyphenation notwithstanding” (Thomas 284).⁹ Beyond resonance with Padmore or Rodney, we might gesture to how Wilderson’s writing is informed by his political practice in South Africa and how Afro-pessimism’s political horizon is invested in shaping alternatives to redemptive strains of Marxism and post-colonial theory embedded in African studies’ readings of decolonial movements (including Rodney’s insistence that African slaves were captured “for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited” [How Europe 88]).

Attentive to the attachments of decolonial struggle, Wilderson speculates that if “a political movement must be built and sustained on behalf of someone who has lost something,” then “necessity may have required Black Consciousness to monumentalize the ego of a dead relation” (“Biko” 106). This ego might be a political figurehead, a nation-state, or a pan-African sensibility that represses slavery’s memory, as its recovery tends to reduce Africans to passive victims or complicit agents. Because political movements are predicated on the restoration of loss, they sustain themselves through practices of filiation that engage “Garveyism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, African Personality, African Socialism, African Humanism, Black Consciousness Movement, and African Renaissance … as imaginations of freedom and recapturing of lost ontologies” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 119). Africanist literary scholar Abiola Irele clarifies the imaginative stakes of Negritude, as it “arose out of a complex of mental images which fulfilled a felt need, and was developed into a systematic and self-sustaining ideology which is, in the last resort, an intellectual projection of this need” (The Negritude Moment 75). This “founding myth” (113) advances a past for the future; it is also at the precipice of such monumentalizing, the political exigencies of which Wilderson recognized, that a conversation toward other inventions might proceed. It might require returning, for example, to the intricate intellectual and nationalist projects Adom Getachew describes as “anticolonial worldmaking,” whose visions “drew on an anticolonial critique that began from the foundational role of New World slavery in the making of the modern world and traced the ways its legacies were constitutive of racial hierarchy in the international order” (5). Such visions remain prophetic because of the ways they exceed the scene of historiography and can rescript its restrictions on indigeneity and freedom.

These obscured conversations are why, for gamEdze and gamedZe, although the Black radical tradition “has largely been formulated and theorized in and from America, and even as it often falls prey to American exceptionalisms in its quest for forms of Black Universalism,” it nonetheless “holds radical potential for us on the continent” (218). Wilderson might agree: awareness of the limitations of black studies does not preclude it from being “a discipline that seeks to offer the best historical and theoretical framework for questions confronting the Black diaspora. Even though it started in the United States, I consider this to be for all continents” (“‘Inside-Outside'” 4).¹⁰ Despite aligning on the potential for radical exchange across oceans, a gulf appears at the (ontological or cultural) register through which such offerings are made—for gamEdze and gamedZe, Afro-pessimism departs, dangerously, from the black radical tradition’s capacious emphasis on “African cultural practices” and the ways African indigeneity has formed “the basis of Black revolt across time and space” (218). Whether gamEdze and gamedZe recognize these cultural practices as political hypostatizations, as concerted myth-making, is not entirely clear. Afro-pessimist theorizations do not wholly object to the work of myth,¹¹ but they wouldn’t suppose African cultural practices to be legible on their own without a shift in the economy of worldmaking of such force that Afro-pessimism designates it as world-ending. Towards this revolutionizing orientation, Afro-pessimism supports an inquiry into negativity, or an engagement with nothingness, to be part of the political potential of the subterranean workings of culture and an alternative articulation of indigeneity.¹² Indeed, Afro-pessimism’s rejoinder to strategies that centralize myth-making, but not the conditions of possibility for such myths, should be considered immanent to conversations that spin their wheels in uncovering or refuting the apparent objectivity of a slave-owning African past in ways that don’t entirely foreclose the resignification of the past for positive political purposes.

Other critical suspicions emanate from the fear of cultural loss: “The manner in which Africanness disappears into Blackness … distorts the conceptual space between the Negro and the African” (Olaloku-Teriba 111). Afro-pessimist analyses, however, represent an invitation to reckon with blackness as the form of this distortion. If writing of diaspora tends to centralize experience, culture, performance, and tradition, it also seems to obscure the workings of race, as when Jemima Pierre writes that “discussions of the ‘Black Experience’ often did not include contemporary Black African experience, even as it is clear that continental Africans have always been and continue to be racialized as ‘Black’ in a global racial order that denigrates Blackness and exploits and dehumanizes Black people” (xiii-xiv). In splitting the difference between modes of “Black Experience” and a global racial order, between performance and the paradigm, this formulation toggles the indecipherability of blackness; the opacity is constitutive of blackness under slavery’s sign. This is why, for Afro-pessimism, blackness seems infinitely fungible, and also why black resistance takes place in fugitive spaces, misrecognized and underground.

As “abstraction and as anti-abstraction” (Edwards 12), diaspora can be thought to mark the reorganization of a negative space dictated by a global anti-blackness, the enigmatic before and after shared between Wilderson’s “Africa has always been a big slave estate” and Padmore’s “to be Black is to be a slave.” Instead of excavating an African conscience to refute a Western one, posing difference against difference or tradition against modernity, Afro-pessimism engages diaspora through the anxiety around (and inventive potential of) nothingness that is slavery’s precipitate. The concept of the African diaspora might, that is, find itself registered through what Wilderson calls “dispersal,” or the idea that the diaspora “does not rest upon some plenitude in the past” (Wilderson, “Inside-Outside”).¹³ The question of diasporic meaning, which may or may not be synonymous with diasporic belonging, takes place in the gap between experience and paradigm, but the way the gap is presented globally is through the elaboration of the paradigm itself.

While the problem of paradigm is only alluded to by historiographical modes of meaning-making that themselves owe coherency to an anti-black order of things, it is often recognized by African scholars. Take Irele: “The colonial experience was not an interlude in our history, a storm that broke upon us, causing damage here and there but leaving us the possibility, after its passing, to pick up the pieces. It marked a sea-change of the historical process in Africa; it effected a qualitative re-ordering of life. It has rendered the traditional way of life no longer a viable option for our continued existence and apprehension of the world” (“In Praise” 207). Irele describes the colonial experience as a paradigm shift for both life and historical processes. The presumptive break between an exceptionalizing black studies and depoliticizing African studies can be examined through the generalized loss of what Irele defines as a “traditional way of life.” If the antinomy identified by Pierre is efficacious, that “where African diaspora studies generally concerns itself with articulations of race and Blackness but not directly with Africa, so African studies generally concerns itself with Africa but not directly with race and Blackness” (xvi), the horizon for a political solution would not be to press too soon for a better synthesis apart from the “no” encountered in the epigraph: the negative response that resounded, “on both sides of the Atlantic,” to the question, “are we free yet?”

Colluding Freedom

The most politically weighted expression of spatial-temporal attempts to secure slavery’s status is that of African collusion—the fantastical medium of exchange between innocent non-slaveholding Africans, on the one hand, and warring rapacious slaveholders, on the other. This image of collusion gives rise to questions of the littoral and inland, class and statehood, guilt and innocence, feudalism and capitalism, continuing to call into crisis what slavery actually is. The crisis is provisionally contained by the deflection of responsibility: that Africans have, in certain iterations of public memory, been constructed as willing accomplices seems to interfere with the relative power imputed to European enslavers, the relevance of an African diaspora, the demand for reparations, and the political pertinence of studying slavery at all. The historiographical trend towards contextualization and disaggregation, in its recent revalorization of resistance, has attempted to make African participants actors like any other.

In a first-order leveling, European merchants, African chiefs, and middlemen are complicit in equal, complicated measure. Their ontologies are made commensurable. A characteristically sweeping statement would have it that “when guilt is apportioned, African chiefs and merchants deserve a large share” (Alpern 57). This share can be numerically measured, as when Philip Curtin disaggregates force to reveal wide-scale African participation: “Europeans bought, but Africans sold; and the number of Africans engaged in the slave trade at any moment was certainly larger than the number of Europeans” (“The Atlantic Slave Trade” 266). But guilt has also been appraised by the origin, quality, and scale of participation—how participants became involved, what they do with that participation, ways they benefit. Here, West African elites take center stage, harnessing power by selling out their supposed own and developing systems of exploitation Walter Hawthorne gathers under the heading of the “predatory state thesis” (9). The elite exploited commoners, the coast raided interiors, and Africa came to cannibalize itself.¹⁴

Certainly, those who traffic in the language of guilt wield the past against the present, in order to amplify or quell the fallout from the mass displacement of peoples and resources. White people have a long history, in Rodney’s indictment, of attempting to “ease their guilty consciences” and throw “the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans” (How Europe 81). The willing participant narrative also informs what Sylviane A. Diouf calls the “black betrayal model” (xiv), posed as a traumatic core for the diaspora. In a widely quoted passage, Henry Louis Gates Jr. narrates learning of African participation at the slave fortresses in Elmina, a narrative that continues to dominate tours today, and propounds on the difficulty of having “to confront the curious ease with which black Africans could sell Africans to the white man” (qtd. in Kaba 8).

Slave historiography and Afro-pessimist criticism align in critiquing assumptions of filiation underlying the betrayal model. We can see this, for instance, in the correspondence between Lovejoy’s 1983 corrective that “it is inaccurate to think that Africans enslaved their brothers—although this sometimes happened. Rather, Africans enslaved their enemies” (Transformations 21) and Saidiya Hartman’s assertion that “contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships, nonmembers of the polity, foreigners and barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society” (5). Hartman continues, in a decidedly theoretical advance, to interrogate the problem of race-making: “In order to betray your race, you had first to imagine yourself as one. The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade.” Diouf likewise appears to indict calls of collusion as expressions of “anachronism”: “ethnic, political, and religious differences” were indeed leveraged in the past, but “nowhere in the Africans’ testimonies is there any indication that they felt betrayed by people ‘the color of their own skin'” (xiv).¹⁵ As Diouf writes, if it is the case that “concepts of Africa, Africans, blackness, whiteness, and race did not exist in Africa … they cannot be utilized today to assess people’s actions at a time when they were not operative” (xiv). What the historiographical terms of debate miss, however, is how the imaginary zoning of a time before race is nonetheless infiltrated by race in the very movement of apprehension—there is now little conceptual escape. Which is also to say anachronism can only be anachronistic absent a vanishing mediator. If anachronism is, instead, symptomatic of this vanishing mediator—the imperceptible shift from formal to real subsumption that appears after-the-fact, in the form of belatedness—then the collision of Africanness-blackness-slaveness informs interpretations of the past even in attempts to divest from them. Without a reckoning of this order, the conceit of indigenous blackness, excavated by ethnophilosophy in mythic pasts, too easily mystifies the ground of its own articulation.

Historiography mediates Africanness-blackness-slaveness through tricks of subjectivity: by diffusing the insider-outsider status in order to amplify agency and expand the sphere of African action beyond a reduction to either “trading partners on the one hand and cargo on the other” (Diouf x). While Rodney identifies as structural critique the idea that “any European trader could arrive on the coast of West Africa and exploit the political differences which he found there … It was so easy to set one off against another that Europeans called it a ‘slave trader’s paradise'” (How Europe 79), the ever-widening scope of historiographical intervention metabolizes Rodney’s structural critique into a problem of passive individual subjects. These historiographic conversions have occasioned recalibrations of agency, as focus shifts from the black betrayer to practices of resistance as survival.

If “agency” in the context of racial slavery “is itself a response to a totalizing and unequal system” (Green xxvii), what does agency mean? What happens to power? Herman Bennett asks in African Kings and Black Slaves, “does the gesture of granting agency not risk giving legitimacy to the very political-conceptual practice that exercised its existence among Africans in the first place?” (25). As African historiography proceeds by incorporating and reclaiming agency, debates over how much agency should be conferred end up stabilizing a subjectivity outside of space and time, inducing a post-racialism at the very emergence of racial thinking. These incorporative calls to agency imply a metaphysics of capacity that underwrites the historiographical state of the field and the political ramifications of its questions (extending to the belief that Africa can be developed, if only the right insight or initiative were deployed). This range of assumptions, as an outgrowth of the terms of slavery itself, works to contextualize the individual but comes at the expense of contextualizing the structure. On the one hand, Rodney’s structuralism seems to absolve everyone, including slave traders and catchers. The view that slavery “was simply ordered and imposed from outside, with the African part in it a purely negative and involuntary one … mirrors a familiar notion of African incapacity” (Davidson 201). On the other hand, historiographers in the tradition of Fage, who assert that African states had vested interests in war and enslavement, “could be accused of trying to shift the burden of guilt for the horrors of the trade from European to African heads” (Curtin, Economic Change 153–54). Celebrations of agency effect a reversal, where the proto-colonial perspective passes, almost imperceptibly, into an avowedly emancipatory one. This is contextualization run amok, the point at which it becomes indecipherable from decontextualization.

The historiography of African slavery does attend to the ways the trade impacted West African systems—how what we think of as tradition and culture bear the weight of slavery. Of particular interest have been transformations to ritual practices: take the evolution of shrines like the Nananom Mpow from local sites to regional significance (Shumway 134–44); the expansion of asafo militia companies, which protected the Fante’s emergent decentralized coalition from the terror of slave raiding (144–52); and the shifting focus to gods who “crystallize historical processes associated with the Atlantic slave trade” (Shaw 51), from the war god Nyigbla in Anlo-Ewe cosmology (Greene 16–7) to the Talensi god Tongnaab (Allman and Parker 23–71). It is now doxa that African traditions are inventive—paradoxically “not entirely ‘traditional’ in the sense that indigeneity or ‘native’ usually implies”—but it is less well established that these traditions reflect the experience of having been “for nearly fifteen generations … consumers of a foreign culture destructive of pre-existing practices and patterns of thought” (Woods 50), and that these traditions are themselves poetic and political negotiations with destruction.

This is what Afro-pessimism approaches—not a flashy new theory, but a breaking away from some of the fetters (positivism, Marxism, history, tradition) that have made agency and resistance, victimhood and culpability the restricted markers of slavery’s impact in the world. Afro-pessimist itineraries augment dependency theory, asking whether diffusion of participation removes West African culpability, putting responsibility into the hands of a select few, or whether diffusion in fact identifies a more intensive form of capture. Even along the coast, a Dutch director-general observed in 1714 that “the kidnapping of people is becoming so common that no Negro whether free or slave dares pass without assistance from one place to another” (qtd. in Shumway 60). In this sense, Afro-pessimism draws from Rodney’s political edge and the occasional lessons of historiography, lessons that expand how “all blacks—rulers, traders, and war captives alike—became victims or potential victims” (Kaba 8). Given the extension of captivity across geography and rank, what needs to be raised as a possibility for thematic attention is the way “captivity and social death” might be “essential dynamics which everyone in this place called Africa stands in relation to” (Wilderson, “‘Inside-Outside'” 8–9). Historical models can chart transformations and continued debates can encircle them, but the paradigm that would seek answers only in actions might hide as much as it reveals. If Africa as a place-name has been made to designate a zone of incoherence through which the puzzle of human desire compels itself to find violent answers, then the enduring legacy of slavery can never be decoded through the performance of agency alone (whether participation, refusal, or resistance) and instead needs to be approached through the apparatus by which performance is articulated and appraised. Such a task necessitates, it might be added, that reparations include a global reclamation of meaning.

Missing Memories

It is here that the problem of a Ghanaian memory of slavery can be delimited. As a postcolonial collective that marks one (conversely Pan-African, democratic, liberationist, and neoliberal) variant of Africanity, Ghanaian identity has been rendered discrete from the problem of slavery through a foreclosure that designates “slavery and race” as “issues of concern only for diaspora Blacks” (Pierre 3). While Mbembe contends (with some ambivalence) that “there is, properly speaking, no African memory of slavery” (“African Modes” 259), and Hartman writes that “slaves have no place in the myth of empires. There were no drum histories of the captives” (190),¹⁶ scholars with an anthropological bent like Rosalind Shaw insist that “there are other ways of remembering the past than by speaking about it” (2). Joachim Agamba calls this other form of knowledge “embedded memory”: his research in Ghana’s Northern region has found echoes of slavery in musical forms, with flute and drum rhythms marking rallying cries warning of incoming raiders. Recent critical ethnography by Emmanuel Saboro continues to excavate resistance to enslavement far before the slave ships ever left shore, recorded in oral histories and on occasions such as the Fiok festival among the Bulsa in Northern Ghana. Similar findings have been documented in Nigerian songs and proverbs.¹⁷ What accounts for this tension between unaddressed memory and its saturation (only recently accessed in scholarship) in mythos and culture?

In one strand of analysis, slavery’s memory is concealed by the demands of a postcolonial present. Nation-building, on the eve of Ghanaian Independence, was caught between the need to retrieve a past positive identity, a “native” or indigenous history of emancipation, and the need to prioritize a certain forward-facing finesse, a finesse that would avoid making Ghanaians passive victims or active agents with respect to slavery. Both positions might, in their own compounding ways, preclude direct paths to either refute European superiority or foster Ghanaian identity. As Ella Keren argues, “It was not just difficult to reconcile slavery and the slave trade with the search for a usable past, which would offer the new nation historical roots, continuity, and unity, but perceived as dangerous insofar as they could be used to support colonial images from which Africans wished to distance themselves” (980). This danger emanates from the racist fascination that links Africa to violence, which is maintained by more overt colonial-era invocations of the “native,” but encrypted by slavery’s supposedly indigenous provenance. The pressure of the postcolonial present, in other words, a collective Ghanaian conversation “shaped by forms of surveillance under colonialism as well as present-day development discourses with its Africa-as-failure mantra and the endless instantiations of Western ideologies of antiblack racism” (Holsey, Routes 8–9), mediates the distinct ways that slavery continues to be repressed and recovered. Cosmopolitan African identities express the eclipse of slavery in Africa by cathecting a triumphant past of indigeneity with the future of independence, but also by potentially ceding to the animating conditions propelling an anti-black present.

Kwame Nkrumah’s intellectual production engages important precipitates of this national cathexis, navigating a reinvigorated past and revolutionary present through gestures toward self-fashioning. Arguing that African pre-history cannot provide transparent access to a socialist utopia, that “what socialist thought in Africa must recapture is not the structure of the ‘traditional African society’ but its spirit,” Nkrumah unearths the tension that is repeated later in West African historiography, writing both that “slavery existed in Africa before European colonisation, although the earlier European contact gave slavery in Africa some of its most vicious characteristics” and that “before colonisation, which became widespread in Africa only in the nineteenth century, Africans were prepared to sell, often for no more than thirty pieces of silver, fellow tribesmen and even members of the same ‘extended family’ and clan” (“African Socialism Revisited”). Faced with the specter of enduring slavery, with an African preparedness to sell that enabled slavery’s “most vicious” iteration, Nkrumah’s turn to the spirit (not the content) of the past invoked indigenous principles without becoming mired in more insidious practices. Ultimately, this negotiation meant that speeches and political tracts rarely centralized slavery, except as metaphor or brief colonial prelude.¹⁸ Self-determination nonetheless become a leitmotif for Nkrumah and his internationalist vision of democracy (Getachew 73–4), a vision whose rhetorical spin indicated that enslavement was ongoing, particularly when leveraged against “neo-colonialist masters” (Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism 33).

Nkrumah inaugurated the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies with explicit exhortation to facilitate “cross fertilisation between Africa and those who have their roots in the African past” (qtd. in Ampofo 11). However, Ghana’s early black internationalist spirit did not translate into scholarship: according to one metric, out of three hundred graduate-level social science dissertations produced at the University of Ghana from 1965 to 1990, only Akosua Perbi’s focused on slavery (Keren 981).¹⁹ Since the early 1990s, meanwhile, slave and heritage tourism has been central to the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations’ 1992 Panafest, the 2007 bicentennial, and now the 2019 Year of the Return. The national response markets shared “brotherhood” based on lost culture. Scholarship and public conversations, however, do not directly engage a continued structuring history that would require negotiating how slavery, racism, colonialism, and capitalism shape Ghana’s position in a global imaginary (a turn that would, perhaps, better reflect the spirit of Nkrumah and Rodney). For Bayo Holsey, this lack of engagement indicates the ongoing impact of the divided world slavery opened: the “distancing from slavery,” which can be seen in gaps in public school textbooks, “and the embrace of slave ancestry encouraged by the state are two sides of the same coin” (“Black Atlantic Visions” 506). Holsey argues that while “narratives about African state-building have exhausted their utility,” those concerning “the slave trade have found a renewed purpose,” including those that link Africa to primordial corruption (“Owning Up to the Past?” 82–83). From the perspective of an Afro-pessimist analytic, this renewed purpose translates into the continued saturation of slavery, not its eclipse. The national containment of slavery both relays global dynamics and mediates how slavery is interpreted.

Ghana’s Northern regions help exemplify the slave state paradigm. The North first featured in official tourism itineraries in 2001, where a delegation from Panafest traveled to the historic slave-holding town of Paga. The region’s involvement in the slave trade has been represented through 1) the mid-eighteenth century’s Asante-Dagbamba war; 2) the abduction of Yaa Naa Abdallah Gariba leading to the forced payment of 2,000 slaves as tribute or ransom to the Asante; 3) the use of Zambarama peoples as raiders and mercenaries; and 4) the supposition that half a million Northerners were sold into slavery from the mid 1700s to 1897 (Der 29). While the impact of this demographic disruption has been disputed, the gulf dividing Ghana’s North and South remains.²⁰ Indeed, accumulated legacies of slavery and colonialism have all but written the North out of the story of the nation, displacing a geospatial Northern imaginary into a timeless past. The nationalized denigration of the North is intimately tied to the “desires of coastal residents to embrace an ‘imagined cosmopolitanism,'” and the “negative characterizations of northerners, which are at times accompanied by explicit references to their past vulnerability to enslavement, provide an ethnographic illustration of the dreadful depth of African historical interactions with Europe” (Holsey, Routes 100–1). This regional zoning engendered “a spatial reconfiguration of power that eventually led to the emergence of new (breakaway) social formations whose very origins and cultural logic resided principally in the expanding Atlantic complex” (Bennett 35). Such zoning transformed into the now well-known colonial carving of rigid ethnic and tribal lines, reduplicating in the consolidation of coastal power and structuring “non-centralized societies as politically illegitimate and therefore tangential to the political structure of the Northern Territories” (Talton 207).²¹

Differently put, Ghana’s Northern regions represent the failed attempt to spatially segregate slavery and its impact. While “During the first phase of the slave trade on the Gold Coast, one’s level of vulnerability to enslavement could be difficult to predict,” after the dawn of the eighteenth-century the North became a primary target for enslavement (Holsey, “Black Atlantic Visions” 510). The containment of slavery was never successful, as the North instead became the zone through which the generalization of slaveness emerged. The Akan term for “bought person,” ɔdɔnkɔ, eventually became synonymous with Northerner (Rattray 34),²² while the symbolic-political strategies that reduced the North to a backwards and stateless people were repurposed and expanded during formal British rule to include all Ghanaians as “native.” The language used by the Northern Territories governor in 1933 echoes that of colonial logic writ large: “When the Whiteman first came to your country you were backward and primitive, a prey to slave raiders from the north and south. You had no cohesion and in many cases no constitution to speak of which was really the root of your troubles” (qtd. in Allman and Parker 72). If slaveness was associated with territorial backwardness that would eventually be engulfed by more triumphant national narratives, then to raise questions about slavery and its legacy may involve, as Emmanuel Akyeampong has argued, a threat to “national integration in recently independent countries” (1). What Akyeampong exposes is the myth of integration, one whose political necessity the history of slavery calls into question and for which it provides new frames.

An investigation into the phantasmatic construction of indigenous slavery can transform our understanding of 1980s neoliberal austerity measures, which map onto the intellectual-political turn away from critiques of structural underdevelopment and towards positive appraisals of African autonomy and agency. Holsey submits, for example, that “the African slave trader provides a leitmotif of structural adjustment reforms” (“Owning Up to the Past?” 83).²³ When the instability represented by the North is both subsumed into the nation and written backwards, its effacement (continuing today in diminished access to resources, infrastructure, and mobility) means having no account of how “the disruption of Africa’s political structures and socio-economic potentials was part of the stagnation of Africa’s technological progress caused by the slave trade” (M’Baye 611). This also means having no longer genealogical route through which to reckon with the failure of development discourses vis-à-vis African political economy.

Conclusion

The “afterlife of slavery,” as described by Hartman (6), is usually taken up to interrogate abolition and Reconstruction in the Americas, but it was also written in an attempt to reckon with problems of emancipation in West Africa, and it extends the interrogative frame in this direction. Take the Gold Coast’s 1874 non-interventionist anti-slavery ordinances (coinciding with the colony’s annexation), which formally announced the emancipation of slaves but provided no mechanism for liberation except individual court appeals, permitting slavery’s post-proclamation continuation (Opare-Akurang). The afterlife of African slavery exposes a through-line from slavery to colonialism and post-colonialism, such that, in Rodney’s estimation, “the period of slave trading in West Africa should be regarded as protocolonial” (History 117–18).²⁴ Lovejoy furthers Rodney’s charge to demonstrate that the anti-slave rhetoric accompanying the scramble for Africa employed the very same language and rationale of slavery. For Lovejoy, however, the collapse of slavery provides the key context, as “the imposition of colonialism terminated slavery as a mode of production” (287). This is where Afro-pessimism makes a crucial modification to historiographical orientation, by reframing slavery’s afterlife not as its subsumption into other more contemporary and comphrensive scenes of violence (such as capitalism or colonialism) but as its continuation, not what comes after slavery but how it lives on.

Slavery isn’t just a past object to be remembered or not—its violent influence shapes how it can be thought. Indigenous slavery, in particular, polices where and when responsibility appears in national discourse and intellectual production; indigenous slavery becomes indigenous slavery because of the way racial slavery transforms the world and rewrites its past. Localizing African practices as slavery’s source interrupts the capacity for critique that would have the Atlantic plantation as the grounding system of modernity and that might reimagine indigeneity otherwise. Racial slavery can instead be demonized as a corrupt (and contingent) “inheritance of wealth and power” and indigenous slavery revalorized precisely as “the inheritance of tradition” (Holsey, “Owning Up to the Past?” 85). Indeed, racial slavery can be said to invest indigeneity with its peculiar anti-black meaning—indigenous not in relation to the land (indigenous studies’ near comprehensive silence on Africa bears this out), but in relation to slavery. In this respect, we need an account of the continuity of the “extraordinary prejudice” that “African and Africans are somehow historically predisposed to violence and savagery” other than mere bewilderment that “it remains still quite widespread one fifth of the way through the twenty-first century” (Green xvi). This is to say that a focus on slavery as the generative condition of modernity, a version of Du Bois’s and Rodney’s positions, refigures the rhetoric of indigenous slavery as a point de capiton for African historiography, national mythology, and global anti-blackness. The legacy of slavery subsists through the displacement of narrative impossibility—shaping spaces and traditions, propelling time forward, securing meaning. If the racial slave is the generation of worldly possibility, the indigenous slave is its impossible effluvia. Every attempt to redeem, reconstitute, or resurrect the proper form of this past object must reckon with the prism through which it appears to us today.

Sara-Maria Sorentino Sara-Maria Sorentino is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Race Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research asks methodological questions that excavate connections between anti-black violence, philosophical abstraction, and material reproduction. She has work published or forthcoming in Rhizomes, Theory & Event International Labor and Working-Class History, Antipode, and Telos.

Footnotes

1. See Kankpeyeng’s summary that “The history of indigenous slavery in Ghana is sketchy, but the oral traditions of present-day Ghanaian ethno-linguistic groups point to the longevity of the institution of slavery” (211), and Perbi’s reiteration of the argument that the Atlantic slave trade “did not supersede the indigenous slave trade. The two systems existed side by side and sustained each other” (62). In many ways, this problem repeats (and could someday clarify) Marxist debates over alternative and resistant sites to primitive accumulation. See Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 82–9.

2. See also Du Bois on how domestic African slaves “could and did rise to freedom and preferment; they became parts of the new tribe. It was left to Christian slavery to improve on all this—to make slavery a rigid unending caste by adding to bondage the prejudice of race and color” (251).

3. Nkrumah writes that of all the “malicious myths” presented by European historians, the most insidious was the denial that “we were a historical people. It was said that whereas other continents had shaped history, and determined its course, Africa has stood still, held down by inertia; that Africa was only propelled into history by the European contact” (Consciencism 61).

4. On how Afro-pessimism re-scripts the historiography of generalized slavery leveraged by Orlando Patterson’s study Slavery and Social Death, see Sorentino, “The Sociogeny of Social Death.”

5. Sexton reads Afro-pessimism as “a certain motivated reading or return to Fanon, an attention to Fanon the theorist of racial slavery and ‘negrophobia’ more so than Fanon the theorist of metropolitan colonialism.” See “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.”

6. See also Wynter: “What has remained constant is the position of Africa. Although no longer militarily and politically colonised, Africa, nevertheless, as the projected continent of origin as the extreme form of the ‘native Other’ to Man, retains its position as the bottom-most world, the one plagued most extremely by the contradictions that are inseparable from Man’s bourgeois conception of being human” (35).

7. de B’béri and Louw attend to “this phenomenon of Afropessimism” as “much more complex and its impact much deeper, not only in terms of how Africa is imagined and perceived, but also as regards the ways in which Africans view themselves” (337)

8. Concern with American exceptionalism is warranted, echoing in the missionary designs of nineteenth-century black nationalists Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Harry McNeil Turner, who grounded their return to Africa in correcting a presumed savage enslaving pre-history (Adeleke), and continuing in a series of diasporic initiatives structured and supported by U.S. Cold War policy. See Von Eschen 176–81.

9. A parallel criticism is levelled against Paul Gilroy in Gikandi, 1–2.

10. In Amalgamation Schemes, Sexton extends this argument by centralizing “the qualitative difference between sub-Saharan Africa vis-à-vis the other regions of the global South” as the primary image that is “reflected in the qualitative difference of black positionality in the U.S. racial formation vis-à-vis ‘the colors in the middle’ (not black, not white)” (40–41).

11. See Wilderson’s support of a multivalent political strategy he calls “Two Trains Running (Side by Side)” in “‘The Inside-Outside of Civil Society'” 18.

12. See Chernoff’s engagement with Dagbamba music as “perhaps best considered as arrangement of gaps where one may add a rhythm” (113–14).

13. See also Gilroy’s interview with Tommy Lott on a diaspora “that can’t be reversed” (57).

14. This internalized consumption narrative takes a politically radical edge, too, as when Rodney converts the well-worn display of “tribal conflict” into a take-down of the ruling class in A History of the Upper Guinea Coast: “When the line of demarcation is clearly drawn between the agents and the victims of slaving as it was carried on among the littoral peoples, that line coincides with the distinction between the privileged and the un-privileged in the society as a whole” (117–18). The class line bears the weight of the acquisitive origin of slaving and has been rendered commensurate with classic accounts of European feudalism. See Diouf: “Aware of these parallels, a king in Dahomey remarked to a British governor, ‘Are we to blame if we send our criminals to foreign lands? I was told you do the same'” (xvi).

15. As testimony, we can take Cugoano’s confession that he “must own, to the shame of my countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery.” Although referring to racial constructions of difference, Cugoano situates this in slavery’s transformation:

if there were no buyers there would be no sellers. So far as I can remember, some of the Africans in my country keep slaves, which they take in war, or for debt; but those which they keep are well fed, and good care taken of them, and treated well; and, as to their clothing, they differ according to the custom of the country. But I may safely say, that all the poverty and misery that any of the inhabitants of Africa meet with among themselves, is far inferior to those inhospitable regions of misery which they meet with in the West-Indies, where their hard-hearted overseers have neither regard to the laws of God, nor the life of their fellow-men.(234)

16. Hartman does record memory inscribed in naming practices (192–96)

17. See Ojo and Opata for examples of oral history in the Nigerian context.

18. More broadly, “preferred Africanist topics of engagement” remain “globalization, nationalism, ethnicity, ritual and folklore, the (failed) state” (Pierre xiv).

19. A similar gap has been noted in black studies, as “the early concrete connections between the lives of Africans on the continent and in the U.S. in the study of the Black experience have all but disappeared” (Ampofo 14).

20. Haas has recently used his research with Dagbamba drummers and warriors to contest broad swaths of widely received history on the Asante empire and its domination over Dagbon.

21. Kankpeyeng identifies how Northern “present-day population and settlement patterns” are grounded in slavery (213).

22. The Dagbamba, meanwhile, tend to avoid dabili (slave) but do sometimes use it as an insult for the “stateless” (MacGaffey 18–19).

23. Such an analysis can also be extended to current anti-police activism in West Africa. On the colonial history of policing in Ghana in particular, see Tankebe.

24. See M’Baye and Nunn for recent econometric demonstrations of slavery’s devastating effect on African populations.

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