BOOK REPORT
11/04/2001
TITLE: TRANSFORMATIONS IN SLAVERY
A History of Slavery in Africa
AUTHOR: PAUL E. LOVEJOY
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building,
Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK. 2000
PAGES: 355
PRICE: US$25.95 (Paperback), US$79.95 (Hardcover)
REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG
In recent times, slavery has returned to the headlines of the
global media, more especially in Sudan. African-Americans are suing Washington for
it’s dabbling in their enslavement and their use, without any payments, as human
machines to transform the United States into a shining capitalist country. Before his
dubious death, Nigeria’s "money man" and presumed winner of the June 12,
1993 presidential election, Chief M.K.O Abiola, had led international campaigns for slave
trade reparation by the Western world for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
This book, a second edition, incorporates recent research with an
updated bibliography and revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography,
returns to the controversial slave trade issue in Africa from the indigenous African,
internal dealings that developed into an international, external business. The book seeks
to correct the "accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in
the slaves’ assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production,
although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from
those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas,
developed from its position on the periphery of capital Europe." However, the author
places African slave trade events at the centre of its external influences.
Data for this work came from diverse sources. Included are the Du
Bois database, though it is weak on Portuguese and Spanish sources, and Walter Rodney
(1966, 1967, 1968). Prof. E. Lovejoy, chair of the department of history at York
University in Toronto, Canada, focuses on the impact of change of the transatlantic slave
trade in Africa, pointing out how transformation occurred in the local context, and how
this affected course of history. For this reason Lovejoy’s book skips any interest in
how the transatlantic slave trade underdeveloped Africa, though he recognizes a causal
relationship. Lovejoy’s interest is rather in how demand for African slaves in the
western hemisphere and elsewhere impacted on the political economy of the African areas
where the slaves came from, and in "so doing demonstrate the interaction between
local and global forces." However, Lovejoy informs us that critics think the internal
economic, political, and social factors were so overwhelming or impervious to external
forces that no transformation within Africa took place from the transatlantic slave trade.
In this context Lovejoy attempts to wrestle with preconceived views
about the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on Africa. One view says economics was
not a factor in the economic marginality of slave trade on Africa; another fact says
slavery did not exist in Africa during the period of the slave trade and all ensuing
transformations took place in Americas in a racialized context; and yet another researcher
argues that the degree of transformation of the slave trade has been overstated and that
the "slaver was so pervasive in Africa that the Americas could be settled by slaves
only because of their prior availability."
Slavery, however, explained the author, is a form of exploitation,
characterized by the slave being a property, that they are outsiders, aliens by origin or
denied heritage through judicial and other sanctions. Coercion was used at will including
the slave’s labour power at the whim and caprices of the master. The slaves have no
right to their sexuality, and by extension, "to their own reproductive capacities;
and that the slave status was inherited unless provision was made to ameliorate that
status."
In all these, despite varied impact of the slave trade on Africa,
the author, using available demographic data and simulated demographic study, says, the
impact was actually "concentrated in relatively restricted regions of western
Africa" and not the whole of Africa. And so is the trans-Saharan slave trade and
Indian Ocean. Lovejoy argues that the slave trade was an import and export business:
liquor, beads, bangles and other high quality goods were ‘imported’ by the
Africans in exchange for ‘export’ of Africa’s sons and daughters, thus
"disproving the myth that Africa got virtually nothing for the export of its sons and
daughters." Over the centuries, the range of commodities changed. However, Lovejoy
informs us that in the 17th and 18th centuries variety of regimes of
slavery in Africa existed. At one end, the business ranges from areas in the far interior
and isolated spots between the key states and trade corridors, though slaves were marginal
to society, "forming one category of dependants in kinship systems but ultimately
having little structural impact on the local economy or society."
The expansion of demand for slaves and the rivalries between African
states oiled the boom in slave trade, both causing tensions that rolled over to the
enslavement of Africans. "The economy became dependent upon exports to satisfy the
personal desires of merchants and rulers and provide many parts of Africa with a money
supply, textiles, firearms, and other goods that were essential to the economy and
political rule. The fragmented political structure, reinforced by military purchases and
the need to acquire slaves to finance imports, was related to a general state of
insecurity that facilitated enslavement," writes Lovejoy, adding that, "The
collision between a Europe that was increasingly, if sometimes reluctantly, committed to
the end of slavery and an African political economy rooted in slavery was most pronounced
along the coast of West Africa in the nineteenth century. Here slavery had been
transformed into institutions affecting the very structure of society, at least in Sierra
Leone, along the Gold Coast, and in the Bights of Benin and Biafra." However, areas
in Liberia and western Cote d’Ivoire slaves were relatively marginal.
Questions of the internal and external dimensions of the slave trade
still call for examinations, such as the links between the pre-colonial economic system
and the colonial economy will reveal new important questions of the slave trade.
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