Dr Abigal Muchecheti
Africa Beyond the Textbook
Abstract
This essay examines the political and
historical dangers of invoking ‘African sellers’ as a counterargument to
Caribbean claims for reparations from Britain and other European powers. It
argues that particular African rulers, merchants and intermediaries must be
studied without converting a continent into a collective perpetrator. The
transatlantic trade began its destruction within Africa through kidnapping,
warfare, forced movement, confinement, depopulation and the extraction of
skilled people. European demand, state protection, shipping, credit and
plantation economies enlarged these processes into an oceanic system whose
institutional gains accumulated principally outside Africa. Reparatory justice
must therefore distinguish specific participation from collective liability,
recognise Africa as the first site of injury, and resist political narratives
that divide Africans from their descendants across the diaspora.
Keywords Atlantic slavery;
reparations; Africa; Jamaica; African diaspora; kidnapping; depopulation;
historical responsibility
Introduction
During Jamaica’s renewed pursuit of
reparatory justice from Britain, MP Everald Warmington argued that Black
Africans who sold captives had more to answer for than the white people who
bought them. He went further: “The white man didn’t go to Africa and pick up enslaved
people,” he said. “They didn’t go there and catch enslaved people.”
Warmington also declared, “My root is here in Jamaica and not in Africa.” These
are not simply requests to examine African participation. They are claims about
who carried out the violence, where responsibility lies and whether Jamaica’s
history can be separated from Africa’s. They require an answer grounded in the
history before the coastal sale.
Warmington’s intervention matters because
of its timing and political effect. Jamaica’s petition concerns Britain’s
responsibility for the forced transportation and enslavement of Africans in
Jamaica and the continuing consequences of that system. Introducing an
undefined African liability at this point enables the former imperial state to
redirect scrutiny. The familiar sentence ‘Africans sold Africans’ then
functions as a verdict rather than the beginning of inquiry. It asks who
completed a transaction at the coast but not who created the expanding demand,
supplied the ships, financed the voyages, intensified warfare, entered the
interior, confined captives, legislated hereditary slavery and accumulated the
resulting wealth.
The argument developed here is not that
every African participant was innocent. It is that historical agency must be
specified rather than racialised. If reparations are concerned with injury,
accumulated benefit and institutional continuity, Africa belongs at the table
primarily as the first site of loss and as a claimant alongside Caribbean and
other diasporic societies—not as an undifferentiated debtor.
The modern word ‘African’ suggests a
continental political identity that did not govern the actions of the numerous
kingdoms, towns, lineages and trading communities involved over four centuries.
A person captured in war, kidnapped while travelling, pawned temporarily,
convicted of an offence, seized in a raid or betrayed during a political
dispute did not enter one uniform institution. Nor can we assume that everyone
involved in local forms of captivity understood the fate awaiting those carried
across the Atlantic. Thomas (1997) describes captives’ distress when ships
sailed away from the coast. That account does not prove what every seller knew,
but it does challenge the assumption that people on all sides of a coastal
transaction understood the oceanic, permanent and hereditary system in the same
way.
African societies had existing systems of
servitude, dependency, pawning and slavery. Recognising this is necessary. It
does not demonstrate that those systems already contained the scale, permanence
or commercial machinery of Atlantic plantation slavery. European and American
demand transformed what defeat, debt and captivity could mean by creating an
external market capable of removing people permanently across an ocean. The
arrival and repeated return of ships enlarged the incentive to produce captives,
while firearms and imported goods could alter regional balances of power
(Lovejoy 2012; Thornton 1998).
The phrase also obscures intermediaries
whose identity crossed the supposedly clear line between Africa and Europe. In
West Central Africa, Luso-African and Afro-Portuguese commercial elites could
be Christian, Portuguese-speaking and integrated into Brazilian and Portuguese
networks Some
occupied protected social positions distinguished them from populations
vulnerable to capture. Describing them only as Africans erases the Atlantic
affiliations through which they exercised power. Candido’s work on Benguela
further demonstrates that even free Africans, traders and locally prominent
people could be kidnapped and illegally exported, while vassal chiefs and their
communities remained vulnerable to raids (Candido 2013; 2020).
The coastal sale is often treated as the
first historical event. In reality it was frequently preceded by violence.
People were kidnapped from roads, fields and homes; seized during warfare;
captured while fleeing; marched towards the coast; confined in barracoons,
forts, cellars and underground holding places; and guarded because merchants
knew that they would escape if given the opportunity. Some European traders
waited offshore or near islands for opportunities to seize people directly.
Others joined military attacks, financed local violence, employed agents or
relied upon mixed Atlantic networks. Hugh Thomas catalogues kidnapping,
warfare, judicial condemnation, debt and raiding among the routes into Atlantic
enslavement (Thomas 1997). Warmington’s assertion that white men did not go
into Africa to catch people is therefore too absolute. European involvement
took several forms across different places and centuries: direct seizure in
some instances, military intervention, financing, agents, coastal confinement,
shipping and the creation of a sustained market for captives. The fact that
many captives were seized by African actors does not erase other forms of
European participation or make the violence before embarkation an exclusively
African affair.
The victims were not only socially
marginal people. Accounts include chiefs, royal relatives and people of high
political status who became captives after defeat, betrayal or accusation. Such
cases destabilise the idea that chiefs simply sold their own populations from
positions of permanent security. A ruler could cooperate in one period, resist
in another, or become vulnerable when alliances shifted. The history of the
Kakondas in Benguela, as it appears in the material under discussion, belongs
to this unstable field of accommodation, rebellion and survival rather than to
a simple marketplace of willing sellers.
African resistance occurred throughout the
centuries of the trade even when it was not continentally coordinated. King
Afonso I of Kongo protested in 1526 that kidnapping and unauthorised removal
were depopulating his kingdom. Other rulers restricted access, attempted to
protect their subjects, accepted vassalage under pressure, fought invading
forces or changed strategies after witnessing the destruction of neighbouring
communities. Captives resisted during marches, in barracoons, aboard ships and
after arrival. The absence of a unified African state capable of coordinating
continental defence cannot be rewritten as collective African consent.
A reparations history beginning only with
those who reached Jamaica omits the parents whose children disappeared, the
communities whose members died resisting capture and those who perished before
they entered a shipping register. These losses are not secondary. They are the
first stage of the same historical crime.
European
demand and the construction of machinery
European participation was not confined to
purchasing people whom Africans independently chose to sell. Monarchies issued
licences, chartered companies, collected duties and defended commerce.
Merchants assembled capital through partnerships. Insurers protected voyages.
Manufacturers produced textiles, metal goods, alcohol and weapons for African
exchange. Shipbuilders adapted vessels, while merchants calculated tonnage,
hold depth, space between decks, speed and the commercial life of a ship.
The improvement of slave ships is
especially revealing. Copper sheathing protected hulls from shipworm and
increased speed. Faster, better-protected vessels reduced commercial risk and
allowed capital to return sooner. This was not the behaviour of reluctant
customers passively responding to an African supply. It was the development of
an industry. By the 1790s, the scale of British shipping assigned to the Guinea
trade and the hundreds of voyages departing Liverpool, London and Bristol
demonstrated organised demand rather than accidental involvement (Thomas 1997).
European observers also classified African
populations according to supposed regional characteristics and labouring
abilities. Their descriptions were shaped by racial ideology and commercial
stereotype, not neutral ethnography. Nevertheless, they disclose intention.
Buyers sought people whom they believed to be skilled farmers, metalworkers,
miners, healers, boatmen or otherwise valuable workers. The trade therefore
removed not only population in the abstract but knowledge embodied in
particular people. Individuals whose expertise might have supported their own
societies were redirected into plantation, mining, domestic and artisanal
labour elsewhere.
Some merchants admitted moral discomfort
while continuing to trade. Jean Barbot acknowledged the unpleasantness of
enslavement in the Americas but rationalised it by degrading free life in
Africa. Stanislas Foäche wrote that slave sales caused him cruel uneasiness and
made him blush, yet remained in the business for years. Henry Laurens later
condemned reprehensible conduct and declared hatred of slavery after
accumulating a fortune. These examples do not demonstrate ignorance. They show
recognition followed by justification, delay or profitable continuation.
Africa
as the first site of loss
If reparations are organised around loss,
Africa cannot appear principally as a debtor. It was the first site of injury.
Before plantation labour was extracted in Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, the United
States and elsewhere, people had already been removed from African families,
economies and political societies. Some died during capture, resistance, forced
marches, confinement or coastal transfer. Others were displaced while fleeing
raids. Shipping databases cannot count people who never reached an embarkation
port.
The losses were demographic, economic,
political and epistemic. African communities lost children and future
generations; farmers, fishers and craftspeople; healers, metallurgists and
traders; military defenders and political leaders; and the knowledge those
people carried. In heavily affected regions, repeated removal could weaken
production, reduced security, altered settlement and migration patterns, and
intensified political fragmentation. The consequences did not end when a ship
sailed. Atlantic extraction was later compounded by colonial conquest, resource
removal and the seizure of cultural objects.
To state that particular African elites
profited is not to establish that Africa benefited. A ruling group can gain
wealth while the wider society is devastated. Indeed, the gains themselves were
profoundly unequal. European merchants converted captive labour into repeated
plantation production and then into ships, banks, insurance, property,
universities, churches, schools, art collections and intergenerational family
fortunes. African participants often received imported goods whose supply and
quality Europeans controlled, including textiles, alcohol, metal goods and
firearms. Some goods were inferior, diluted, second-hand or manufactured
specifically for that market. Weapons could deepen the very insecurity that
generated further captives.
Hugh Thomas reports exceptional wealth
attributed to King Tebegsu of Dahomey. Such cases require scrutiny, including
scrutiny of the evidentiary basis for the sums reported. They cannot establish
continent-wide enrichment. The relevant comparison is not whether any African
profited, but where the durable financial and institutional accumulation
occurred. The enduring banks, merchant houses, estates, civic buildings,
universities and political dynasties documented in Europe and the Americas have
no continent-wide African equivalent generated by the trade.
A serious reparations framework can
investigate African perpetrators without imposing collective African guilt. It
can identify a specific ruler, merchant, dynasty or institution; establish the
conduct involved; trace the benefit; distinguish voluntary profit from
coercion; and ask whether a surviving institution inherited the gain. That is
historical accountability.
‘African sellers,’ by contrast, is a
racial and continental accusation. Modern African borders frequently contain
descendants of raided communities alongside descendants of rulers and
intermediaries. A present-day citizen may descend from people captured, killed
or displaced rather than from anyone who profited. Some people will descend
from several positions at once. Modern states created through colonial
partition cannot automatically be treated as the legal successors of every
earlier kingdom located within their boundaries.
Institutional continuity matters.
Jamaica’s petition identifies Britain because the British Crown, Parliament,
chartered companies, colonial administrations and legal system authorised and
protected the enslavement practised in Jamaica. British financial, religious
and educational institutions also retained identifiable benefits. CARICOM’s
reparatory framework directs claims towards governments and institutions
enriched by crimes against humanity and proposes remedies extending beyond
individual cash payments, including formal apology, cultural institutions,
African knowledge programmes, public-health repair, technology transfer and
debt cancellation (CARICOM Reparations Commission n.d.).
The African Union likewise frames
reparations as justice for Africans and people of African descent. Its recent
agenda recognises enslavement, colonialism and apartheid as connected sources
of continuing harm and treats continental and diasporic claims as mutually
reinforcing rather than adversarial (African Union 2025; African Commission on
Human and Peoples’ Rights 2026). This is a more coherent political direction
than placing Africa and the Caribbean on opposite sides of an imagined
reparations invoice.
The
political danger of diasporic division
The claim that ‘Africans sold us’ has
produced real anger among some Caribbean descendants. That anger cannot simply
be mocked; it reflects an inherited trauma and a historical education that
often ended at the moment of sale. Yet the truncated narrative encourages
Caribbean people to imagine Africa principally as the betrayer and Africans to
respond defensively by minimising Caribbean suffering. The descendants of
people harmed at different locations in the same system are then invited to
blame one another. Warmington is entitled to say that Jamaica is his home and
the centre of his political identity. But “my root is here in Jamaica and not
in Africa” cannot settle the historical question. For descendants of Africans
forced across the Atlantic, Jamaican belonging and African ancestry are not
mutually exclusive. Enslavement violently interrupted the ability of many
families to name particular African ancestors or places of origin; it did not
make their lives begin at the point of arrival in Jamaica. That rupture is part
of the injury for which reparatory justice is sought.
Warmington’s intervention is dangerous not
because difficult questions should be prohibited, but because an incomplete
question can perform political work. In the context of Jamaica’s claim against
Britain, the demand to include African sellers supplies European governments
with a diversion: responsibility can be redirected to an undefined continent,
and Black populations can be told to settle the issue among themselves.
The African diaspora is not confined to
Jamaica. Descendants of enslaved Africans live across Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, the
United States, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Argentina and numerous other
societies. Histories of slavery and forced movement also extend through Cape
Verde, São Tomé, Mauritius, Seychelles and the wider Atlantic and Indian Ocean
worlds. Reparatory justice requires collaboration among African states,
Caribbean societies, African Americans, Black Latin Americans and other
African-descended communities. No single national group can represent the
totality of the loss.
The same need for historical breadth
applies to Black British history. Windrush is a crucial twentieth-century
chapter, but it is not the beginning of Black presence in Britain. Black people
lived in London, Bristol, Liverpool and other cities centuries earlier—some
free, some enslaved, some in conditions between liberty and bondage, and some
sent for education by African merchant families. Making Windrush synonymous
with all Black British history erases those earlier populations and the direct
African dimensions of Britain’s Atlantic world.
Sources
archives and public responsibility
The controversy also demonstrates why
public claims about slavery should be sourced. Political status, emotional
certainty and social-media reach do not substitute for historical reading. The
archive must itself be approached critically because many surviving records
were created by merchants, officials and enslavers, but unreferenced assertion
is even more vulnerable to inherited myths and rage-driven simplification.
Public commentators should state the basis
of their claims: which archive, voyage register, court record, company account,
letter or historical study supports the argument? They should distinguish
evidence from inference and identify disagreement among historians. This is
especially important in an environment where short videos and confrontational
television reward moral certainty more readily than explanation.
The demand for sources is not a demand for
emotionless history. Rage, grief and moral revulsion are reasonable responses
to slavery. But deduction must follow evidence. Without that discipline, a
slogan inherited from colonial education can be repeated as though it were
historical discovery.
Conclusion
African participation in the Atlantic
slave trade must be studied. Some rulers and merchants pursued profit, and
their actions should be named. But the category ‘African sellers’ cannot bear
the historical or legal weight placed upon it. It obscures kidnapping, direct
European capture, warfare, political coercion, mixed Atlantic elites,
resistance and the vulnerability of African rulers and communities. It also
ignores the unequal accumulation produced by the trade: durable European and
American institutions on one side, and profound African demographic, political
and epistemic loss on the other.
If chronology and foundational injury
guide reparatory analysis, Africa must come first—not as the sole victim and
not in competition with Jamaica or the wider diaspora, but as the first site
from which people, capacity and knowledge were extracted. The Caribbean and the
Americas then became further sites of forced labour, hereditary bondage and
colonial underdevelopment. These claims form a chain; they do not cancel one
another.
Warmington is entitled to ask why
particular African participants receive insufficient scrutiny. He is not
entitled to substitute an undefined racial continent for identifiable
historical actors. Before asking why African sellers are absent from the reparations
claim, he must ask where African victims have gone in his own argument: the
kidnapped children, the grieving parents, the captured chiefs, the displaced
communities, those who died before embarkation and those whose knowledge was
permanently removed.
Reparations should unite the descendants
and societies harmed across Africa and its diaspora. A historically serious
movement will name every perpetrator it can identify, trace institutional
benefit wherever it survives and recognise injury at every stage. It will not
allow the colonial sentence ‘Africans sold Africans’ to divide the people whose
histories were violently joined by the same system of extraction.
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