THE COLONIAL SYSTEM UNVEILED: TOWARDS NEW PERSPECTIVES OF STUDYING SLAVERY IN AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY (original) (raw)

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

Postmodern Culture, 2020

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.

Historicising the Politics of Slavery and the African Diaspora

2017

African history and historiography have largely accounted for the question of slavery, colonialism, racialism and neo-colonialism. This is because the above phenomena passes as the experiences of the African people which have elicited responses from scholars and researchers of diverse civilizations largely because such phenomena have without doubt, altered the history of the continent of Africa as well as the trajectory and tapestry of the thought pattern of the African person. This paper attempts to historicise the politics of slavery as well as engage in a lucid discourse on the African diaspora which is a resultant effect of the politics that ensured both during the trade and the processes that lead to the abolition of the trade. It engages the expository and analytic methods of philosophical research and argues that the high point of the politics of slavery is evident in the fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade would not have been successful and sustainable as it were if the...

Three Recent Texts in Africana Philosophy: Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence

Journal of World Philosophies, 2016

The following essay is a review of three recent texts in Africana philosophy. These three texts are united by the overarching theme of the teleological suspension of mainstream philosophy. Lewis Gordon takes a global approach to Africana philosophy and his text engages the issue of the historiography of Africana philosophy; George Yancy's approach is situated within the subtradition of African American philosophy and his text pursues a critical Africana study of the existential reality of whiteness; and Neil Roberts situates his work within the subtradition of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, with the declared goal of tackling the concept of freedom.

The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery1

Studies in the World History of Slavery Abolition and Emancipation, 1997

Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing the "extensive documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the diaspora," but he lays out a program for future diasporic studies. Prominent in this program are the compilation of biographical data on captives and slaves (including oral source material), the analysis of the sites of the slave trade and movements of Africaderived peoples, the analysis of cultural activities, and an unprecedented form of international, inter institutional cooperation, most notably among African, American, and European institutions which promote education and research. "Il ne servirait a rien non plus de dissimuler nos propres résponsabilités dans les désastres qui se sont abattus ou continuent de s'abattre sur nous. Nos complicités dans la traite [en esclaves] sont bien établies, nos divisions absurdes, nos errements collectifs, l'esclavage comme institution endogene...." Nicéphore Dieudonné Soglo The UNESCO Slave Route Project With these words, the Président de la République du Bénin launched the UNESCO "Slave Route" Project on 1 September 1994 at the old slaving port of Ouidah. 2 To achieve world peace, Soglo continued, it is necessary to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, not only the brutalities of the transAtlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas but also the legacy of the blood-soaked ritual houses in the royal palaces at Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The "Slave Route" began within Africa, and its impact was often severe for both deported Africans and those who remained as slaves in West Africa as well. The pursuit of the "Slave Route" represents a departure in the study of the history of Africa and the African diaspora. Hitherto, Africa and the diaspora have generally been discrete subjects of enquiry. Despite the work of Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide, Melville Herskovits and others, scholars have rarely pursued common links between Africa and the Americas. 3 To address this disjuncture in scholarship is the target of the UNESCO Project, which aims to trace the slave trade from the original points of enslavement in the African interior, through the coastal (and Saharan) entrepots by which slaves were exported from the region, to the societies in the Americas and the Islamic world into which they were imported. 4 The selection of Ouidah as the venue for the announcement of the Slave Route Project was auspicious, since Ouidah had witnessed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 5 The enduring memories of the trade were on display, as a tour of museums in Ouidah, Porto Novo and Abomey revealed. The Porto Novo palace was the venue for a display of contemporary Béninois art, which depicted the tragedies of the slave trade in several mediums. The current depiction of the African past through art stood in sharp contrast to the racism of French society during the late nineteenth century as depicted through posters and advertising from the age of the Scramble; the legacy of slavery and the slave trade were readily apparent. The horrors of slavery emerge in a most grotesque form in the Abomey palace of King Ghezo. The walls of the shrine where thousands of war captives were sacrificed contain the dried blood used to make the bricks. In this setting, the opening words of President Soglo became all the more poignant. As the President proclaimed, "we are all responsible for the slave trade." At the closing of the colloquium, the Minister of Education and Culture disclosed the fact that he is the son of a slave and that he wanted to know about the descendants of his brothers and sisters in the diaspora; the pain of the past era could not have been sharper. With the UNESCO initiative, an effort is being made to bridge that almost unbridgeable gap that separates the academic study of slavery and the slave trade from a full and general appreciation of the heritage of Africa in the diaspora and the modern world. The emphasis on the "slave route" draws attention to the consequences of the trade on Africa and the continuities that rooted the deported slave population in Africa. Some slave descendants and former slaves returned, particularly in the nineteenth century. And there seems always to have been a small movement of individual freemen, especially merchants and their sons, within the diaspora. The settlement of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone and their subsequent dispersal represented one of several patterns of population movement that was a consequence of the slave trade. Besides the slaves taken off slave ships and settled in Sierra Leone, 6 other former slaves returned from Brazil, especially after the suppression of the Male revolt of 1835. 7 A few came from the United States, the Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora, a migration that tended to increase after the emancipation of slaves in the different parts of the Americas. 8 As these demographic patterns suggest, the return of former slaves and their descendants to Africa was one mechanism by which the diaspora influenced West Africa. "African history" not only followed the slave route to the Americas and the Islamic world, but "diaspora history" came back to Africa with the repatriates, thereby complicating the African component in the evolution of the diaspora. The African diaspora came to embrace Africa itself. A revisionist interpretation of the dispersal of enslaved Africans in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade, and by extension to the Islamic world and the Indian Ocean basin, concentrates on the role of Africa in the genesis and ongoing history of the diaspora. This revisionist approach emphasizes the continuities in African history and the extension of that history into the diaspora. The identification of disjunctures in that history is essential, but in contrast to previous interpretations of the diaspora, these disjunctures are analysed in terms of the continuities that have been largely overlooked. There were often

Africana Philosophy as a Cultural Resistance

Vernon Press, 2018

My aim in this chapter is to historicise a specific reading of Africana philosophy in terms of cultural repudiation to imposed historical memories and episteme. I use the term “Africana” in broad generality, for an inclusive representation of intellec- tual traditions emerging from Africa and the African Diaspora. From the per- spective of intellectual history, “Africana” is used here to signify a cross fertili- sation of knowledge-experiences between Africa and the African Diaspora, and how these experiences mirror each other.