"The Atlantic Slave Trade Was Not a "Black-on-Black Holocaust

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2595953
AutoresLansine Kaba (autor de correspondencia)
Año2001
Volumen44
Número1
Páginas1
Fecha de publicación2001-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAfrican Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-0206 • E-ISSN: 1555-2462
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/525389
OpenAlexW2126807307
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas16

This article, which derives from the wisdom of my Koranic teachers in Kankan, Guinea, as well as the dedication of the Africanist community, discusses the question of the representation of Africa in general, and especially the claim made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that Africans committed a Holocaust-type crime by selling other blacks to whites. To refute this allegation, I rely on my familiarity with the literature on the quasi-universality of slavery in human history and on the Atlantic slave trade. This leads me to assert that, though painful to acknowledge, some Africans of the slave trade era did participate as pivotal middlemen in the brutal, ignominious, and peculiar trade that drastically changed the image of the black in the white mind. But the wars and raiding that resulted in the enslavement of millions of Africans were not fought according to any theory of racial or ethnic purity such as the one that would emerge as a key Nazi ideology. Furthermore, sound historical evidence points to the European and American origins of the slave trade. Far from being an accident, the slave trade was a significant part of modern European expansion. The white businessmen, ship owners, mariners, and plantation owners played the dominant role in this business, a point to which Gates—unlike W.E.B. Du Bois, in whose grand tradition he aspires to follow—pays only lip service. Therefore, the notion of a black “Holocaust” perpetrated by Africans in the era of the slave trade is a flawed and objectionable analogy which tends to “relativize” the Holocaust and to sow discord in the relationship between Africans and black people of the diaspora

Allegation · Atlantic slave trade · Ideology · Middle Passage · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · White (mutation · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law