Doing Honor to African History

These days most American and European historians of Africa want to do honor to Africans. But they take very different approaches to doing this.

One school hopes to lift up Africans by blaming all their problems on outsiders. If Africans participated in the slave trade, that must have been because outsiders somehow forced them to. If their politics were a mess, that is because Europeans (or, earlier, Arabs) ruined them. For example, one theory holds that Europeans got Africans to sell so many of their people abroad by creating an arms race that forced all African leaders to spend heavily for imported weapons.

John Thornton thinks that such theories are first, wrong, and second, make Africans out to be much weaker and stupider than they really were. In Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992) he set out to show that Africans were not overmastered by Europeans in that period, but chose to do what they did for their own reasons. He is, in one way of putting this, restoring agency to Africans in the slave trade era.

Thornton points out that when Europeans tried to conquer pieces of mainland Africa in this period they almost always failed. European ships and canons allowed them to seize offshore islands but taking even coastal islands was beyond their capability. The one exception was the Portugese seizure of part of Angola, and that only happened because they intervened in an African civil war, helped one side win, and got a substantial territory as their reward. Their attempts to extend that territory in the 1600s were defeated.

Thornton notes that in the period he covers European manufacturing was not much more advanced than it was in Africa. Europe's most valuable exports in that period were cloth, metal goods, and horses. Horses, of course, were hardly any kind of European innovation; they just happen to breed more readily in cooler places. European cloth was valued in Africa, not because it was better, but because it was different, and the African elite liked to have new and different ways to show off their status. The Portuguese also made money by carrying African cloth from one region to another, and to Brazil, so they certainly saw African textiles as something worth dealing in. And, says Thornton, European exports never amounted to more than 5% of the African market, even in coastal kingdoms. 

As for metal, African smiths could make crucible steel, so they could equal the finest European products; not until after 1750 or so did European metallurgy acquire any real technical advantage over the rest of the world. Africa did have something of a metal shortage, because they were short of charcoal for smelting, but even so European imports did not control a large share of the market until the 1800s. 

Nor did the traditional, trans-Saharan trade routes ever die out. For horses in particular the cross-Sahara route remained viable, and Thornton says some African merchants positioned themselves to be able to draw on whichever source had more and better product that year. African merchants, both native and creole, were big operators who could deal on equal terms with European traders.

One major advantage the Europeans did have was in certain weapons, notably canons and armor. But the pope forbade selling weapons to Africans, and the European powers do seem to have been reluctant to sell advanced weapons for the first few centuries. Even when they began to acquire muskets in the 1600s, African armies did not make much use of them; our accounts of African battles in this period show the use of a few canons for attacking forts, but otherwise a lot of spears and swords. (Even so, they regularly defeated European forces, for example by swarming ships with bowmen in canoes.) So, says Thornton, there was no sense in which Africans were forced to trade with Europeans.

Unfortunately Thornton's book ended just when the worst period of the slave trade was getting going, so I don't know what he has to say about the 1680 to 1750 period. But it certainly remained true that African kingdoms and African merchants were independent operators who made their own decisions and defied Europeans who tried to boss them around.

My favorite part of this book was the short chapter on Christianity in pagan Africa. Thornton says that Africans and Europeans Christians easily understood each other's religious ideas, because they were similar: both posited a spiritual world to which certain people had access, and from which revelations might come. The biggest problem many Africans had with Christianity was that its key revelations took place too long ago and far away; they wanted messages closer to themselves in space and time. Thornton says Africans were more impressed by immediate signs. For example, the Jesuits drew large audiences when they used Christian divination to decide which saints to dedicate their new churches to. In the period Thornton covers many Africans "converted to Christianity" to the extent that they attended Christian services and consulted priests for magical aid, but without giving up other sources of spiritual assistance.

Thornton's book is also eye-opening on the vast scale of the documents available for the study of African history in this period. Most of them were written by Europeans, but they were written by a wide variety of men working from a dozen nations, giving us a rich potraryal of these lands at least as they related to trade and coastal governance. The number of African polities Thornton was able to map and describe frankly astonished me. The African trade was highly politicized and always required managing local governments and local power brokers, so European traders made very careful notes on who those people were and how best to deal with them.

African history is intimidating because the space is so huge, the number of independent states so great (hundreds), the vocabulary so strange and varied, the sources scattered across two continents in dozens of languages. Most of us also lack the basic framework for understanding that we acquired in school about the European past. Getting entrance to this mysterious kingdom of the past is not easy, but after a dozen books I feel like I am at least starting to idle around the threshold.