Did Africans “Sell Their Own People” into Slavery?

In July 2021, I was invited by Prof. Fabio Silva Vallejo of the Department of Anthropology of the Universidad del Magdalena in Colombia to speak about Slavery in one of his seminars which was conducted remotely. One major question that I had to deal with then was about African chiefs purportedly selling their own people into Slavery. It is time again to, once and for all, address this persistent myth that usually rears its ugly head whenever a discussion about Slavery comes up. It is time also to unmask those who peddle this narrative for who they really are: irredeemable apologists for Slavery and white supremacy.

Indeed, the question of whether Africans “sold their own kith and kin” for beads and mirrors and trinkets during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is one of the most recurring and fraught debates in world history. It has resurfaced again with the discussions about Reparations and Reparatory Justice gaining traction. Frequently used in modern political discourse to soften the accountability of European chattel Slavery or to suggest shared moral culpability for that evil system, the claim relies on a fundamental distortion of history: it projects modern concepts of racial unity onto a complex, highly fractured continent.

To understand the demented mechanics of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, one must dissect the reality of African geopolitics, and the savage operations of chattel Slavery.

1. The Myth of Pan-African Identity in the Early Modern Era

The assertion that Africans sold “their own people” rests on a basic historical error: the assumption that 17th- and 18th-century West and Central Africans possessed a shared "Black" or Pan-African identity. They did not.

Prior to European contact, Africa was not a unified political or cultural entity; it was a continent composed of hundreds of distinct polities, empires, kingdoms, and ethnic groups, including the Asante, Oyo, Dahomey, Shongai, Kongo, and Ndongo, to name a few. An 18th-century Asante warrior did not view an Imbangala or Dahomean individual as a brother or "kith and kin". They viewed them as foreigners, political rivals, or enemy combatants.

In this context, captives were acquired primarily through:

• Inter-state Warfare: Where enemies were captured on the battlefield.

• Judicial Punishment: When individuals were convicted of serious crimes, or through

• Kidnapping and Raids: During  raids conducted by militarized states seeking commodities to trade.

When powerful African rulers turned over their captives to European merchants along the coast, they were not “selling their own people;” they were exchanging foreign enemies or political outsiders for weapons, etc. To call this “selling kith and kin" is like claiming that 18th-century English forces were “selling their own people" when they imprisoned French or Scottish soldiers in European wars and used them for hard labor.

2. Chattel Slavery and the Triangular Trade System

While there is no denying that forms of domestic servitude existed in West Africa prior to European arrival, (as it did in many places around the world), comparing them to Trans-Atlantic chattel Slavery creates a misleading moral equivalence.

Domestic servitude in Africa was never perpetual or inherited; captive persons often retained basic human rights, could assimilate into the host community over generations, and could buy or earn their freedom.  They were never systematically deprived of their humanity nor considered beasts. They were never treated with the extreme savagery, cruelty, degradation and legal dehumanization as those who were forcibly removed from the continent to foreign lands where they were stripped of their names, languages and the practice of their religions and cultures. Their identity was systematically erased.

In contrast, European merchants transformed human beings into legal property - chattel - commodifying them on an unprecedented global scale.

African elites were caught in a coercive economic structure created by the European Triangular Slave Trade: Firstly, European traders brought vast quantities of firearms and gunpowder to the African coast which they exchanged for African prisoners of war (POWs).

Secondly, there was the issue of existential threat. Polities that acquired European firearms dominated their neighbors. Those that refused were vulnerable to capture and enslavement.

In this way, the situation became escalated. To defend themselves, African nations needed firearms, which European traders exchanged almost exclusively for human captives.

This created a self-reinforcing violent cycle. Participation was often driven by state survival rather than mere economic opportunism. African rulers had no control over the destiny of those they traded, nor could they have foreseen the barbaric horrors of the Middle Passage or the generational plantation Slavery that awaited captives in the Americas.

The notion that African chiefs/kings “sold their own people” to Europeans in exchange for mirrors and trinkets and guns is simply ludicrous, a warped invention of the mind designed to appease the conscience of the European enslavers.

First of all, this would basically imply that there were markets in Africa where slaves were “sold”. This is not true at all. The “holding” spaces like El Mina Castle in Ghana, Goree in Senegal, Badagry in Nigeria, etc. were not built by African chiefs and kings but by Europeans using slave labor! Where then were the slave markets in Africa? However, there were actual slave markets in the so-called New World! That is where you had auction blocks where captured Africans were sold like animals.

While they were on African soil, they were not Slaves. They were artesans, farmers, griots, teachers, doctors, scientists, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. They had names. They had dreams. They had their own religions. All of that was taken from them. They became enslaved when they arrived in the Americas following weeks of a nightmarish Middle Passage.

3. Historical Legacy and Moral Accountability

Acknowledging the role of African political elites in supplying captives to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade does not diminish in any sense the primary responsibility of European powers.

European capital, consumer demand for plantation goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton), and racialized legal codes… all created and sustained the global chattel system which Europeans invented and sustained for millennia.

They destabilized indigenous systems of governance on the African continent for centuries, sparking wars, destroying political institutions, and leaving a legacy of social fragmentation that paved the way for 19th-century European colonization.

Conclusion

Did Africans "sell their kith and kin"? No!

They traded foreign enemies, political rivals, and war captives in an era before a shared African or racial identity existed. While a few African rulers actively participated in the supply chain of the trade, they operated within local geopolitical realities and coercive global economic pressures.

Besides, we very seldom hear about those brave African kings and queens who fought tooth and nail against the European raids and kidnappings. Just as happened in the Americas, there was a relentless resistance against the wholesale capture of Africans to be forcibly transported to the plantations of the “New World.”

Therefore, this often repeated narrative about the alleged complicity of African chiefs, kings and rulers in the evil and ignominious institution of Slavery needs to be thrashed once and for all. I strongly believe that it is a craftily designed, exaggerated colonial excuse to minimize the crime against humanity which the whole world now accepts that Slavery was. In fact, the “apologies” coming from both the private and public sectors in Europe for their roles in that crime against humanity are, in themselves, a confession and a confirmation of the monstrosity of the system.

We must be careful not to continue to amplify the nonsensical propaganda of shifting the blame on African kings and chiefs who may wittingly or unwittingly have collaborated with the evil doers.

Just by the volume and longevity of the Transatlantic Slave Trade alone, Africa must be awash with mirrors and trinkets and those erstwhile kingdoms must  have been unconquerable sitting on so much gunpowder, since those were what they allegedly got in exchange for the humans they “sold”!! The fact of the matter is that we have elevated the betrayal of a few to the level of a massive collaboration with the enemy. However, historical facts point to the contrary.

Enough is enough. Let’s focus on reparatory justice. That is what they want to avoid. That is what they want to escape responsibility for. There is no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity. You can’t do the crime and blame the victims when you have to do the time. We ain’t falling for that trick no more.

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