When the Slave Traders Were African
Those whose ancestors sold slaves to Europeans now struggle to come to terms with a painful legacy
By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Updated Sept. 20, 2019 11:06 am ET
This August marked 400 years since the first documented enslaved Africans arrived in the U.S. In 1619, a ship reached the Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia, carrying “some 20 and odd Negroes” who were kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola. The anniversary coincides with a controversial debate in the U.S. about whether the country owes reparations to the descendants of slaves as compensation for centuries of injustice and inequality. It is a moment for posing questions of historic guilt and responsibility.
But the American side of the story is not the only one. Africans are now also reckoning with their own complicated legacy in the slave trade, and the infamous “Middle Passage” often looks different from across the Atlantic.
Records from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by historian David Eltis at Emory University, show that the majority of captives brought to the U.S. came from Senegal, Gambia, Congo and eastern Nigeria. Europeans oversaw this brutal traffic in human cargo, but they had many local collaborators. “The organization of the slave trade was structured to have the Europeans stay along the coast lines, relying on African middlemen and merchants to bring the slaves to them,” said Toyin Falola, a Nigerian professor of African studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Europeans couldn’t have gone into the interior to get the slaves themselves.”
The anguished debate over slavery in the U.S. is often silent on the role that Africans played. That silence is echoed in many African countries, where there is hardly any national discussion or acknowledgment of the issue. From nursery school through university in Nigeria, I was taught about great African cultures and conquerors of times past but not about African involvement in the slave trade. In an attempt to reclaim some of the dignity that we lost during colonialism, Africans have tended to magnify stories of a glorious past of rich traditions and brave achievement.
But there are other, less discussed chapters of our history. When I was growing up, my father Chukwuma Nwaubani spoke glowingly of my great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, a chief among our Igbo ethnic group who sold slaves in the 19th century. “He was respected by everyone around,” he said. “Even the white people respected him.” From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 1.4 million Igbo people were transported across the Atlantic as slaves.
Chukwuma Hope Nwaubani in Umuahia, Nigeria, this month. PHOTO: ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI
Some families have chosen to hide similar histories. “We speak of it in whispers,” said Yunus Mohammed Rafiq, a 44-year-old professor of anthropology from Tanzania who now teaches at New York University’s center in Shanghai.In the 19th century, Mr. Rafiq’s great-great-great-grandfather, Mwarukere, from the Segeju ethnic group, raided villages in Tanzania’s hinterland, sold the majority of his captives to the Arab merchants who supplied Europeans and kept the rest as laborers on his own coconut plantations. Although Mr. Rafiq’s relatives speak of Mwarukere with pride, they expunged his name from family documents sometime in the 1960s, shortly after Tanzania gained independence from British colonial rule, when it was especially sensitive to remind Africans of their role in enslaving one another.
Yunus Mohammed Rafiq in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, Aug. 6. PHOTO: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The need to keep his family’s history secret intensified after Mr. Rafiq left home in his 20s to study at Indiana University and then at Yale and Brown for graduate work. “Truthfully, with my African-American colleagues, I never revealed this aspect,” he said. “Because of the crimes, the pain, the humiliation that I saw them suffer in the United States, I thought talking about this legacy of Africans selling themselves is just piling another wound in a body that is already very shot through, fractured, broken down by other things.”He decided instead to highlight the beauty of Tanzanian music, architecture and poetry and, at Indiana, worked with the black students’ union to organize events that would build bonds to Africa. “Knowing this legacy and what we have done, it put so much pressure on me,” he said.
Like Mr. Rafiq, I also felt apprehensive before deciding to write about my own family’s history. I live in Nigeria but have extended family all over the U.S. How would black Americans respond to the descendants of a man who sold some of their ancestors into slavery? And if my own background was tainted with inhumanity, what authority would I have to lend my voice to the human rights issues in Nigeria and around Africa that cause me such grave concern?
Some families feel no qualms about publicizing their own history. “I’m not ashamed of it because I personally wasn’t directly involved,” said 58-year-old Donald Duke, a lawyer who ran for president in Nigeria’s 2019 elections. He is from the port town of Calabar, home to the Efik ethnic group of Nigeria’s Cross River state. In the 18th century, some 1.2 million slaves were sold through Calabar, according to the Tulane University historian Randy J. Sparks. The Efik were mostly stevedores and middlemen. They negotiated prices between the white traders and their African partners from the hinterlands, then collected royalties. “Families like mine benefited from that process,” Mr. Duke told me.
Donald Duke in Lagos, Nigeria, Aug. 1. PHOTO: LAKIN OGUNBANWO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mr. Duke was elected governor of Cross River state in 1999, and his administration built the Slave History Museum near the point on the coast from which slaves were shipped. One of its exhibitions depicts various currencies of the slave trade, such as flutes, Dane guns and brass bells. “It is not a glorious past, but it is the truth,” Mr. Duke said. “That is why I went out to document it.”
The Zambian pastor Saidi Francis Chishimba also feels the need to go public with his family’s history. “In Zambia, in a sense, it is a forgotten history,” said the 45-year-old. “But it is a reality to which history still holds us accountable.” Mr. Chishimba’s grandfather, Ali Saidi Muluwe Wansimba, was from a tribe of slave traders of the Bemba kingdom, who moved from Zanzibar to establish slave markets in Zambia. He grew up hearing this history narrated with great pride by his relatives.
In 2011, he decided to see the place of his ancestor’s origin and traveled with his wife to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. As they toured a memorial in what used to be one of the world’s largest slave markets, the photos of limbs amputated from runaway slaves and the airless chambers that once held dozens of slaves at a time shocked him into silence. “It brought a saddening in my heart that my own family lines were involved in this treatment,” he said. “It was so painful to think about.”
Mr. Chishimba decided that this gruesome history should be openly acknowledged and has since become popular in Zambia for his sermons, radio talks and articles on the impact of the slave trade. He uses them as an opportunity to “demonstrate the grace of God” even in so wicked a practice. He believes, for example, that mixing the races was always in God’s plan and the slave trade was an effective device for dispersing black people from Africa to other parts of the world. “What the devil meant for evil, God used it for good,” he said.
Saidi Francis Chishamba in Ingombe Ilede, Zambia, Aug. 8. PHOTO: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Some families feel cursed or burdened by their history and wish that they could be rid of it. “What our ancestors did wasn’t right,” said 48-year-old Teddy Nwanunobi, a journalist from southeastern Nigeria. “If they had thought about the consequences, they wouldn’t have done those things.” His great-grandfather was an Igbo slave trader, and Mr. Nwanunobi and his male relatives think that their own failure to produce children, in a patrilineal society, is a result of their family’s role in bringing other people’s lineages to an end. “I didn’t think twice about believing it,” Mr. Nwanunobi told me. He quoted a portion from the Book of Exodus, which refers to God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children…to the third and fourth generation.”
Similar Bible passages have become popular in certain religious circles in Nigeria. The pastors encourage their congregations to identify patterns in their afflictions and to investigate their histories for root causes, then to ask God for forgiveness, usually after a period of fasting. In collaboration with his younger brother in England, Mr. Nwanunobi is now making arrangements for priests to visit the family and advise on what steps to take to free them from their past. “If not, the family will continue to go down,” he said.
My own family held a similar intervention in January 2018, organized by my father, who, at 79, is the oldest male and head of the extended family. Members of the Nwaubani family in Nigeria and around the world participated in the three days of prayer and fasting. On the final day, a few dozen who lived nearby gathered in my father’s home, then accompanied him to the local Anglican Church, where a priest invoked God’s mercies on us. In December, my father organized another ceremony. Hundreds of family members who were home for the Christmas holidays joined in the thanksgiving service. This time, we dressed in our Sunday best and danced merrily to the altar to present a special money offering as a token of gratitude to God for granting us a new beginning.
Still, my father does not believe that the descendants of those who took part in the slave trade should now pay for those wrongs. As he points out, buying and selling human beings had been part of many African cultures, as a form of serfdom, long before the first white people landed on our shores. And though many families still retain the respect and influence accrued by their slave-trading ancestors, the direct material gains have petered out over time. “If anyone asks me for reparations,” he said sarcastically, “I will tell them to follow me to my backyard so that I can pluck some money from the tree there and give it to them.”
Mr. Chishimba takes a similar view. “Slavery was wrong, but do I carry upon my shoulders the sins of my forefathers so that I should go around saying sorry? I don’t think so,” he said. Mr. Duke doesn’t believe that Africans should play much of a part in the American reparations conversation, because the injustices the descendants of slaves suffer stem primarily from their maltreatment and deprivation in the U.S. “The Africans didn’t see anything wrong with slavery,” he said. “Even if the white man wasn’t there, they would still use these people as their domestics. However, because the white man was now involved and fortunes were being made…that was when the criminality came in.”
Mr. Nwanunobi wishes the matter were as straightforward as paying reparations in cash. He says that he would be willing to hand over all his family’s land and houses to anyone that suffered from his grandfather’s slave trading, whether in Nigeria or the U.S. “I am happy to give anything as long as it would bring an end to this suffering,” he said. “I will do whatever it will take to appease anybody, if only I can identify the particular people we offended.”
As for Mr. Rafiq, he agrees that Africans owe something to the descendants of slaves in America—a forthright acknowledgment of their own complicity in the trans-Atlantic trade. “Educated Africans need to rewrite their history, especially postcolonial history, which was a kind of restorative history that tended to marginalize issues like slavery,” he said. “Part of the compensation is telling the story of our part in what is happening to African-Americans today.”
Ms. Nwaubani is a Nigerian writer and journalist. Her debut novel, “I Do Not Come to You by Chance,” won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Her latest novel is “Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree.” Reporting for this piece was supported by a Reporting Award grant from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-slave-traders-were-african-11568991595
Those whose ancestors sold slaves to Europeans now struggle to come to terms with a painful legacy
By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Updated Sept. 20, 2019 11:06 am ET
This August marked 400 years since the first documented enslaved Africans arrived in the U.S. In 1619, a ship reached the Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia, carrying “some 20 and odd Negroes” who were kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola. The anniversary coincides with a controversial debate in the U.S. about whether the country owes reparations to the descendants of slaves as compensation for centuries of injustice and inequality. It is a moment for posing questions of historic guilt and responsibility.
But the American side of the story is not the only one. Africans are now also reckoning with their own complicated legacy in the slave trade, and the infamous “Middle Passage” often looks different from across the Atlantic.
Records from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by historian David Eltis at Emory University, show that the majority of captives brought to the U.S. came from Senegal, Gambia, Congo and eastern Nigeria. Europeans oversaw this brutal traffic in human cargo, but they had many local collaborators. “The organization of the slave trade was structured to have the Europeans stay along the coast lines, relying on African middlemen and merchants to bring the slaves to them,” said Toyin Falola, a Nigerian professor of African studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Europeans couldn’t have gone into the interior to get the slaves themselves.”
The anguished debate over slavery in the U.S. is often silent on the role that Africans played. That silence is echoed in many African countries, where there is hardly any national discussion or acknowledgment of the issue. From nursery school through university in Nigeria, I was taught about great African cultures and conquerors of times past but not about African involvement in the slave trade. In an attempt to reclaim some of the dignity that we lost during colonialism, Africans have tended to magnify stories of a glorious past of rich traditions and brave achievement.
But there are other, less discussed chapters of our history. When I was growing up, my father Chukwuma Nwaubani spoke glowingly of my great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, a chief among our Igbo ethnic group who sold slaves in the 19th century. “He was respected by everyone around,” he said. “Even the white people respected him.” From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 1.4 million Igbo people were transported across the Atlantic as slaves.
Chukwuma Hope Nwaubani in Umuahia, Nigeria, this month. PHOTO: ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI
Some families have chosen to hide similar histories. “We speak of it in whispers,” said Yunus Mohammed Rafiq, a 44-year-old professor of anthropology from Tanzania who now teaches at New York University’s center in Shanghai.In the 19th century, Mr. Rafiq’s great-great-great-grandfather, Mwarukere, from the Segeju ethnic group, raided villages in Tanzania’s hinterland, sold the majority of his captives to the Arab merchants who supplied Europeans and kept the rest as laborers on his own coconut plantations. Although Mr. Rafiq’s relatives speak of Mwarukere with pride, they expunged his name from family documents sometime in the 1960s, shortly after Tanzania gained independence from British colonial rule, when it was especially sensitive to remind Africans of their role in enslaving one another.
Yunus Mohammed Rafiq in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, Aug. 6. PHOTO: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The need to keep his family’s history secret intensified after Mr. Rafiq left home in his 20s to study at Indiana University and then at Yale and Brown for graduate work. “Truthfully, with my African-American colleagues, I never revealed this aspect,” he said. “Because of the crimes, the pain, the humiliation that I saw them suffer in the United States, I thought talking about this legacy of Africans selling themselves is just piling another wound in a body that is already very shot through, fractured, broken down by other things.”He decided instead to highlight the beauty of Tanzanian music, architecture and poetry and, at Indiana, worked with the black students’ union to organize events that would build bonds to Africa. “Knowing this legacy and what we have done, it put so much pressure on me,” he said.
Like Mr. Rafiq, I also felt apprehensive before deciding to write about my own family’s history. I live in Nigeria but have extended family all over the U.S. How would black Americans respond to the descendants of a man who sold some of their ancestors into slavery? And if my own background was tainted with inhumanity, what authority would I have to lend my voice to the human rights issues in Nigeria and around Africa that cause me such grave concern?
Some families feel no qualms about publicizing their own history. “I’m not ashamed of it because I personally wasn’t directly involved,” said 58-year-old Donald Duke, a lawyer who ran for president in Nigeria’s 2019 elections. He is from the port town of Calabar, home to the Efik ethnic group of Nigeria’s Cross River state. In the 18th century, some 1.2 million slaves were sold through Calabar, according to the Tulane University historian Randy J. Sparks. The Efik were mostly stevedores and middlemen. They negotiated prices between the white traders and their African partners from the hinterlands, then collected royalties. “Families like mine benefited from that process,” Mr. Duke told me.
Donald Duke in Lagos, Nigeria, Aug. 1. PHOTO: LAKIN OGUNBANWO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mr. Duke was elected governor of Cross River state in 1999, and his administration built the Slave History Museum near the point on the coast from which slaves were shipped. One of its exhibitions depicts various currencies of the slave trade, such as flutes, Dane guns and brass bells. “It is not a glorious past, but it is the truth,” Mr. Duke said. “That is why I went out to document it.”
The Zambian pastor Saidi Francis Chishimba also feels the need to go public with his family’s history. “In Zambia, in a sense, it is a forgotten history,” said the 45-year-old. “But it is a reality to which history still holds us accountable.” Mr. Chishimba’s grandfather, Ali Saidi Muluwe Wansimba, was from a tribe of slave traders of the Bemba kingdom, who moved from Zanzibar to establish slave markets in Zambia. He grew up hearing this history narrated with great pride by his relatives.
In 2011, he decided to see the place of his ancestor’s origin and traveled with his wife to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. As they toured a memorial in what used to be one of the world’s largest slave markets, the photos of limbs amputated from runaway slaves and the airless chambers that once held dozens of slaves at a time shocked him into silence. “It brought a saddening in my heart that my own family lines were involved in this treatment,” he said. “It was so painful to think about.”
Mr. Chishimba decided that this gruesome history should be openly acknowledged and has since become popular in Zambia for his sermons, radio talks and articles on the impact of the slave trade. He uses them as an opportunity to “demonstrate the grace of God” even in so wicked a practice. He believes, for example, that mixing the races was always in God’s plan and the slave trade was an effective device for dispersing black people from Africa to other parts of the world. “What the devil meant for evil, God used it for good,” he said.
Saidi Francis Chishamba in Ingombe Ilede, Zambia, Aug. 8. PHOTO: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Some families feel cursed or burdened by their history and wish that they could be rid of it. “What our ancestors did wasn’t right,” said 48-year-old Teddy Nwanunobi, a journalist from southeastern Nigeria. “If they had thought about the consequences, they wouldn’t have done those things.” His great-grandfather was an Igbo slave trader, and Mr. Nwanunobi and his male relatives think that their own failure to produce children, in a patrilineal society, is a result of their family’s role in bringing other people’s lineages to an end. “I didn’t think twice about believing it,” Mr. Nwanunobi told me. He quoted a portion from the Book of Exodus, which refers to God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children…to the third and fourth generation.”
Similar Bible passages have become popular in certain religious circles in Nigeria. The pastors encourage their congregations to identify patterns in their afflictions and to investigate their histories for root causes, then to ask God for forgiveness, usually after a period of fasting. In collaboration with his younger brother in England, Mr. Nwanunobi is now making arrangements for priests to visit the family and advise on what steps to take to free them from their past. “If not, the family will continue to go down,” he said.
My own family held a similar intervention in January 2018, organized by my father, who, at 79, is the oldest male and head of the extended family. Members of the Nwaubani family in Nigeria and around the world participated in the three days of prayer and fasting. On the final day, a few dozen who lived nearby gathered in my father’s home, then accompanied him to the local Anglican Church, where a priest invoked God’s mercies on us. In December, my father organized another ceremony. Hundreds of family members who were home for the Christmas holidays joined in the thanksgiving service. This time, we dressed in our Sunday best and danced merrily to the altar to present a special money offering as a token of gratitude to God for granting us a new beginning.
Still, my father does not believe that the descendants of those who took part in the slave trade should now pay for those wrongs. As he points out, buying and selling human beings had been part of many African cultures, as a form of serfdom, long before the first white people landed on our shores. And though many families still retain the respect and influence accrued by their slave-trading ancestors, the direct material gains have petered out over time. “If anyone asks me for reparations,” he said sarcastically, “I will tell them to follow me to my backyard so that I can pluck some money from the tree there and give it to them.”
Mr. Chishimba takes a similar view. “Slavery was wrong, but do I carry upon my shoulders the sins of my forefathers so that I should go around saying sorry? I don’t think so,” he said. Mr. Duke doesn’t believe that Africans should play much of a part in the American reparations conversation, because the injustices the descendants of slaves suffer stem primarily from their maltreatment and deprivation in the U.S. “The Africans didn’t see anything wrong with slavery,” he said. “Even if the white man wasn’t there, they would still use these people as their domestics. However, because the white man was now involved and fortunes were being made…that was when the criminality came in.”
Mr. Nwanunobi wishes the matter were as straightforward as paying reparations in cash. He says that he would be willing to hand over all his family’s land and houses to anyone that suffered from his grandfather’s slave trading, whether in Nigeria or the U.S. “I am happy to give anything as long as it would bring an end to this suffering,” he said. “I will do whatever it will take to appease anybody, if only I can identify the particular people we offended.”
As for Mr. Rafiq, he agrees that Africans owe something to the descendants of slaves in America—a forthright acknowledgment of their own complicity in the trans-Atlantic trade. “Educated Africans need to rewrite their history, especially postcolonial history, which was a kind of restorative history that tended to marginalize issues like slavery,” he said. “Part of the compensation is telling the story of our part in what is happening to African-Americans today.”
Ms. Nwaubani is a Nigerian writer and journalist. Her debut novel, “I Do Not Come to You by Chance,” won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Her latest novel is “Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree.” Reporting for this piece was supported by a Reporting Award grant from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-slave-traders-were-african-11568991595
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