Excavating the role of Africans in the creation of the modern world - Europe would have been a marginal player in world history without the continent’s natural resources and centuries of cheap African labour
bureau chief in the Americas, Africa and Asia scrutinises the received history of “the West”. He fills in crucial gaps and pulls down the assumptions, narratives, and myths that exclude Africans and Africa from the formation of the modern world.
They utterly transformed the civic culture, through the creation of the coffee shop, which is another outgrowth of African slave labour. Africans grew the coffee. Africans grew the sugar that made the coffee palatable.
I say that if Europe had not had the benefit of [Africa’s] natural resources, and then subsequent centuries of African labour, Europe would have been a marginal player in world history in the era that’s under discussion. I don’t mean to say by this, however, that Europeans had no talents or no qualities, or that they wouldn’t have had their own fair share of achievements.
The speculative counterfactual answer to your question that seems most persuasive to me is that if Africa had not had the accidental history of the 15th and 16th century, whereby the Portuguese and, subsequently, other European powers, begin to engage south of the Sahara — first to trade for large quantities of gold, and then seduced African powers into the trade in slaves; if those things had not happened, Africa as a continent, especially the Atlantic part of the continent, would have been...
This created a shock of awareness in me. I’m American, and I’m deeply familiar with the lack of that very thing in my own society. I also found that when I went to Brazil, home to the largest black population of any society outside Africa. WEB du Bois helped to start this reflection off a century ago, but we’re only just now achieving some momentum; we’re excavating our way out of this deep hole, where we, as people of color, allow ourselves to be invested in understanding these stories and to reassess our own central role in the building of the world.
But when I got to work on this book, and dove into the archives, I discovered a much thicker history even than I had suspected back then. The Portuguese arrived in Kongo just a few years after they arrived in Elmina. When the Portuguese come ashore, it becomes clear to the Kongolese that the Portuguese have as a Christian religious symbol, the cross.
This is another one of these powerful coincidences that make history so fascinating. The eventual success of the Haitian Revolution was probably, in part helped, by the fact that many of the Africans who were imported to Haiti, as enslaved peoples, in the 18th century came from areas in Africa that had advanced states involved in very complicated warfare.
Americans talk of the expansion to a continental-size country in terms of the pluck and the courage and willingness to conquer “the untamed West”. But this all begins with Haiti. Once this happens, the Mississippi River Valley becomes a site of economic exploitation on a very large scale by white people. These territories became the focus of cotton cultivation. And cotton cultivation, like sugar cultivation, was performed by black people, the descendants of people brought from Africa in chains.
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