STATE OF THE DISCIPLINES

African Historiography: New Myths for Old

Stanley B. Alpern

t is now half a century since Melville J. Herskovits, father of modern I African studies in the United States, published his landmark work of historical rectification, TheMyth of the Past) This myth, he noted, formed one of the main supports of white racism by validating the concept of black inferiority. He reduced it to five basic, interrelated points: blacks were naturally childlike and adjusted easily even to slavery; only the least clever Africans were enslaved; the slaves came from all over , were culturally very diverse, and deliberately separated from their cotribesmen in the , so that no common traditions could survive; even if tribesmen could stay together, African cultures were "so savage and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization" that they would have been totally abandoned in the face of superior white customs; and "the Negro is thus a man without a past. "~ Herskovits observed that the myth overlooked available evidence and relied heavily on misinformation. African resistance to enslavement was so well documented, for example, that he wondered how the idea of the compliant black ever got started. Contemporary testimony about who was enslaved and who was not indicated that the former were in no way inferior to the latter. Slaves did not come from all over Africa; the great majority came from the western coast, and relatively few of those from far inland. Traditions of some heavily represented tribes could and did survive in the . The prevailing myth held that in every domain-economic, social, political, religious, esthetic-African life was deficient; crude, simple, rudimentary, naive, barbarous, fear-ridden were among the adjectives commonly employed. And yet, by the time Herskovits wrote his book, enough scholarly research had been done to prove the contrary, that African institutions were highly complex and often sophisticated, particularly in the core slaving . American blacks had a rich African past. In the period since Herskovits wrote, African studies have reinforced his findings, sweeping away the old racist canards, Can we congratulate ourselves,

Stanley B. Alperu is a retired U.S. Information Agency foreign service officer who served in from 1969 to 1973. Please address correspondence to Academic Questions, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540. A different version of this article appeared in the Summer 1992 Bostonia. 52 Academic Questions/Fall 1992

then, on having established an African historiography that is at least as objective and unbiased as other areas of historical inquiry? Unfortunately, the emotional element in modern African studies has too often led to the replacement of derogatory old myths by patronizing new ones. It is as important to expose these new myths as it was to debunk the old.

The Meeting as Equals Myth

When, in December 1990, President Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria called on Western nations to pay compensation to Africa for the damage done by the slave trade, he argued that before the trade began, Africa and were almost equal in levels of development, and that the huge loss of young manpower had greatly contributed to "marginalizing" the , s His statement went unchallenged--though no Western government reached for its checkbook--but even the seemingly unassailable proposition that African development was retarded by the slave trade is debatable. The human hemorrhage was counterbalanced and perhaps overbalanced in eco- nomic terms by the effects of certain European trade goods Africans received in exchange for the humans they sold and of the European introduction of new food crops. European iron bars enabled African smiths to turn out considerably more farm and craft tools than before; steel-bladed machetes made it easier to clear living areas and paths and to start and maintain farm plots and kitchen gardens; smaller knives facilitated myriad economic tasks; firearms helped farmers protect crops from wild animals and hunters bag more game; fish- hooks boosted ocean, lagoon, and river catches. Europeans introduced at least seventy new crops into Africa during the slave trade period--including such staples as maize, cassava, Asian rice, pea- nuts, sweet potatoes, and tannia (yautia)--plus several new species of livestock, improving diets immeasurably and accelerating population growth, to the point, some specialists would contend, that human losses through the trade were more than offset by the enhanced ability to feed people. President Babangida's proposition that Africa and Europe were almost at equal levels of development before the trade began is simply preposterous, yet it is one of the major new myths of African historiography, one of the romantic, patronizing refrains that have succeeded the old pejorative canards. I call it the Meeting as Equals myth. Like most of the ideological wares hawked by politically correct Africanists, the Meeting as Equals myth has been around a while. As long ago as 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois claimed that in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese explorers reached sub-Saharan Africa, "there was no great disparity between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe. "4 Three decades ago Basil Davidson, the foremost modern popularizer of African history, wrote that "the Alpern 53

'cultural gap' between the European discoverers and the Africans they found was narrow and often felt to be non-existent....Africa and Europe, at the beginning of their connection, traded and met as equals .... [T]his acceptance of equality...long continued to govern relations" between them. 5 Thus, not only were Africans and Europeans more or less equal in development, but they were perceived as such by both sides. Other authors have embraced and embroidered this notion. Historical anthologists Clark D. Moore and Ann Dunbar assert that when the Portuguese reached West Africa "they found a culture...which they felt they could under- stand and appreciate .... [T]hey accepted the idea that native African states were on an equal footing with European ones. "6 Another historical anthologist, Melvin Drimmer, writes that the Africans' "high level of culture" made them "attractive to Europeans as a source of skilled labor." He adds that Africans met Europeans as equals "until the advent of the industrial revolution in Europe," that "powerful African nations" restricted Europeans to coastal areas, and that "a well developed state structure" kept Europeans from controlling Africa until late in the nineteenth century. 7 E. Jefferson Murphy tells us unequivocally that "in the first century or two of European-African contact, the relationship between African and European was between equals. "s The view is even advanced by Claudia Zaslavsky that "in the fifteenth century, the level of culture among the masses of in West Africa was higher than that of during the same period. "g To support such assertions, these and other writers point to striking parallels between European and African feudalism; to some positive remarks (but not to the negative ones) made by medieval Arab visitors about Islamized or Muslim-influenced black kingdoms just below the ; to the complexity of African political and legal institutions; to the well-developed African market and trading systems that Europeans found; to African houses of wattle, daub, and thatch that were not much different from many European peasant homes; to the (unique) city of Benin, whose size, broad avenues, and rows of attractive buildings led visitors to compare it favorably with contemporary European cities; to African habits of personal hygiene and delicacy of manners that made most Europeans look like barbarians by comparison; to the nearly comparable state of illiteracy in Europe and Africa; to the Europeans' continued use of bow and arrow and lance; and to the slavery that was still common in in the fifteenth century. But the idea of cultural equivalence does not withstand scrutiny. The development gap between and sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth century was already very wide and growing fast. Europe had inherited an immense catalogue of material and intellectual advances from all the ancient civilizations of the and the , advances whose outermost ripples had apparently never reached the Coast. 54 Academic Questions / Fall 1992

Some of these innovations dated back more than five thousand years, to before Sumer and dynastic Egypt: the land sledge, for instance, and the sailboat. From Sumer alone came the potter's wheel and vehicular wheel (both based on the rotating-shaft principle used previously only in the fire drill), draft and pack animals, the plow, irrigation, kiln-fired bricks. Above all, the Sumerians invented writing, which permitted progress in many directions: standardization of length, area, volume, weight, and time, as well as a calendar, mathematics, astronomy, cartography, natural history, grammars and diction- aries, the preservation of myths, epic tales, hymns, proverbs, fables and essays, libraries to accumulate and store knowledge, and schools to diffuse it. From Phoenicia came the alphabet, which put literacy within everyone's reach. The Hittites contributed the horse-drawn chariot and an economic method for smelting iron on an industrial scale, the Lydians coinage that simplified all commercial transactions, the Persians the post road and pontoon bridge, the Assyrians the aqueduct. Egypt developed glass, and its pyramid builders used plumb lines, wedges, copper saws, chisels, wooden mallets, and apparently a try square. They hauled huge blocks of stone by means of sledge, roller, lever, rope, and ramp. (There is no evidence that any of these Egyptian contributions derived from Black Africa.) The possibilities of the rotating shaft were developed further by the ancient Greeks, who produced the rotary mill, the toothed or geared wheel, the screw, and probably the water wheel. Rome invented concrete and made better bricks. The intellectual, artistic, and architectural contributions of Greece and Rome to European civilization are too familiar to enumerate here. Much of what had been lost of Greek and Latin letters since the fall of Rome had been regained for Western Europe (with Arab help) by the fifteenth century. When the Portuguese reached the Guinea Coast, they did so in three- masted oceangoing sailing ships using compass, quadrant, astrolabe, naviga- tion tables and charts, knowledge of stars, winds, currents, latitudes. The Africans they met used dugout canoes and paddles, and rarely if ever ventured out of sight of land. The simplest manufactures brought to the coast by the early European traders--such as mirrors, glass beads and botdes, brass basins, wooden chests, locks and keys, bells, and a wide selection of cloth--found an appreciative market. European merchants were already using modern business methods: credit, loans, checks, bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, insurance of goods in transit. Europeans were already far more efficient than Africans at killing enemies (though poisoned African arrows took their toll). Gunpowder had appeared in Europe the previous century and revolutionized warfare. Cannon's were in common use by the end of the fourteenth century. The metal spring, known to the ancients but used by them only in the safety pin, began to show its mechanical potential in the fourteenth century with the steel crossbow. Body armor reached its highest technical d, lelopment in the late Alpern 55

fifteenth century, with flexibly jointed steel plates replacing chain mail. The harquebus, the first portable firearm, came into use at the same time. When Captain Diogo de Azambuja sailed from Lisbon in December 1481 to found the first permanent European trading post in Black Africa (in what is now Ghana), he left a continent that had already harnessed the energy of water and wind to grind grain, crush ore and tanbark, mash pulp for paper and hops for beer, work bellows, saw lumber and marble, full cloth, and pump water. Europeans already measured time with large mechanical clocks and would soon know portable timepieces. Concave lenses were used in eyeglasses. A century earlier paper began to replace parchment; a generation earlier Gutenberg printed his Bible. By 1490 every country of Western Europe would know printing, and by century's end as many as 110 communities would boast presses. Musical notation on a graph was already well developed, and Euro- peans possessed the ancestors of practically every instrument in today's symphony orchestra. Coaches had been introduced in midcentury, and an international posting system was to be established in the final years of the century. By 1400 forty-five universities had been founded in Europe; during the fifteenth century another thirty-four were established. Literacy had spread from monastery to manor, to lawyer and notary, burgher and master crafts- man, even to apprentice. By 1481 all the great Gothic cathedrals already dominated European townscapes. They incorporated the quintessential cul- tural achievements of medieval Europe: the architect's soaring, clustered pillars, pointed arch, ribbed vault, and flying buttress; the glazier's stained- glass window; the finest creations of the stoneworker, carpenter, sculptor, tapestry-maker, goldsmith, painter, and ceramicist. The Italian Renaissance was nearly a century old. Florence, building on foundations laid by Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, had already pro- duced its incredible constellation of aesthetic and intellectual pathbreakers: the sculptors Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, the architects Brunelleschi and Alberti, the painters Masaccio and Fra Angelico, the historian Bruni. Leonardo was painting his Adoration of the Magi. Italian travelers and books were spreading Renaissance ideas to all cities of the West. Azambuja, debarking at the Village of the Two Parts (now known as Elmina) in January 1482, represented a civilization in full cultural ferment--and one that was not about to concede equality to any of the other civilizations it would soon encounter. So just how unequal were Europe and Africa? The eminent Africanist Philip D. Curtin once made an educated stab at it, not for the fifteenth century but for the mid-eighteenth, i.e., before the Industrial Revolution made the gap enormously wider. He put the technological distance between most African societies and at "hardly more than a thousand years" in 56 Academic Questions/Fall 1992

1750, and calculated that the western (the Senegal-Mali-Niger region) and Britain were on a par in 750 A.D) ~

Power Versus Responsibility

The Meeting as Equals myth has an important variant that I call the Power Versus Responsibility myth. It focuses on the alleged strength of African polities while downplaying or excusing the role of African kings, chiefs, grandees, and merchants in the slave trade. It seems beyond dispute that for practically the whole period of the trade, most European footholds on the African coast were precarious. They existed and survived on the sufferance of local rulers, who occasionally killed, expelled, or merely humiliated resident Europeans. As Freda Wolfson has remarked, "no European felt really safe on the outside the walls of his fort"n--and there were more forts to protect them on the Gold Coast than anywhere else. In terms of relative power on the coast, Europeans were inferior to Africans. However, the Europeans tolerated such a situation for so long not, as Drimmer would have us believe, because "powerful...well developed" African "nations" kept them at bay, but because coastal forts and lodges served their main purpose of trading for slaves. Scattered efforts to penetrate the interior, to get closer to the sources of slaves (and gold) and bypass the coastal middlemen, were discouraged more by natural than human obstacles, and by a staggering white death rate from local diseases. The Portuguese discovered very early on that there was no need to risk their necks raiding African villages for slaves; other Africans would do the job for them at an acceptably low price. The villainous image (conjured up by Alex Hale), in Roots) of hairy, red-faced, stinking "toubobs" waylaying hapless blacks was atypical at best. Historians would agree that the vast majority of slaves shipped to the New World from Africa were enslaved by fellow Africans and sold to European traders on the coast. Where historians differ is in assessing African willingness to engage in such a business. Curtin, for example, points out that "the slave trade was not forced on Africa by the Europeans. Europeans bought, but Africans sold; and the number of Africans engaged in the slave trade at any moment was certainly larger than the number of Europeans. "1~ Davidson, on the other hand, stretches to find mitigating circumstances for the enslavers. African chiefs, he says, found that to obtain the European goods they desired, including firearms needed for their own survival, they had to deliver up their fellow men. Otherwise the ships went elsewhere. So willy-nilly "the rulers of coastal Africa surrendered to the slave trade. They struggled against its worst excesses from time to time; but the trade was always too strong for them in the end. "is Specifically, Davidson contends that the kingdom of Dahomey "in spite of its reluctance...was caught in the slave trade's ruinous chain of cause and Alpern 57

effect,...pushed into wholesale participation in slaving. "14 And the Asante of Ghana, too, "whether they wished it or not, were driven into the slaving business. 'q5 Davidson bases his claims of African reluctance and resistance on slim and, for me and some other Africanists, unconvincing evidence. 16 In the end even Davidson concedes:

The history of the Guinea Coast between about 1550 and 1850 is increasingly and continuously the history of an international partnership in risk and profit....Those Africans who were involved in the trade were seldom the helpless victims of a commerce they did not understand; on the contrary, they understood it as well as their European partners....They exploited its opportunities. 17

And, I might add, when the British eventually tried to stamp out the trade it was the African kings and chiefs and merchants themselves who were its staunchest defenders. Elizabeth Isichei, a specialist on the Igbo people of Nigeria, suggests that rather than sell slaves, African rulers would have preferred to develop their countries' resources:

What the rulers of the [Niger] Delta repeatedly asked to buy, Europe was never prepared to sell. This was basically knowledge, which could help them span the ever-widening technological gap between Africa and Europe....But unanswered requests of this kind are a recurrent leitmotif in West African history, is

The record does not at all support her. It indicates, rather, that African rulers did not start thinking along such lines until they were persuaded to abandon the slave trade. One cannot consistently minimize the power of white men along the Guinea Coast in the days of the slave trade and maximize the responsibility of white men for that trade. When guilt is apportioned, African chiefs and merchants deserve a large share. There is balanced testimony on the matter from one of the trade's victims, a Gold Coaster named Ottobah Cuguano, who was enslaved as a boy in 1770, shipped to Grenada, and later taken to England and freed. "I must own," he wrote, "to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kid-napped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery; but if there were no buyers there would be no sellers. "19

Racism and the Slave Trade

The Meeting as Equals myth also has an important corollary that I call the Racism and the Slave Trade myth. This is the common assumption that white racism grew out of the slave trade, that the notion of black inferiority arose as ex post facto justification for the trade and as balm to the European conscience. If Europeans and Africans met as equals, the former obviously 58 Academic Questions/Fall 1992

could not yet have been racists. The very idea of race, it is even said, emerged only in the seventeenth century, following two centuries of European explo- ration of the globe. ~~ Typical is a remark by Robert G. Armstrong that "the system of race prejudice in America and Europe had its basic, sociological origin in the slave-trade. "2] Evidence suggests, however, that it was an exacer- bating factor, not a first cause. Winthrop D. Jordan, in researching his well-known study White over Black, found that to understand white American attitudes toward blacks one had to dig deep into British history, back in fact beyond the first contacts between Englishmen and Africans in the sixteenth century. Even before that century, he discovered, white in England connoted purity, virginity, virtue, beauty, beneficence, and God, while black connoted filthiness, sin, baseness, ugliness, evil, and the devil. For Englishmen, with their ideal of a fair complexion, Africans' skin color would seem "the very picture of perverse negation." Similarly, African heathenism was a "counter-image" of England's religion. Africans' alleged "condition of savagery--the failure to be civilized"--set them apart from Englishmen "in an ill-defined but crucial fashion." Africans were therefore different in so many ways that Englishmen were [ady to believe them to be more bestial than human. "Long before first English contact with West Africa," says Jordan, "the inhabitants of virtually the entire continent stood confirmed in European literature as lustful and venerous. "22 Other Europeans were no more enlightened in their early contact with Africans. A more recent historical study of French attitudes toward blacks reached the same conclusions that Jordan did about the English. William B. Cohen found that "the French developed initial negative reactions toward Africa and its inhabitants long before setting foot on the continent," and that slavery simply "confirmed the inequality between the races that travelers to Africa and writers in France had already proclaimed."2s The old idea that the Portuguese were from the ira'st less racist than other whites has been debunked by C.R. Boxer, a noted historian of the Portuguese empire. He fmds that by the fifteenth century, "[h]atred and intolerance, not sympathy and understanding, for alien creeds and races was the general " for Iberian Christians, and that blacks (and descendants of Jews) would for centuries bear the brunt of Portuguese prejudice and persecution. 24 In the mid-fifteenth century, Portuguese court chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara wrote the first postclassical European book to touch on Black Africa. It contains the earliest extant description of an Atlantic slave mart, held in Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. Some 230 captives were brought ashore and placed together in a field. Among them, wrote Zurara, "were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others...were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in feature and body, as almost to appear...the image of a lower hemisphere. "~s By the sixteenth century Europeans had already acquired a sense of superiority that had little if anything to do with enslavement of Africans and, Alpern 59

paradoxically, a lot to do with the "humanist" revival of classical learning. Renaissance Europe rediscovered Grecian glory and Roman grandeur just before it discovered the rest of mankind. Greek contempt for the barbarian and the Aristotelian belief in the natural slave would soon play in a global setting. Writing in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese naviga- tor/soldier/historian Duarte Pacheco Pereira was merely updating Pliny the Elder when he exclaimed on Europe's excellence in comparison to the rest of the world:

Nor may we doubt that in cities, towns, walled fortresses and other stately and beautiful buildings Europe excels and Africa, as also in her larger and better fleets, which are better armed and equipped than those of any other region; nor can the inhabitants of Asia and Africa deny that Europe possesses great abun- dance of arms and skill in them and much artillery, besides being the most excellent scholars of all the world in every science, and that in many other respects it excels all the rest of the world. 26

Timbuktu U.

Perhaps the most overblown myth is that of the great "University of Timbuktu." Sometimes called the University of Sankore, after a quarter surrounding a mosque in that fabled desert-edge city, this university has been an enduring staple of one school of African historiography. Du Bois wrote that under Askiya Muhammad, emperor of Songhay ( 1493-1528), the univer- sity swarmed with thousands of black students. 27 J.C. de Graft-Johnson, a Ghanaian scholar, called it "one of the world's greatest seats of learning. "~8 S.M. Cissoko, a Senegalese historian writing more recently in UNESCO's General History of Africa, says the black elite of the middle region "reached the heights of Islamic learning at Timbuktu. "29 Actually, no formal university ever existed at Timbuktu. Instead, there was an unorganized community of Muslim scholars who taught theology, jurispru- dence, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and other Islamic subjects. The earliest of these scholars included blacks sent by Malian emperor Mansa Musa (1312-37) to the University of Fez, Morocco, for training. However, it was not until the sixteenth century that Timbuktu flourished as a center of learning and that local instruction most resembled a university; and by that time most of its leading scholars were of Berber or Arab extraction. The Sankore mosque in particular was a foyer of Sanhaja Berber, not black, academic life. s~

A Resilient Myth: African Cultural Uniformity

One myth is shared by the old mythmakers and the new--a monolithic view of sub-Saharan Africa that survives all evidence of its immense diversity. False generalizations have been succeeded by other false generalizations, pejorative 60 Academic Questions / Fall 1992

by meliorative lumping. Even historians who acknowledge and detail African diversity have written books with such sweeping titles as A History of the African Peopleal or History ofAfrican Civilization. s2 Yet no one questions anthropologist George Peter Murdock's observation that Africa "has more distinct peoples and cultures than any other continent."ss Typical illustrations are a remark by E.W. Bovill that the Malian empire left behind by Mansa Musa at his death (in 1337) provided "a striking example of the capacity of the negro for political organization, "s4 and one by historian James S. Coleman terming Ghana's cocoa industry "a classic example of African ingenuity, enterprise and adaptability. "s5 What, in fact, the one shows is the capacity of the Malinke people for political organization, the other the economic abilities of Akan farmers. Would anyone but a racist think of saying, for instance, that the Roman Empire provided a striking example of the capacity of the European, or the white, for political organization? Who would claim that Japan's industrial development of recent decades demonstrates the ingenuity, enterprise and adaptability of Mongoloids? Textbook writers, especially, pay lip service to African heterogeneity then proceed to talk about things African. Davidson wrestles with the historio- graphic problem of African unity versus diversity and draws up the textbook writers' brief. He concedes that Africa has spawned "an extremely wide and complex range of political and moral authority, so that there is scarcely a single case where one people governs its behavior by the same rules and precepts as those of any of its neighbours," but assigns greater weight to the "underlying unities and similarities which give to all of them, practically without exception, their profound inner coherence and inter-relationship. "s6 Davidson even suggests that from the Early Iron Age to the nineteenth century, Africa offered a "remarkably unified chapter in the history of mankind. "sT One might also stress the "underlying unities and similarities" of the Indo-European, Far Eastern, or Amerindian worlds, or, for that matter, of the or all humanity, but would that be the key to understanding individual peoples? Does such an approach do Africans justice? I think not. Why make generalizations about blacks that one would not make about the other major races? The reason, of course, is the legacy of misrepresentation that Africanists feel obliged to debunk. Yet those who minimize race as a causal factor in human development are inconsistent if they treat sub-Saharan Africa as a historical or cultural entity. For understanding the Wolof of Senegal, the Dinka of Sudan, or the Zulu of South Africa, their shared racial characteristics are infinitely less important than their historical and cultural particularities.

Conclusion

In 1941, Herskovits himself warned against such overreaction, which had already begun. In The Myth of the Negro Past he spoke of writers who, "customarily Alpern 61

with little valid documentation, center attention on Africa principally to prove that 'Negro culture' can take its place among the 'higher' civilizations of mankind." Their works, he said, were "significant more as manifestations of the psychology of interracial conflict than as contributions to serious thought."ss Du Bois, who foreshadowed much of what is both good and bad in modern African historiography--including advancing some claims so extravagant they are no longer heard (at least among serious students)S~ the essential point that "whatever it is fair to predicate of the mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and of its inhabitants. "4~ This is just as true for the new mythmakers as for the old.

Notes

1. MelvilleJ. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1941). 2. Ibid., 2. 3. "Make Amends for Slavery, West Told," International Herald Tribune, 26 December 1990. 4. W.E.B. Du Bois, TheNegro (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1915; London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 86. 5. Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The African Slave Trade (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1961), 7, 21. 6. Clark D. Moore and Ann Dunbar, eds., Africa Yesterday and Today (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 117. 7. Melvin Drimmer, ed., Black History: A Reappraisal (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 13. 8. E. Jefferson Murphy, History of African Civilization (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), 293. 9. Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1979), 276-77. 10. Philip D. Curtin, The lmage of Africa: British ldeas and Aetion, 1780-1850 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 31. 11. Freda Wolfson, Pageant of Ghana (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 6. 12. Philip D. Curtin, "The Atlantic Slave Trade 1600-1800," in vol. 1 of History of West Africa, ed.J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1976), 328. 13. Davidson, 85. 14. Ibid., 241. 15. Ibid., 253. 16. The idea that Dahomey, for example, was initially a reluctant slaving state was developed by I.A. Akinjogbin in Dahomey and Its Neighbors, 1708-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 73-95, 108-9. His arguments were destroyed in four articles in History in Africa--David Henige and Marion Johnson, "Agaja and the Slave Trade: Another Look at the Evidence," 3 (1976); Marion Johnson, "Bullfinch Lambe and the Emperor of Pawpaw: A Footnote to Agaja and the Slave Trade," 5 (1978); David Ross, "The Anti-Slave Trade Theme in Dahoman History: An Examination of the Evidence," 9 (1982); Robin Law, "Further Light on Bullfinch Lambe and the 'Emperor of Pawpaw': King Agaja of Dahomey's Letter to King George I of England, 1726," 17 (1990)---and another in the Journal of African History: Robin Law, "Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey," 27, no. 2 (1986). 17. Davidson, 201-2. 62 Academic Questions/Fall 1992

18. Elizabeth Isichei, The Ibo People and the Europeans: The Genesis of a Relationship-to 1906 (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 54, 55. I9. Ottobah Cuguano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the SlaveTy and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1787), 12. 20. Ashley Montagu, ed., Race and IQ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 26. 21. Robert G. Armstrong, The Study of West African Languages (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1967), 1-2. 22. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 3-43. The quotes are from 9, 21, 24, 33. 23. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Reaponse to Blacks, 1530- 1880 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1, xvi. 24. C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empir~ 1415-1825(London: Penguin Books, 1973), 3, 251,265; and Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 40, 101, 103, 116, 120-21. 25. Comes Eannes de Azurara, vol. 1 of The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans, and ed. Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896, 1899), 81. Gomes Eanes de Zurara is now the preferred spelling. 26. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, trans, and ed. George H.T. Kimble (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), 20. 27. Du Bois, 32; and W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: Viking Press, 1947; New York: International Publishers, 1965), 211. 28. J.C. de Graft-Johnson, African Glory (New York: Praeger, 1954), 107. 29. S.M. Cissoko, "The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th Century," in vol. 4 of General History of Africa, ed. D.T. Niane (Berkeley, Calif.: Heineman, 1984), 208-9. 30. Nehemia Levtzion, "The Western Maghrib and Sudan," in vol. 3 of Cambridge History of Africa, ed. Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 392-93, 416-18, 421-22. 31. Robert W.July, A History of the African People (New York: Scribner, 1970). 32. See note 8. 33. George Peter Murdock, Afrita: Its Peoples and Their Culture Hs (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), 1. 34. E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 2d ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89. 35. James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1958), 64. 36. Basil Davidson, Africa in History, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 68, 67. 37. Ibid., 35. 38. Herskovits, 2. 39. For example, the claim in The Negro "[that] Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven," 62. 40. Ibid., 7.