Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of “darkest” West Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the coastline of West Africa. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking, and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the functioning of Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough so that he would later be able to reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home.

Well before he mounted his expeditions on behalf of Spain, Columbus, an Italian from Genoa, had sailed to provision Europe’s first large, fortified overseas outpost in the tropics at Elmina, in modern-day Ghana. Europe’s expeditions to West Africa of the mid-fifteenth century were bound up in a search for the sources of that region’s prodigious wealth in gold. Indeed, it was the huge trade in this precious metal, discovered by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia. This helped make it possible for Lisbon, until then the seat of a small and impecunious European crown, to steal a march on its neighbors and radically alter the course of world history. Bartolomeu Dias, another habitué of Elmina, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that, when da Gama finally sailed to Calicut.

Of central concern in the following pages is the deeply twinned and tragic history of Africa and Europe that began with geopolitical collisions in the fifteenth century. Events and activities that flowed from Afro-European encounters set the most Atlantic-oriented Europeans onto a path that would eventually propel their continent past the great civilizational centers of Asia and the Islamic world in both wealth and power. This ascension was not founded upon any innate or permanent European characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognized, it was built on the foundation of Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in slaves who were put to work by the millions growing sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.

Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer, and spy, bested them both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes etc.; no sugar etc no islands no continent, no continent, no trade.” Postlethwayt, Raynal, and Defoe were surely right, even if they were far from comprehending all of the reasons why. As this book will make clear, more than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the West. African labor, in the form of slaves, became the providential factor that made the very mise en valeur or development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World, such as we know them, are simply unimaginable.

In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by slaves in the American South helped launch formal industrialization, along with an immense second wave of consumerism. After plentiful calories, abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history. As revealed here, the scale and the scope of the American antebellum cotton boom, which made this possible, were nothing short of astonishing. This made the value derived from the trade and ownership of slaves in America alone, as distinct from the cotton and other products they produced, greater than that of all of the country’s factories, railroads, and canals combined.

Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in West Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal, then unified with Spain, fought something little short of a world war in the seventeenth century, with control of trade in the richest sources of slaves in Africa, present-day Congo and Angola, flipping back and forth between them. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil, the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early seventeenth century, was caught up in this same struggle, and repeatedly changed hands. Later in that same century, England fought Spain over control of the Caribbean. Why did faraway powers contend so fiercely over such things? Tiny Barbados provides an answer. By the mid-1660s, just three decades or so after England initiated an African slave-labor model for its plantations there—one that was first implemented in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé little more than a century earlier—sugar from Barbados was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America.

Nowadays, the consensus estimate on the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers around 12 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for slaves, before they could be placed in chains. Estimates vary, but between 5 and 40 percent perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. And another 10 percent of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit that constituted an extreme mental and physical test for all those who were subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-nineteenth century was probably around 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.

In most of the New World plantation societies the average remaining life span of trafficked Blacks was reckoned at seven years or less. In 1751, an English planter on Antigua summed up the prevailing slaveowner sentiment this way: “It was cheaper to work slaves to the utmost, and by the little fare and hard usage, to wear them out before they become useless, and unable to do service; and then to buy new ones to fill up their places.”

In 1808, a typical picker in South Carolina, then still the heart of America’s cotton-growing region, averaged 28 pounds per day of harvest. By 1846, the average Mississippi cotton picker delivered up 341 pounds to his masters, a rate of increase fully in step with the growth of factory productivity in Manchester.

Specialists aside, few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti, even more so. In the eighteenth century it became the richest colony in history, and in the nineteenth, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, Haiti rivaled the United States in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfill the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all, ending slavery.

I hiked a verdant peak in northern Haiti. There, Henri Christophe, that country’s early Black leader, built the formidable Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Western Hemisphere, arming it with 365 cannons to defend the country’s hard-won independence from France. Other hints came when I wandered into the mountains and rain forests of Jamaica and Suriname, respectively, and was thrilled to be able to make myself understood speaking bits of Twi, the lingua franca of Ghana learned while courting my wife, as I spoke with the descendants of proud runaway slave communities known as maroons.

There stood a faded sign attached to a rusty iron post. It announced the site to be part of something called “The Slave Route,” but it provided no further information. With the sun racing downward in the western sky, I paced about briefly, snapped a few photographs, and then finally collected myself as the wind whistled through the cane. I tried mightily to conjure some sense of the horrors that had transpired nearby, and of the abundant wealth and pleasure that the sweat of the dead had procured for others. In the moment, there was little else I could do to render proper homage to the countless lives that had been mercilessly ground up in the production of sweetness and cheap calories for faraway markets. This book constitutes my effort to carry this reflection as far as I can extend it.

Djenne-jeno, or “ancient Djenné,” sprung to life roughly 250 years before the birth of Christ, on a floodplain near the banks of the Bani River, not far from where it joins the course of one of the continent’s greatest rivers, the Niger, on its long, trundling arc through West Africa. In its early phases of growth, the city counted more than fifteen thousand residents, many of whom lived inside a high, 1.3-mile-long wall that was twelve feet thick at its base. Another thirty thousand or so people lived in related urban clusters nearby. Early in the Christian era, an aggregate population like this would have placed ancient Djenné among the ranks of world-class cities. There were bigger urban centers in China and in a few other places, to be sure, but not very many.