This fact always blows my mind… I suppose it shouldn’t, given the topic. But it does.
Of the 12.5 million African souls who were transported across the Atlantic to the Americas during the slave trade, only TWO first-hand accounts of that journey exist. Did you know this??
There are a few others that were narrated to white people who interpreted, authored, and published their stories. So really, it’s only TWO! Two of the 12.5 million souls.
These two books were powerful radical voices in the 18th century, delivering the anti-slavery argument with a righteous rage missing from other abolition publications.
Recently, my students and I read one of these narratives—by Ottobah Cugoano, published in 1787.
Who was Cugoano?
He was born in modern-day Ghana, and at 13, he was captured and taken to the West Indies. There, he was enslaved at a plantation until purchased by a man and taken to England where he secured his freedom.
Cugoano’s book is beyond powerful in its rage. What he wrote was theoretically brilliant for his time. You see, most anti-slavery texts focused on Christian hypocrisy. But Cugoano also took on European imperialism!
One of his radical theoretical points: Colonial expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were mutually constitutive… ie. the colonial theft of land from the Amerindians was pointless without enslaved labour, and vice versa:
“The Spaniards began their settlements in the West Indies and America, by depredations of rapine, injustice, treachery and murder; and they have continued in the barbarous practice of devastation, cruelty, and oppression ever since; and their principles and maxims in planting colonies have been adopted, in some measure, by every other nation in Europe.”
Of the British Empire in North America and India he wrote: “The wickedness that you have done is great, and wherever your traffic and colonies have been extended it is shameful.”
And then he completely shreds the notion of European civility: “…the several nations of Europe that have joined in that iniquitous traffic of buying, selling and enslaving men, must have left their own law of civilization to adopt those of barbarians and robbers.”
While Cuguano stated that his book is merely a collection of “thoughts and sentiments which occur to me as being obvious,” it was theoretically brilliant… in its time and context when most Europeans gave no thought to the immorality of imperialism and slavery.
