A focus on our own national myths obscures slavery’s international scale. It offers too simple an answer to the question, What do we want history to do for us now? For Du Bois and his generation, historical narratives vindicating Black agency mobilized the past in service of revolution, drawing a direct line from what was before to an emancipation that will be. Our own history wars cannot offer such assurances. But by presenting Africa’s place in the world from the fifteenth century to the twentieth in unflinching, extraordinary detail, Born in Blackness offers a guide to how to answer this question.
The fifteenth century was the Age of Discovery. In our standard account of the period, Africa was first and foremost a roadblock to Europeans searching for easy access to the spices and silks of Asia—as in Christopher Columbus’s search for a westward path to the East or the circumnavigations of Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama. Only later, according to this line of thinking, did Africa become important, as the supplier of the enslaved women and men whose labor sustained the plantation economies of the New World.
Not so, says French. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia,” he writes, “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.” The history of Iberian explorers begins on the west coast of Africa. European interest in the Americas and Asia was only a later development.
To understand why Portugal’s sights were set on West Africa, which was referred to as the “New World” before 1492, French again shakes up the conventional story. Rather than starting with the forces driving European exploration, he begins with the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Ancient West African cities like Djenné (in present-day Mali) were part of far-reaching trade routes. (For instance, archaeological digs have uncovered glass beads from there as far away as Han China.)
The region’s prominence was based on gold. In the tenth century the Ghana Empire came to be known as the “country of gold” throughout the Mediterranean because it controlled the entrepôts where gold from the south was traded for salt and other essential goods from the north. Mali, which succeeded Ghana in the thirteenth century, controlled the nexus of three important river valleys—the Senegal, the Gambia, and the Niger—and had by the fourteenth century an estimated population of 50 million. Like its predecessor and its successor, the Songhai, the Mali Empire built its power on trade in gold and slaves, whom it used as laborers but also sold in North Africa.