It is essential to address the implication of Florida schools teaching that slavery gave Africans needed skills. It is false that Africans could only acquire value by a forced order. The idea sets aside the savage nature of slavery itself to rationalize the solemn burden of white folk to save Africans from their self-imposed languishment.
This racist construction implies that the people of the African continent were childlike and uncivilized until the Europeans came and rescued them from their jungle savagery and ignorance, a la “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Only the white man, by virtue, could rise from savage beginnings, overcome them, and civilize the dark continent and the heathens dwelling there.
The idea of beneficial enslavement is racial and continental extremism steeped in the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his work, “The Philosophy of History.” In it, he describes Africa as shut up, a land of childhood, completely wild and untamed and having nothing harmonious with humanity. It is a documented dogma unabashedly sermonized in the poem “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling’s abject contempt for the people of the Philippines resonates with European condescension toward people of color.
The premise that Africans were enslaved by grace because they lacked skills, knowledge, maturity, civility or divine salvation is a terrifying posit. Colonizers postulated it to rationalize immorality and greed. It is codified by ancient papal bulls seeking to cast Africans and Saracens outside the grace of God, therefore qualifying their conquest.
The transatlantic slave trade was a brutal and dehumanizing system driven by economic greed, deeply rooted in the ideas of empire and religio-racism. Beneficial slavery is the definition of historical contrivance and deception surrounding the forced enslavement of Africans, first in South America, Central America, the Caribbean and, ultimately, North America. The experience of enslavement was relentless and brutal oppression steeped in the systematic denial of the most basic human rights. Enslaved Africans endured physical and psychological abuse, families were torn apart and their cultural heritage was suppressed to strip them of their identity.
The enslavement of Africans was driven solely by economic motives. There was no consuming desire to save the souls of God’s lowly, as implied by Kipling. The demand for cheap labor in the expanding European colonies, especially in the Americas, was the driver. European colonizers and slave traders viewed Africans as labor to exploit. The desire for gain led to the seizure and forced transportation of millions of Africans to the Americas and other parts of the world, not for their lack of skills but because of them. Upon arrival in the Americas, enslaved Africans were subjugated to intense labor on marshy plantations, in suffocating mines and in other industries, using the skills they already possessed. Those with knowledge of farming toiled in agriculture. Men skilled in metalworking leased for blacksmithing. At one time, the production of Senegalese rice produced by Senegalese slaves made Charleston, South Carolina, the wealthiest city in the world.
African societies had rich cultures — advanced civilizations that pioneered ancient trade routes, built exquisite structures and supported diverse economies long before European colonization of Africa and the forced labor and transatlantic trafficking of its people. Its people possessed valuable skills in agriculture, metalworking, textiles, medicine, maritime proficiency and countless other crafts and trades. African societies had established trade networks and interactions with parts of the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, Arabia, the Red Sea, the Saharan expanse and the sub-Saharan region millennia before the transatlantic slave trade.
African people were not childlike and savage but adept centers with unique heritages and cultural backgrounds. Their use of language and art was well in advance of the Europeans. Africa flourished with thousands of diverse languages and folkways.
It is crucial to reject and challenge any narratives that seek to justify the enslavement of Africans based on false constructs about their lack of skills or cultural development.
The transatlantic slave trade was abhorrent. Its legacy of systemic racism and inequality persists in the idea of beneficial enslavement. Slavery, in and of itself, is violent, vile and loathsome. Insinuating false benefit can never be a cause for obscuring the dislocation and obliteration of African individuals, families and communities or their disconnection from their continental homes.
Recognizing and learning from this dark, ancient and barbaric history is vital for promoting understanding, equality and social justice in our modern world.
Robert S. Burch, Jr.
Robert S. Burch, Jr. is a public historian and genealogist living in West Valley City.