Howard W. French - Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Africa, Africans, and the
Making of the Modern World,
1471 to the Second World War

Howard W. French

For my sisters and brothers.
And for Tania, too.

All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON,

Barracoon

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.

TONI MORRISON,

Beloved

NARUKAWA MAP

(Hajime Narukawa)

BORN
IN
BLACKNESS

I T WOULD BE UNUSUAL for a story that begins in the wrong place to arrive at the right conclusions. And so it is with the history of how what we routinely think of as the modern world was made.

Traditional accounts have accorded a primacy of place to Europes fifteenth-century Age of Discovery, and to the long-yearned-for maritime connection it established between West and East. Paired with this historic feat sits the momentous, if accidental find of what came to be known as the New World.

Other explanations for the emergence of the modern reside in the ethics and temperament that some associate with Judeo-Christian beliefs, with the development and spread of the scientific method, or, more chauvinistically still, with Europeans often professed belief in their unique ingenuity and inventiveness. Ideas like these have become associated in the popular imagination with the Protestant Reformation and with the strong work ethic, individualism, and entrepreneurial drive that supposedly flowed from it in places like England and Holland.

There is no gainsaying the significance of the voyages of Iberians like Vasco da Gama, who reached Calicut via the Indian Ocean in 1498, Ferdinand Magellan, who traveled west to Asia, skirting the southern tip of South America, and other famous mariners of their era. This is all the more so for Christopher Columbus, even though he mistook the islands of the Caribbean for Japan and India, errors he went to his death still clinging to. As one writer has elegantly said of Columbus, when he sailed west from a medieval world, surrounded by medieval notions about Cyclops, pygmies, Amazons, dog-faced natives, antipodeans who walk on their heads and think with their feetabout dark-skinned, giant-eared races who inhabit the lands where gold and precious gems grow. When he stepped onto American soil, however, he did more than enter a new world: he stepped into a new age.

But however common in the popular imagination, the commencement of modern history with these most famous of feats of discovery, presented as if to be viewed on a trapeze in the center ring of a three-ring circus, obscures the true beginnings of the story of how the globe became permanently stitched together and thus became modern. It also so dramatically miscasts the role of Africa that it becomes a profound mis-telling.

The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europes 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. Iberias 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 Europes first large, fortified overseas outpost in the tropics at Elmina, in modern-day Ghana. Europes expeditions to West Africa of the mid-fifteenth century were bound up in a search for the sources of that regions 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 Gamas 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 habitu of Elmina, rounded Africas 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. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades from the Portuguese arrival at Elmina until their landing in India. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.

Although fundamental to understanding how todays world was built, this elision is merely one of numerous examples in a centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and of people of African descent from the story of the modern world. A central aim of Born in Blackness is to restore key chapters like these to their proper place of prominence in our common narrative of modernity. Although often obscure, most of what is written here does not consist of freshly discovered information. In reality, history seldom works that way. Rather, siloed and piecemeal, the facts that I relate have been silenced or repeatedly swept into dark corners. 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 Europes 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.