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Chapter 4 Visions of Africa Anthony Benezet transformed eighteenth-century discourse about slavery by using empirical knowledge of Africa to combat the existing negative image of Africans as lawless, heathen savages and even as not fully human. As the first Quaker epistles against slavery (1753–58) make clear, Benezet had by then read some of the slave traders’ journals and narratives.1 By the time he published Some Historical Account of Guinea, such Philadelphia collections as the Library Company of Philadelphia (where his younger brother Daniel was a member) and the Friends Library of Philadelphia and Logan’s Library (Benezet worked as a librarian at both) held copies of these narratives.2 Using the travelers’ narratives was a brilliant rhetorical strategy on his part: no one could accuse the authors of a pro-African bias or of any animosity toward slavery. Benezet took full advantage of this obvious bias: ‘‘Yet they cannot but allow the Negroes to be possessed of some good qualities, though they contrive as much as possible to cast a shade over them.’’3 He did not begin using these works naively. He told his reader in the first pages of Some Historical Account of Guinea that he had ‘‘extracted from authors of credit; mostly such as have been principal officers in the English, French and Dutch factories, and who resided for many years in those countries.’’4 Benezet combined this knowledge of Africa with both religious and philosophical attacks on slavery, thus creating a new framework for the debate on slavery. ‘‘By citing all the eyewitness accounts of the West African coast to which he had access,’’ he could show that ‘‘what depravity and degradation appeared there was the product of slave-trader influence.’’5 Far from presenting a naive utopian view of Africa, as C. Duncan Rice and others have claimed, Benezet employed a careful calculus to make his selections. Quite apart from his opposition to slavery, he wanted to use the narratives for other purposes, some part of larger campaigns, for example, promoting Quaker ideals (at least his view of them),6 such as temperance,7 and other intensely personal ones,8 like vegetarianism. Benezet discovered a discourse in which a simple dichotomy reigned: white equaled civilized; black equaled savage. Harkening back to the ideas of Montaigne (1533–1592), Benezet argued that if blacks were savages, then so were whites, and, conversely, if whites were human, then so were Visions of Africa 73 blacks. In the beginning of his major study on Africa, Some Historical Account of Guinea, he asserted that the misinformation in some of the travelers’ accounts meant to show that whites were ‘‘naturally induced to look upon them [Africans] as incapable of improvement, destitute, miserable, and insensitive of the benefits of life: and permitting them to live amongst us, even on our most oppressive terms, is to them a favor.’’ Yet he argued that ‘‘on impartial enquiry, the case will appear to be far otherwise; we shall find that there is scarce a country in the whole world afforded the necessary comforts to its inhabitants, with less solicitude and to; than Guinea.’’9 The Early Colonial Image of the African Benezet had to combat the negative views of the African promulgated in such well-known collections as those of Richard Hakluyt. In writing to Walter Raleigh, Hakluyt called on him to ‘‘go on as you have begun, leave to prosperity an imperishable monument of your name and fame such as age will never obliterate. For to posterity no greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant with the orbit of reason.’’10 Often the words slaves, booty, and gold were interchanged with God, glory, and the Crown. Authors of many of the narratives about voyages knew that their works would be used to ‘‘promote colonization, rally support for the growing naval forces, hail the achievements of great captains, and at the same time reveal the weaknesses of England’s great enemy Spain.’’11 Benezet found that if the sponsor country were Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, or England, then the names of the merchant venturers might change, but the volumes served the same purpose: to solicit investors and governments and to promote the national enterprises of the European powers.12 In America these powers built their empires on a labor force of enslaved Africans. The reasoning—even before the development of a hardened...

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