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38 o n e African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade J o h n Th o r n t o n One of the great paradoxes of African history, indeed of world history, is the response of African leaders and decision makers to the slave trade. It does not take much work to demonstrate that the slave trade was very damaging to Africa from a demographic point of view, both on a continental scale and on a more limited local scale.1 Yet it is also obvious that the slave trade could not have proceeded very far had African decision makers, both political and commercial, not cooperated with the European merchants who sought to buy laborers on the African coast. While some scholars have argued that European technical, military, and economic superiority gave them an extraordinary influence in African decision making,and thus in effect they were forced to participate in the trade,2 I have argued that African leaders were not necessarily forced into the slave trade through their own inabilities, or the inability of their countries to prevent it.3 Accepting a position that African political and economic leaders had substantial say in the crucial decisions to sell slaves to Europeans thus necessarily opens another potential line of investigation that has not been widely studied, that is, the ethical reasoning that African leadership employed in their decision. African leaders clearly participated voluntarily in the slave trade, but that does not mean that they did so without recognizing the ethical problems that the trade presented. As a way of exploring the ethical attitudes of the African elites, I would like to study the correspondence of several African leaders who were literate, or who produced a body of literature through literate secretaries in their employ. By looking 39 African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade at the correspondence of those members of the African decision-making elite who recorded their ideas, we can begin to penetrate their ideas about the ethics of the slave trade seen from the African side. Theseleadersinclude,fromwest-centralAfrica,KingAfonsoI(r.1509–42) of Kongo; Queen Ana de Sousa Njinga Mbande (r. 1624–63) of Ndongo, and later of Ndongo-Matamba;and King Garcia II (r.1641–61) of Kongo; and from West Africa the rulers of Dahomey, particularly Adondozan (r. 1797–1818). Scholars have already used this body of material to explore African reactions to the slave trade. The correspondence of Afonso I, for example, is often cited as an example of an African monarch confronting the slave trade.4 Likewise, Queen Njinga has occasionally been held up as a leader who opposed the slave trade, and perhaps in reaction to this, she is often backhandedly vilified as nothing more than a slave trader when documents show that she, too, participated willingly in the trade. This examination reveals that all these African rulers led societies that recognized an institution of slavery, and thus they accepted the legal possibility that an individual could have a bundle of rights over another person that surpassed those of any other community or the state. These rights, moreover, could be alienated to any other person by sale. This institutional framework made the slave trade possible and smoothed its way along, and it explains why it is preferable to more complex definitions of slavery in terms of lineage rights, or based on methods of exploitation. These features of African social structure certainly can explain why African leaders did not actively resist the sale of people as slaves, and it must be invoked in their defense when they are accused of being European dupes for doing so. But simply recognizing that the making, holding, use, and sale of slaves were legally permissible did not mean that the slave trade did not pose ethical problems for African leaders. They felt strongly that there were legal limits to who could be enslaved and when. In many cases they felt that the Portuguese and other Europeans violated these limits, and moreover that these violations were a manifestation of greed and pride, two serious political sins. The question was not with the institution of slavery itself but in establishing a proper order of enslavement and an orderly slave trade. King Afonso (1509–42) and the Slave Trade Afonso’s reign is critical because it illuminates the situation of African rulers at the very start of the Atlantic slave trade. Afonso is best known for being an African ruler who opened his country to European religion...

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