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Indeed, the idea that “Blacks sold Blacks into slavery” is one of the most successful pieces of racist propaganda ever – despite it being about as absurd as saying Vladmir Putin is bombing “his own people” (in Ukraine). Perhaps most tragically, it has served as a source of continued stigma and division amongst the victims of the crime (i.e. Black people descended from the enslaved and Black people who are not).
The implication is that because Black people share a skin pigmentation or regional origins, they are the “same people”. At the time of the crime, this could not have been further from the truth.
In the same way England, Scotland, Ireland, Japan, China, Korea, etc have seen each other as rivals; Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo, Dahomey, Itsekiri, Ashanti, Fante, Ga or any of the hundreds of West African ethnic groups didn’t see themselves as fellow “Black people”. A lot of them were rival nations, kingdoms or empires – often warring against each other.
European human traffickers, seeking people they could enslave to cultivate the Americas, arrived in Africa and did what they do: kidnapped and trafficked millions of people. Where they did not go on human snatching rampages, they offered goods, including weapons, in exchange for people.
As in most other places, slavery had existed in parts of Africa for centuries. The enslaved were often prisoners of war or prisoners (the latter remains the effective case in the United States as a result of the 13th amendment to the Constitution).
The arrival of European weaponry created an arms race. Whichever ethnic group had more guns had more power. The coin of exchange the Europeans demanded in return was people. As ethnic studies professor Anthony Q Hazard explains, this reshaped slavery in parts of Africa from the result of wars to the cause of wars.
Because European weapons became essential to survival, some African leaders had two choices: collaborate with European enslavers or perish. Critically, many more Africans violently resisted the trade than were involved in it. They often resisted on humanitarian grounds or in defence of what they considered their actual people, not what we would today monolithically describe as “Africans” or “Black people”. Some West African groups used scarification techniques to clearly mark those who belonged to their group, and thus those for whom they should fight to be protected or liberated from slavery.
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