Thread by @davidvolodzko

I admit I'm surprised to see #BoycottWomanKing trending, and am still looking forward to it, but I somehow doubt this means folks are ready to talk about African complicity in the Atlantic slave trade. Maybe not. Thread.

The slave trade was only possible because it used already existing infrastructure set up by African kingdoms and the Arab slave trade, something else that's still somewhat taboo in US discourse since Arabs are not white.

But when Ibn Battuta visited the kingdom of Mali in the mid 14th century, he noted that citizens competed over how many slaves they had. The Dahomey of modern-day Benin using slaves for human sacrifice in their annual holiday is just one example.

There's also the Benin Empire of Ghana, or in southern Nigeria, the Nile River valley, much of North Africa, the Bono State, the Ashanti of modern Ghana, the Yoruba of modern Nigeria, the Imbangala of Angola, the Nyamwezi of Tanzania—all slavers, plus much of the rest of Africa.

Indeed, the amazing Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea are an entire ethnic group of about 100,000, who once numbered closer to 3 million, entirely descended from escaped slaves formerly held by other Africans.

Boston University's African history professor John Thornton and AfAm studies professor Linda Heywood have said about 90% of slaves traded on the Atlantic slave trade were captured by fellow Africans.
nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opi…

And Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard chair of African studies, has said the Atlantic slave trade would not have been possible except as a kind of joint venture between European traders and African elites.
nytimes.com/2010/04/30/opi…

Thanks to the 1619 Project, many now know slavery began in the Thirteen Colonies from 1619 with the arrival of “twenty and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia, but it's also worth noting that abolitionism began almost as early.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, for example, was the first religious protest against slavery in the colonies. And James Oglethorpe, who founded the colony of Georgia, banned slavery there on the basis of Enlightenment humanitarian principles.

This is not to say the US has not been a white supremacist nation. And indeed, Oglethorpe's legacy didn't last long—by the time my Black ancestors reached Georgia as slaves, his lovely ideals were six feet under the red clay. Only Mississippi lynched more people.

But the nuance of the history has been lost to many Americans today. For instance, in the 1700s, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island banned slavery meanwhile it continues *to this day* in parts of Asia and Africa.

In fact, Niger didn't criminalize slavery until 2003, Mauritania until 2007, Sahrawi ADR until 2010 and Chad until 2017! And this is the nuance that often gets left aside because it doesn't fit the black-and-white paradigm (pun intended) we're used to and more comfortable with.

With such rich discourse on racism in the US, you'd think our understanding of slavery's history would be more textured. That doesn't mean "Africans had slaves too bro," but while counter-intuitive, it CAN mean a more nuanced, less dismissive approach to films like Woman King.