Reaction Paper #1

Houston Hynes

September 28, 2014

Response Paper #1

Although native Africans were capturing and supplying African war captives to the slavery regime, this constant flow of human trafficking was fueled by Europeans alone.  The Portuguese landed in the early 15^th century with primarily gold and trade-oriented goals. Their arrival initialized a series of large changes for Africa and it’s peoples. Introduction of maize to Africa led to the transition from hunter and gathering communities to more permanent agriculture based settlements as well as population growth. This combination of variables along with the New World need for labor forces, geographic location in relation to Europe and evolutionarily advantageous African immunities provided the perfect historical storm for the slavery regime to develop out of Africa. From 1580-1640, already more than 700,000 Africans had departed on trans-Atlantic journeys, largely terminating in Brazil, Lima, Cartagena, and Veracruz via the Portuguese, but around the later date of this half-century period the English, French and Dutch were increasingly becoming players in the African slave trade. By the middle of the 17^th century England and Holland were the dominant slave trade powers. Around the same time, increasing imperial tendencies and war destabilization and firearm introduction in Africa created a steady supply of slaves. The volatile and unstable African environment seemed to develop perfectly with English dominance of the slave trade. This coincidence allowed the English to exponentially increased the commodification of African people, only to change the fate of Africa once again via European manipulation.

The origin of the commodification of people raises many questions and overall is difficult to rationalize. There are several explanations as to why the African people were subject to this monstrous process, including Africa’s geographic location in relation to Europe, immunological advantages, ‘endless’ supplies of African people, cultural and physical differences as compared to Europeans, among others, yet none of these explanations can attempt to rationalize the transformation of people into property. Some sense can be made of the commodification process by examining the initial assimilation of war captives into a marginalized slave. Considering that many new war captive communities were destroyed and families separated, not to mention many were traded and sold numerous times things were bleak for war captives. No single group or person is solely responsible for the commodification process. Yet the root of this process lies with the ‘social death’ or assimilation of a person with no ties and no structure to function like a normal person does. This initial dehumanization in Africa most definitely plays a role in commodification, although it remains debatable where and who started the process. Europeans are largely to blame, only further distorting the horrendous fate of enslavement. Using ledgers like those used for tobacco and rice to keep track of people, packing ships to full carrying capacity by allocating inhumane amount of space for individuals, insufficient food and medical treatment and most importantly using extreme violence to reinforce insubordination. These examples merely brush the surface of what enslaved Africans endured before, during and after their respective trans-Atlantic journeys.

As masses of enslaved Africans arrived the Americas, if they survived, they were sold again and dispersed far and wide amongst Caribbean, South, Central and North American territories only further reinforcing commodification. Whether it was the sugar plantations in Brazil or tobacco plantations in Charleston, South Carolina, ‘social’ death still existed. With a large language barrier, unfamiliar territories, and memories of the trans-Atlantic journey fresh in their memories, it is utterly impossible to gauge the distress and disorientation of any enslaved individual at the time. Simultaneously, upon the arrival of the first Africans in American, a new culture began to develop. This new culture was not solely African or American in scope, but as a combination of the two. Peter Kolchin explains it best in American Slavery 1619-1877 when he suggests that Frazier’s ‘Americanization’ or Herskovits ‘African survival’ cannot totally explain the African American culture with out the other. With this new developing culture many of the American barriers reinforcing the idea of people as property began to dissolve. As more and more African Americans began to read and write and turn to Christianity, as well as when revolutionary rhetoric began to develop, American slaves began to find loop holes to why slavery was inhumane, unchristian and contradictory to the freedom American founders were preaching and in turn fighting for. These contradictions were apparent and highly visible to all Americans, yet it was always ignored because slaves were property not people.  Conceptual humanity, American law and even Christianity were all bent to allow slavery to be considered one of the only exceptions to things all things considered American.

In reality slavery had existed for thousands of years before the American slavery regime was even in the process or beginning, yet this idea of commodification, of stripping a person of essentially everything that constitutes a person was new. After analyzing truly enlightening literature like Saltwater Slavery, Major Problems in African American History, and American Slavery 1619-1877 it remains difficult to conceptualize this idea of commodification and the inhuman practices associated with it. The trans-Atlantic journey and the American slavery regime are some of the most terrifying and horrendous historical processes in current history. Yet in light of these everlasting and unchangeable terrors, lies the resilient and powerful multi-century struggle that is the African American culture.