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In his most recent work, Lamin Sanneh offers a novel perspective on nineteenth-century antislavery movements. Instead of the usual narratives of William Wilberforce in England or William Lloyd Garrison in America, Sanneh tells of the vital role Africans—albeit often Americanized or Anglicized Africans—played in the abolition of slavery both on their own continent and around the globe. Much of the existing scholarship on antislavery has focused on the arduous campaigns in England and the United States to destroy the political and economic structures that supported the peculiar institution. While these histories focus on the countries whose plantation systems and involvement in the transatlantic market created the demand for chattel slavery, Sanneh wants to draw our attention to the continent that supplied the slaves. The campaign to end slavery in the New World, he argues, "was only half the story."
Slavery in Africa was older than and in many ways more intractable than slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. From time immemorial, Africans had been enslaving one another. Selling captives to European and American slave traders—beginning around 1500—was a comparatively recent and much more lucrative variation on the common practice of capturing, trading, and selling slaves within the continent. In general, as Sanneh explains it, political existence in precolonial West Africa was exceedingly harsh. A leader's esteem, and therefore power, rested on the number of people he controlled—thus the incentive to enslave others and keep them enslaved. Distancing himself from those scholars who attempt to gloss over precolonial African slavery as a comparatively innocuous institution, Sanneh writes that the law of the land was "the law of the survival of the fittest, with no second chance for losers." Convincing a chief whose powers derived from this system to surrender his slaves, then, was tantamount to asking him to forfeit much of his political power and risk being enslaved himself by a stronger and shrewder neighboring chief who refused to give up the custom.
This was the dilemma antislavery forces in West Africa had to overcome if they were to be successful. The solution to the problem, as Sanneh puts it, was "antistructure," a radically different way of organizing society that would ultimately undermine chiefly authority. In general, by antistructure Sanneh means the establishment of free colonies in the midst of West African slave societies. In such zones of freedom, those at the very bottom of society—ex-slaves—could challenge the power of those at the top.
As Sanneh makes clear, the challenges to establishing enclaves of freedom in West Africa were great, but so were the potential rewards. The existence of free colonies in the heart of the slave trade would strike the institution at its literal source, providing a haven for runaways and a powerful model of what Africa without slavery could look like—an example both for neighboring Africans desperate for a different way of life and for Western abolitionists concerned with defending the humanity of Africans. Such colonies would provide valuable ammunition against the prevailing Western notion that Africans were somehow less than human and thus naturally suited to bondage. Like John Winthrop's "city on a hill," free colonies would demonstrate to the rest of the world that Africans were fully capable of governing themselves responsibly and treating their neighbors compassionately.
For those of us familiar with the usual narratives of the Anglo-American antislavery movements, Sanneh's assertion of the importance of African antislavery provides a healthy corrective to our overly Western-centric point of view. But if in Sanneh's narrative the setting (Freetown, Monrovia, Abeokuta) and main characters (Equiano, Cuffee, Crowther, Ezzidio, Blyden) are unfamiliar, the general outline of the story—and especially its turning point—is not. What ultimately terminated the centuries-old tradition of slavery in Africa was an injection of powerful and radical religious ideas.
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