The uses of history.

|I FEEL THE need of the help of friends": this quotation is from the April 24, 1812, journal entry of Captain Paul Cuffe, a black New England sea captain. He called for aid from a white group composed primarily of former slave traders when his ship, Traveler, was seized by the U.S. customs collector upon his return to the U.S. after an African voyage. While I have not been able to prove unequivocally that the captain himself was a slaver, his friends--blacks as well as whites--certainly were. And Captain Cuffe had earlier been intercepted by Captain Tildwell of the British Anti-Slavery Squadron off the coast of West Africa on suspicion that he was an agent of slave traders, although Tildwell had had to let him go for lack of evidence. The prime witness was a ten-year-old African boy taken by Cuffe as an "apprentice."

The involvement of whites in the slave trade is well known, but the role of blacks is one of the best-kept secrets in academia. The comforting cultural myth is that of the white-run slaving vessel floating off the coast of some tropical paradise, waiting for a quiet moment when boats could be lowered over the side, and sailors could roam the beaches to kidnap unlucky blacks. Undoubtedly this did happen many times, especially along the middle West African coast (e.g., Senegal), but as one goes further south and east, one reaches the powerful forest kingdoms with their elaborate internal and overseas slave-trading networks.

On the Trail

I BEGAN my research quite unwittingly, enticed by one of those rare and golden "finds" legendary in scholarship. Several years ago, I was given a photocopy of Mr. Cuffe Slocum's will, dated June 1772. This is probably one of the earliest black wills on record in this country. Mr. Slocum, an ex-slave, was the father of Captain Paul Cuffe. His five-page will had been found in the basement of the probate court in Taunton, Massachusetts. Looking at the small, childlike handwriting of a long-dead black man who had been born into a distant and exotic culture, reading of his two farms--one, in Rhode Island, described as a "plantation"--I wondered how an ex-slave had gathered enough possessions to fill so lengthy a document.

As with the son, I was never able to prove beyond a doubt that Mr. Cuffe Slocum had engaged in slave trading along with his master's family, the Slocums, but he had obviously served them well enough to have been taught to write and given his freedom. I documented the voyages of Captain Charles Slocum, a relative of Cuffe Slocum's master, and his multiracial crew on the Sierra Leone River in West Africa. I followed the captain's haggling with his black trading partner, Mr. Laurence. It was Mr. Laurence who was delegated to gather the human cargo. Slocum remained on his ship, which was anchored safely offshore. I was to read of this trading pattern--whites on the ship, blacks ashore transacting the actual business--numerous times.

The name "Cuffe" is an Akan (Gold Coast) African name derived from "Kofi," the name given to a boy born on Friday. Further research revealed that Gold Coast blacks were the aristocrats of New England blacks. They were assiduously sought by New England merchants and by South Carolina and West Indies planters, who often put them in positions of authority. Knowledgeable whites realized that Gold Coast blacks came from ancient and advanced civilizations that had cultivated cotton and rice, worked in iron, and traded in gold. Hence, such people were valuable to both plantation and commercial economies. Gold Coast blacks living near rivers or the ocean were also skillful canoemen who could be easily trained for use on overseas voyages. Very significantly, such blacks had come from well-developed hierarchical societies in which black-on-black slavery was deeply entrenched and accepted. Investigation of sources such as the National Ships Registry revealed that the higher the positions of blacks on New England vessels (e.g., first mate), the more likely the ship was to have been engaged in slave trading.

Blacks began their ownership of other blacks in New England as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. At least one of my doctoral advisors frowned on hearing this and stated that such slave-owning blacks had probably purchased relatives in order to free them. However, records indicate kinship between black master and black slave in only a small number of cases. While the revenge factor was certainly present in some cases ("You enslaved my parents and/or me, so I see nothing wrong in enslaving you"), the main motive for black slave traders and owners seems to have been the same as for white traders and owners: the hard-nosed Yankee search for profit.

The signposts were unmistakable in the case of Mrs. Betsy Walker. This beautiful young unmixed black woman and her husband were slaves in one of the Southern colonies. During the Revolutionary War, they sided with the British, as did most North American slaves, because the British offered freedom to any black who joined them. After the war, Mrs. Walker (by now a widow) and other blacks were evacuated first to Nova Scotia, then to their ancestral homeland. Back home in Africa, Mrs. Walker took up with Mr. James Carr, an English official of the Sierra Leone colony. The two embarked on a romantic and business relationship that lasted until Mrs. Walker's death 27 years later. They became two of the most successful slave traders on the West African coast. Known by her African name, Fu-seng Be, Mrs. Walker is mentioned in various anti-slavery records. And none other than our Captain Paul Cuffe was the honored guest of Mrs. Walker and Mr. Carr on his trip to Sierra Leone in 1812.

My research into Captain Cuffe caused concern among black leaders because the captain had been canonized as a black hero, with schools in black areas throughout the country named after him. He was the black Horatio Alger, a self-made man. Mrs. Walker was well on her way to becoming a heroine in the "strong black woman" cultural tradition, and so my research into her life caused not only liberal but feminist concern.

There were probably thousands of Mrs. Walkers: black African and American women who did not view slavery in the same way that it is viewed today. Nonetheless, my "revisionist" studies were regarded as reactionary dabblings devised to undercut black role models.

As a result of the concerns about my research, my trip to New England to secure the copy of the Cuffe Slocum will had to be financed by my own resources, even though I was a doctoral student in an extremely well-funded university--the University of Chicago--that prides itself on its ability to fund "worthy" students. All four of my African journeys were financed from private sources--family, sympathetic supporters, State of Illinois Arts Council grants, and a very small amount of royalties.

Friends, fellow scholars, and even academic advisors began to voice some feelings about my "neglect" of what they considered to be the "real" focus of my research. My chief advisor told me loftily that he felt my proper role was to bolster the image of the son of an ex-slave as a black-nationalistic force in American history. I retorted that I could find nothing "nationalistic" about Captain Cuffe in the modern sense of the word. When the captain referred to the "black nation," he meant the uniting of various African subethnic groups such as Akan, Ibo, Yoruba, Mandinka, Kikongo, and others, newly brought to this country. He meant teaching them to read and write so that they might more efficiently trade. (My advisor, who was not born in this country but nevertheless regarded himself by virtue of being a Marxist as an expert in black American concerns, had never heard of Captain Paul Cuffe until I presented him as a dissertation topic.)

The Trade in Men

SITTING in the un-airconditioned library of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria one hundred-degree afternoon in the summer of 1978, I experienced the same feeling that I would have when I touched the copy of Cuffe Slocum's will. I was poring over microfilms of Roman Catholic mission records. Father Broghero had written in French about the slave-trading activities of a black woman known as Madam Tinubu. I immediately thought of Tinubu Square in Lagos, named for a nineteenth-century black woman nationalist who purportedly had sought to drive out the British.

It was indeed the name Madam Tinubu, a Yoruba woman whose own town of Owu had been destroyed and many of its inhabitants killed or enslaved (including at least two of her own brothers). As a teenager, Yemisi Tinubu made her living selling maize porridge to European sailing ships. A likable and attractive young woman, she ingratiated herself with both slavers and anti-slavers. The Portuguese gave her tobacco to trade, but she knew what the big trade item was: men for the slave cargoes bound for the New World.

My further research revealed the presence of a substantial slave-trading network controlled by black marketwomen on the West African coast. In traditional West African societies, men farmed and women traded. Madam Tinubu earned the traditional Yoruba title iyalode, mother of the market, for her prowess in trade. She was a female market administrator who moved goods and services. The goods were men. Madam Tinubu and her marketwomen followed the Yoruba wars and bartered for the many captives, who would be sold at a sizable markup to slave ships. Her services were linkages between African and European military and financial interests both in and out of the slave trade. Her influence on the African coast stretched from Badagry on the west to Benin on the east, a distance of over two hundred miles.

African society respected Madam Tinubu's financial acumen: her gold, cloth, livestock, houses, and ability to support a large retinue of relatives and vassals. In a strange system of obligation difficult for us today to understand, she was sometimes patroness to men and women she had caused to be sold away and who survived in the New World. Those returning to Africa often joined her in her slave trade. There was little concern except among Christian missionaries and British officials about how Yemisi Tinubu conducted her business.

How then could such a woman have come to be regarded as a nationalist to whom a modern African country was so indebted that a prominent downtown landmark was named for her? I was curious and sought some of Madam's descendants. They are prosperous and much less embarrassed than the black American and Nigerian scholars who had attempted to make her into a nationalist. Having heard of my research, one such descendant contacted me when he came to this country several years ago. Naively, I thought that it would be interesting and informative to have him speak on campus about his great-great-great-aunt's exploits.

My advisor told me the descendant's family records were "hearsay" bordering on gossip, and that I ought to be "ashamed" to discredit a woman who might serve as a role model for black children. I countered by pointing out that the oral tradition put Madam in the center of the coastal slave network. I furthered my argument by distributing translations I had made of the mission records, including Father Broghero's, corroborated by handwritten sources. I was told that there was no money for speakers on such a "bizarre" topic.

The life of Madam Tinubu continued to fascinate me, and indeed I took some time from my research to write a novel about her. The Christian missionaries had taught her to read and write English, hoping to gain her as a prize convert to Christianity, but she remained a pagan until her death. Not even her friend Father Broghero could change her. She used the white man's language to enhance her trade in men.

I was contacted by a famous black American writer with an open mind who had heard of my research. This writer read my manuscript and admitted that she believed what I had written. It was unfortunate, of course, this business of blacks owning and selling blacks, but I was correct. She wanted me to share the manuscript with a liberal white New York literary agent. The novel was duly sent to New York and I began the completion of my dissertation.

In Their Own Time

IT IS difficult to place oneself back in the past. How does an African woman, freed from slavery in the Southern colonies, return to Africa to become a slave trader? How does another African woman whose town is destroyed and whose own brothers are enslaved become a dealer in men? And how does a black sea captain whose father was brought over on a slave ship ask, one generation away, for assistance from slave-trading friends of his father's master?

The study of history presents us with the challenge of placing ourselves back in time, of trying to imagine what it must have been like to live in another sea. Slavery was often an alternative to death. It was the custom throughout sub-Saharan Africa--as it was in other times and places such as early Asia, South America, and pre-Christian northern Europe--to bury an aristocratic man or woman with his or her servants so that they might serve in the next world. (Sieglinde stated a wish to be accompanied in death by 13 slaves--eight male, five female--so that she would not appear to be "mean" when she entered the next world.) In Africa, however, after the Commercial Revolution, such deathbed excesses were seen as an awful waste of manpower. There came a reinterpretation of spiritual obligations in terms of the afterlife: goats, chickens, and exquisite wood or ivory carvings of human figures were buried beside the deceased, and likely young men who might hitherto have been grave offerings took their places in the hold of the slave ship. It had been the custom in Benin, a great West African civilization known for its artistic treasures, to sacrifice criminals and war captives. After the development of the overseas slave trade, such criminals and captives were taken away to the slave ships.

As a result of my research, my academic relationships are bitter. I did not attend the ceremonies for the awarding of my PhD in June 1988. I have instructed the alumni association never to contact me for any reason. I have not spoken to, or communicated with, my chief advisor since May 1988. On more than one occasion, he held me up to ridicule in a classroom or a seminar. Once he screamed that I owed a black male student who had gotten a huge grant to study abroad "an apology" because I stated innocently that I did not know of a significant black presence in medieval France. The student later approached me in the middle of the campus one day and told me my research was "demeaning" to black people. Other graduate students supervised by my advisor seemed to be afraid after a time to interact with me.

See No Evil

ORAL COMMITTEES were sparring matches. There appeared to be two kinds of academics. One kind refused to acknowledge any participation by New England blacks in the slave trade, although the evidence of the West African black presence was too overwhelming to be ignored. This kind of scholar was usually someone who had made a name for himself as an Africanist. The second kind was usually in the field of American history. This kind of scholar seemed embarrassed by the whole thing and thought that my choice of a research topic while under the auspices of a "liberal" university indicated some obscure psychiatric malformation in me.

The book that I wrote on Madam Tinubu was finally returned after several years by the New York literary agent. She had gotten some feedback from "experts" in the field of African history, and felt the book was unpublishable.

It is unfortunate when scholarship is not respected because it reveals facts that offend certain academic sensibilities. History is--or should be--a guide to understanding the past: how people acted in circumstances very different from ours, how they were shaped by different experiences, and how they in turn shaped their own destiny, sometimes in line with, sometimes in opposition to, the prevailing social and economic pressures. Blacks involved in the slave trade illustrate such human dilemmas, it seems, almost too perfectly. Some were victims, as the current political fashion in history allows; some may even have been plaster saints, as the current fashion would like to dictate; but some were resourceful and self-interested people attempting to do the best for themselves in unpromising circumstances. Their morality is not our morality. But we should neither censor them out of existence nor ignore the substantial human abilities their lives display. To do so is not history; nor, in the long run, is it sensible politics.

Dr. Amanda Lee Brooks teaches African-American history at the Austin Community Academy High School in Markham, Illinois.