Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza has said that he wishes Blacks would appreciate what slavery has done for them. “Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen?” D’Souza writes in his book America: Imagine a World Without Her. The answer is yes, but “that debt … is best discharged through memory because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.”[1] Those who wish to overcome the issue of slavery point to the standard of living in the United States, the possibility to change your material circumstances being easier in this country than anywhere else in the world, and juxtapose it to the blight, political corruption, and genocidal wars of Africa as proof that slavery worked out for the best. The problem with this reasoning is that it works both ways. If Black people were still in Africa, there would have never been a United States, and whites would have never been able to leave Europe, where they were worse off than anyone else in the world.
Let us begin with a basic understanding of the state of the world in the seventeenth century. During the 1600s, Saharan and Sub-Saharan West Africa were politically, socially, and economically stable with culture and academia. An interest in Africa before the trans-Atlantic slave trade has shed light on how presumptuous D’Souza’s statement is. The captive Africans that were brought to the Americas to be made slaves were not being introduced to civilization or the rudiments of an advanced society; they were taken from an advanced society and brought to inferior European colonies that they were forced to build into something that resembled civilization.
Let us contrast Europe to Africa during this time of colonialism: Europe was just emerging out of the “Dark Ages.” The Dark Ages refers to the economic, cultural, and intellectual decline of Europe, which typically refers to the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and continued until what is called the Renaissance or Age of Enlightenment.
In Dirt: A Social History As Seen Through The Uses And Abuses Of Dirt, Terrence McGlaughlin gives the reader a sense of Western European attitudes towards cleanliness. Europeans during this period generally believed that cleanliness was a vain indulgence.[2] The filth of Europe eventually led to the bubonic plague.
In Europe, it was not uncommon for even the kings to be illiterate. The majority of Europe’s population could not read or write. Education was the privilege of the clergy. It involved church literature. There was, in Christian Europe, tension between religion and science that culminated in the Enlightenment.
England was rampant with crime. Murder was only murder, depending on who was killed and who was the killer. The same was true with rape. England had prisons that were filled with criminals whose crimes ranged from murder to defaulting on a loan or pickpocketing.
Many of the people who left England and came to America were actually released from prison. They were the dregs of society, not the best and brightest. England was not a place of envy, nor were the English colonies.
Africa, on the other hand, experienced no such Dark Ages during the medieval period. On the contrary, Africa was the home of the sciences, mathematics, philosophy, and architecture. The Muslim university of Cordoba, Spain, was an extension of the university of Al Qarawiyyin in Morrocco. Considered one of the most advanced universities in the West, Cordoba was indicative of the Islamic influence on Western Europe.
French Social Psychologist Charles Marie Gustave Le Bon wrote: “If only Muslims would have conquered Paris as well. Because if they would have, it would have been like Cordoba. For 600 years, we depended on the Muslims to translate for us Great Greek Philosophy.”[3] Le Bon continues, “You walk through the streets of Cordoba, you find that the people can read and they can write, and some of them even know poetry. In an age when the Kings and Princes of Europe could not spell their names in their own languages. Seven hundred years before Paris had its first hospital, Cordoba had fifty hospitals.”[4]
Islamic civilization in West Africa was not simply up to par with the rest of the Muslim world during this time but was exceptional in every way. Timbuktu is a fabled city in the West, but it was very real and situated in the very part of West Africa where many Africans were taken from and brought to America. The city of Timbuktu was made into an epicenter of learning during the reign of Mansa Musa, who is considered to be the richest man in the world.[5]
Mansa Musa made his pilgrimage to Mecca between 1324 and 1325. He traveled from the West African kingdom of Mali to Mecca with an entourage of 70,000 vassals, advisors, warriors, and merchants—each with camels carrying pounds of gold. Gold was the source of the kingdom’s wealth, and his journey made Musa and his kingdom renown. During his trek, he gave away much of the gold he took with him in charity—so much so that it changed the value of the precious metal wherever he went![6]
After returning to Mali, Musa built a mosque and university that employed scholars in every endeavor known to civilization at that time. There were several schools that he built, but the most famous was the university of Sankore. Sankore accommodated 25,000 students and would eventually house between 400,000 to 700,000 manuscripts.[7] The main subjects taught were Qur’anic and Islamic studies, law, and literature. The other subjects were medicine and surgery, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy, language, linguistics, geography, history, and art. Students also learned a trade along with business code and ethics. The university trade shops offered classes in business, carpentry, farming, fishing, construction, shoe making, tailoring, navigation, and so on.
Historian Felix Dubois writes:
The scholars of Timbuctoo (Timbuktu) yielded in nothing, to the saints in the sojourns in the foreign universities of Fez, Tunis, and Cairo. They astounded the most learned men of Islam by their erudition. That these Negroes were on a level with the Arabian savants is proved by the fact that they were installed as professors in Morocco and Egypt. In contrast to this, we find that Arabs were not always equal to the requirements of Sankore.[8]
Before coming to America, Black people were not in the jungle swinging from trees. Africa was home to advanced civilizations, from the Mali empire to the Songhai empire.
The American colonies were experiments in remote rule; they were not developed. The plantation was the principal economic unit of the colonies and required year-round routine labor to make them successful. All of this was labor intensive. Europe was just emerging out of the Dark Ages. The captive Africans that were brought to the American colonies came from the sophisticated cities that we discussed. These Africans remarked how the American colonies were substandard compared to back home.
Ibrahim Abdul Rahman was a captive African enslaved in Mississippi. He was born and raised in the legendary city of Timbuktu. What was remarkable about Ibrahim and indicative of the nature of American slavery was that Ibrahim was a prince. His father and mother were royalty. Ibrahim was a military commander.[9] He spoke five languages. He was presumably educated in one of the schools of Timbuktu. When Ibrahim Abdul Rahman arrived, he said that the houses where the whites lived were shabby and of an inferior quality compared to the homes in Timbuktu. Ibrahim was told they were poorly built. This illustrates that, contrary to the claim that the slave trade rescued Black people from a dismal life in Africa, the opposite was true in the 1600s and 1700s. The material conditions of Africa were far better than those of the underdeveloped colonies of the Americas and even the towns in Europe.
Certainly, Ibrahim was better off as a prince in his native Africa than as a slave in Mississippi. The comparison is ridiculous. While Southern slave codes forbade slaves from learning how to read and write, Ibrahim was fluent in several languages and able to read and write Arabic, while most whites (including slave owners) were illiterate. The story of Ibrahim was not the only one of its kind. The indiscriminate nature of the slave trade resulted in Africans of different social strata being enslaved together. Most of the Europeans who came to America were at the bottom of the barrel: they were criminals, fugitives, peasants, or misfits of a sort. There was a large concentration of whites who were the underclass of English society who became socially superior to someone like Prince Ibrahim Abdul Rahman solely because of race.
How was Ibrahim better off because he was “hauled” from Africa to America? In what way did his life improve because of slavery? Now, people like D’Souza will probably say something like, “Look at Africa today and look at America today. Is there really any doubt that Africa is worse off than America?” The response to that is Africa is where it is today, and America is where it is today because of slavery. The argument that slavery worked out in the end ignores the basic fact that if slavery had never happened, Africa would not be impoverished, and there would have likely been no United States.
Blacks are not indebted to Whites for removing them from Africa, but, rather, whites are indebted to Black people whose contributions made the colonies and later the United States a success. Slavery was massively instrumental in financing the Industrial Revolution. Without the West Indian and American tobacco and cotton plantations (and the shipbuilding business that transported the captive Africans), the main sectors of industrialism would not have been economically possible. There is a general ignorance of just how massive the fortunes were connected to slavery. The areas of mining, steel, machine tool building, shipbuilding, artillery, oil, gas, construction of large buildings, and trains and railroads would made possible because capitalists who made their fortune on slave-based agriculture invested their money in these inventions. Financial institutions like banks and insurance companies were established using money generated from slave trading or slave labor.
The Industrial Revolution—the world’s major developmental shift—was directly tied to the enslavement of Black people. This revolution made technological advancement more rapid, where inventions were made at an unprecedented pace, and because it was based squarely on the exploitation of non-Europeans, the white Western world drastically outpaced the non-white world.
To compare where America is today to where Africa is today and to say that slavery was a blessing in disguise does not account for the fact that neither of these two places would be in the state they are in were it not for slavery.
Despite all of the barriers, African Americans’ ingenuity has shown through. There were many Black inventors whose inventions contributed to the industrial and technological development of the United States. These Black inventors were denied patents or simply had the credit stolen from them because of structural racism.
To claim that slavery was a blessing in disguise is nonsensical. The descendants of the slaves, African Americans, would have to have been able to fully benefit from the fruits of their ancestor’s labor. In other words, there would have had to be zero color discrimination. There would have to have not been Jim Crow, racial terror, housing segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, police brutality, and a racial wealth gap stemming from the aforementioned. If slaves and their descendants received reparations, if thriving black towns during the early 1900s were allowed to continue thriving without being attacked, and if Radical Reconstruction were a success and former slaves were given land from the ex-Confederates, then more than likely, Black Americans would be better off than in Africa. This was not the case.
Enslaving Africans and exploiting their resources undoubtedly greased the wheels of American economic supremacy—allowing the country to amass wealth and establish a global presence that paved the way for continued growth and dominance.
But, to suggest that the absence of slavery would have left Africa in a state of perpetual poverty is a faulty assumption that ignores a complex web of historical and economic factors. Centuries of colonialism, exploitation, and resource extraction by European powers have contributed to the continent’s economic underdevelopment.
It is impossible to know how things would have played out if slavery had never occurred. Perhaps Africa would have been better positioned to control its resources and develop at a faster pace without the exploitative practices of European colonial powers.
Furthermore, the slave trade wreaked havoc on African societies—uprooting millions of people and destabilizing social and economic systems. The resulting loss of productive labor and disruption of agricultural productivity had long-lasting effects that still plague African economies today.
And let’s not forget the legacy of colonialism, which created economic instability and hindered development by imposing artificial borders and political systems on the continent. If left to develop independently, Africa could have blossomed into a prosperous and stable region.
The argument that Blacks should be grateful for slavery is akin to a twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome—in which victims come to identify with their oppressors. It is time to reject this fallacy and recognize the harm that slavery and colonialism have inflicted on Black communities and the world at large.
“If Black people weren’t enslaved, they would still be living in poverty in Africa.” This argument is fallacious because it assumes that slavery was the only possible way for Black people to escape poverty when in reality, there are many different factors that contribute to a country’s economic development. Additionally, the argument ignores the complex historical and economic factors that have contributed to Africa’s underdevelopment, such as centuries of colonialism, exploitation, and resource extraction by European powers.
Imagine being kidnapped from a mansion, taken to a deserted land, and beaten into building a mansion for someone else. Following this, after the mansion was built, being relegated to the bathroom and seeing everyone else who came to this paleaceous home that you’ve built—being allowed to go places that you’re restricted from going even though you’re the one who built it! It is not an improvement on that captive’s life.
The fact is that whites are better off because Blacks were enslaved. The inconvenience of having to tolerate Black protests and complaints of racism pales in comparison to the benefits of Western civilization made possible by anti-Black oppression. To put it another way, slavery didn’t give Blacks a better life than they had in Africa. Slavery gave whites a better life than they had in Europe.
[1] D’Souza, D. (2014). America: Imagine a World without Her. Simon and Schuster.
[2] McLaughlin, T. (1971). Dirt: A Social History as Seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt.
[3] Ahmed, M. H., & Ahmed, M. H. (2021, September 22). When King of England sent his daughter to study in Muslim university of Cordoba. The Siasat Daily. https://www.siasat.com/when-king-of-england-sent-his-daughter-to-study-in-muslim-university-of-cordoba-2195897/
[4] Ibid.
[5] Bradley, F., & Bradley, F. (2022, October 17). Who was Mansa Musa, the ‘richest man in history’ – and what would his net worth be now? Today’s. . . South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3195577/who-was-mansa-musa-richest-man-history-and-what-would-his
[6] Meri, J. W. (2006). Medieval Islamic Civilization: L-Z, index. Taylor & Francis.
[7] Brown, M. C., II, & Dancy, T. E., II. (2017). Black Colleges Across the Diaspora: Global Perspectives on Race and Stratification in Postsecondary Education. Emerald Group Publishing.
[8] Dubois, F. (1896). Timbuctoo the Mysterious.
[9] Alford, T. (2007). Prince Among Slaves. Oxford University Press, USA.