Blacks sold blacks too

2026-07-24

The contemporary discourse surrounding the history of slavery frequently devolves into a complete analytical failure, often anchored by the very phrase acting as the title of this essay. Participants routinely abandon historical materialism in favour of reactionary point-scoring. One faction retreats into historical revisionism by denying the documented existence of pre-colonial African servitude. The opposing faction seizes this historical reality to validate a classic colonial deflection tactic. They deliberately conflate indigenous systems of bondage with the European Transatlantic Slave Trade. Evaluating these historical periods requires rigorous structural analysis grounded in the relations of production, the mechanisms of social reproduction, and the position each system occupied within a given economic order. Obfuscating the fundamental economic and socio-political differences between these two distinct systems serves purely to absolve global capital of its foundational atrocities.

Any serious materialist study of servitude begins with a question the popular slogan is engineered to avoid: what relation of production organised the labour, and what relation of kinship organised the person. Claude Meillassoux's anthropology of slavery supplies the apparatus for that exact question. Meillassoux distinguishes societies whose membership and continuity reproduce through birth into lineage, the reproductive "womb" of the kin group, from the servile relation produced instead through capture, purchase, or seizure by violence external to that womb. The moment of capture strips the captive of prior social identity and drops them outside every existing genealogical claim. The captive's position inside a lineage-based African society remains open, across the course of a single lifetime or across a generation, to closure through marriage, ritual adoption, clientship, or absorption into the captor's household. A society organised on this basis treats servitude as a suspension of kinship status pending eventual resolution, rather than a permanent category stamped onto a body for the whole of its existence and the existence of everyone descended from it.

Lovejoy's periodisation in Transformations in Slavery supplies the typology separating a society merely containing servile persons at its margins from a society whose entire mode of production runs on servile labour as its central engine. The majority of documented pre-colonial West African, Sahelian, and Central African polities fall into the first category. Debt bondage, pawnship arrangements pledging a dependent against a loan, penal servitude for specific offences, and the absorption of captives taken in localised warfare supplemented household labour, extended lineage networks, and consolidated the political authority of a ruling house. These mechanisms did not organise a society's total productive base around servile output for a distant market. Servile status under this arrangement carried no automatic transmission across generations in the majority of documented cases, and a captive's children, born inside the captor's household and inside the captor's kin network, frequently acquired full lineage membership within a generation or two. Lovejoy's account of the later Sokoto Caliphate plantations and comparable zones of intensification marks the exception proving this rule: those systems moved toward something closer to a slave mode of production precisely where and when external demand pulled them in that direction, a point returned to below.

Jubo Jubogha, remembered to history as Jaja of Opobo, supplies the single most complete illustration of this structural mobility available in the documentary record of the Niger Delta. Born around 1821 in Umuduruoha, in the Igbo hinterland of present-day Imo State, he was captured amid local conflict and sold into servitude as a boy of roughly twelve years old, funnelled in all likelihood through Aro trading networks running between the Igbo interior and the coast. He was carried to the city-state of Bonny and purchased into the Anna Pepple House, one of the trading and war-canoe houses governing Bonny's commercial and political life. British merchants renamed him Jaja because they found his given name difficult to pronounce, a small detail that nonetheless marks the first stage of a life that would run entirely through institutions the Europeans on the coast could observe but never fully command.

Kenneth Onwuka Dike's Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta specifies the precise institutional mechanism that made a trajectory of this kind structurally available. The Delta city-states organised political and commercial life around the "house system," a corporate unit combining a war-canoe fleet, a resident labour force that included free members, pawns, and slaves working under a single head, and a headship whose legitimacy rested substantially on demonstrated wealth, trading acumen, and command of a following rather than on birthright alone. A house absorbed capable subordinates into positions of genuine authority because its survival depended on continuous commercial and military competence rather than on the preservation of a closed hereditary caste. Dike documents headship passing repeatedly to men who had entered a house in servile status and climbed through it by exactly the ability the house's own structure was built to reward.

Jaja advanced along precisely this channel. He served first as a page boy attending his master's canoe, then rose to oversee a fleet of trading boats in his own right, mastering the palm oil trade that had displaced the direct export of captives as the region's central commodity following Britain's abolition of the transatlantic trade in 1807. He extended Anna Pepple's operations into the interior, absorbed rival trading factions under its authority, and by his mid-twenties held a position of substantial economic and political weight inside Bonny. He assumed headship of the Anna Pepple House itself, directing its fleet, its trading relationships with European merchants on the coast, and its political standing against the rival Manilla Pepple House.

A succession contest with the Manilla Pepple House, led by the chief Oko Jumbo, produced open conflict inside Bonny through the late 1860s. Jaja withdrew his following rather than accept subordination inside a Bonny he could no longer secure, and in 1869 and 1870 he established a sovereign settlement some twenty six miles east of Bonny, naming it Opobo. The chiefs installed him as Amanyanabo, king, of the new state. Opobo rapidly eclipsed Bonny's trading volume, drawing fourteen of Bonny's former eighteen trading houses into its orbit, and Jaja secured for Opobo an effective monopoly over the palm oil routes running from the interior to the coast, at points shipping cargo directly to Liverpool and bypassing British coastal middlemen entirely. Queen Victoria's government awarded him a sword of honour in 1871 for assistance rendered during the Ashanti campaign on the Gold Coast, a diplomatic gesture directed at a sitting head of state.

Every stage of this biography is structurally, legally, and biologically impossible within the framework of European chattel slavery. A captive transported to a Caribbean sugar estate or a Carolina rice plantation possessed no institutional pathway toward headship of the plantation, no mechanism converting demonstrated trading acumen into command over the apparatus that had enslaved him, and no route toward founding a sovereign polity recognised by the imperial power that had classified him as property in the first instance. Jaja's eventual downfall arrived from the mechanics of the imperial capitalist system encroaching from the coast, never from the mechanics of the servile system that had first carried him to Bonny. The British vice-consul Harry Johnston lured him aboard a vessel in 1887 under the pretence of diplomatic negotiation, seized him, and deported him first to the Gold Coast and later to the Caribbean, before permitting a return that never arrived; he died in exile in Tenerife in 1891, his monopoly over the palm oil trade an obstacle British commercial interests required removed. The empire found it necessary to entrap a reigning king through deceit rather than simply reclaim him as escaped property, and that single fact demonstrates the qualitative gulf between the two systems more precisely than any other detail in his biography. A self-liberated formerly enslaved person in the United States remained, for the entire duration of the chattel system, legally reclaimable as property under the Fugitive Slave Acts regardless of any achievement accumulated in the interim. Jaja's servile origin generated no equivalent permanent legal claim against him once the pathway of assimilation had run its course inside the house system that had absorbed him.

The mechanics of the Transatlantic system operate on an entirely separate axis from the moment a captive is loaded onto a European vessel. Chattel slavery fixed servile status permanently and transmitted it automatically across generations through the legal doctrine that a child inherited the mother's condition regardless of the father's status. This doctrine severed every enslaved person's descendants, in perpetuity, from any prospective route toward kin absorption into the owning family or the owning society. Colonial law classified the enslaved person as movable property, valued according to a depreciation schedule and an output calculation rather than according to any residual social personhood. The plantation complex organised labour through continuous, supervised, mechanised extraction geared to fixed production quotas for a commodity crop grown expressly for a transatlantic export market, a mode of labour discipline absent from the household-based servitude Lovejoy documents across the pre-colonial interior. The system further required inventing and hardening a rigid racial taxonomy that rendered servile status coextensive with a phenotype, marking the captive and every descendant, in every generation and in every place, regardless of achievement. African systems marked servile origin instead as a genealogical fact recorded within a specific lineage, a fact capable of being renegotiated, absorbed, or forgotten within a few generations, and entirely unconnected to any physical marker separating captor from captive.

Eric Williams established in Capitalism and Slavery the economic function this commodified labour force performed within the structure of European capital. Profits generated by the slave trade itself, and by the sugar, cotton, and tobacco produced through enslaved labour on American and Caribbean plantations, supplied a central stream of capital accumulation for British mercantile and manufacturing interests across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Williams traces this capital into the insurance sector underwriting slave voyages and plantation cargoes, into the banking houses that grew directly from slave-trading fortunes, into the shipbuilding industries of Liverpool and Bristol, and into the capital base financing the mechanisation of British textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. The triangular trade circuit, manufactured goods carried to the African coast, captives carried to the Americas, plantation commodities carried back to Europe, was engineered from the outset for the continuous reproduction and expansion of mercantile capital. Williams further demonstrates that the eventual abolition of the trade tracked a shift in economic interest as industrial and financial capital found the West Indian sugar monopoly increasingly obsolete against free trade competition and beet sugar production, placing the moral rhetoric surrounding abolition atop an underlying recalibration of capital's own requirements. Every stage of the Atlantic system, its initiation and its formal termination alike, answered to the requirements of capital rather than to any moral register internal to its operation.

Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa specifies the corresponding cost imposed on the African side of this same circuit. The removal of tens of millions of people, concentrated disproportionately among the most physically able segment of the population and skewed heavily toward male captives, across four centuries constituted a direct haemorrhage of productive and reproductive capacity from African societies at the exact historical moment western European economies were consolidating the technical and institutional foundations of industrial capitalism. Rodney documents the systematic distortion this exerted on African economic development: established ironworking and textile manufacture retreated across large stretches of the West African coast as European manufactured imports, exchanged for captives, flooded local markets; regional trade networks reoriented around the coastal export circuit rather than internal accumulation and technological advance; political energy across affected regions redirected increasingly toward raiding and warfare aimed at supplying captives for the coastal trade rather than toward agrarian or craft investment. Rodney frames this pattern as the active production of underdevelopment, a specific historical process engineered by the requirements of the external capitalist system. He extends the argument directly into the colonial period that followed, documenting how the railways and ports built during the subsequent Scramble for Africa were designed exclusively to extract raw materials outward to European industry rather than to integrate or industrialise African economies internally, cementing a dependency whose foundations were laid across the four centuries of the slave trade that preceded colonial partition. The wealth financing the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the corresponding arrest of productive development across the African continent constitute two faces of a single historical transaction, not two separate and comparable national experiences of servitude.

Lovejoy's analysis specifies further that a significant share of the internal expansion and intensification of servitude documented within nineteenth century Africa, in the plantation zones of the Sokoto Caliphate, along the Kongo river basin, and across the Niger Delta hinterland Jaja himself operated within, developed as a derivative response to external demand rather than as an autonomous system operating in isolation from the Atlantic economy. The scale of servitude cited by revisionists eager to demonstrate African participation frequently describes an apparatus that expanded specifically because the Atlantic and trans-Saharan export markets created the demand structure calling that expansion into being. Dike's account of the Niger Delta houses after 1807 supplies the clearest regional demonstration of this dynamic. Abolition of the direct slave trade redirected the Delta's commercial energy toward palm oil, a commodity whose British demand derived from industrial requirements for machine lubricant and for soap manufacture feeding metropolitan factories and cities. The labour producing that oil within the Delta hinterland remained substantially servile labour, its scale and organisation governed by the quotas the Delta houses required to satisfy Liverpool and Bristol merchants. The house system Jaja rose through, for every documented mechanism of internal mobility it contained, operated as one node within a commercial circuit whose ultimate demand signal originated in British industrial capital. A domestic servitude apparatus entangled at every stage of its nineteenth century intensification with the requirements of an external capitalist economy stands as the product of that economy's demand curve, a fact the popular slogan is constitutionally incapable of accommodating.

The qualitative rupture separating the two systems becomes precise once the analysis returns to Meillassoux's original distinction between kinship relation and market relation. A captive absorbed into an African household remained, throughout the term of dependent status, a person embedded within a network of personal obligation binding captor and captive together within a household or lineage structure, a relation retaining social specificity even where it involved real subordination and real violence. A captive loaded onto a slave ship and sold onto a Caribbean or American plantation entered instead into a relation of pure abstraction, a fungible unit of productive capital whose individual identity carried no bearing on treatment beyond its effect on output and resale value. The first relation, whatever coercion it contained, retained the captive within a social order capable, across a single lifetime, of producing a Jaja of Opobo. The second relation was engineered by design to foreclose that exact possibility permanently, for the captive and for every descendant born after.

The persistent narrative that Africans simply sold themselves exists as a deliberate ideological mechanism, engineered to distribute the moral and economic culpability of a global capitalist atrocity onto the victims of that atrocity. Equating a socio-political system of assimilative, kin-embedded servitude, a system whose own nineteenth century expansion remained substantially bound to the demand signal of the very capitalist economy the slogan seeks to exonerate, with a transnational engine of racialised chattel slavery engineered from its origin for the primitive accumulation of industrial capital, constitutes an act of supreme historical negligence. Acknowledging the documented material realities of pre-colonial African servitude, the debt bondage, the pawnship, the assimilative household economy that Dike, Lovejoy, and Meillassoux each specify from a distinct documentary angle, demonstrates historical literacy. Weaponising those specific and bounded realities to launder the systematic, structurally distinct, and world-historical devastation that Rodney and Williams document as the foundation of European industrial capital demonstrates active complicity in imperialist propaganda.