🇻🇮Nato Jacobs🇬🇩

Remember when I said that we are always told to let go of slavery and Colonialism so one day we are gaslighted into narratives like this one. Africans are not a monolith today and more importantly not back then. You cannot use the african elites who participated in slavery as a representation of the entire continent. Even then, most didn't willingly participate in slavery, for most it was survival at the hands of European guns. Europeans flooded the West and east African coast with firearms, ammunition, and manufactured goods. This created an existential security dilemma known as the gun-slave cycle. Participation in slavery was rarely a choice made in a vacuum; it was an existential necessity. Kingdoms that refused to participate such as the Kingdom of Benin in certain centuries or Queen Nzinga’s early resistance faced economic isolation, internal destabilization, or armed destruction by heavily armed rivals funded and supported by the Europeans. Of course how loving for Europeans to document transactions and write their half baked references, without showing the underlying structural pressure they created for their slave trade. Lastly Using Cugoano’s kidnapping to argue that "Africans were the primary culprits." is so funny. Cugoano himself explicitly condemned the entire system of european demand and African elite complicity. In his 1787 work (Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery), he clearly identified European greed and the transatlantic trade network as the root driver of internal conflicts and kidnappings in West Africa.