The African libertarians who fought for freedom are described in this piece in Le Monde Diplomatique by Elikia M’bokolo.

“Africans, like all other peoples, had no particular liking for slavery. Slavery was generated and maintained by a specific system. While the revolts of black slaves during the Atlantic crossing and in America are well documented, there is much less awareness of the scale and diversity of resistance to slavery within Africa. Both to the Atlantic slave trade as such and to the slavery in Africa which it induced or aggravated.

One long neglected source is Lloyd’s List. It throws unexpected light on the rejection of the slave trade in the African coastal societies. It is packed full of details of damage to vessels insured by the famous London company from its foundation in 1689. The figures show that in more than 17% of cases, the damage was due to local rebellion or plundering in Africa. The perpetrators of these revolts were the slaves themselves, assisted by the coastal population. It is as if there were two separate interests at work: the interest of states that had allowed themselves to become incorporated in the slavery system, and the interest of free peoples who were under constant threat of enslavement and were moved to act in solidarity with those already reduced to slavery.

As for slavery within African society itself, everything appears to indicate that it grew in parallel with the Atlantic slave trade and was reinforced by it. It similarly gave rise to many forms of resistance: flight, open rebellion, and recourse to the protection afforded by religion (attested in both Islamic and Christian countries). In the Senegal valley, for example, the attempts by certain monarchs to enslave and sell their own subjects gave rise, at the end of the 17th century, to the Marabout war and the Toubenan movement (from the word tuub, meaning to convert to Islam). Its founder, Nasir al-Din, proclaimed that “God does not permit kings to pillage, kill or enslave their peoples. He appointed them, on the contrary, to preserve their subjects and protect them from their enemies. Peoples were not made for kings, but kings for peoples.”

Further south, in what is now Angola, the Kongo peoples invoked Christianity in the same way, both against the missionaries, who were compromised in the slave trade, and against the local powers. At the beginning of the 18th century a prophetess in her twenties, Kimpa Vita (also known as Doña Beatrice), turned the slave traders’ racist arguments on their head and began to preach that “there are no Blacks or Whites in heaven” and that “Jesus Christ and other saints are black and come from the Congo”. Similar appeals to religion are still a feature of demands for freedom and equality in various parts of Africa. Clearly, the slave trade was far from marginal. It is central to modern African history, and resistance to it engendered attitudes and practices that have persisted to the present day.

A continent of “savages”

The ideas of abolitionist propaganda, which certain ways of commemorating the abolition of slavery tend to reinforce, should not be accepted uncritically. The desire for freedom, and freedom itself, did not come to the Africans from outside, whether from Enlightenment philosophers, abolitionist agitators or republican humanists. They came from internal developments within the African societies themselves. Moreover, from the end of the 18th century, merchants in countries bordering on the Gulf of Guinea, who had mostly grown rich on the slave trade, began to distance themselves from slavery and send their children to Britain to train in the sciences and other professions useful for the development of commerce. That is why, throughout the 19th century, African societies had no trouble responding positively to the inducements of industrialized Europe, which had converted to “lawful” trade in the produce of the land and was henceforth hostile to the “unlawful” and “shameful” trade in slaves.

But the Africa of the 19th century was very different from the continent which Europeans had encountered four hundred years earlier. As the Trinidadian historian, Walter Rodney, has tried to show, Africa had been drawn by the slave trade down a dangerous path, and it was now well and truly underdeveloped (6). The racism rooted in the slave-trade era blossomed anew in these propitious circumstances. European discourse on Africa now centred on the “backwardness” and “savagery” of the continent. On the basis of such value judgements, the West was postulated as a model. African upheavals and regression were attributed, not to real historical developments in which Europe had played a part, but to the “innate nature” of the Africans themselves. Emergent colonialism and imperialism cloaked themselves in humanitarian garb and invoked “racial superiority” and the “White Man’s burden”. The former slave-trading states now spoke only of liberating Africa from “Arab” slavers and the black potentates who were also engaged in slavery.

However, once the colonial powers had carved up the continent between them, they took great care not to abolish the slavery structures they had found in place. Any change would have to be gradual, they argued, and “native” customs had to be respected. Slavery thus persisted within the colonial system, as we can see from the League of Nations surveys conducted between the two world wars (7).

Worse still, in order to drive the economic machine, they created a new type of slavery in the form of forced labour. “Whatever it is called, nothing can disguise the fact that forced labour is de facto and de jure simply the reintroduction and promotion of slavery (8).” Here again, to look no further than the French example, the impulse for freedom came from Africa. It was due to the efforts of the African deputies, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Léopold Sédar Senghor, that forced labour was at last abolished in 1946.”