From Equals To Enslaved
Dr Toby Green discusses his book A Fistful Of Shells
It was German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who once claimed that the continent of Africa was “no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit”. This dismissal of the contribution of this entire region to the history of the globe is patently ridiculous, and yet for many the history of this continent is largely a blank space in time. In his new Wolfson History Prize-nominated book, A Fistful Of Shells, Toby Green focuses on the history of West Africa in the same way that so many historians might have previously written about the history of Western Europe. His broad investigation into the economic and social changes that took place from the before the Atlantic slave trade to the age of revolution delves back in time to reveal truths about the rich and diverse nature of events in this region.
As we learn from Green, this particular region of Africa was standing toe-to-toe with Europe as it entered the 16th century.
“I think it’s no exaggeration to say that certainly Mali, for example, was richer and better globally connected than most places in Europe at that time,” he tells us. Mansa Musa, sultan of the Mali Empire during the 14th century, has been estimated to have been the richest man who ever lived, which goes some way to supporting the notion of West Africa’s wealth and status. “The gold that was mined in different parts of West Africa, like the Gold Coast but also Senegambia, was the gold that financed the expansion of coinage in North Africa. The name, for example, of gold coins in Spain in the 16th century, the maravedi, derived from al-murabitun, which was a gold coin in Western Sahara. So this was the source of gold. Its rulers were, according to some estimates, the richest people who have ever lived, and they were connected to places like China, Iraq and so on, which European states weren’t.”
So how did these two massive geographic and economic regions begin to diverge? This is one of the key questions that Green’s book investigates. “European trade in Africa starting in the late-15th century has traditionally been depicted in historical writing as Europeans turning up with baubles and getting what they wanted, and it wasn’t like that,” he says. What they were trading in was currency, which in West Africa in this time took a number of different forms, including cowries, a small shell from which Green’s book takes its title. “Cowries were one of the major currencies in West Africa from the 13-14th centuries, right through to the late-19th century and the end of the pre-colonial period,” he says. “Cowries were initially brought in through the caravan trade from along the Silk Road and then down across the Sahara.” They were also a very practical currency, as Green explains: “They were a useful form of currency because you could assess them by weight, but they were also very small, so you could use them for minor transactions, which you couldn’t necessarily do with gold, which is too valuable.”
This is the first step of the disparity opening up between the continents. “The African markets were also being flooded with new currencies. One of the big differences is that if you bring in currency and there isn’t an increase in manufactured goods and trading with it, that tends to lead to inflation. That’s what classic
“The trade was in currencies, and that essentially began to create inflation in African currencies”
economic theory tells us. That increase of manufactured goods being transported into and out of Europe from China and India was happening in Europe, but it wasn’t happening to the same degree in Africa. The trade was in currencies, and that essentially began to create inflation in African currencies.”
And then came the transatlantic slave trade, which feeds even more into this cycle. “A lot of this trade and the currencies that were coming in were part of the slave trade. What was happening was that while the value of African currencies was declining, through the process I’ve just described, the major exports, which were gold and captive human beings, were themselves producing value outside of Africa.”
So on the currency side the relative value of gold was rising, giving European traders more spending power, while simultaneously enslaved people were being used as a labour force, generating more value or what economically we would call a surplus. “So while the currencies within Africa were declining in value, its exports were producing value outside of the continent which exacerbated this process,” explains Green.
It’s easy to see how the cycle of decline might continue from there and it was made even worse by the new element of slavery that the transatlantic trade introduced: that being enslavement could be a heritable state. “Here’s where the term or the concept of slavery has led to a lot of confusion because we have one concept that actually covers a huge range of relationships between human beings,” says Green. Slavery as it had existed in West Africa previously had been mostly about outsiders to the community being incorporated into society. According to Green: “They might be war captives, they might be migrants, but the key thing was they had no kinship relationships. It was by making kinship relationships over a couple of generations that those people might
become incorporated into a community.” The trade that enslaved African men and women and forced them to work in the fields and mines of the New World now introduced the concept that the children of these enslaved people would themselves be born into bondage with no clear means of emancipation.
But as Green points out, a singular concentration on slavery can be a disservice to West African history where advancements and human ingenuity continued to be expressed, even if figures like Hegel dismissed them. “One of the chapters of my book points out that the history of Africa is often being studied through the lens of slavery, particularly outside the continent, but that doesn’t give much scope to look at the history of art or music and the enormous artistic and musical achievements that took place in the same period of time. So we have to take stock of that.”
The journey to bring us these stories and this local history that includes but also goes beyond the transatlantic slave trade proved to be a challenging one for Green. “It was a bit of an odyssey, to be honest, putting together this book. Unlike a lot of historical topics, the materials for West African history in the precolonial period are not all gathered in one place or one or two places. They’re scattered around the world. And in a way that’s a testament to elements of African history. I used archives in different European countries, Spain,
Portugal, the Netherlands, as well as
Britain, but also in Latin America, in
Brazil, Peru, Chile and Colombia.”
But these Western records are only one part of the story. “If you were to just use these written sources, you would come away with the idea that the most important or the only really important issues in African history were slavery, trade and African-european relations,” explains Green. “But in West Africa you get a very different view of what matters in history. In fact, a lot of history in most parts of West Africa (not all parts, but most parts) is an oral genre. And in that oral record the Atlantic slave trade appears very little, and if you were to just use those sources you would come away thinking well, the important things in African history are histories of kingship, religion, migration and family relationships. The reality is that all of this is important, but you need both perspectives to try and produce something that reflects the balance of that history.”
In this way A Fistful Of Shells looks to both tackle the issues of slavery and the triangular trade that gradually stripped West Africa of its enormous wealth and power, as well as look deeper into what continued to happen in the region after the trade. Through both approaches we can begin to debunk the notion of Africa as a continent without any history. “I think you just have to look at any chapter of the book to have this idea overturned, because it’s clear that African societies transform themselves in many different ways,” explains Green. “Once you look at any aspect of this in detail, you see how completely false that view is, but also how insidious it actually is.”