Abolitionists Abroad

Lamin Sanneh. Abolitionist Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. 

Lamin Sanneh’s transnational approach to abolition focuses on who he refers to as Black Americans, those who either escaped from slavery or freely chose to emigrate to new colonies in West Africa. The convergence of American, European, and African history makes Sanneh’s focus on the role of religion in the abolition movements easy to understand. Sanneh’s thesis is that evangelicalism and colonization of Africa allowed American Blacks to create an antistructural society, simultaneously free from and controlled by the racial expectations forced upon them in American and European societies.

Antistructure is equated with antislavery because the antislavery movement in Africa challenged both the structural power of caste and chieftains, disrupting preexisting African (read slave-trading) power structures. In a similar vein Evangelicalism is equated with antistructure because it disrupted the preexisting power structures in European societies that suppressed the power and agency of individuals, as demonstrated by Sanneh through the rhetoric of the American Revolution and writers such as Locke and Milton. Sanneh emphasizes the importance of religion in the creation of West African colonies, and the eventual end to the slave trade in the region. It is this emphasis on religion that is Sanneh’s greatest contribution to the discussion of colonial West Africa. As one of the first attempts to connect the interwoven histories of American Blacks, European antislavery sentiment, and colonization in West Africa Sanneh’s Abolitionists Abroad is  a landmark exercise in transatlantic studies that look beyond the slave trade, and focuses on abolition and the consequences of colonization in Africa with the purpose of abolition.

Sanneh’s analysis of the antislavery actors whom he focuses centers on the role they played in promoting humanitarianism and antislavery in Europe, rather than the transatlantic slave trade. While he does explore the continental slave trade that became disrupted by colonists and missionaries in Africa, he largely ignores the colonial structures that replaced the disrupted African power structures and the move to “legitimate” trade. Additionally Sanneh does not distinguish power structures that were already in existence in Africa, assuming all cultures to be chiefdoms that depended on slavery as the only viable commercial asset they possessed. Both of these notions are faulty.

The assumption that Evangelical Christianity disrupted preexisting power structures by undermining the monarchical power of chiefdoms is much more complicated than Sanneh indicates, as many indigenous cultures acted as Terence Ranger stated: “Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century, pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single ‘tribal’ identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild (Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns, “Problem III: Colonial Rule in Africa,” Historical Problems of Imperial Africa, 139).”  While evangelicalism did play a significant role in the colonization of Africa and the creation of later ethnic identities, it should not be considered the largest motivator in the abolition of slavery in West Africa.

Similarly, Sanneh ignores palm oil, lumber, and other raw materials that Africans were producing and trading to Europe in addition to or instead of trading in slaves. The increased demand for these goods, primarily palm oil, had as much of an impact on the end of the slave trade in West Africa as the abolition efforts from Europeans and Black colonists (see Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century).