John Thornton (1)

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.… (mais)

Thjis is a strong argument for the position that the Africans (or at least the various African states) were active players during the era of the slave trade,not passive pawns of the Europeans. In a way this is positive for the Africans --arguing for example that they produced their own iron and cloth, and had a free choice of importing European materials --foreign cloth was imported as a matter of style; foreign iron was inferior to African steel, but was used for expendable items like javelin heads. However, it also implies Africans feely chose to engage in slave trading. He argues most African wars were for political reasons,not just slave raiding, though slaves could be a salable byproduct of wars. Most of his arguments focus on the earlier period before 1700 and are based on good evidence chiefly from European clerics and traders in Africa, though some places (notably the Kingdom of Kongo) produced their own records. I think his arguments are weaker for the 18th century (which he added for this volume); it does appear that flintlock muskets led to larger wars and more slave trading. He follows up the African section with one on the Americas, primarily Latin America and the Caribbean, arguing most "maroon" runaway slave settlements were authoritarian and militaristic, not the idealized republics of earlier writers. He also argue that many slaves had the opportunity to live with other slaves from the same region and maintained broadly "national' cultures in the first generation, though he accepts that later generations accepted creolization. He argues African religions tended to be based on revelations by prophets whose status depended on the success of their prophecies, and this system coud be adapted to Christian (especially Catholic) saints and miracles.… (mais)

The subject matter is fascinating, but the execution is lacking. The Kongolese Saint Anthony relates the story of an intriguing, but little known, incident in Kongolese history: the heretical Catholic movement founded by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young Kongolese noblewoman who is sort of an African Joan of Arc. She claimed to be possessed by Saint Anthony of Padua and led an uprising against both the secular rulers of Kongo—unpopular because of their constant warmongering—and its religious hierarchy—mostly white Capuchins from Italy. Despite widespread support, Kimpa Vita was captured by orthodox forces and burnt at the stake at the age of 22.

However, though the topic itself was intriguing, Thornton's stylistic and organisational decisions made this a book that I struggled to finish, though it's only about 200 pages long. He disdains oral and anthropological evidence in favour of working from written commentary from European sources. It's a thoroughly Eurocentric approach, compounded by the fact that when those sources "quote" a Kongolese speaker, Thornton changes those indirect speech remarks to direct quotations, often with remarks on tone such as "he said sarcastically." It makes for a dramatic narrative, but it's jarring, makes pretty much everything Thornton writes suspect, and requires us to view everything through a European lense. Interesting introduction to what is a new topic to me, but very flawed.… (mais)