Miller on Africa and African Slaving
from Dr. Miller’s Presentation at the 2006 AP World History Reading
Adapted from notes by Chris Cuddihy
Pomona High School, Arvada, Colorado
At the 2006 AP World History
reading, Joseph Miller presented his thoughts on African history and its
relationship to world history. A more complete version of these notes can
be found at World Class Learning Alliance (http://www.worldclass.net/),
a project of Joseph and Sayuri Adams. Joseph Adams' commentary on Dr. Miller's
talk also appears at the site.
Joseph Miller is the T. Cary Johnson Professor of History at the University
of Virginia. He is current president of the African Studies Association
and past president of the American Historical Association. His best known
work is Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Miller's view, the concept of "slavery" with all of its 18th century colonial
and 19th century American connotations must be considered in the broader
context of Africa's history. Professor Miller offered no easy answers for
achieving this goal in the classroom, but did provide a definitive foundation
for incorporating an African perspective rather than more common Atlantic-centered
narrative. Dr. Miller suggested six ideas that have guided his work over
of Bafflement": A Way Out of the Colonial History Model. At the University
of Wisconsin in the 1960s and 1970s, Miller and fellow graduate students
tried to reconcile Western political concepts to their African field studies.
In his own work, Miller soon discovered a huge discrepancy between contemporary
Portuguese sources on African traders and the oral histories of the people
themselves. Miller says he reached a point of thorough confusion regarding
the relationship between his academic preconceptions and African society
as he found it. The breakthroughs began only when he became comfortable
with his confusion. As Miller told his audience, "you can't get anywhere
until you become thoroughly confused. This is the Principle of Bafflement."
Africa. Though the AP World History curriculum is one of the first
fresh approaches to historical instruction in decades, it relies on outdated
political constructs to understand Africa. Consequently, the curriculum
asks that students focus on large political units: kingdoms and empires
such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Great Zimbabwe. These are familiar categories
for thinking about Africa, but we shouldn't forget that they "apply to less
than 1% of human societies." Borrowing tools from anthropology and sociology,
historians have questioned the utility of Western political terms like "civilizations",
"kingdoms", and "states". These terms are particularly problematic when
scholars mine African history searching for evidence of "political competence."
Chronology. The traditional 8000 BCE benchmark for beginning the world
history narrative, though appropriate to Eurasia's river valley civilizations,
does not work for most of Africa. Instead, Miller argues, we should look
back at least 50,000 years. At this time-scale, states and world religions
diminish in importance. Other structures loom larger: particularly kinship
and lineage. These become particularly significant when considering the
African context of "slaving".
Rethinking Individualism. Scholars and
teachers need to be conscious of the extent to the Descartes articulated
a version of economic individualism when he declared "I think therefore
I am." The African socio-economic ethos rests on a much more on communal
identity. The African equivalent of cogito ergo sum would be closer to,
"I am because I belong. We are because we belong." In this context, people
represent wealth, not possessions. This means that the African concept of
the "slave" differed significantly from that of the European Atlantic. The
African definition of "enslavement" or "slaving" comes closer to "taken-out":
taken out from one communal or social identity and "taken-in" to another.
There are no direct 17th century African equivalents for Western concepts
like national identity, individual equality under the law, or social and
political categories of race.
African Slaving vs. Atlantic Slavery.
Miller advises teachers to be careful using the term "slavery" when comparing
African and colonial contexts. Doing so may erroneously imply that slavery
is a static, unchanging institution, rooted in individual, economic circumstances
of the 17th century. While the African practice of slaving usually meant
assimilation into a new social context, 17th century European Atlantic slavery
usually made the slave an economic object.
as Gender History. Until the 17th century, women represented a majority
of enslaved peoples. During times of economic duress, rural women were often
taken into the cities as slaves to work and / or to produce children. The
Roman familia consisted of an extended family that included slave
women whose children would be loyal to the familia and the state,
making good soldiers and administrators. For similar reasons, the militaries
of many empires in history were slave based. African contexts for enslavement
were closer to those of Rome than to those of the 17th century Atlantic.
In the New World, land was unlimited, willing labor scarce, and enslavement
of men more than women served a more purely commercial aim. Further,
the Atlantic commercial system maintained control through extreme violence
toward male slaves.
Dr. Miller reminded us that our westernized version of identity is dependent
on a Cartesian premise of "I think; therefore, I am". Just as David Christian
challenged us at the 2005 AP reading to integrate humanity's story into
the 13.5 billion year history of the cosmos, Miller challenged us to consider
think beyond the state-based societies whose populations are dwarfed by
those living outside territorial boundaries.