Silencing Evidence: Reflections on the Scholarship on African Involvement in the European Slave Trade

Abstract

The scholarship on the European slave trade—a forced removal of millions of Africans from their homelands between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries to serve as slaves in the Americas—is extensively documented by European travellers and scholarly accounts. Recently, African involvement in the European slave trade has attracted considerable attention. Despite vigorous research that has demolished negative images about Africa, enormous amounts of literature still enter the market, as late as the twentyfirst century, reviving and parading old myths and stereotypes to perpetuate the misguided notion that Africans were backward and inhuman. This, the sources tell us, explains why Europeans enslaved them.