Herman Bennett's African Kings and Black Slaves offers an in-depth examination of imperial chronicles about Africa and its people. It counters early-modern European narratives about expansionism by positioning Africans beyond the savage trope. Bennett writes that “at its core, this book asks what role, if any, did the acknowledged existence of politics in Africa play in shaping early modern European expansion” (2). He also asks: “How might this political grammar be illustrative of pasts that have been lost under the subsequent weight of successive colonial impositions and our restricted political imaginations” (Ibid.).
The text serves as a counter-narrative and reinterpretation of early-modern encounters between Africans and Europeans. Its raises questions regarding the mechanics of sovereignty and identity. Bennett's approach is two-pronged. He highlights the mercantilist aspects of trade between Africans, Portuguese, and the Spanish that predate large-scale transatlantic trade in slaves. In these complex systems of commerce, Iberian traders adapt to African sovereignties and rituals. He also emphasizes how, constrained by their norms regarding sovereignty, Iberian traders debated matters regarding who they could legitimately enslave. Situated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bennett embeds his approach within some of the earliest encounters between Africans and Europeans.
Bennett's book has many positive characteristics. It serves as an early-modern counterweight to nineteenth century British liberal narratives about Africa and slavery. Regarding these narratives, Bennett states: “By 1852 Britain had suppressed its own slave trade (1807), emancipated the enslaved throughout most of its empire (1833), and for much of the nineteenth century let a crusade against human trafficking” (17). By the mid-nineteenth century, an array of Europeans conceded to both British liberal standards and diplomacy to help defeat the practice of slavery. In contrast, African Kings and Black Slaves unpacks traditions and cultural norms among Atlantic coast African sovereigns starting in the fifteenth century. Particularly noteworthy is Bennett's analysis of lordship in the evolving history of power within this region. He writes: “In the 15th century, and African loci of power invariably centred on his ability to marshal vassals and retainers whose fortune, status, debts, and ties (or lack thereof) triggered a political calculus that transform subjects into slaves—the charter beings of the early modern African diaspora” (34). He articulates his agenda as “discerning how one might engender a more nuanced history of the early modern Atlantic slave trade, a history that transcends the liberal triumphalism of the nineteenth century that to this day frames the African-European encounter as a singular event—the slave trade” (156). This perspective argues that African-European encounters were not one-dimensional but negotiated through codes and sub-codes based on early-modern religious and secular conventions. Bennett cautions not to romanticize Africa or the transatlantic slave trade: “writings on the slave trade memorialize human tragedy … as is often the case with romances and tragedies, they assume a transcendent quality when, in fact, the experience, event, or phenomenon embodied the contrary” (156). He provocatively calls out scholarly tendencies that “analyse the structure of the trade thereby expanding our knowledge of the African past, but [that] such studies rarely have left the slave trade and a new modality of power” (157). Arguably, this new modality power rests in the epistemological space.
Bennett immerses himself in collections of travel-logs from the mid-fifteenth century to detail early European encounters with African. Through these collections, he foreshadows the commodified and market-driven human trafficking enterprise that would become the transatlantic slave trade. Before this trade achieved its surge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bennett argues that the Portuguese vacillated between the spiritual and scalar spheres. In matters of commerce, Africans were slaves in Portuguese eyes that viewed them as commodities selling and buying. However, in the spiritual realm, the Catholic doctrine of the day governed the status of Africans as “pagan”. Bennett details how this status fed conflict among the Portuguese and created debates about immunity from enslavement. Such conflicts inform the author's questions as well his examination of the rhetoric and performance monarchy. His analysis focuses on “lordship alongside the legal regimes, ceremonies, pomp constitutive of early modern politics” (5). Bennett argues that such politics and diplomacy were not a smooth ebb and flow but, instead, myriad chaos. Through his historical account of this chaos, Bennett details the elaborate diplomatic rituals and treaties between African kings and Iberian sovereigns.
Through his research on Africans and Europeans, Bennett demonstrates how accounts of the former by the latter fuel false narratives that served early-modern perspectives on domination. He writes: “In analysing the earliest phase of the slave trade, we discern long-standing traditions—specific institutional practices, established customs, and intellectual norms—whose social logic preceded but also survived the immediate African and European encounters” (3). Exploring this phase with a critical lens, Bennett achieves an epistemological end, which serves to reposition the hegemonic narratives about Africa, slavery, and early modern imperialism. This repositioning produces a counter-discourse to European descriptions of the transatlantic slave trade from an African epistemological space.
Herman L. Bennett's African Kings, and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic makes a notable contribution to the study of European expansion and interaction with African. The book is particularly noteworthy for framing the African-European encounter not only as physical but epistemological. A challenging yet well-orchestrated and vital read, Bennett's book is an excellent addition to the historical landscape of African and European encounters.
