The custom of slavery

The trade in black slaves created three components of what it means to be human in the modern world. First, racial slavery enacted a purely gratuitous form of violence on black people as a special class of human beings. Blackness as a product of a permanent structure of gratuitous violence departs profoundly from humanism's presumption that subjects experience violence only contingently or instrumentally—meaning, violence is presumed to be a response to a transgression of some kind or to shifts in power relations. White people, and then later, all nonblack people, came to realize their humanity, no matter how immiserated, by means of their shared capacity to engage in antiblack violence with impunity.Footnote ⁹ Second, being structurally positioned by gratuitous violence signifies blackness as the defining marker of the non-human.Footnote ¹⁰ Third, the slave's general dishonor and natal alienation constitute a culture of politics that rests on black fungibility—that is, the way in which black people enable society's most pressing debates, and at the same time, are precluded from authorizing such deliberations about social life.Footnote ¹¹

Since the African slave trade has built a structure of humanity that rests on these three components, slavery is not a discrete historical event, nor is it primarily a political economy organizing the accumulation of surplus value. Rather, it is more accurate to understand slavery as a structure that transcends any particular historically bounded political economy and arranges the symbolic universe according to its dictates. The structural positionality of differently racialized human beings, therefore, calls for a different level of analysis from that addressed in questions about consciousness, experience, identity, performance, or representation.Footnote ¹² This is one reason why black liberation and anticolonial movements, in their opposition to the psychic alienation of antiblackness and institutionalized methods of social control arrayed against black people, have not yet been able to approach the restoration of what has been defined a priori as an absence: black standing in the structure of humanity.

Structural analysis of this sort begets an understanding of the qualitatively different degrees of violence black people confront in the world of antiblackness as compared with various nonblack struggles. As the sole objectified nonhumans who enable the subjectivity and historical agency of human beings, black people stand in an antagonistic position vis-a-vis global civil society and its institutions and subjects, whereas nonblacks face social conflicts and contradictions among each other.Footnote ¹³ Conflicts and contradictions are resolvable within the structure of humanity, while an antagonism is irremediable without altogether obliterating the structure. For instance, the US Civil War presented the historical paradox of a nation founded on and deeply invested in slavery waging a death-match with itself over how to conduct black captivity, not over whether or not it should continue. Indeed, the war revealed that the structure of humanity is capacious enough to encompass a conflict among its slaveholding class to the tune of over six hundred thousand of its sons dead. The ensuing change in the legal standing of black people, however, did not alter the structural position of blackness, for, while North-South was a social conflict, white-black is a structural antagonism.

Since the Civil War was never meant to fundamentally change the status of, in Anthony Farley's words, “white-over-black,” even as the slaves were eventually manumitted, white people essentially slaughtered over half a million of their brothers for the right to control the manner of black social death.Footnote ¹⁴ Under the conditions of social death, whether in the ship's hold, on the plantation, or after emancipation, there is no reciprocal relation between black and nonblack, as blacks are positioned as “the things against which all other subjects take their bearing.”Footnote ¹⁵ Since gratuitous violence turns the black body into a fungible object and destroys the possibility of relation, the only way that black people can appear to participate in the world alongside human beings is by way of a “structural adjustment” wherein blacks are permitted to act as if they possess ontological capacity—for example, as workers—in exchange for remaining within the agreed upon limits of knowledge and ethics.Footnote ¹⁶

This analysis of the structure of humanity opens up the paradoxical reality that the paradigm of slavery, as distinct from its historically transient institutions, could exist without any individual being legally enslaved, and moreover, that slavery could reproduce itself through the very mechanisms ostensibly geared toward its eradication.Footnote ¹⁷ As Guyora Binder observes, abolition could not excise slavery without scraping every nook and cranny of slaveholding society—“in this sense, abolition of the custom of slavery threatened the legitimacy of custom itself.”Footnote ¹⁸ As set forth here, this analysis of slavery's structuring of human relations suggests that black people, construed as beasts of burden regardless of whether they are enslaved or manumitted, may work but can never inhabit the category of “labor” reserved for those people construed as “human.” We would not say that oxen “labor” in the fields, after all. Likewise, antiblackness troubles the proposal that emancipated slaves can ever be “settlers” or “colonists” anywhere in the time of slaveholding.

In this sense, Liberia is a template for excavating the antagonism holding together the world that slaveholding has constructed. Liberian “settlers” included both slaves and “freepersons” alike, exposing emancipation as shackled to humanity's foundational antagonism. Moreover, Liberia encompasses native Africans within this antagonism; all three parties endured slavery's conversion in Liberia. Within the scope of humanity as structured by racial slavery, then, black existence in the modern world is properly understood in terms of different states of marronage. It is not that the American Colonization Society's (ACS) founding of Liberia was a white supremacist scam or that blacks correctly adduced that there would be no equality in America and chose the lesser of two evils—rather, it is both at once: These are the coerced “options” that antiblackness brooks, and that is as good as it gets in the world that slavery made. It is to this structure that the following analysis of settler colonialism and Liberia is accountable.

The “Black Settler” and the “Black Native”

Throughout this essay, I use “settler” and “native” under the same terms of erasure as “freedom” and “choice.” Yes, black emigres to Liberia were “settlers” in the empirical or sociological sense; and yes, Liberia as a nation-state was founded through the geo-political occupation of indigenous African lands and societies. The structural context in which colonization unfolded, however, strikes at the insignificance of this level of analysis. As one discrete manifestation of slavery's conversion between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the question of Liberia looms: can black people ever be settlers, positionally? Does not settlement connote institutionality and structural power, capacities that black people, enslaved or “free,” are by definition precluded from possessing? If we are to make inroads on the travesties that settler colonialism has wrought, not to mention enslavement and genocide, is sociological description a necessary but insufficient step toward recognizing what blocks the way ahead? More to the point, perhaps, once the slave trade has indelibly transformed African society into the one place on the planet where people of any race (including black) can go to find the one kind of person known the world over to be eligible for enslavement, can a black person ever, truly, be “native” to Africa again? What would they be “native” to, exactly—the before or the after? The basis of the slave trade was that it jettisoned belonging, demolished origins, and foreclosed the honor of standing or return: What would it mean to be “native” to such a void?Footnote ²⁰ Again, these questions are loaded to the problem of structural positionality; they are not meant to discount or diminish the level of lived experience, but merely to challenge how we think about it. I am not suggesting that the many diverse African cultures and peoples have disappeared, or that the slave trade and subsequent colonial and neo-colonial eras have rendered African indigeneity meaningless phenomenologically, experientially, or sociologically. Rather, I seek to pause analytically on slavery's ramifications in the ontological structure of humanity.

I have found settler colonial studies and indigenous studies to be insufficient for grappling with the world of antiblackness that slavery has created. A pointed gloss of the increasing literature that proposes to think settler colonialism and antiblackness together reveals two tendencies at this point. First, a small number of scholars appropriate the recent black studies scholarship on antiblackness and slavery's afterlife towards promulgating a settler colonial studies framework, which the black studies concepts were originally meant to disturb. Iyko Day's essay “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique” illustrates this approach.Footnote ²¹ Day argues that racial slavery (enslaved labor) and settler colonialism (expropriation of indigenous land) constitute a dialectical relation, not a causal or historical one in which the former created the conditions for the latter. Day demonstrates a rhetorical tactic recurrent in how some scholars are addressing the recent interventions from black studies: “To be clear, my intentions in this article are not to engage in an evaluation of who the greater victim is—even if this kind of evaluation is precisely the objective of the scholarship under discussion.”Footnote ²² Much like how systemic critiques of power are dismissed as “conspiracy theories,” Day's sentiment functions to silence black studies’ analyses critical of the treatment of slavery and antiblackness in settler colonial studies and indigenous studies. Day affirms this censure in her conclusion: “By way of conclusion, I want to question the impetus for an Afro-pessimist or any other attempt to dismantle the validity of settler colonial critique by recourse to the issue of Native sovereignty…[Leading frameworks] have tended to relegate Indigeneity rather than blackness to the ‘position of the unthought.’”Footnote ²³ In other words, Day ends up doing precisely what she said she was not going to do—evaluate who is the greater victim—with the evident intention of quarantining the black studies intervention at hand by incorporating its terms into her settler colonial critique.

Secondly, there is an attempt to balance the analytics of slavery and settler colonialism. For Tiffany Lethabo King, to take one illustrative example of this approach, this balancing act means considering “what it would look like for Black Studies to take up issues of settler colonialism,” and in so doing, King labors to elucidate how critical approaches to conquest and indigenous genocide have long been features of the examination of slavery in black studies, rather than working to subject both indigenous and settler colonial studies to the distended analysis that antiblackness compels.Footnote ²⁴ Day and King's respective approaches to thinking antiblackness and settler colonialism together may be generative at a sociological level, but the potential for productive engagement is constrained by the reality that paradigms do not bend well. To the extent that paradigms, and the deeply drawn political desires they reflect, are hard to reconcile with each other, then either one paradigm must historically prevail over the other (Day), or the sincere effort to balance both cannot go beyond a merely descriptive capaciousness (King). In other words, the antagonism of the world forces a confrontation between two ways of explaining power that are fundamentally at odds with each other—one cannot have it both ways, slavery took that possibility off the table long ago.

Settler colonial and indigenous studies’ impoverished grasp of slavery is evident in the work of some of its leading figures. Their work denotes aphasia with respect to black positionality, rendering key concepts in these fields of study problematic. Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd characterizes African slaves as “arrivants,” a term she appropriates from Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite at the expense of his meditation on the violence and terror of the Middle Passage.Footnote ²⁵ In The Arrivants, Brathwaite defines New World blackness in relation to an irredeemable loss:

Byrd empties “arrivants” of the historical and ontological specificity underwriting Brathwaite's work in order to construct a native/non-native binary that repositions manumitted slaves alongside the many different kinds of people who currently benefit from and enact the power structure known as slavery—as in, “through the continued settling and colonizing of indigenous peoples’ lands, histories, identities, and very lives that implicate all arrivants and settlers regardless of their own experiences of race, class, gender, colonial, and imperial oppressions.”Footnote ²⁷

In his book Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Patrick Wolfe, doyen of settler colonial studies, insists that slavery is primarily a coerced labor regime that develops through colonialism, not as its precondition. Wolfe also relies heavily on white historiography and social science for understanding slavery and black struggle, leading to grim historical errors, such as the fallacious assertion that there has been no significant black marronage in North America relative to the rest of the hemisphere, and that the trade in African slaves was not fully established until the mid-to-late seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁸ Contra Wolfe and the settler colonial studies framework, my argument that the West African settlement of Liberia is not a colony, but merely a mundane moment of marronage in the slaveholding regime's enterprise to convert slavery from a discrete institution into the structure that no longer requires its name, rests on labor's important but inessential place in slaveholding culture (a matter to which I will turn shortly) and on the reality that racial slavery paved the way for colonization.

In order to recognize the slave trade as the precondition for imperial expansion, we must consider that the practice by which blackness became synonymous with the commodified flesh of the slave begins at least as far back as the eighth century under Arab slave traders in the Indian Ocean.Footnote ²⁹ The subsequent African slave trade in the Mediterranean region by both Arab and European traders, and down the West coast of Africa prior to the opening of the transatlantic trade routes, was instrumental both in producing the wealth that would later make possible the European “voyages of discovery” to the so-called New World, beginning in the fifteenth century, and in congealing antiblackness as the basis for the emergent modern world's culture of politics. The sixteenth-century debates on the moral and theological legitimacy of enslaving indigenous Americans was premised on, and ended up reinforcing, the assumption that only Africans were quintessentially eligible for human commodification.Footnote ³⁰ Despite his canonization amongst the ethnic studies and American studies cohort that comprise much of the settler colonial studies field, many readers of Cedric Robinson overlook his discussion of the Italian merchants driving the Mediterranean trade in black slaves. Thanks to this slave trade, the Genoese were in a position to loan erstwhile nation-states like Spain the capital to “discover” the New World. It is worth observing, finally, that both capitalism and the nation-state itself were barely nascent at this historical juncture, and as such, it is the case that both were produced through the antiblack violence of the slave trade.Footnote ³¹ The New World's identification of blackness with the slave was then never destabilized, despite the presence of both free blacks and various nonblacks held in bondage for periods of time here and there.

In my analysis, identifying African Americans in Liberia as “settlers” would be akin to calling their own ancestors in North America “arrivants,” “immigrants,” or “conscripted laborers,” rather than enslaved Africans. The Middle Passage was a very specific sort of “arriving.” Is the return shipment of cargo from North Carolina to Liberia any less violent absent the blood in the water? The discussion of Liberia's conversion of enslavement is meant to show that there are merely slaves encountering slaves-in-waiting on Africa's west coast, including those who chose to become slave traders in order to forestall their own enslavement.Footnote ³²

Rethinking “Black Labor”

Does a slave, the definitive person-displaced, displace the indigenous? A related question concerns the status of black labor: Does a black person who survives the plantation emerge imbued with the attributes of a human, such as the subject of labor? There is a vast critical Black Studies literature exploring at length the inadequacies of “labor” as a category of analysis for explaining black existence, the fallacy of organizing black liberation around a putatively working-class identity, and the practical and theoretical limitations of Marxism, which is all the more notable as it is informed by black people's longstanding participation in a wide variety of workers’ unions and political organizations.Footnote ³⁴ My aim in understanding the place of labor in slavery's conversion is informed by this archive.

Understanding slavery primarily as forced labor misrecognizes the comprehensive dehumanization that defined enslavement, but it also sets up the assumption that the history of legal and social emancipation is more rupture from than continuity with the chattel condition, on account of the idea that black people were able to regain their standing in the human family through the work they performed. In order for this to be true, the perimeters of the plantation would have to mark the boundaries of antiblackness, and moreover, the plantation would have to be a value-producing space, wherein human objects create value and bank it towards a future when the political economy adjusts itself to their human potential and the plantation is replaced by a global marketplace wherein ex-slaves are now esteemed on precisely one of the very terms (human labor power) for which they were previously dehumanized (beasts of burden). Emancipation has not worked out this way. Indeed, abolition and independence have shown that the plantation was merely one institutionalization of the black hole in the world's symbolic schema, a symptom of the essential anti-value of blackness underwriting modernity writ large—no plantations necessary. Labor is a category of human agency and the slave is a human surrogate. The more blacks labor, the more whites become human—that is the parasitic relation of the surrogate to the human, and in the independence era, it also characterizes the parasitism between the post-colonial black nation-state and the neo-imperialist one in North America or Europe. The more blacks labor, the more the white man is recognized for his industriousness and productivity; the more impoverished and dependent the post-colony becomes, the more the empire claims its status as civilized and magnanimous.Footnote ³⁵ Underdevelopment continues because the relations of dominance built by slavery continue.Footnote ³⁶ There is no amount, or quality, of labor power that can overcome a condition of categorical degradation because that dehumanized position is the result of purely gratuitous violence. The point that I seek to sharpen here is that you never leave the plantation; there is only marronage everywhere. Shona Jackson's study of “creole indigeneity” in Guyana illustrates the problems that arise with an inadequate conception of slavery's onto-epistemic regime of violence. According to Jackson,

On the contrary, the gratuitous violence of the slave trade was the condition of possibility for the modern state form—in other words, black non-humanity created the state, not the other way around. Jackson explains how modern black neo-colonial governments continue to define indigenous people as the state's antithetical element within, and if we understand this dynamic as a feature of the custom of slavery, then what is still being sought after is black humanity—only now it is being prosecuted through the oppression of indigenous peoples. In the end, black people can no sooner persecute their way to human standing than they can labor their way into humanity. As Walter Rodney observes about his native Guyana, the competition between Africans and Indians there is a deliberate construct of the capitalist order, and “this competition could only be resolved by breaking with that type of production which required that there should always be a large surplus of unemployed.”Footnote ³⁸ Without eradicating this type of production, in the least, black labor power can only be an expression of slavery's persistent institutionality.

Labor is, ultimately, an arbitrary category of analysis for black and indigenous standing in the modern world. To borrow from Robinson, since the movement for black liberation long preceded Marxism, it is likely that Marx and Engels themselves were informed by such events, albeit poorly or in a fundamentally mistaken way. It thus becomes necessary, Robinson argues, to approach the categories of thought propounded by Marxism independent of its suppositions and within the penumbra of black struggle.Footnote ³⁹ Robinson explains that Marxism was the product of bourgeois intellectuals projecting “the social forces of their own experiences back into their constructions of previous social orders.”Footnote ⁴⁰ First, the emphasis on class as the social agency par excellence was an expression of the conceits of bourgeois historical consciousness.Footnote ⁴¹ Second, Marx's schematic periodization focused only on one segment of the working classes, a political myopia that ignored the revolutionary praxis of slaves and the indigenous.Footnote ⁴² Third, despite realizing that capitalism was always transnational, Marx and Engels formulated their theory of national culture in line more with the cultural significations of their time than with empirical reality.Footnote ⁴³ In short, Robinson's study shows that relying on Marxist theory of historical change will inevitably mobilize some of the key ordering terms of the society that needs dismantling.

In order to avoid such pitfalls, my approach to the case of Liberia tacks a different course through labor's entanglement with slavery. Thinking structurally about the question of labor during slavery's conversion, brings to the fore other ways of considering black struggle, whereby Liberia's formation defines a site of marronage within the global regime of slaveholding. Although the Marxist construct of “class” was not applicable to the social relations in Africa across the many centuries during which enslavement transformed the human cultural geography of the continent prior to colonial occupation, the contradictions between African elites and the masses were instrumental in the former's procurement of slaves to trade for European commodities.Footnote ⁴⁴ The slave trade, which continued on the African continent for decades after the transatlantic commerce in slaves had been abolished, and which produced more slaves in the nineteenth century in Africa than in the Americas, was the original zero-sum cultural and political economy wherein “one could gain only at the expense of one's neighbors,” and even commoners were compelled to defensively pillage each other to prevent themselves from being sold into slavery.Footnote ⁴⁵ The coastal regions, including the area that became Liberia, were beset most severely by the toxic social upheaval of the slave trade, in large part because some of the Africans captured for the purpose of sale to the slave traders remained in the service of their African captors for greater or lesser periods, and sometimes forever.Footnote ⁴⁶ A brand-new forced labor regime, thus, arose in the coastal regions, based on the social conflicts internal to African society that drove the procurement of slaves, sowing the seeds for social stratification into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The instructive category of analysis, however, is not labor power but rather antiblack violence.

Marronage, Here and There

Although it must be said that blacks have envisioned freedom through a return to Africa, as lore has it, since the first Africans arrived on the shores of the New World, saw what lay in store for them, and promptly flew back home across the ocean, the debate continues as to how to accomplish such a feat.Footnote ⁴⁸ For black leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African emigration was a hotly contested proposition, with a significant movement by some to advance “an independent emancipatory colonizationist agenda” apart from the machinations of the ACS, the institution that actively advanced the relocation of New World Africans to the Liberia colony beginning in 1816.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nineteenth-century abolitionist David Walker, for one, was vehemently opposed to the ACS's plans for relocating blacks to Liberia. He saw it as a cover for extending, not undoing, black subjection. Walker arrived in Boston from the Carolinas, where he likely was involved in the Denmark Vesey-led slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Walker, there was little point distinguishing between the North and the South, let alone North America or Africa, arguing that “freedom” anywhere, be it Massachusetts or Liberia, meant little in the midst of a culture of slaveholding. While the reader will readily recognize the repetition of this theme throughout black history, most people fail to perceive it as the mark of marronage.Footnote ⁵¹

When emigration is understood as marronage, it makes sense that black insurrectionists featured prominently on both sides of the ACS debate in the late nineteenth century. Walker's contemporary, Martin R. Delaney, for instance, felt that emigration was the necessary alternative to an untenable life for black people in North America. Delaney's support for emigration comes with an extraordinary transcript of agitation against slaveholding culture. Prior to the Civil War, he served as co-editor with Frederick Douglass (who did not support African emigration) of the abolitionist newspaper North Star, facilitated John Brown's preparations for the Harper's Ferry raid in 1859, and led an exploratory party of New World Africans to the Niger River region of West Africa. In addition to these activities, Delaney's 1852 pamphlet The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered; his novel about slave rebellion, Blake, written as a riposte to Harriett Beecher Stowe's pathological depiction of black docility in Uncle Tom's Cabin; and his later service in the Civil War and in the postwar Freedman's Bureau left record of a nascent black nationalism, of the intransigence of antiblackness, and of the need for black self-determination—all told, a decidedly sober early analysis of the forces arrayed against black life in the modern era. Above all else, however, it is the ceaseless itinerary of the maroon.

We can discern emigration as marronage when black “freepersons” in North America sought freedom from “freedom,” but instead found Africa. For black emigration to Africa to be marronage, moreover, is to say that Africa is not African; or more to the point, because of the slave trade, Africa stopped being for black people. This is why when the newly founded Republic of Haiti sought to recruit North American black immigrants during the 1820s, it was rejected by US authorities.Footnote ⁵² Although Haiti's emigration agents found numerous interested black “freepersons,” and a couple hundred African Americans did settle there, the circulation of fugitive blacks, enslaved and free, around the Caribbean region had already been a well-known factor in the lead-up to the successful Haitian revolt and the ACS was fearful of facilitating these connections.Footnote ⁵³ Contrary to the situation it was cultivating in West Africa, the ACS did not like the idea of black relocation to an independent and sovereign black nation, just offshore from American plantations, where slaveholding society would not easily control black life. The fact that President Lincoln was a prominent supporter of colonization prior to and after emancipation neither counters nor complicates this assessment of the threat that slaveholding society perceived in the form of the independent black state of Haiti.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Joan Dayan explains, slavery sets up two kinds of narratives: those that would create the servile body, and those that would promise salvation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Colonization shows how both narratives are in fact the same story—although in terms of salvation, perhaps Lincoln appreciated more than most the existential question thrown down by the Haitian revolutionaries: “retreat stolidly from slavery or risk losing everything—including one's life, as in Hispaniola.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Likewise, almost a century later, when Marcus Garvey attempted to connect his United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) movement with Liberia, he too was blocked. By this time, a colonization agenda as typified by the ACS had waned and Pan-Africanism had become a cogent ideology and was enjoying a rich political life on both sides of the Atlantic, north and south; in this context, Garvey's plans were threatening to the Western powers in which the Liberia project was now ensconced. The secret surveillance agencies of Britain, France, and the United States had been monitoring Garvey's activities for some time, working to thwart the spread of Pan-Africanism in the colonies. The president of Liberia eventually succumbed to pressure to reverse his prior decision permitting Garvey to make Liberia the African headquarters of the UNIA-ACL.Footnote ⁵⁷

Marronage is not a place and it is not a static condition; rather, it indexes the horror of the surrounding society, and as such, every moment of escape is measured by the defining terror. Slavery persists; or, the culture of antiblackness that is the hallmark of slaveholding persists in structuring the world long after emancipation. It is not difficult to trace the chaos of modern-day Liberia back to the ACS and to the slave trade as the essential fount of terror for the present-day nation-state. As Jeremy Levitt explains, the appearance of the American settler community was not a new development for the region, but simply the latest in a succession of migrations into the area.Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, the upheaval the ACS fomented with the establishment of Liberia was a continuation of the political deconstruction of African society at work for almost four centuries by that point. This fact impacts our conception of “indigenous” and should inform how we understand the kind of power manifesting across the centuries in the form of present-day black nation-states. The indigenous Africans present prior to the arrival of the “Americos” (as the Liberian “settlers” were called initially) were not entirely “traditional” in the sense that indigeneity or “native” usually implies.Footnote ⁵⁹ They were native to the continent, but for nearly fifteen generations they had been consumers of a foreign culture destructive of pre-existing practices and patterns of thought.Footnote ⁶⁰

African metaphysics began transmuting prior to the Atlantic slave trade due to the incursion of Islam and then the impact of the foreign societies throughout the Mediterranean region, Arabia, Persia, Mesopotamia, India, and even the Chinese Empire that used enslaved Africans. The manner of this transmutation is noteworthy for the questions I am raising here regarding “native” and “traditional.” Although various forms of bondage and service have long been practiced throughout Africa, there is no record of captives being permanently cast out of social relations and deprived of human belonging and what the Western tradition would come to call “liberty.”Footnote ⁶¹ The spread of Islam within Africa, however, led to cultural changes that contributed to Africa's vulnerability to the increased demand for black slaves. Cheikh Anta Diop notes that while Islam mostly propagated “peacefully” from white Berber traders to certain black kings and notables, the introduction of Muslim culture brought a renunciation of the traditional African past.Footnote ⁶² Non-African religion, thus, prepared the ground culturally for the slave trade and its accompanying religiously motivated conflicts.Footnote ⁶³ By the nineteenth century, as the slave trade slowly gave way to formal colonialism, African societies had been traumatically turned inside out across almost seventeen centuries.

The point I aim to underscore here is how cultural strength and knowledge can mitigate against external encroachments, but when these traditions are weakened, let alone transmuted in sympathy with the external forces themselves (Arab slave traders, in this case), then violence more easily finds its way in until a people do not need to be held at gunpoint—they hold the weapon themselves. By the time the ACS established Liberia, Africans had overhauled the social basis of their societies, in a deadly march from which black people have yet to recover. As Ayi Kwei Armah writes, “the time will come when those multitudes starting out on the road of death must meet predecessors returning scalded from the white taste of death.”Footnote ⁶⁴ It was inevitable and by design that Liberian “settlers” seeking marronage from “freedom” in North America—their “white taste of death”—would profoundly misrecognize their African counterparts. A former Virginia slave, Peyton Skipwith, wrote his former master after his arrival in Africa: “It is something strange to think these people of Africa are called our ancestors. In my present thinking if we have any ancestors they could not have been like these hostile tribes … for you may try and distill that principle and belief in them and do all you can for them and they still will be your enemy.”Footnote ⁶⁵ “Doing all you can for them” included acquiring their land, cutting their forests, killing their game, imposing Christianity, and interfering with the slave trade that was by then enmeshed with virtually all African economic activity.

The “natives,” in turn, saw the “settlers” in terms of access to Western commodities: They conducted small nocturnal raids on storehouses and fought to continue their slave trading. Indeed, the “settlers” found that bartering with the “natives” was a far more expeditious way of making a living than farming: Their correspondence to their former slave masters is replete with requests for commodities with which to trade. “Settlers” were thus not newly inserted within capitalism's commodification of African life as “free labor” in a colonial setting. Rather, in the persons of the “natives” with whom they bartered, they confronted both the effects of their own longstanding objectification as black people and their ongoing subjection to social relations from which they remained structurally excised but were nonetheless forced to interface with economically. This state of affairs is precisely what is meant by enslavement's “natal alienation” of the slave from all manner of social ties: severed from both ascending and descending generations, positioned within a matrix of human objectification, the slave is forever a “genealogical isolate” in the world of slaveholding.Footnote ⁶⁶ The “native” and the “settler” cannot recognize each other as they are, let alone understand that they are products of the same gratuitous violence; instead, they perceive each other through the antiblack world's antagonistic relationship to black people, as problems to attack, rather than as people produced through a shared problem. The antagonism places black people outside of human relations; but since “native” and “settler” are human positions, when black people claim them as their own (as in the case of at least some of the black emigrants to Liberia, like Skipwith noted above), they do so in bad faith, which inevitably leads them to also misrecognize other black people.

The violence between “settlers” and “natives” embodies slavery's conversion—and in this sense, Liberia was the advanced state of enslavement in that it redrew the frontier of the antiblack world. Slave masters in North America created “schools of freedom” wherein they anointed a select number of slaves to be emancipated to Africa; but first, they put them through a training program where they had to prove their fitness for independence. Some of these “freedom schools” lasted years, and most slaves remained enslaved and never “graduated.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The slaveholding class was training their “elite” slaves in the arts of self-subsistence, intolerance, and hierarchy—lessons, of course, they had endured in spades throughout their lives on the plantations. In this sense, for many of these ex-slaves, emancipation amounted to an education in slavery's conversion, a pedagogy for antiblack liberty. Bonded to their former masters whom they regarded as their “fathers,” the “settlers” expertly performed the basic mythology of colonization: Christian mission to bring light to the darkness; mighty struggles against heathen savages; perseverance borne of industriousness and morality to overcome great hardship; indebtedness to the father who receives letters penned with endearments that recount how his “children” engaged in their own colonial struggle for survival at civilization's threshold on the dark continent; and so on.Footnote ⁶⁸ Black “settlers” on the newly redrawn antiblack frontier performing an institutional authority they could never embody, but only borrow, on loan from the slaveholding class—and they wielded this borrowed institutionality against the very people from whom, and by whom, they were once and forever stolen.Footnote ⁶⁹

Emancipating their slaves to Liberia satisfied many slaveholders’ concerns with how to discipline black labor and preserve the social hierarchy. Ex-slaves in North America threatened the status quo by moving about, refusing to enter contracts with former slaveholders, subsisting outside wage labor relations as long as their wants diverged from the demands of commodity production, and generally sought seams of marronage beyond white terror and control. The ad hoc “schools of freedom” created by owners on their plantations were but one example among many from the period in which the slaveholding class sought to levy a discourse of discipline and consent on ex-slaves, mostly by “fashioning obligation” and constructing “the burdened individuality of the responsible and encumbered freedperson.”Footnote ⁷⁰ As Saidiya Hartman explains, “debt was at the center of a moral economy of submission and servitude” and contributed to the production of peonage.Footnote ⁷¹

The “settler,” likewise, arrived in Liberia bound to a past fashioned by slavery's conversion, and in turn, sought to recapitulate black servitude in the “native.” The duties and obligations of “freedom” were strong themes in Liberian “settler” discourse as well. “Settlers” referred to the African captives that they liberated from slave traders as “recaptives,” signifying a proprietary burden for overseeing the passage towards freedom at some later date. The “recaptives,” however, expected liberty to accompany the removal of their shackles in short order: in a letter dated February 11, 1833, “settler” James C. Minor observed to his former master John Minor that the “recaptives” proved to be “somewhat presumptuous at times.”Footnote ⁷² Minor seemed to chafe at the lack of gratitude exhibited by those Africans who narrowly escaped the Middle Passage, but who found themselves captives of those whose immediate ancestors had not eluded its grasp. In another letter, Minor described efforts by the Brazilian government to secure in Liberia “a tract of land to colonize the worn out and unruly Brazilian slaves—a people that we do not want among us at all.”Footnote ⁷³ “Settler” sentiments such as these must be read in the context of manumission into another state of unfreedom—a relation of force, not of consent or duty.

The case of the Captain Isaac Ross estate of Jefferson County, Mississippi, underscores the violence of manumission under the auspices of the ACS. Ross died in 1837 and his will provided that his slaves be given the choice of being “freed” and sent to Liberia or being sold along with the remainder of his estate. Ross's heirs contested the will on the grounds that slaves could not make choices. The ACS brought suit to force compliance with the will; a protracted legal battle ensued; and ten years after Ross’ death, the ACS prevailed in court and the Ross plantation slaves were manumitted to Liberia in 1848.Footnote ⁷⁴ The ACS's victory in this case contrasts sharply with the outcome of Bailey v. Poindexter's Executor, an almost identical case where John Lewis Poindexter's will stipulated that, upon his death, his slaves should have “their choice of being emancipated or sold publicly.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Poindexter actually died in 1835, two years before Ross, but the Poindexter case wound its way through the courts for twenty years before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals found that slaves have no legal capacity to choose to be free and ordered the Poindexter slaves to become the property of his heirs. The only difference between the two cases is that the latter did not feature manumission to Liberia. It seems likely that the impact of the ACS as the overseer of the Ross slaves’ conversion to Liberian “settlers” was a factor in the earlier case.