Pinpointing Responsibility, Power, and Narrative in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Contemporary Reparations Debate (II)

In part I, we discussed the United Nations General Assembly’s formal declaration, led by Ghana, that the transatlantic slave trade was a “crime against humanity,” reigniting global conversations about reparations, historical accountability, and the enduring legacy of slavery. We noted that while the resolution reflects a broad scholarly consensus—echoed by thinkers like Walter Rodney and Eric Williams—that European industrial growth was deeply tied to the exploitation of enslaved Africans, it has also exposed tensions within African and diaspora discourse. Critics such as Manasseh Azure Awuni argue that African intermediaries played roles in the trade and that this complicates claims to reparations, while other scholars emphasize that such participation occurred within a global system designed, financed, and enforced by European powers.

As institutions like UNESCO have stressed, the slave trade was not a decentralized African enterprise but a coordinated system driven by external demand, coercion, and military dominance. This ongoing debate sets the stage for a deeper examination of one of the most persistent and misleading narratives of all—that Africans were equally responsible and culpable for their own enslavement—and invites a closer look at the forces of power, violence, and historical distortion that shaped the transatlantic slave trade.

Of Europeans generally did not venture into the African interior to capture people

The claim often advanced in popular discourse—that Europeans could not penetrate the African hinterlands (dismissively labeled “jungles”) because of high mortality rates from tropical diseases (malaria, yellow fever) and stiff resistance from local African populations and therefore must have relied entirely on Africans to capture and sell enslaved people—rests on an oversimplified reading of history.

While it is true that early European traders were initially concentrated along coastal forts and trading posts, this does not mean that European actors were absent from inland violence or incapable of projecting power beyond the coast. And even the presence of stiff resistance means that not all kings and chiefs participated in or facilitated the capture of Africans for enslavement.

Granted, disease environments and resistance did shape early interactions. Yet, the historical record—especially by the nineteenth century—demonstrates that European powers repeatedly organized and executed military campaigns deep into African territories. These incursions were not limited to trade along the coast but extended into political, military, and symbolic domination of inland states.

A clear example of the earliest and most important cases is the Portuguese involvement in the Kingdom of Kongo and neighboring regions in the late 15th and 16th centuries. After initial diplomatic contact with Nzinga a Nkuwu (João I of Kongo), the Portuguese developed both missionary and military alliances. Over time, this relationship deepened into armed intervention. Portuguese forces participated directly in inland conflicts, culminating in the Battle of Mbwila. In this battle, Portuguese troops fought deep within Kongo territory against the forces of António I of Kongo. The king was killed, and the political structure of Kongo was severely destabilized. This demonstrates that Europeans were not merely coastal traders but could and did engage in decisive inland warfare when conditions allowed.

Another example comes from Portuguese expansion in West Central Africa, particularly in Angola. Beginning in the late 16th century, Portuguese settlers and soldiers moved inland from Luanda, establishing fortified positions and conducting campaigns against African polities such as the Kingdom of Ndongo. These conflicts brought them into direct confrontation with Nzinga, one of the most formidable African leaders of the period. The Portuguese waged repeated ռազմական (in Armenian, rrazmaka meaning military) campaigns into the interior, attempting to control trade routes and secure captives for the Atlantic slave trade. These were not passive commercial interactions—they involved raiding, sieges, and shifting fronts deep inland.

There were also earlier coastal-to-interior incursions in Senegambia and along the Upper Guinea coast. Portuguese expeditions in the 15th and 16th centuries occasionally launched raids and military ventures inland, though these were often limited in scale and sometimes ended in failure due to strong resistance and unfamiliar terrain. Even so, they illustrate a pattern: Europeans did inland penetration consistently.

In more recent centuries during colonialism, the War of the Golden Stool in the Ashanti Empire (in present-day Ghana) bears testament. British forces marched inland to Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, and engaged in sustained warfare after Governor Frederick Hodgson demanded control of the sacred Golden Stool, a central symbol of Ashanti sovereignty. He said: “Where is the Gold Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment? I am the representative of the paramount power; why have you relegated me to this chair?” –

The resulting conflict, led on the African side by Yaa Asantewaa, involved a prolonged siege of British positions and large-scale mobilization of troops. British forces deployed Maxim guns (the first fully automatic, recoil-operated machine gun, capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute), underscoring that this was not a peripheral or coastal encounter but a direct inland military confrontation.

As noted in scholarship by B Wasserman from Cambridge University Press, “the possession of the Stool gives supremacy,” highlighting that British objectives extended beyond commerce to political control. Anthropologist Edwin W. Smith later criticized Hodgson’s demands as “a singularly foolish speech,” reflecting both the depth of British intervention and their misunderstanding of African political institutions.

An equally striking case is the Benin Expedition of 1897, during which British forces undertook a full-scale invasion of the Kingdom of Benin. A force of approximately 1,200 troops advanced inland, captured Benin City, and carried out widespread destruction, including the burning of the city and the exile of the Oba, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi. Scholars have described this campaign in stark terms. A study in The Journal of African History characterizes it as a “manifestly disproportionate punitive expedition,” while historian Dan Hicks argues that the violence “foreshadow[ed] the ferocity of the twentieth-century world wars.”

Contemporary accounts from the expedition itself describe scenes of devastation, reinforcing the extent to which Europeans were not merely trading partners but active military aggressors within the African interior.

It is also important to recognize that labeling African landscapes as impenetrable “jungles” reflects a long history of racialized language used to justify European actions. Such terminology obscures the reality that African societies were highly organized and interconnected, with established trade routes, political systems, and centers of power. The idea that Europeans were somehow helpless without African participation ignores both the agency of African resistance and the adaptability of European imperial strategies

The broader historical record clearly reveals that European expansion was consistently accompanied by violence, even when mediated through local actors. As Walter Rodney argued, “force was the ultimate determinant of the relationship between Europe and Africa,” underscoring that economic exchange in the slave trade was inseparable from coercive power. Firearms, naval dominance, and organized state backing gave European traders decisive advantages, enabling them to influence internal conflicts and, in some cases, provoke them to sustain the capture of slaves.

Taken together, these cases demonstrate that Europeans were fully capable of—and actively engaged in—deep inland penetration, warfare, and political intervention. They organized large expeditions, deployed advanced weaponry, and directly confronted African states on their own territory.

Examples around the globe

Moreover, the notion that Europeans were incapable of penetrating inland regions is contradicted by broader patterns of imperial expansion across the globe. In the Americas, European settlers and colonial powers did not remain confined to coastal enclaves. They moved inland through a combination of warfare, forced alliances, forced displacement, and disease, fundamentally reshaping entire continents. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, writes that U.S. expansion was “a process of invasion, displacement, and genocide,” demonstrating that European-descended powers were fully capable of sustained inland campaigns when it served their interests.

The comparison to the dispossession of Native Americans is indeed instructive. In North America, European settlers and later the United States government did not rely solely on Indigenous groups to displace one another; they conducted direct military campaigns, enforced treaties under duress, and carried out policies of removal and extermination. As the National Museum of the American Indian notes, colonization involved “systematic efforts to dispossess Native peoples of their lands and resources.” This pattern of expansion—combining direct violence with the manipulation of local divisions—mirrors broader imperial strategies used in Africa and elsewhere.

In sum, the argument that Europeans could not access the African interior and therefore bore limited responsibility for the capture of enslaved people does not withstand historical scrutiny. Rather, it reflects a selective narrative that minimizes European agency while exaggerating African responsibility. Understanding this dynamic requires moving beyond simplistic explanations and recognizing the interplay of strategy, coercion, and global power that defined one of history’s most devastating systems.

What happens when history moves beyond stolen labor and confronts stolen bodies? Inside institutions like the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, the legacy of slavery and colonialism takes on a chilling new dimension—where human remains, taken in contexts of violence and “scientific racism,” expose a system that reduced African lives to objects of study.

As thinkers like Achille Mbembe describe it, this was the “objectification of the African body,” a process rooted in power, not knowledge. But this is only part of the story. The third part in the series dives deeper into how European states didn’t just participate in slavery—they engineered it, embedding human exploitation into law, finance, and empire. From the Code Noir to the rise of global banking systems, slavery was not incidental—it was infrastructure. And as institutions like UNESCO now affirm, confronting this past is not just about memory—It’s about justice, accountability, and the unfinished fight to restore dignity to those that history tried to erase.

Jules Nartey-Tokoli

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