Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Preface | The William and Mary Quarterly, 58.1 | The History Cooperative

Preface

THE specter of the enslavement of black human beings from the African continent on a scale unprecedented in savagery and brutality in human history has haunted African-American discourse for the past two centuries. Anxiety, angst, anger, bitterness, remorse, regret, sadness, and, if truth be told, embarrassment, complicity, shame, the urge to forget, as well as pride in the urge to remember and glorify these are only a few of the broad range of emotions that African Americans have expressed in their-writings about our slave past, about the complex heritage of a system of slavery that constituted for people of African descent what T. S. Eliot called the disassociation of sensibility, a term he coined to describe the internecine aspect of the World War I experience for the Western world, the experience that severed whatever continuity ostensibly obtained between classical Greco-Roman culture and modern Europe. That is what slavery was for us.

Especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans felt a deep-seated anger at the role of Europeans and Americans in the slave trade, yet their anger was often coupled with a deep sense of ambivalence and ambiguity. Their discomfort may be attributed partly to incomplete information about the immense scale of devastation on the lives and cultures both of Africans taken to the New World as well as of those Africans left behind in the Old World. Europeans and Americans had long failed to acknowledge the extent of the trade. In addition, bitterness at the role of black Africans in the trade ran deep. No one put this sentiment more bluntly than the great Frederick Douglass, who surprisingly railed against the savage chiefs of the western coast of Africa who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them. Much later, Richard Wright in his book about Ghana, Black Power, published in 1954, severely criticized the Ashanti kingdom for its role in the slave trade.

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