Africans sold their own people in to slavery.
This is not a reasonable way to think of this. Sub-Saharan Africa was a diverse region and there wasn't a unified political identity. There were many independent tribes and nations and they were often in conflict with each other. Prisoners taken in war could be sold off to slave traders and the seller would benefit from weakening a rival tribe and making some profit from their war. I have never seen any evidence that those Africans who captured and sold other Africans from rival tribes would have considered those people to be "their own people", he would not have self identified primarily, or even secondarily as an "African", and so it would be inappropriate for us to assume that he would have or should have.
However, the economist in me wants to caution about giving too much credit to the supply side of transactions for driving markets. Demand is what drives the market to move. In the export slave trade from Africa, it was European demand for slaves that created that market and kept it churning. I can't say this for certain, but like many supply responses to demand-moved price signals, it very possible that much of the conflict that supplied African slaves for the export market was created by the demand for slaves. Tribes may have gone out to raid or conquer other tribes in order to take slaves to sell to Europeans.
Doesn't this mean that Africans who participated are just as responsible for the slave trade as European and American traders?
It would a subjective matter to say yes or no here, but I lean towards no for the reason I stated above, but further, this is not really a healthy way to think about history. Looking through the historical record for the sake of pointing fingers, or legitimizing or de-legitimizing the path to the status quo is the domain of politics, not honest historical study. Looking at some episode of history that we in the present would consider a crime or treachery if it happened today, we should remind ourselves not to apply our present values to our perspective. Making such normative judgments about the past creates an incentive on the part of those who are connected to those who you are judging to deny the past, or try to revise history to reflect better on their ancestors or predecessors.
I am all for folks taking an academic interest in how the slave trade worked, who was involved, and how it evolved, but I would very much try to discourage you from any approach to this study that focuses on assigning or spreading blame for it.
Yes, of course various people in Africa sold slaves to European slave-traders.
But if you're looking for a moral (or even historically-minded) apportioning of "blame," then you need to realize that:
all slavery is not the same.
In most sub-Saharan African cultures that had slavery, a "slave" was simply the lowest social status a person could have. Yes, African slaves could be "sold"… and could suffer great abuse: slaves were given drudge-work and labor that could be brutal, and could be treated badly. But often, slaves (whether purchased or acquired by other means, such as war) were incorporated into the owner's household. (African slavery in this way was not unlike Roman slavery-- a wealthy Roman might entrust the education of his children to a Greek slave, for instnace.) Africans facing famine would sometimes sell themselves as slaves. Not a great option, but better than starving to death.
Why slavery? Well, the status of a household in many sub-Sahran African communities was determined by size (more dependents = more prestige = more political power), but having all these kin-networks with so many wives could get, well, complicated. Here's where slavery could be useful. You could buy retainers! Prestige without the hassle of kinship. Also, sometimes a leader purchased slaves to be wives, to have children, be part of the household, etc., without having any complications from adding to the long list of in-laws (who, if you've never been married, are always asking you for favors).
Sometimes generals purchased slaves to fight in armies; in fact, one of the greatest generals of the Manikongo (in the Kingdom of Kongo) was a slave who rose through the ranks (and stayed a slave, even while the general of the army.)
In short: slavery was a shitty social status, but you could survive it and sometimes rise above it.
Enter the Europeans.
The European genius (evil genius, really), was to exploit this "availability" of slave-purchasing in Africa, and then:
industrialize it; and
racialize it.
Industrialize: the vast majority of slaves purchased in Africa, sent across the Middle Passage, and sold in the Americas went to Brazil (and, to a far lesser extent, the plantations in the South U.S.A.), where they were worked to death on vast agricultural plantations. This was "slavery" on massive, brutal, inhuman, murderous scale… all for short-term profit. (TOTALLY different from what these African slaves would have expected had they stayed slaves in Africa.) Sidney Mintz sees European-style of slave-usage as the origins of the (brutal) industrial workhouse, by the way.
But when a system is SO brutal that it will eventually grind all of its sufferers to death, how do you keep order? and how to quiet your guilty conscience? Answer: make it all about "race": your slaves conveniently look different (black skin), so make sure that all people with black skin are slaves (you spot a black guy wandering about rather than working? "escaped slave!"; time to whip him to death as an example to others.) Your preacher lectures you that all men are brothers? Twinge of guilt… until, wait! there's the "blacks are animals" escape clause… blacks are not really human, they're only good for working to death. (racism is not just bigotry--it's a system of keeping a group down and under control, even causing the sub-group to internalize that control.)
It's more complicated than this, of course. Some black slaves rose to trusted positions in American households. (though, statistically, this was much rarer than Southern apologists would have us believe.) But still, slavery in the Atlantic system (i.e. American plantations) was an entirely different thing.
TL/DR: slavery is different: while it sucks to be a slave in Africa, it was (statistically) brutal, back-breaking death to be a slave in the Americas.
Where do our "moral" judgements fit in here?
I would say this: where else have we seen "ordinary" violence and brutality 1) industrialized and 2) racialized, to horrific effect that becomes a short-hand for the most immoral event possible? You guess it: the Holocaust.
In fact, one might see the Holocaust--with its industrialized death-camps and it's iron-clad, legalistic "logic" of racism--as taking the low-level bigotry of anti-Semitism (widespread in Europe for centuries) and applying the system of dehumanization that Europeans invented in their creation of Atlantic-system slavery.
In fact, a great professor I once knew (Larry Thomas) taught a class on Slavery and the Holocaust, comparing them, step-for-step. And these two (evil) genius inventions are, in many ways, comparable… (one key difference being slavery served the goal of profits, while industrialized genocide served the goal of ideology.)
This submission has been removed because it is soapboxing, promoting a political agenda, or moralizing. We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history.