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Forgive me for plugging in to this discussion late. Michael Loutzenhiser has a very ahistorical view of the African past. This shows up in several things. First, the notion that back there at some point in time, there is an authentic "tribal Africa." He defines that authentic Africa as pre-Christian or pre-Islamic. He clearly sees Christianity and Islam as alien, but so too were the ways of Bantu-speakers who imposed themselves on earlier Khoisan-speaking inhabitants of southern and central Africa. The Sereer of Senegal, who I studied, claim to have been colonized by Mande-speakers. Voltaic peoples claim to have been colonized by warriors from the "northeast" before Muslims arrived. Furthermore, if Loutzenhiser were to go to Senegal and Mali and ask about the authentic cultures, people would tell him that this is what they are. They are Muslims and they think that Islam is as African as the River Niger. And it is. Change has been taking place since Lucy produced our earliest ancestors. We can study processes of change if we have data, but there is no line anywhere between what is authentic and inauthentic. Second, he seems to have a notion that the long-distance slave trade corrupted or deformed African societies. I would agree with him that the export slave trade had many negative, even corrupting effects. That does not mean that Africans were in some sense pure or that they did not take slaves or exploit slaves. The Yoruba certainly enslaved people and incorporated slaves in their political social systems. In this, they were no different from almost all societies in the middle ranges of complexity. His ancestors and my ancestors took slaves. Ancient Mexicans and Andeans took slaves. People in India, China and the Russian steps took slaves. Most of them did not chain those slaves to stinking ships and drag them to distant lands where they were forced to work abusive schedules, but they were not always nice to their slaves. Martin Klein
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