My Story Didn’t Begin With Slavery

Reclaiming the African past—and imagining the African future

For most of my life, I knew that my story did not begin with slavery.

Of course I knew.

I knew Africa had civilizations before Europeans arrived. I knew about Kemet—ancient Egypt—and the civilizations of the Nile Valley. I knew there were kingdoms, cities, systems of government, trade networks, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, agriculture, metallurgy, scholarship, families, wars, migrations, triumphs, failures—the ordinary complexity of human civilization.

I knew that enslaved Africans did not suddenly become people when they reached America.

But knowing something and locating yourself inside it are not the same thing.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

I knew African history.

I did not know where I was in it.

Where Does the Story Begin?

There is something peculiar about the way the African American story is commonly told.

It often begins with slavery.

We begin in chains.

We begin on ships.

We begin on auction blocks.

We begin on plantations.

Then comes emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, migration, segregation, civil rights, and the long unfinished struggle over what freedom was supposed to mean.

All of that history is real.

It must be remembered.

But it isn’t the beginning.

Slavery is something that happened to us.

It is not where we began.

Where a story begins affects how everything that follows is understood.

Begin a person’s biography with imprisonment and you have told us something important about what happened to that person.

You have not told us who that person was before the prison door closed.

For millions of descendants of enslaved Africans, the door closed so completely that what came before it became extraordinarily difficult to recover.

Names disappeared.

Languages disappeared.

Kinship lines disappeared.

Specific places of origin disappeared.

We inherited the consequences of a history whose opening chapters had largely been torn from the book.

Africa Was There All Along

I felt connected to Africa long before I could explain why.

African art mattered to me.

African history mattered to me.

African civilization mattered to me.

But there was always a distance.

It belonged to Africa.

I belonged to America.

And if I am truthful about my earlier thinking, there was something else.

Somewhere inside me remained the assumption that traditional African life represented an earlier stage of human development.

Primitive is an uncomfortable word, but it may be the most accurate word for the assumption.

I had absorbed an idea of progress in which stone buildings seemed more advanced than earthen ones.

Shoes seemed more advanced than bare feet.

Industrial complexity seemed more advanced than simplicity.

The farther human beings moved from nature, the more civilized they seemed to become.

I don’t believe that anymore.

And losing that assumption has been almost as important to my reconnection with Africa as learning the history itself.

Different Is Not Less

Kemet matters.

The great civilizations of the Nile Valley matter.

So do Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kongo, Asante, and countless other African societies.

They matter partly because they destroy an old fiction—that Africa sat outside civilization until someone else arrived to introduce it.

We did not need others to civilize us.

Europeans did not bring civilization to Africa.

Arabs did not bring civilization to Africa.

Africa contained civilizations, cultures, systems of knowledge, political institutions, technologies, economies, religions, and social structures long before either became a dominant force on the continent.

And influence did not travel in only one direction.

African civilizations participated in the development of the wider human world. The civilizations of the Nile Valley interacted with and influenced peoples beyond Africa. African societies participated in Mediterranean, Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean worlds. Goods, technologies, ideas, beliefs, and knowledge moved in more than one direction.

Africa was not merely receiving history.

Africa was helping to make it.

But I have also come to realize that even this argument can become a trap.

I don’t need to prove that Africans civilized somebody else in order to establish that Africans were civilized.

Civilization is not a baton passed from a superior people to an inferior one.

Human beings develop ways of living, knowing, building, governing, worshiping, creating, and surviving. They encounter other human beings. They exchange knowledge. They borrow. They adapt. Sometimes they conquer. Sometimes they destroy.

And civilization changes.

Africa was never outside that process.

Africa was one of the places where it began.

I No Longer Need to Upgrade My Ancestors

This realization has changed the way I look at traditional African life itself.

Why should an African society have to leave a stone monument before I recognize its sophistication?

Why should architecture made from earth, wood, grasses, or other locally available materials be inferior?

Why should bare feet signify backwardness?

Why should living simply or close to the land mean that a people had failed to progress?

I once looked at some of those things and saw what was missing.

Now I see something else.

Adaptation.

People built with the materials their environments provided.

They dressed for their climates.

They developed technologies appropriate to their circumstances.

They created families, communities, governments, religions, economies, art, music, rituals, moral systems, and ways of understanding the world.

They were not Europeans who had failed to become European.

They were not Arabs who had failed to become Arab.

They were Africans.

And difference is not deficiency.

I don’t know whether my particular ancestors lived in great cities or small villages.

Some may have worn elaborate textiles.

Some may have gone barefoot.

Some may have lived in substantial compounds; others in structures that would appear extraordinarily simple to modern American eyes.

I no longer need to upgrade them in my imagination.

I don’t need to put robes on them.

I don’t need to place them beside pyramids.

I don’t need to discover that one of them was a king.

I don’t need them to resemble anyone else in order to respect them.

There is something profoundly natural about human beings adapting their lives to the places in which they live.

That is not primitiveness.

It is one of the oldest forms of human intelligence.

History Became Personal

For years I could say that my ancestors came from Africa.

But Africa contains thousands of peoples and languages and histories. Saying my ancestors came from Africa was geographically true and personally incomplete.

The continent was known.

The people were missing.

And then, gradually, that began to change.

DNA did not hand me a complete genealogy.

It couldn’t.

No test can reconstruct everything slavery destroyed.

But it gave me something I had not possessed before: points of connection.

Places.

Peoples.

Possibilities narrow enough to become imaginable.

My paternal line connected me to the Bissa people. Other family DNA results pointed toward several populations and regions of West Africa. My travels gave those abstractions physical reality. Ghana, and particularly my experience among the Asante in Kumasi, gave me another kind of connection altogether.

None of this allows me to reconstruct the precise village from which every ancestor came.

I don’t need it to.

Something more fundamental happened.

African history stopped being a collection of facts and became a story I recognized myself inside.

That changed everything.

Not because I suddenly became African.

My ancestors had already settled that question long before I was born.

What changed was my ability to imagine them before America.

Before They Were Slaves

We use the word “slaves” so easily that it can swallow the person.

But the people who entered those ships were not born as an economic category.

Before someone enslaved them, they were children.

Parents.

Brothers.

Sisters.

Farmers.

Traders.

Craftspeople.

Spiritual practitioners.

Leaders.

Followers.

Lovers.

Troublemakers.

Storytellers.

People with jokes nobody living remembers.

People with family arguments whose details disappeared centuries ago.

People who knew exactly where home was.

They belonged to societies.

Those societies were no more perfect than other human societies. Africa does not need to be romanticized in order for African history to matter.

There were conflicts.

There were hierarchies.

There was exploitation.

There was slavery within Africa.

There were African participants in the Atlantic slave trade.

Human beings were human beings.

The point is that there was a world before the rupture.

And my ancestors lived in it.

What Slavery Actually Took

Once I began thinking this way, slavery looked different to me.

It did not become less horrific.

It became larger.

Because now I could see that the theft wasn’t merely labor.

It wasn’t merely freedom.

It wasn’t merely land or family.

It was continuity.

A person was removed not only from a place but from a network of meaning.

Who are your people?

Where are your ancestors buried?

What stories did your grandparents tell?

What language did your mother sing in?

What does your name mean?

What ceremonies mark birth, marriage, and death?

What foods tell you that you are home?

What symbols do you recognize without anyone explaining them?

These are ordinary questions for much of humanity.

For descendants of American slavery, many became mysteries.

And the extraordinary thing is that African Americans created culture anyway.

We created family structures under conditions designed to break families.

We created music.

Religion.

Food.

Language.

Literature.

Political traditions.

Humor.

Beauty.

Community.

We built new forms of continuity after the old continuity had been violently interrupted.

That is one of the great stories of human creativity.

But creating something new did not restore everything that had been lost.

A New People Does Not Require a New Beginning

There is an understandable desire to recognize African Americans as a distinct people, not simply as Africans who happen to live in America.

I share it.

Centuries of common experience here created something that did not previously exist.

We became a people here.

That matters.

But becoming a new people does not require us to surrender the people we were before.

A branch can become something distinctive without pretending it has no tree.

Our African ancestry does not make African American culture less authentic.

Our American development does not make our African ancestry less real.

One describes what we became.

The other tells us where the human beings who became us came from.

Because if our story begins with slavery, our first identity is something imposed upon us.

If the story begins earlier, slavery becomes something very different.

It becomes an interruption.

Moving Slavery Out of the Beginning

I am not trying to minimize slavery by moving it out of the beginning.

I am putting it where it belongs.

Slavery is not Genesis.

It is catastrophe.

There must be something before a catastrophe for catastrophe to have meaning.

Something existed that could be disrupted.

People existed who could be displaced.

Relationships existed that could be severed.

Cultures existed that could be interrupted.

Histories existed that could be obscured.

Once I understood that emotionally rather than merely intellectually, I began to see my ancestors differently.

I stopped imagining an ancestral line disappearing into darkness somewhere around the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

The line continued backward.

I may not know all their names.

I may never know them.

But anonymity is not nonexistence.

They were there.

They lived.

They belonged somewhere.

And eventually, somewhere in that long chain of human lives, someone was taken.

Africa Is Not Only My Past

But there is another danger in all of this.

I can recover Africa as my past while failing to see Africa as part of my present.

Africa is not a museum of my ancestry.

It is alive.

And perhaps most importantly for what comes next, it is extraordinarily young.

Across the continent, a huge generation of Africans is growing up with access to something no African generation before it possessed on this scale: the ability to see the rest of the world—and one another—in real time.

A young African with a phone can encounter histories that were once difficult to find. She can compare what she was taught with what others were taught. He can see how African resources enter the global economy and ask who benefits. Africans separated by colonial borders can speak directly to one another. Africans on the continent can communicate with descendants of Africa throughout the diaspora.

They can see what Europe became.

They can see what Asia became.

They can see what America became.

They can also see what those transformations have cost.

And they can look again at Africa.

That does not guarantee anything.

The internet can spread ignorance as efficiently as knowledge. A young population can repeat old mistakes. African governments can fail their people. Ethnic, religious, economic, and political divisions remain real. Outside powers still pursue their own interests on the continent.

I have no interest in replacing an old caricature of Africa with a new romantic one.

But I believe something important is happening.

For generations, Africans were frequently forced to understand themselves through categories created elsewhere.

What is civilized?

What is developed?

What is modern?

What is successful?

What should an African city look like?

What should an African economy produce?

What should an educated African know?

What should progress mean?

Increasingly, Africans can participate in answering those questions for themselves.

That could matter enormously.

Because Africa’s youth will not merely inherit the continent.

They will inherit knowledge of what has happened to the entire world.

They can see industrialization and its achievements.

They can see environmental destruction.

They can see extraordinary wealth and extraordinary inequality.

They can see what technology has made possible and what it has disrupted.

They can see colonialism from the other side of colonialism.

And they can recover parts of their own histories at the same time.

I believe that combination has the potential to produce something powerful.

Not simply an African economic impact.

Not simply an African demographic impact.

A conscious African impact.

A generation with the opportunity to ask not merely:

How do we catch up?

but:

What is actually worth becoming?

That is a very different question.

Perhaps Africa’s next great contribution to civilization will not come from recreating Kemet, Mali, Asante, or anything else that existed before.

Perhaps it will come from taking everything Africa has been, everything that has happened to it, everything it has learned from others, and everything it can now see happening throughout the world—and creating something we have not yet seen.

I don’t know what that will be.

But I increasingly believe Africa will have a great deal to say about the human future.

An American Story With an African Beginning—and Future

None of this makes me less American.

America shaped me.

African Americans became a distinctive people here, under circumstances none of our ancestors would have chosen.

That history is mine too.

But Africa is no longer merely the place from which my ancestors came.

It is part of the living world to which I belong.

I no longer have to choose between being the descendant of people who survived America and the descendant of people who lived before America.

They are the same people.

And I don’t have to choose between honoring ancient Africa and caring about modern Africa.

They are the same continuing story.

The rupture is real.

But so is the continuity.

And continuity runs in both directions.

Backward toward people whose names I may never know.

Forward toward people who have not yet been born.

I no longer need the people who came before the rupture to satisfy somebody else’s definition of civilization before I can claim them proudly.

They did not have to build pyramids.

They did not have to wear shoes.

They did not have to live in stone buildings.

They did not have to become European.

They did not have to become Arab.

They had only to be what they were:

human beings creating lives within their own environments, histories, relationships, and possibilities.

There was never actually a blank space before slavery.

There was only a space from which the names had been taken.

My ancestors did not begin on a plantation.

They did not begin at an auction.

They did not begin in the hold of a ship.

They did not begin when someone wrote them into a ledger as property.

Before any of that, they had lives.

Some may have lived in cities.

Some may have lived in villages.

Some may have walked barefoot on the earth.

None of that makes them less than anyone who happened to walk on stone in shoes.

Before they were enslaved, they belonged to people.

Before America knew them, they knew themselves.

And the people they left behind did not stop developing when my ancestors were taken.

Africa continued.

Africa continues.

And Africa will continue.

So when I say that my story did not begin with slavery, I no longer mean only that I have a past before America.

I mean something larger.

I have a history before slavery, a life shaped by what came after it, and a connection to a people whose story is still being written.