Profs and Pints DC presents: “How Africans Fought Slavery,” on the hidden history of resistance to the Transatlantic Slave Trade among those targeted by it, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in human history. In all, more than 12 million African men, women, and children were kidnapped and made to board European ships destined for the New World.
Generally left out of our history books is the fact that African people fought the Transatlantic Slave Trade from the moment raiders approached their villages throughout every stage of the deadly Middle Passage.
Join Profs and Pints fan favorite Richard Bell for a talk that turns the slave trade’s history inside out by examining the huge varieties of African resistance to this 400-year-long nightmare.
He’ll discuss how African people fought capture through fortified villages, armed flight, and deception awareness. Their struggle to stay free involved rebellions inside African coastal forts, hundreds of shipboard mutinies, hunger strikes, and mass drownings.
You’ll learn how African suicides and revolts, as well as the constant threat of captive rebellion, forced European traders to spend enormous sums on weaponry, guards, surveillance, and ship redesign. Such costs, historians now calculate, saved more than a million Africans from ever being trafficked across the Atlantic.
Far from being helpless victims of an unstoppable system, African captives proved relentlessly defiant, leaving a record that reshapes our understanding of the trade and the roots of African American resistance. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The slave ship La Amistad, site of a famous mutiny by the slaves on board. (Artist unknown / Wikimedia Commons.)