Missing in Action: Africans in School History Textbooks

Omissions, silences, and mystifications have plagued stories of slavery and the slave trade told in American schools. Reflecting a “savage-to-slave trajectory,” as historian Herman L. Bennett calls it, histories of Africa wrongly portrayed the region as having been in a state of savagery that became a source of slaves when Europeans showed up. Today, this narrative continues to obscure the history and impact of Africans and their civilizations in shaping the modern world. In addition to silences about African leaders and traders, Africans who were enslaved are generally characterized as lacking agency. School materials, films, and books for popular audiences focus mostly on the terrors of enslavement and victimization of the enslaved. Indeed, according to Teaching Hard History, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (2018), school textbooks and curricula give more space to the lives of planters and small farmers than the diverse experiences of enslaved Africans.

Seeking to learn whether other countries’ textbooks acknowledged Africans as historical actors in the story of Atlantic trading, I conducted a textbook analysis at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany. I found secondary history and social studies textbooks from countries at each point of the triangle of trade—England, Ghana, and Jamaica and the Caribbean (test preparation guides for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate [CSEC]). My analysis focused on African agency on two levels. First, I asked how African traders and their actions were portrayed, taking note of the names and numbers of African and European trading nations and ethnic groups identified by the authors. Next, I looked for representation of enslaved people as individuals, not simply helpless victims, and references to their contributions to present-day society.

In three sections, each focused on a different region, my poster will display charts and textbook excerpts and images that illustrate key findings of this study. English accounts reflected a Eurocentric perspective that centered mostly on the actions of Europeans and rendered African traders as invisible. In addition, enslaved persons appeared primarily as brutalized victims, with little to no discussion of their social, cultural, or economic lives before, during, or after slavery. In Ghana, authors named equal numbers of trading nations in the transatlantic trade. But in promoting a story of African innocence, they tended to overlook or underplay African involvement in trans-Saharan slaving that pre-dated the Atlantic trade, suggesting instead that Africans began slaving in the Atlantic due to a temporary bout of immorality. Their accounts also gave little space to the lives of enslaved people. Only in Jamaican and Caribbean textbooks did African traders appear as full participants in the Atlantic trade. Moreover, the diverse experiences of enslaved people across time and space were described, presenting them as historical actors even amidst the terrible conditions of enslavement.