Istwa Nou

The men who bought and sold human beings needed a story about the people they were selling, and they built one. Africa was backward, its peoples had no history worth the name, and bondage was therefore a kind of promotion. That story outlived the traffic by two centuries and it is still resident in a great many heads. Ehret refuses to treat the persistence as a lag that education will dissolve on its own. He calls it structural, a standing refusal by historians to engage African sources that have been available for decades, so the continent stays invisible in the general histories even where the evidence is abundant. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Haiti is where the story was tested. People drawn from Kongo, Dahomey and the Bight of Benin destroyed the strongest army in Europe and founded a state, and the world answered by isolating the country and then explaining its poverty by the character of its people.