I'll indulge in an even broader brush generalization: slavery or analogous forms of forced labor was a near social universal in every civilized society and most barbaric ones from the rise of the city state until the 19th century. That includes both the Americas -- and not just after the European Conquest (oops, Europe is continent too . . . ), the Indian Subcontinent, China, Russia, the Near East, North Africa, and Europe.
Why would you expect Africa, or if you like, the civilized nations and barbaric tribes in Africa, to be different than anyone else? There may have been places and societies in Africa where there was civilization or organized nomadic ("barbaric") social orgamozation but never any slavery. Probably there were some such places, but slavery was no less common in Africa (sorry) than in Europe, the Near East, or America.
It's been some time since I researched the history of slavery, but this is what I recall from reading, e.g., Orlando Patterson, David Brion Davis, any number of books on the European slave trade that emphasized the large role of African and North African slave traders in providing slaves to the Europeans. I'm no special expert in African history, and maybe I misread these sources, but I doubt it.
Anyway, if Africa (there I go again) was reasonable like almost severy where else, where was a lot of slaveholding. Given the mix of African peoples in the African dispora, where it's pretty unlikely that any African-American, -Carribean, -Brazilian, etc. can trace her ancestors to just one place in Africa, one where slaveholding may not have the rule,a nd given that the slave trade itself seized both propertied individuals (including slaveholders) and unpropertied ones (including people who were already slaves), I think it is reasonably likely that any randonmly chosen person in the African Diaspora has some African slaveholding ancestry.
I'm not sure Obama's Kenyan ancestry puts him in the Diaspora, and I don't know whether premodern or early modern, anyway pre-colonial Kenyan societies had slavery, but I bet they did, or a lot of them. So I wouldn't be surprised if Obama is descended from slaveowners on both sides, as well sa many some slaves on the African side.
Of course, you might wish to maintain that the African peoples in general left to themselves inhabited an Edenic paradise of justice without slavery, serfdom, forced labor, and the like. But if you did that I'd write you off as Rousseauean romantic or demand your proof. The idea that Africa was not unlike anywhere else in this regard is the null hypothesis.
Don't let the issue be obscured though, that Obama, for all his flaws, is being threatened with the pillory because his ancestors had slaves -- white politicians with similar backgrounds don't get this treatment.
My favorite comment in the area of recent days, when it emerged that some of Al Sharpton's ancestors had been owned by some of Strom Thurmond's ancestors, a surviving Thurmond (I believe), came out the immortal line, "Strom Thurmond may have been a segregationist, but peple forget all the wonderful things he did for black people." ("Some of my best slaves are Negroes.") (The stuff in the parenthesis not not the quote, the "wonderful things" sentence is genuine.")
--- tfast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
> Um Africa is a continent not a monolithic entity
> that lends to such
> generalizations. Exactly where in Africa was
> chattel slavery the "normal"
> practice?
>
> Travis
>
> > In addition, if one goes back on the African side,
> > it's reasonably likely that virtually any
> > Africa-American had black slaveowning ancestors in
> > Africa from when slavery was the normal practice
> > there.
> >
>
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