temporary account we have by an African, Olaudah Equiano remembered
that when, as a boy about 1750, he was kidnapped and carried away from
his village in the little state of Essaka, he could understand only some of
what he heard even in nearby villages.
Neighbors to one another but also strangers, the little states were per-
petually locked in hostilities. Each house in his village, Equiano wrote, was
surrounded by a wall “made of red earth tempered: which, when dry, is as
hard as brick.... And when they [the townsmen of Essaka] apprehend an
invasion, they guard the avenues to their dwellings by striking sticks into
the ground, which are so sharp at one end as to pierce the foot, and are gen-
erally dipped in poison.” When the inhabitants go “out to till their land,
they not only go in a body but generally take their arms with them for fear
of a surprise.”
These little communities—we might think of them as something like
the tiny (and also warring) city-states of archaic Greece—numbered in the
hundreds. Each “village-state” would be composed of several hamlets
focused on a market and would have a population of only a few thousand
people. Although the tendency was for the larger states to absorb the
smaller, particularly after the introduction of firearms, the difficulties and
costs of travel gave even those that were parts of empires or kingdoms a
large degree of autonomy. Equiano comments that “our subjection to the
king of Benin [the larger neighboring inland state] was little more than
nominal. Every transaction of the government, as far as my slender observa-
tion extended, was conducted by the chiefs or elders [embrenche] of the
place.” These men held court, tried accused prisoners, and carried out sen-
tences; they led their people in warfare with other societies; and they pre-
sumably ensured that local customs were taught to the young so as to
preserve the moral authority of their rule.
Although Africa was thought of as an isolated jungle inhabited by
primitive savages, many of the political structures of the village, town, king-
dom, and empire evince a high degree of political organization. Equiano’s
description is borne out by the seventeenth-century Dutch merchant
Willem Bosman. He went so far as to suggest that in at least some little
states there were rather elaborate village councils. But, being small and
unable to form protective alliances with neighbors who seemed alien, the
The African Roots of American Blacks 89