Recent remarks by Jamaican Member of Parliament (MP) Everald Warmington have once again thrust a repeatedly recycled but never seriously examined claim into the public eye. “White people didn’t go to Africa to catch slaves. Black people caught them, sold them to white people, and then they were shipped here,” Warmington said during a parliamentary debate.

According to the Jamaica Observer, the MP for St Catherine South Western interrupted the agenda while Culture Minister Olivia Grange was reporting on the reparation petition, questioning Jamaica’s efforts to seek compensation from Britain: “We keep talking about the white people who bought slaves, but nobody mentions the black people who sold them,” he said.

Warmington’s argument is nothing new. In debates over reparatory justice, it is a frequently cited counterpoint: If Africans participated in the slave trade, what standing do their descendants have to demand compensation from Europe?

But this argument is built on a myth historians have repeatedly dismantled. Africans did not “voluntarily” sell their compatriots — they resisted all along. They simply failed.

Two Fundamentally Different ‘Slaveries’

In precolonial Africa, various forms of servitude existed. But these were fundamentally different from the chattel slavery Europeans established in the Americas. In many African societies, prisoners of war or those born into subordinate status were integrated into households through relationships of dependency and mutual obligation. They could marry, own property, and sometimes achieve social mobility.

Their status was neither permanent nor hereditary in the same way as chattel slavery in the West and, therefore, in the beginning, when the Portuguese began seeking slaves, the belief was that they would be treated as they were treated in Africa.

However, transatlantic chattel slavery was entirely different. The enslaved were reified as property; stripped of all legal rights; and reduced to commodities to be bought, sold, inherited, and worked to death. Historian Sylviane A Diouf points out that contemporary concepts of Africa, Africans, and blackness did not exist in precolonial Africa and cannot be retroactively applied to judge people operating within entirely different social frameworks. To equate African servitude with Atlantic chattel slavery is to distort both history and morality.

An African King’s Protest Letters

The most powerful refutation comes from King Afonso I of Kongo. A Christian convert who initially welcomed Portuguese traders, he became one of the most vocal opponents of the slave trade in the early 16th century.

In letters to King João III of Portugal, written in 1526, King Afonso protested that Portuguese traders and their African agents were kidnapping free Kongolese —including nobles and even members of his own family — and selling them into slavery. He demanded Portugal cease sending merchants intent on acquiring slaves and insisted the trade be banned in his kingdom.

These were not the complaints of a minor chief but the diplomatic correspondence of a sovereign ruler addressing his European counterpart. King Afonso’s appeals were ignored, but that does not diminish their significance — African rulers understood the slave trade as a violation of their sovereignty and a threat to their people, and they used every diplomatic tool available to oppose it.

Resistance Was Everywhere

Diouf’s work Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies systematically dismantles the myth that Africans were passive victims or willing participants. The research documents a comprehensive picture of organised resistance — manipulating the environment to hide from raiders, mass migration away from vulnerable areas, redeeming captives through local systems, building centralised states for defence, forming Maroon communities, violently attacking slave ships and coastal trading posts, and shipboard revolts.

Diouf argues that Africans assessed their situations and adopted combinations of protective, defensive, and offensive strategies. The facts show “no evidence substantiating the view that Africans more popularly used offensive strategies” —Africans were more likely to be resisters than sellers. Reviews note the book “challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade”, showing that “resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged”.

Basil Davidson’s classic, The African Slave Trade, likewise documents widespread African opposition, examining precolonial West and East Africa from 1450 to 1850. This foundational text demonstrates the slave trade was experienced by Africans not as a commercial opportunity but as a catastrophe.

Guns and Demand: How Europe Crushed Resistan ce

If Africans resisted so extensively, why did the trade continue for centuries? The answer lies not in African complicity but in the overwhelming military and economic power deployed by Europeans and their African intermediaries. European traders supplied firearms to African states and merchants willing to participate, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of violence. Communities that refused were vulnerable to slaving raids backed by European guns; those that participated used their weapons to raid neighbours. The choice was not between selling and not selling, but between participating under duress or being destroyed.

The resistance documented by Diouf and others was real, widespread, and costly. It was overcome not by willing African cooperation but by the coercive power behind European economic demand.

The Political Function of the Myth

The myth that “Africans sold their own people” serves a clear political function: It absolves European nations and their descendants of responsibility for chattel slavery and undermines the case for reparatory justice.

Warmington’s remarks fall precisely into this framework. He called Jamaica’s petition to Britain an “embarrassing spectacle”, saying his “roots are in Jamaica, not Africa”. But this avoids the core question: How did the ancestors of African-descended Jamaicans come to be here? Not because they “chose” to be sold, but because a violent system driven by European demand and sustained by European guns captured, transported, and enslaved them.

To say “Africans sold their own” is to erase the voices of King Afonso and the countless communities that fought against the slave trade; it is to ignore the distinction between African and European systems of servitude; and it is to shift moral responsibility from those who created and profited from the trade to those who suffered and resisted it.

While I agree that the visit to King Charles III was an unwarranted spectacle because it appears Jamaica was seeking permission and outside of the collective African-Caribbean framework being pursued jointly, Warmington, for whom I have the greatest of respect, was merely parroting that which is not history but right-wing propaganda in service of continued injustice.