Slavery at Sea

African-American historian and professor Sowande Mustakeem’s Slavery at Sea (2016), is both a historical analysis and theoretical revision of the tragic trafficking of black bodies in the eighteenth century, a time when no legal recourse existed enshrining their basic rights or offering recourse for their suffering. Rather than look at the displacement of Africans from a statistical, economic, or otherwise quantitative view, Mustakeem validates their individual narratives, exploring and humanizing their uniqueness. In doing so, she analyzes the erasures that are endemic to the act of historicizing the experience of mass atrocity.

Mustakeem begins with an introduction in which she lays out her framework for thinking about the Middle Passage. She argues that, contrary to common narratives, slaves did not really have a shared experience of this time. Rather, the transatlantic slave experience was multiple. Any attempt to resolve the stories of slaves who suffered, often alone, is necessarily reductive, relying on emotional tropes such as those of being demoralized, of suffering, of alienation. To produce a new historicism of this time, Mustakeem contends, scholars must acknowledge the elliptical truth of the slave narrative, and the consequence that little can be recovered in the form of language.

Mustakeem proceeds to explore how the prevailing narrative describing the passage of youthful and able-bodied people into lifetimes of slavery in new lands unforgivably marginalizes slaves who did not fit in this category. She highlights people whom the slave trade “forgot,” arguing that the commodification of African bodies helped their owners rationalize and systematize their sale and abuse. The book breaks down this production of humans as commodities into three stages. She utilizes modern language for describing commodity goods operations, naming them warehousing, transport, and delivery.



In the first segment, warehousing, Mustakeem quickly makes clear that the term is meant as an ironic euphemism for violent enslavement. She analyzes the money and power-driven mentality that brought ships to African territories to purchase people who had been ripped from their homes to facilitate white European colonization. She considers the terrible fact that by the mid-1900s, this cruel culture had enabled the kidnapping of over two-thirds of the already enslaved.

In the second section, Mustakeem focuses on slave transport, particularly at their main nodes in West African port cities, where European slave traders would first meet and purchase their captives. She shows how many slaves, rejected by buyers, were left in Africa, often to be murdered by the same people who first took them hostage. She argues that this market phenomenon engendered debilitating, paradoxical anxiety in African people, who often yearned to be purchased. Knowing that they would die if refused, slaves often tried to conceal the fact that they were injured or sick. Mustakeem exhorts historians to concentrate more on these aspects of the transatlantic slave trade which complicate our simplified economic models.

In Mustakeem’s final segment on the slave trade, she focuses on the horrible conditions slaves faced on the huge, often derelict and ill-stocked ships that passed from West Africa to the United States, South America, and Europe. These atrocities left indelible scars on slaves and on the consciences of their captors. Mustakeem contends that their legacies are impossible to erase and still weigh on the conscience of modernity. Most frighteningly, the same power dynamics that facilitated these atrocities are still recognizable in legal and social norms today.



At the end of Slavery at Sea, Mustakeem touches on the end of the slave trade’s commodity flow: the final delivery. Having endured weeks or months of unsanitary, sleepless, malnourishing conditions at sea, even the healthiest slaves struggled to stay alive towards the end. Slave sellers in the Americas struggled to make them seem appealing, even hiring surgeons to work on ships to keep them alive. These surgeons often brutalized and mutilated the slaves to follow their own scientific inquiries or to broaden their career experience. Mustakeem draws a vivid picture of the moments when the slave ships set anchor in American bays: slave buyers would flood the ships and try to quickly seize the few slaves who seemed healthiest.

Slavery at Sea recasts the economy of the Middle Passage in terms of the emotional trauma it inflicted, then internalized, for centuries. The slave trade, Mustakeem contends, cannot be really understood if one divorces it from an economy that became pathologically fueled by human suffering.