• • •
In addition to information, families also pass down beliefs and behaviors—at least, we believe we know this, because it seems so obvious. Gisela Heidenreich taught her clients family-systems therapy, which is based on the idea that emotional predispositions and behavior may be transmitted through generations. Family-systems therapy, which was developed from clinical experience, has been very successful in many countries. Until recently, however, no one had ever tried to systematically measure whether and how culture is transmitted from one generation to another and, if indeed it is, to determine for how many generations it is passed along.
Chapter 7
Ideas and Feelings
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you
—Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”
When Olaudah Equiano was eleven years old, the adults in his eighteenth-century village would head off in the morning to work in the fields. The children who remained behind would meet up in someone’s house to play, and whenever they did, at least one of them would take up a post in a nearby tree to keep a watch out for strangers. One day, Equiano wrote, he and his sister were home alone with no lookout when two men and a woman suddenly appeared over the walls of their compound. With no time to scream, the children were seized and their mouths covered as the trespassers took them back over the wall.
The kidnappers journeyed to a waiting place, and along the way Equiano spied people in the distance. He cried out for help, but his captors gagged him and put him in a sack. That night he and his sister clung to each other, but the following morning his sister was taken away, never to be seen again. “The small relief which her presence gave me from pain was gone,” he later wrote. “And the wretchedness of my situation was redoubled by my anxiety after her fate, and my apprehensions lest her sufferings should be greater than mine.” Of his sister he wrote: “Though you were early forced from my arms, your image has always been rivetted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune has been able to remove it.”
It is true that the convict system destroyed families and communities and caused enormous suffering: It lasted from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth, during which time it is estimated that two and a quarter million convicts were transported, and even though many ex-convicts survived and went on to prosper, many did not. But even so, the period in which convicts were subjected to forced labor overlapped with one that saw a system that was even more cruel and lasted much longer: slavery.
The slave trade in Africa took place over many hundreds of years and in fact consisted of four different slave trades. From as early as the ninth century the trans-Saharan slave trade abducted people and brought them to northern Africa; the Red Sea slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade transported them to the Middle East, India, and Indian Ocean plantation islands. The Atlantic slave trade primarily took slaves to the New World. In many African countries at least twenty generations lived and died in a world in which a spouse or a friend or a child might suddenly disappear without a trace. Many Africans believed they were being captured and shipped over the ocean to be eaten.
The insecurity of life in a world of slavery is hard to imagine, let alone the extraordinary length of time that the threat of abduction loomed. Some eighteenth-century Africans, like the members of Olaudah Equiano’s village, began to leave children in locked stockades under armed guard as they went off to work in the fields.
But the threat didn’t always come from outside. In the course of a conflict one village or ethnic group might attack another, and sometimes entire villages would be surrounded by horsemen and burned down; those who did not die in the initial attack were tied together and taken away. Communities also turned on themselves. Farmers who were desperate to defend themselves against attack abducted other villagers and sold them to slave traders so they could afford iron knives or firearms. As local communities collapsed, even their chiefs became traders, offering their people up as tributes, sometimes hundreds of them in a single year. In some areas all the traditional punishments for lawbreakers evolved into the single sentence of being sold to slavers, and people were often falsely convicted of crimes from adultery to witchcraft in order to supply merchandise to the trade. The chief of the Cassanga tribe made accused criminals drink a poisonous red liquid in the “red water ordeal.” Those who vomited were declared guilty and sold as slaves. Those who didn’t vomit died—and their family were sold as slaves.
Even worse, villagers found themselves tricked and betrayed not just by close neighbors but by family members in order to pay off debt. The nineteenth-century German missionary Sigismund Koelle asked over 140 ex-slaves how they had been taken. Almost 20 percent of them told him that family or friends had given them up. An anthropologist who stayed with the Kabre of Togo in the 1990s said they have “surprisingly vivid memories” of the period, and they were matter-of-fact about it. Kabre locals pointed out the houses where people who sold their relatives had once lived, and many of the names of people who sold their kin were remembered. Often the seller was a man who, according to tradition, had ownership rights over his sister’s young children. Even today Kabre uncles may jokingly threaten their nephews that they will sell them to slavers.
It may be that more than thirty million Africans were wrested from their homes and families, and the great majority never saw either again. In just a single period of the Atlantic slave trade, between 1700 and 1850, ten million people were shipped across the ocean. The diary of a sailor from this era records the anguish of the slaves on a ship that was about to leave Africa: “The slaves all night in a turmoil. . . . They felt the ship’s movement. A worse howling I never did hear, like the poor mad souls in Bedlam Hospital. The men shook their fetters which was deafening.”
Of the ten million who were shipped, only 8.8 million made it to the other side of the ocean, many lost their lives along the way.
Today the continent is afflicted by many problems related to underdevelopment, much of which has been attributed to the legacy of the slave trade and also to the colonial period, which lasted from 1885 to 1960. While historians have made a compelling argument about the long-term damage of slavery and colonialism using extensive documentation from the period, until recently no one had attempted to quantify that damage. As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today.
How could the slave trade shape economies and affect lives in Africa over a century after it ended? Nunn discovered that the legacy was passed on not only in the materials and institutions from the past but also in the way people thought about one another.
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Nathan Nunn was born in a log cabin on a Canadian ranch that was so remote it could be reached only by plane or snowmobile. One of his earliest memories is of forlornly looking through a gap between the floor logs where his toy truck had fallen. Nunn lived with his American father and South Korean mother, who were there because his father had migrated from Montana to Canada to try to breed a hybrid of a cow and a yak, an animal that would tolerate minus-forty-degree temperatures better than the typical cow. Years earlier he had met Nunn’s mother in Seoul. They corresponded, and then she flew to the Canadian west coast to marry him. The move from a city of seven million people in humid Southeast Asia to a ranch with ten people in the Canadian tundra was enormous. She told the young Nathan stories about the culture shock, like the time when he was very little and the family’s horse-drawn sleigh crossed a frozen lake. The ice broke, the horses fell through, and Nunn’s father had to cut them from the ice and chop down a bunch of trees on the shore to get a fire going so they wouldn’t freeze.
On a cold New England day I
met Nunn outside at his Harvard office. He had a boyish face and a casual air that belied the years he has spent digging through archives to amass records for one hundred thousand slaves, as well as his reputation among economists as a trailblazer. We sat down and spoke about the systematic differences between cultures, how history matters, and why the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today.
In order to find a connection between slavery and modern economies, Nunn asked if the differences in economic well-being today could be explained by differences that existed before the slave trade. Were the countries that were already poor the same countries that were more engaged in the slave trade? In fact, Nunn found the opposite: Regions that lost the most people to slavery had once been among the best-developed economies and best-organized states on the continent, with central governments, national currencies, and established trade networks. It was the states that were least developed and had higher degrees of violence and hostility at the time of the slave trade that were better able to repel slavers and not suffer the long-term effects of the trade.
Could the relationship between modern poverty and historical slavery be explained by the subsequent effects of colonialism or by the natural resources possessed by a country? Nunn found that although those factors appeared to have an effect, neither was as powerful. It was slavery that mattered, and it mattered greatly.
When he was a graduate student, Nunn read about Olaudah Equiano’s life and Sigismund Koelle’s account of slavery and was stunned by the number of first-person reports about friends and family selling someone into slavery: Almost 20 percent of slaves had been betrayed by people to whom they were close. He began to wonder what kind of long-term impact such betrayal might have. Then one day he met someone who had been asking the same question but for different reasons. Nunn gave a presentation about his slave data, and afterward a man named Leonard Wantchekon introduced himself. Wantchekon grew up in Benin, one of the countries that was most impacted by the slave trade. Nunn’s ideas about how the trade affected modern economies deeply resonated with Wantchekon’s own experience, who believed that trust was an important part of the story.
Wantchekon had been thinking about trust for a long time. As a young student he was dedicated and bright and particularly talented in math, but in college in the 1980s he became more and more involved in political activism. He organized protests and distributed leaflets criticizing Benin’s brutal government. When some of his friends were arrested, he had to go into hiding. For five years Wantchekon changed his location every other day, sometimes sleeping in a cave or a forest. Later he was arrested and tortured. His guards made him stand up for three days and nights and then beat him for hours at a time. After eighteen months Wantchekon escaped jail, fleeing to Nigeria and from there to Canada.
Despite his experiences at the hands of the guards of Benin’s Petit Palais, as the intelligence headquarters was known, Wantchekon told me that the worst of Benin was not the overt corruption but the distrust between people who were closely connected. That suspicion existed everywhere: in economic activity, in political activity, and in family life. When he was a student, people would turn on each other for no apparent reason. Friends would accuse each other of being witches. Distrust was evident in proverbs like “You can escape your enemies, but not your neighbors and family members. So beware of those you know.” It featured in popular songs, which had lyrics like “This guy, he looks good, but be careful, he can hurt you” or which would explain who was trustworthy (a brother from the same mother) and who wasn’t (brothers from different mothers, cousins, other relatives). All his life Wantchekon’s mother had warned him to be wary of his great-aunt Awetinjo, lest she bring him harm, and yet his mother demonstrably cared for the old woman. After his mother died and he started to live his life on the run, Wantchekon knocked on the old lady’s door. She was on her deathbed but got up to greet him. Her only thought was to say something kind: “When I get to heaven, I will meet your mother and tell her not to worry, that you are okay.”
Distrust was evident even in the language of small children. As Wantchekon recalled, if kids of nine or ten warned each other off someone, they would say, “He can sell you” or “He can make you disappear.” It wasn’t until Wantchekon left Benin that he even questioned the literal meaning of the phrase “sell you.” It must have been a remnant of the slave trade.
Canada gave Wantchekon refugee status, and before too long he completed an undergraduate degree and then went on to do a PhD in economics. He was made a professor of economics at NYU and later Princeton. After their first meeting, he and Nunn began to work together.
They began with the intuition that trust could be a channel through which slavery still affects modern economies. But their goal was to find evidence for it. Of course, trust is a crucial part of any economy: Societies must have some degree of trust in order to be able to trade. At the most basic level, if people don’t trust one another, they are less willing to take a chance in business, whether it involves a simple exchange of goods or a complicated contract. But no one in economics had ever tried to measure the relationships among history, trust, and the economy before. After all, trust was an element of culture, and “culture” was a vague, fuzzy concept. Nunn and Wantchekon defined it as simply as they could: Culture, for their purposes, was the rules of thumb people used to make decisions. Do I trust this person? Do I distrust him? People from different cultures use different rules of thumb to make such determinations.
Building on Nunn’s finding that the countries that lost more of their populations to the slave trade over one hundred years ago were also the poorest today, Nunn and Wantchekon examined the Afrobarometer, a survey project that measures public attitudes to different aspects of African daily life, like democracy, employment, and the future of citizenship. It is comparable to a Gallup poll, and it includes seventeen countries. The researchers found that overall, people tended to have more trust in those who were closer to them—for example, friends over government officials. This was a universal pattern. But it was also the case that the groups that were most exposed to the slave trade over one hundred years ago were also the groups with the lowest levels of trust today. Modern Africans whose ancestors lost the most people to slavers distrusted not just their local government and other members of their ethnicity but also relatives and neighbors much more than Africans whose ancestors were not as exposed to the slave trade.
Did the slave trade give rise to a culture of mistrust that was passed down from the slave era even to individuals who live in the same places today? There are good reasons to believe that it might have. For those who witnessed the ways an innocent bystander might be swept up by or somehow betrayed into the slave trade, it would have made more sense to distrust people, as a general rule. People who automatically distrusted others were probably more likely to do well, or at least to not be enslaved. Wariness would also have been a smart strategy to teach the next generation.
There’s another way this terrible correlation could be interpreted: Perhaps the slave trade made people not less trusting but less trustworthy. Perhaps people weren’t trusted in countries like Benin because they didn’t deserve to be trusted. After all, chiefs turned on their own people, and families sent some of their own literally down the river. Was a culture of betrayal passed down as well as a culture of distrust? This could partially be the case. Nunn’s analysis reveals that ethnic groups and local governments in the regions that were most affected by the slave trade in the past are also least trusted today. People whose ancestors were more affected by the slave trade were more likely to report that they did not approve of their local councilors, who were corrupt and did not listen to constituents. As Nunn explained, it’s quite likely that this is an accurate assessment of the local councils in these areas. Nevertheless, when they controlled for this effect, there was still a significant amount of distrust in countries most affected by the slave trade—reg
ardless of whether the object of trust was truly worthy.
When Nunn and Wantchekon published their study, Wantchekon spoke about it on a television show in Benin, and it struck a very deep chord. Many locals wrote to him, and it seemed that everyone had something to say about it. One old friend phoned and put the call on speakerphone so that Wantchekon could hear his entire family excitedly affirming and arguing about the idea of trust. It was as if a fever had broken. Everyone acknowledged that a deep distrust still shadowed their lives, and they also agreed that being so suspicious made no sense. They should trust one another more.
Still, even years after his study was published and after he had lived in the United States for a long time, Wantchekon rang his sister in Benin to tell her that an old friend was visiting him. She warned, “You know, you should be careful. Watch out for him!” Wantchekon thought, I’ve known this guy for forty years! He hasn’t killed me in forty years! Trust remains a major topic in public meetings in Benin. Indeed, Wantchekon has now started a university in the country. “The best contribution that I can make to Africa and to Benin in particular is by training the next leaders and the next academics through a strong graduate program in economics,” he said. “In September we are going to start, everything is on track.”
The Invisible History of the Human Race Page 17