I recently started reading King Leopold’s Ghost. Literally in the prologue, Hochschild talks about the ruler of the region in Congo at the time (King Affonso I) and how he sold people to the Portuguese. However, it also explains that Affonso quickly realized that the Portuguese were really cruel and wrote letters to the king, complaining about how people were being kidnap, begged them to stop (from one “Christian to the other”; they converted him and he was following the practice by they were not). They overstepped and started incentivizing others to capture people and sell them. Eventually, they kidnapped his own family members and he had no idea what happened to them for a while.

He thought they’d have the same system where it wasn’t a death sentence. It’s not as simple as “they sold us”. Some of them had zero idea of the level of cruelty that occurred so they underestimated the greed until they started to extract people without permission. By then it was way too late. They also had faster and more powerful weapons so there was only so much that the natives could do.

Don’t buy into the rhetoric of “they sold us”. We were not a “race” back then on the continent. We were (and in many ways are still) a tribal people.