Europe

By: Leyla Keough

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Europe

Continent north of Africa that has a long history of connections with Africa and Africans.

Europe, lying just across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa, has had a complex relationship with the African continent and its people. Europeans began the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the sixteenth century. They also explored and colonized Africa, much of which remained under European control until the twentieth century. Africans, however, have also traveled to Europe. During the early modern era, most blacks in Europe were slaves or paid servants, but a few became artists and scholars. During the early twentieth century, Africans and people of African descent living in Europe experienced remarkable intellectual, political, and artistic stirrings that led to influential movements such as Pan-Africanism and Négritude. Since the 1950s, a wave of black immigration has transformed many European nations and given rise to a new population of Afro-Europeans.

Early African Presence in Europe

Even before the rise of the large-scale slave trade, blacks and other Africans found their way to Europe, especially to southern Europe. Ancient records reveal the presence of Africans in Roman society and history. Roman armies captured Africans in battle, and African writers and philosophers (including Saint Augustine, who was born in in Algeria in 354 C.E.) traveled to the centers of Roman scholarship in Italy. African soldiers joined the Roman army and went on campaigns to Germany in 58 B.C.E. and to Great Britain in 200 C.E.

Beginning in the eighth century, Muslim armies of North and West Africans crossed a narrow stretch of the Mediterranean to conquer the Iberian Peninsula, consisting of Spain and Portugal. The Christian Spanish and Portuguese fought the conquerors, whom they called Moors and considered infidels. During their centuries-long resistance to Muslim rule, the Spanish and Portuguese developed racist images of Africans. These racist images traveled to northern Europe during the Middle Ages, before northern Europeans had much contact with Africans. There were, however, occasional exceptions to racism. In the thirteenth century, for example, the army and court of Emperor Frederick II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (later Germany), included African soldiers and entertainers. By the fifteenth century, when Portuguese navigators began exploring the coast of West Africa, European art and literature had begun to depict Moors, or Africans. Europeans often used the two terms interchangeably.

Slaves and Free Blacks in Early Modern Europe

The slave trade gave rise to a significant population of blacks in Europe. After the Christians drove the Muslims from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, the rulers of those nations funded seafaring voyages of discovery. Sailing along the African coast, European mariners encountered and sometimes captured Africans. The first African slaves were brought to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1444. Soon slaving became common, justified by a 1452 statement from the pope that allowed slave raiding as a crusade against non-Christian “heathens.” Once the European nations began establishing colonies in the Americas, they turned to Africa as a source of labor for the colonial plantations whose Sugar and other crops produced great wealth for Europe. The nations of Europe competed for control of the slave trade. The Netherlands dominated the trade in the seventeenth century. Later, the chief slave-trading nations were France and Great Britain.

A member of the Viennese court in the eighteenth century, Mmadi-Make (also known as Angelo Soliman), is pictured here in an engraving after a portrait painted by Johann Steiner, ca. 1760.

Erich Lessing

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Europe's black population grew during the early modern period, especially in Europe's largest slave ports, Lisbon and Seville, Spain. By 1600, one-tenth of the population of each of these cities was black (14,000 blacks in Seville, 15,000 in Lisbon). By the late eighteenth century, Great Britain had about 15,000 black residents, mostly slaves who worked in domestic service. As in earlier centuries, wealthy Europeans made gifts of black slaves to royal courts, where they acted as entertainers or musicians or served as decoration. In the eighteenth century, it became fashionable for wealthy European women to use young black boys as pages, or attendants. The women often discarded these servants when they reached adulthood.

Although most European nations were heavily involved in the slave trade, only Spain and Portugal officially permitted slavery on their own soil. The British claimed that their soil was too pure to hold slaves, and the Dutch freed the first slaves brought to the Netherlands. Yet in spite of such declarations and laws, slave owners from the West Indies who visited or lived in Europe brought their slaves with them. The legal status of slaves in Europe was unclear. Many tried to escape, believing that they would be freed by law in countries that banned domestic slavery or by baptism in countries where Christians could not be enslaved. If recaptured, they often were brought before judges, whose verdicts varied. Some escaped slaves were forced back into slavery, while others were freed. In 1772 an English judge handed down an important verdict in the James Somerset Case by freeing an escaped slave from his West Indian master. This decision supported the belief that slaves were free in Great Britain and led thousands of blacks to side with the British against the American colonists during the American Revolution.

In both the American colonies and the European nations, children of white masters and enslaved black women were often freed and educated—this practice was especially common in Spain and Portugal, where the law permitted and regulated slavery. Under such laws, some slaves were allowed to buy back their freedom within set periods of time. These liberated slaves were sometimes required to work as employees for their former masters for the rest of their lives, but their children would be born free.

Most freed slaves could find work only as servants. Some, however, were sailors, one of the few occupations open to blacks in Europe. A few blacks who had wealthy patrons managed to obtain educations and contributed greatly to European societies. One was Anton Wilhelm Amo, a slave given by the Dutch West India Company to the German Dukes of Wolfenbüttel in 1707. Amo attended a university, obtained a doctorate, and became a noted scholar, eventually returning to Africa. Similarly, black slave Abram Hannibal was presented to Peter the Great, ruler of Russia, in 1700. The tsar sent Hannibal to Paris, where he learned engineering. After receiving his degree, Hannibal returned to Russia to design structures. Juan de Pareja was a noted painter in seventeenth-century Spain and Italy, and during the following century Jacobus Elisa Capitein studied in the Netherlands and became the first African ordained as a Protestant minister. Olaudah Equiano, a slave who became literate in English, bought his freedom from his master and settled in London in the eighteenth century. He joined the abolitionist movement and was an administrator of a plan to establish a settlement of former slaves in Sierra Leone. To some extent, European society regarded these educated and accomplished blacks as “Enlightenment experiments,” products of the wave of intellectual and social progress known as the Enlightenment. Their patrons and member of the abolition movement used them as examples of Africans' humanity and potential.

Abolition and the Roles of Blacks in Europe

During the nineteenth century, both whites and blacks campaigned for the abolition of slavery. They spread news of the cruelties and abuses of slavery and as well as information about the economic disadvantages of the slave trade. Denmark abolished its slave trade in 1802. Great Britain followed with the Abolition Act of 1807 and the final emancipation of slaves in 1838. The Netherlands abolished the trade in 1814, freeing slaves in Dutch territories in 1863. But although France had outlawed slave trading in 1794, Napoléon Bonaparte revived it in 1804. “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” had been the rallying cry of the French Revolution of 1789, but France continued to participate in a legally murky slave trade until 1848. Under pressure from Great Britain, Portugal abolished its slave trade in 1831 and emancipated slaves in 1877. Spain began gradual abolition in 1870.

In France, the emancipation of slaves gave blacks citizenship, voting rights, and the right to hold office. During the nineteenth century, blacks represented French colonies in the country's government. Other countries, however, were slower to make such progress. Blacks were not elected to Great Britain's Parliament, for example, until 1987. Most blacks who remained in Europe after the end of slavery faced lives of poverty and racial discrimination. Still, many free blacks merged into white European populations. In the United States, a person with only one black ancestor was considered black, but in Europe people with African ancestry did not necessarily consider themselves black. Well-known nineteenth-century French novelist Alexandre Dumas père and Russian literatary giant Aleksandr Pushkin had African ancestors but did not identify themselves as black—they thought of themselves as Europeans. Because of racism, African ancestry often became a disadvantage; people denied their African backgrounds if they could.

Intermarriage among free black men and white working-class women was not uncommon in Europe, where few black women lived. For the most part, the English, Dutch, and French did not object to marriage between blacks and whites as long as they had the same class background. Such relationships produced children whose racial identity could vary from country to country. In The Netherlands, for example, when a black man named married a white woman, official registries listed their children and grandchildren as white. Many blacks merged into the general European population in the nineteenth century through intermarriage.

Soon after the abolition of the slave trade, European powers entered the Scramble for Africa, dividing the continent among themselves and imposing Colonial Rule. France, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and, to a lesser extent, Spain and Italy colonized Africa. As colonial subjects, Africans traveled to the parent countries in Europe to obtain educations, and some gained positions of power in the colonial administrations. Many fought as servicemen for the colonial powers.

Modern Era

After World War I began in Europe in 1914, many blacks fought in European armies, while many others took jobs left vacant by white men who had gone off to war. Later in the war, U.S. troops—including African Americans—became involved in the conflict. Europeans generally appreciated the contributions of black troops. The French praised Africans and African Americans as their saviors in the war and treated them as such. In France, many African Americans encountered a society with significantly fewer racist customs and institutions than their homeland, the United States.

In the years after the war ended in 1918, France welcomed African American jazz musicians, artists, and writers. A substantial community of black expatriates, people living outside their native countries, formed in Paris. During these postwar years, Africans and African Americans also received moral support from the newly formed Soviet Union, the communist state that had arisen in Russia. The Soviets, who viewed racism and colonialism as ways in which capitalists exploited the working class, saw blacks as allies. In the 1930s, the Soviets recruited black Americans to help them in an agricultural campaign in Uzbekistan, one of the Soviet republics, and treated them as honored guests.

Blacks were not equally welcome everywhere. In some parts of Europe, white soldiers returning from the war were alarmed to discover significant populations of blacks who had arrived during wartime. In Great Britain, where the discharge of soldiers and the end of wartime industrial production led to widespread unemployment, working-class whites accused blacks of taking their jobs. Many called for the forcible return of blacks to Africa or the West Indies, and in 1919 this anger led to rioting in Cardiff, Wales. Some returning whites also resented postwar interracial marriages. Most Germans, for example, despised blacks in the French army sent to occupy the German Rhineland after the war, especially when the black soldiers married or had affairs with German women. These relationships produced a small but very visible black German population. One of the many atrocities committed by the Nazis was the forced sterilization of nearly 400 of these Afro-Germans.

During the first half of the twentieth century, dramatic intellectual, political, and cultural innovations and exchanges took place among blacks gathered in Europe from many parts of the world. As their awareness of a shared African identity increased, Pan-Africanism flourished. The movement's first large meeting occurred when African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois led the Pan-African Congress of 1919 in Paris. Later conferences took place in Great Britain. Many of the blacks who came to Europe during this period—including future African presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah—protested the injustice of colonialism and worked to end it. At the same time, the Négritude movement was influencing the arts and scholarship, as people such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire drew on their African heritage and on the experiences of racism and colonization to forge a positive, modern African approach to cultural expression. Artists and musicians such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Sidney Bechet, among others, dazzled Europe with their talents.

Black intellectuals and artists in Europe generally had a different experience than those in the United States. They were free of the discrimination and segregation enforced by American Jim Crow laws, although racism did occur—for example, when blacks competed with whites for employment. When World War II began in 1939 in Europe, the Allied forces that fought German and Italian fascism included thousands of blacks, both Africans and African Americans. Many of these felt that their service and sacrifice entitled them to demand an end to legally permitted discrimination and colonialism. By 1965, twenty years from the end of the war, most African and West Indian colonies had gained their independence and the Civil Rights Movement had begun to challenge racism in the United States. In Europe, however, racial prejudice seemed to worsen.

Immigrants, Guest Workers, and Afro-Europeans

During the 1950s and 1960s, Europe experienced an economic boom. European countries recruited blacks to work in industry, and new black immigrant communities developed in many European cities. Most of the West Indians and Africans (especially North Africans) who came to Europe during this period were guest workers seeking temporary employment or political refugees seeking asylum. Many planned to return to their homelands eventually. They came to Europe expecting to be accepted as equals—after all, as a result of European colonialism, they shared languages and often cultures with the people of Europe. At first, white Europeans welcomed black immigrants as a needed workforce. But when the European economy began to falter in the late 1960s, whites began to view black and African immigrants as threats to their jobs. Even in France, with its strong history of racial tolerance, public acceptance of blacks wore thin, and racism became more common.

European definitions of race and ethnicity differ from American ones. In several European languages, the word for “black” can refer to people with no African ancestry. Some whites group all Europeans of African descent together with people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and even East Asian descent, calling all of them black. Some Europeans of non-European ancestry have taken advantage of this grouping, joining together to fight for their civil rights. The struggle has not been easy. Many white Europeans simply assume that blacks cannot be European—they view all blacks, even those born and raised in Europe, as immigrants or foreigners. For this reason some residents of Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, and other European countries do not recognize dark-skinned fellow citizens as their equals. These attitudes make life difficult for Europe's permanent black population, mostly the children and grandchildren of blacks who immigrated during the 1960s. These individuals face rampant discrimination in housing, education, and employment.

Even citizenship is not always secure. Some countries, including Germany, define citizenship by ancestry rather than place of birth. Blacks in these countries, even though born and raised in Europe, may not be eligible for citizenship. Other nations, including Spain and France, automatically give citizenship to anyone born in the country. Since the 1980s, the Europeans governments have been trying to develop consistent policies on citizenship, as well as issues such as voting rights and legal and illegal immigration. The Netherlands leads Europe in offering citizenship and rights to its black population, both immigrant and native-born. Within the European Union (EU), border controls between member states have loosened since 1990, but EU states have also taken measures to tighten Europe's external borders and restrict immigration from the rest of the world.

An Afro-European identity began to take shape in the 1990s, as European nations attempted to deal with the legacies of their involvement in the slave trade and colonialism. Black organizations formed and grew, pressing for Afro-European rights and equality. Blacks are increasingly being elected to European government offices. Black culture—in music, art, fashion, and entertainment—enjoys great popularity in many European nations. Although people of African descent make up less than 1 percent of most European countries' populations (perhaps 2 percent in Great Britain), this minority is growing and increasingly visible.

See also Explorers in Africa Before 1500; Explorers in Africa, 1500 to 1800; Explorers in Africa Since 1800; National Socialist Sterilization Policies in Germany; Nationalism in Africa; World War I and African Americans; World War II and African Americans.

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