Enslaved Africans occasionally poisoned those who abused them. As legal scholars, how do we process this? You may have jumped, as I did, to drafting a mental list of legal justifications that could apply in a poisoning case. Or you may have assumed, as I did, that such legal defenses would be the focus of Angi Porter’s analysis in her new article “POISON! An Africana Legal Studies Investigation into Enslaved Africans and their Deadly Roots.” In fact, however, Porter, an assistant professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, does something wildly, brilliantly, courageously different.
POISON! moves outside of the framework of the enslavers and their legal system to assess the use of poisons by enslaved Africans from the perspective of indigenous African governance. With this shift, Porter confirms that the emergence of Africana Legal Studies brings us a new methodology, not just an expansion of the subject matter at hand. Utilizing her meticulous research on poisonings, the knowledge held by African healers, and what she terms the governing Protocol of West African Akan speakers, Porter helps us see that these enslaved Africans may best be understood not as individuals forced to act in self-defense but, instead, the enforcers of a collective Protocol that governed and protected their communities.
This opens up a world of fresh insights. And Porter, thankfully, is not afraid to speak the truth, as she understands it. The legal frame of self-defense, she argues, is a dead-end because it is still a defense, a narrative of victimhood firmly embedded in the legal construction of crime imposed upon African peoples. “At its core, [the legal frame of self-defense] prioritizes a Western Way of thinking about Governance and silences and invalidates the African Way.” (P. 21.) And this silencing, she emphasizes, is part of the “narrative violence that . . . render[s] the catalyst for African resistance—the original violence—invisible.” (P. 18.)
Porter asks, “What were African people doing before we were so rudely interrupted?” (P. 32.) She highlights the plurality of perspectives on law and governance across human societies, while noting that one particular frame—laying claim to universality—has been imposed on many of us without our consent. This prompts us to see enslaved Africans not as generic human victims, but as specific peoples, from particular cultures, with unique histories and ways of understanding and ordering their worlds. Colonially imposed law is thus de-centered. Now we can think about liberation not just in terms of rights, but as a matter of genuine self-determination.
In this article, engagingly written as a cold case study, Porter brings an Africana Legal Studies lens to a series of poisonings attributed to enslaved Africans in Maryland in the eighteenth century. The framework itself is presented in more detail in her Africana Legal Studies: A New Theoretical Approach to Law & Protocol, 27 Mich. J. Race & L. 249-322 (2022). In POISON! she begins by summarizing her work’s “grounding principles” (P. 3) and then describes cases in which Africans in Maryland in the 1700s were prosecuted for poisoning their enslavers.
Porter takes us through the law as it was invoked, pointing out its shortcomings before making a “pivotal shift from a Legal orientation to [the Africans’] Protocol orientation.” (P. 27.) This leads to a fascinating overview of Akan “Ways of Knowing” (P. 36)—knowing that permeates all aspects of the culture and informs an approach to life, death, and healing from a communal rather than individual perspective. This is not a rhetorical exposition. It is a door that Porter opens to particular histories and narratives, allowing us glimpses into a very different worldview and illustrating the richness of its—and her—perspective.
Angi Porter speaks truths that have long been in need of articulation in legal scholarship. She prods us to revisit our assumptions and to open our minds to fresh ideas. I was particularly struck by Porter’s insistence on “distinguishing African Governance from European Governance by using distinct language and avoiding use of Legal terms of art to describe African Governance.” (P. 4.) Initially, I was resistant—partly because I often find specialized terms and unorthodox capitalization to be gimmicky, but mostly because I am hesitant to cede the construct of law to the colonizers. Nonetheless, Porter makes an extraordinarily important point about the extent to which culture is embedded in language, and how difficult it is to use the language of the dominant culture to deconstruct its foundational premises.
Throughout the piece, I was delighted to have my thinking on this subject expanded and challenged. But my favorite part of POISON! is embedded in Porter’s first footnote, the one typically reserved for identifying ourselves and thanking all the important people we can plausibly name. The note begins with a quote from James V. Deane, who had been enslaved in Maryland: “When we wanted to meet at night we had an old conk, we blew that. We all would meet on the bank of the Potomac River and sing across the river to the slaves in Virginia, and they would sing back to us.” (P. 1.) They would sing back to us. Porter provides this beautiful, searing image to explain that she is singing across the river, and thather “article is meant to be a voice in a collective song, an invitation to sing back.” (P. 1.) Would that we all had that vision for our scholarship.
