David Walker's Appeal

Walker suggests that his ancestors spent many generations living in “ignorance.” However, when the “enlightened” white Europeans discovered Africa, they did not attempt to teach and enlighten the people there. Rather, they enhanced this ignorance by teaching them “that they are an inferior and distinct race of beings” (34). Walker describes how certain technologies originated in Africa and then traveled to Europe, where they were further developed and refined. He suggests that the great African general Hannibal would have conquered Rome if his troops had been “well united.” However, like African Americans in the United States, they were “disunited,” and this caused their downfall.

Walker claims that God will soon send another Hannibal to lead African Americans out of slavery and cause white Americans to “curse the day they ever saw [them]” (37). He also calls on contemporary events, such as the successful revolt of enslaved people in Haiti as proof that “a servile and abject submission to the lash of tyrants […] are not the natural elements of the blacks” (38). Instead, this condition of servitude is largely due to ignorance. He describes how an enslaved man might obey a command to beat his own wife or mother to “pacify the passions of unrelenting tyrants” (38).