Henry Louis Gates' recent New York Times piece about reparations has raised a number of eyebrows. Professor Gates attempts to tackle the controversial issue by "shedding some light" on its apparent complexities. To him, that complexity means the role that West African slave owners played in selling Africans to Europeans. Not only should Africans be held culpable for slavery, he says, but they are "complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization."

While Gates is right that Africans should be held accountable for selling slaves to Europeans, his argument still does not adequately address the issue of people being compensated for the many hundreds of years spent giving their free labor, livelihoods and, indeed, lives to build America. Gates also gives a naive and simplistic view of Africa, treating it as if it's one country that is homogenous in belief and attitude.

First, Gates fails to provide a nuanced understanding of what slavery was in Africa – and indeed in many other parts of the world – in comparison to the Transatlantic slave trade. This is not to get Africans off the hook, but to provide a true framework to his argument, which is fundamentally flawed without such context.

Slavery has existed in history for thousands of years in many different forms. Before the Europeans arrived, being a slave in Africa likely meant that you were akin to a farmer and often that you would get a share in the crop. If you were in the royal courts, a slave may have been a soldier or a courtier. Female slaves – of which there were many - were agricultural workers and gave birth to children.

It was dramatically different from the Transatlantic slave trade, where the enslavement of Africans was taken to a new level in both scale, intensity and, most destructively, the addition of overt notions of white racial superiority and black inferiority. It involved the deliberate stripping of identity, names, language, history, connections, family and culture, and a consciously constructed physical and psychological degradation and humiliation of Africans designed to ensure that slavery would be mental and last longer than even the physical act of slavery itself.

I don't believe that African slave owners anticipated that their slaves would spend hundreds of years being denigrated and treated as sub-human in order to build what is now the most powerful nation on earth. That is not what slavery was, nor how it worked, at the time when Africans sold other Africans to Europeans.

In fact, historical evidence tells us that there were African kings and queens who were vehemently opposed to European slavery. While Gates references some Africans who owned slaves, he fails to add that the European version of slavery was seen as controversial by many others who went to lengths to stop its progress.

Queen Nzinga of Angola was famous for having devoted her life – in the 1600s – to fighting the enslavement of her people by the Portuguese. In 1624, Nzinga declared that any African slave or free person reaching her land would be free and called her land "Free Country." She was absolutely determined not to allow the Portuguese to use her people as slaves.

In the 1500s, that is one hundred years before Nzinga, Kongo's King Afonso – who actually presided over a land in which slavery, in its more traditional form, was practiced yet believed that slavery should be subject to the laws of his own land and not those of Europeans – asked Portugal's King Joao to put an end to the illegal enslavement and selling of people.

In 1524, King Afonso wrote several letters complaining about the role that the Portuguese were playing in the growing slave trade and the way in which they were going about enslaving African people. He was said to have written:

"Each day the traders are kidnapping our people - children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves."


Where are these people in Gates' argument?

If Gates is going to present a supposedly factual account of African involvement in slavery, he must address all sides.

By not giving a full and clear picture of what slavery was to Africans in those days, Gates is simply playing in to people's heightened sensitivities over the word; a word for which very few have any reference or context apart from how it occurred in America. It then becomes easy for people to say, 'Oh, well, Africans enslaved other Africans so why is it a problem that America did it too?'

Gates also does the reparations discussion a serious disservice by reducing it to a "blame game." The fact that African slaves built America for free is not about blaming anyone, it's about reality. America as a country, its institutions and many many individuals and families profited massively from slavery, while the Africans who did the work got nothing. Literally nothing. In fact, they had what they had in the first place taken away. This is what needs to still be addressed.

Wondering whether or not to "blame" African slave owners as well does not actually take away from that reality. It just simply provides a justification for America not to take responsibility. One could even argue, contrary to Gates' argument, that the Africans who sold their slaves did themselves a disservice, because Africa lost so many of its best and strongest people to the Transatlantic slave trade.

For me, I'm of the same view as President Barack Obama on reparations: I am not clear on exactly how it would work.

What I am clear about, though, is the supposed complexity that Gates thinks he is revealing to us is nothing but a smokescreen.

Did America enslave Africans for many hundreds of years? Yes. Did they profit from it? Yes. Did they repay those they enslaved? No. Professor Gates: where is the complexity in that?

Lola Adesioye is a British socio-political writer. She writes regular commentary for The Guardian and The Huffington Post and is regularly featured on TV and radio in the UK and United States giving her perspectives on current affairs. Read more of her work at www.lolacreative.com.