It takes a village to raise a child. That much is known and widely agreed upon. The nature of that village, however, is ever devolving. The traditional village consisted of grandmothers and grandfathers, aunties and uncles, cousins upon cousins, brothers upon sisters—fictive and kin. And those who bore the great...

In the historical accounts of some European men and white American men about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, “their idea of ‘African complicity’ is more myth than a reality,” I say. It claims: Africans captured other Africans and sold them to European ships. The theory is misleading but we know...