You really need to read more history. Africans were selling slaves for thousands of years. Why do you think several leaders of African nations apologized for their role in the slave trade?
Slavery in on the Continent was much different from the slave society white Europeans built in North and South Americas. The nations apologized because their ancestors did not know the hellscape they were sending the captured into.
Since you did the white thing and claimed I need to “read more history” (whiteness claims expertise over Blackness, even when it has none), here are the two concepts of social death and slavery as written by Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death. The first, he argues, is an “intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside—the domestic enemy.” He specifically mentions the Ashanti people as understanding this mode of slavery, noting that the tribe “referred to slaves as people of a foreign country. Indeed, adonke, the general term for slave in Ashanti, was the same term for all foreign northerners…” Within this complex were methods of manumission, such as gift exchange in the Mbanza Manteke and Kerebe cultures, or intermarriage between the enslaved and freed in the Sena, or adoption in some Igbo-speaking culture such as the Aboh.
The second form of slavery was of “extrusive representation.” Patterson defines that as the slave being “an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior.” This fits more into the mold of slavery that Africans were kidnapped into within the Western hemisphere, with no legal protections and a matrilineal, perpetual, subterranean place in the socioeconomic order.
As typical of lazy, racist arguments that make moral equivalencies between slavery in Africa and slavery in the Americas, it leaves out the details that distinguishes both. The many African tribes, for thousands of years, were societies with slavery, filled with complex rules that ordered the behavior of the slave and yet provided modes of manumission; they were brutal, yes, but with mercy. White settlers, however, created a slave society, one where the entire civilization would fall apart if you took out enforced bondage and labor. Your argument is lazy and you yourself need to do more reading of historians of slavery such as David Biron Davis, James McPherson, Orlando Patterson, Edmund Morgan, Edward Baptist, and Milton Meltzer. Your argument is racist because not simply because you came into a Black space (Allison’s comments section) to make a false racial quibble that is ancillary to her story, but because you are also trying to flatten the lived Black experience to make you, a white man, more comfortable with his forefather’s horrible history. Truly trollish behavior.
As for kidnapping, nope. Going into the continent was hard for Europeans, and dangerous because of their susceptibility to malaria. It was a whole lot easier to just sail into a port and buy slaves from the local slave merchants.
Merriam-Webster defines kidnapping as:
to seize and detain or carry away by unlawful force or fraud and often with a demand for ransom.
The Europeans fit that bill.