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The transatlantic slave trade had a wide-ranging impact on the communities from which the enslaved Africans were drawn, especially the peoples along the Atlantic seaboard, from modern Senegal to modern Angola, and the immediate hinterland. As the trade developed in volume and intensity, it tended to spread further inland. However, it was not only those African communities that participated directly in the trade, either as purveyors or victims, who were affected, but also the whole of Western Africa and, indeed, the whole continent. Historians have debated, and continue to debate, whether the trade had any positive demographic, economic, political or social impact on the region under review. This essay argues that the impact on the region as a whole was quite negative, though in the short term individual groups, and more particularly rulers, might have received some small material advantage from the trade. The scale of human death and suffering was such that the traffic must be regarded as the African Holocaust or Maafa. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
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Abstract
The transatlantic slave trade had a wide-ranging impact on the communities from which the enslaved Africans were drawn, especially the peoples along the Atlantic seaboard, from modern Senegal to modern Angola, and the immediate hinterland. As the trade developed in volume and intensity, it tended to spread further inland. However, it was not only those African communities that participated directly in the trade, either as purveyors or victims, who were affected, but also the whole of Western Africa and, indeed, the whole continent. Historians have debated, and continue to debate, whether the trade had any positive demographic, economic, political or social impact on the region under review. This essay argues that the impact on the region as a whole was quite negative, though in the short term individual groups, and more particularly rulers, might have received some small material advantage from the trade. The scale of human death and suffering was such that the traffic must be regarded as the African Holocaust or Maafa.
The impact of the Atlantic slave trade has been one of the most controversial issues in relation to the European connection with Western Africa. The debate is perhaps best represented by the views of two of the most well-known scholars on the subject. In 1969, British historian J.D. Fage expressed the view that the slave trade was "big business", contributing substantially to the economies of West Africa.1 On the other hand, in 1965, Ghanaian historian Adu Boahen asserted that "the slave trade did not confer benefits of any kind on West Africa", and that, "on the contrary, it was, to use the words of one historian of the 1890s, 'an unmitigated misery - a crime unredeemed by one extenuating circumstance' ".2 Both Fage and Boahen are now dead, but the debate lives on. To some extent, the divide on this issue has ethnic or racial overtones. While some white scholars claim to discern some marginal benefits to Africa from the trade, it is extremely difficult to find any black scholar who agrees with them.
The trade itself lasted for over three hundred years. It is not generally known that it increased substantially in volume after the British abolition in 1807. Average annual figures for the eighteenth century are 100,000, and, for the period 1800 to 1850, about 135,000, with the highest point being reached between 1815 and 1840. The geographical reach of the trade in Western Africa was very wide. It spanned basically the 3,000-mile stretch of coast from modern Senegal to modern Angola, though it also compassed peripherally other areas further to the north and south. In the last phase, it reached as far as modern Mozambique on the East African coast. Within Western Africa it also penetrated far inland, progressively embracing, and in some instances engulfing, areas and ethnic groups in the heart of modern Ghana, Nigeria, Kongo and Angola. By the late eighteenth century, captives were coming from the northern Ghanaian territories of Asante and, occasionally, farther north, among the Mossi and Dagomba peoples. Within Nigeria, its penetration was even deeper, embracing such middle and northern areas as Nupe, Ilorin, Kano and Bauchi. For instance, Muslim captives, brought to Brazil from Northern Nigeria in the nineteenth century, constituted a visible and sometimes well-organized resistance group in Bahia and elsewhere. They were behind the aborted revolt in that province in 1835, which aimed to set up a Muslim theocratic state.
In terms of the numbers of persons who became victims of the Atlantic trade, the matter is more one of "guesstimates" rather than "estimates", regardless of the so-called scientific approach to this subject by a number of excellent scholars. In 1969, Philip Curtin attempted the first comprehensive estimate of those who actually made the traverse across the Atlantic to the Americas and came up with a figure of just under ten million.3 However, a number of scholars have challenged this figure, claiming that it is far too low. Careful research by scholars such as Joseph Inikori has shown that, in numerous instances, Curtin grossly underestimated the number of captives that left Africa from various destinations. Inikori has settled for a figure of roughly fifteen million involuntary migrants from Africa to the Americas. In 1965, Boahen suggested the large figure of 30 to 40 million "souls lost to Africa", but in his revised edition of the same work in 1986 he gave a much more modest figure of 15.4 million, based, as he stated, on "the latest studies" on the subject. However, he emphasized that this latter figure excluded Africans who died in the raids and on the march to the coast.4 While none of the figures mentioned above can be verified, it is possible to estimate the demographic impact on Africa, or various parts of Africa, in different ways.
One of these ways is the overall demographic growth within the continent during the era of the Atlantic trade. Some consensus is emerging that Africa did not witness any significant growth in its population during the period under review. Indeed, some scholars argue that the population remained stagnant, while a few believe that it actually declined. According to one estimate, the continent's population remained stagnant at roughly 100 million from 1650 to 1850. During the same period, Europe's population increased from 103 million to 274 million; Asia's population increased from 257 million to 656 million.5 The dynamic population growth in the case of Asia was particularly astonishing, given the many natural and human disasters that continually visited that continent. A similar observation might be made in respect of Europe, where all the main societies were engulfed in military conflict for several hundred years, including the many religious wars during the late medieval period and the French revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholars have argued that the slave trade was the major variable in population growth between Africa and the two other continents mentioned above.
A second major way in which the demographic (and other) impacts of the slave trade could be discerned is in relation to the many "empty spaces" or denuded enclaves that existed in various parts of Western Africa during and after the slave trade. Many of these once fertile areas were laid bare of their populations, either through military devastation with a view to obtaining captives for the Atlantic trade, or through persons fleeing them for less fertile, though more secure, zones. Examples can be drawn from various parts of Kongo, Angola, Sierra Leone and the 'great empty belt' in Ghana, Togo, Benin (pre-colonial Dahomey), and Nigeria.6
Fage has argued that the trade might have served to relieve population pressures on West Africa, and in this sense could have been a boon.7 This is an interesting but rather convoluted argument. In the first place, no scholar has ever demonstrated that any part of Western Africa ever suffered from major population problems, at least not during the era of the slave trade. Second, Africans had traditionally migrated to other parts of the continent for a variety of reasons, so that any population pressures could have been relieved by such migration. It must be emphasized that internal migration has been one of the main themes in African history from early times up to the present day. Large areas of the continent had, and still have, very low population densities. There was therefore no reason why such migration would not have continued during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the period of the Atlantic slave trade, if population pressures had become too great in any given region. Moreover, population pressure has historically been an important stimulant to the development of science and technology in order to resolve that problem in human society.
Fage noted that there was no decrease in the medical knowledge or the disease environment in West Africa during the era of the slave trade, suggesting that, in medical terms, the region did not suffer any notable demographic setback as a result of the trade.8 However, this statement must be assessed in the context of the fact that, during this same period, Europe's medical knowledge increased appreciably (though not nearly as much as in more recent times). Static medical knowledge, if that indeed was Western Africa's experience, must have been due to a number of specific factors which Fage did not care to mention, but which must have had a very adverse effect on the region's population growth in comparison with that of Europe. In fact, it must have been nothing short of a disaster for West Africa to have remained static in its medical knowledge for over three hundred years. Overall, Fage's arguments read like a regurgitation of that of Thomas Malthus, who viewed wars, diseases, famines, natural disasters and other such circumstances as having positive effects on human society by constraining population growth and ensuring the survival of the fittest members of the society.9 The Malthusian view, however, has never been the preferred or rational solution to the demographic challenges facing European or other countries.
Fage's argument that the slave trade was big business, noted above, revolves around the view that it created an economic revolution in the trade of West Africa similar to that created years earlier by the Western Sudanic commodity trade across the Sahara. He cites certain figures, of doubtful computation, about the volume of the Atlantic trade. In a sense, one could agree with Fage that, if viewed in structural terms, the trade created, or led to, an economic revolution. Many small fishing and trading communities along the coast, in time, became important centres in respect of the trade. Among these were Gorée in modern Senegal; Ouidah (Whydah) in modern Benin (colonial Dahomey); Accra and Koromantin in modern Ghana; the city-states in the Bights of Benin and Biafra in modern Nigeria; and Luanda and Benguela in modern Angola. European agents, called factors, resided in these and other ports, plying their wares in return for human cargoes, a phenomenon that did not exist on the coast before the birth of the Atlantic slave trade. As Davidson has shown in his book Black Mother, the trade also involved a fairly complex form of administration, negotiations and rules of conduct.10 No doubt, over time this led to more sophisticated internal and external trading networks and the development of trust systems in which goods would be given on credit against the delivery of human cargoes.
However, the more outstanding feature of the trade is that it led to a considerably distorted economic system within Western Africa. Communities that had traded a host of other commodities now became increasingly dedicated to the trade in human beings. Villages that before had lived in peaceful dialogue with each other were now often caught up in the vortex of the slave trade. Wars fought to enlarge empires now had, at least as a major objective, the acquisition of prisoners to be sold into Atlantic slavery. Walter Rodney, the well-known Guyanese historian, has argued that, while it would be impossible to show that the wars of the late seventeenth century and onwards were directly motivated by the desire to obtain captives for the trade, it is clear that all other motives were subsumed under that objective.11 No scholar challenges the view that the wars of the period under review became more large-scale and lethal, sometimes made so by the introduction of new military technology in the form of guns. Historians continue to debate the importance of such weaponry in the overall development of a number of African kingdoms, such as Asante, Dahomey and Ndongo, and the wider role of the slave trade in the emergence of several other states. Some scholars are unequivocal in their view that the trade, and the wider European connection, proved critical to the emergence of the coastal states, with one or two notable exceptions such as Benin (in modern Nigeria) and Kongo. Others are ambivalent on this matter, while still others hold the view that the rise of the new states and empires could be explained without reference to the Atlantic trade. J.F.A. Ajayi, for instance, argues that the rise and development of the powerful Yoruba empire of Oyo in Southern Nigeria, between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, could be explained more adequately by reference to its northern (trans-Saharan) than its southern (Atlantic) connections. He argues that it was only in the nineteenth century, with the collapse of that empire and the emergence of new ones, that the southern connection became critical to Yoruba state development.
The fact is that the growing military power of the authoritarian state bolstered its quest for captives, and sometimes neighbouring or peripheral conquest areas were reserved as perennial or periodic slave-raiding grounds. The outlying areas of such states as Kongo, Ndongo, Asante and Dahomey provide such examples. Historians have also cited several examples of the legal systems being manipulated to sell criminals overseas. Kongo was one of many states that had excessively mild punishments before the Portuguese arrived there. Basil Davidson tells us that Affonso, the Mani-Kongo, or emperor, once asked one of his Portuguese advisers: "What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?"12 However, as a result of the Portuguese connection and the slave trade, the Kongolese laws became increasingly harsher, often reflecting those in Portugal at the time. This was true also of several small polities in the Gambia, as the slaver Francis Moore noted in the early seventeenth century.13
The debate about the reasons for state development is interesting, but whichever side one takes on this matter, it does not really deal with the most critical issues relating to the slave trade. Much of the argument about state development is based on the view that the existence of large states or empires constitutes an index of human development, or, to put it more crudely, the evolution of human societies from "barbarism to civilization". Thus, small, decentralized polities, which formed a large part of the African landscape during the period under discussion, are often viewed as evidence of their peoples' backwardness or lack of political sophistication. In reality, a number of African and other small polities (including those of the Greek city-states many years ago and of the modern-day Caribbean) displayed and still display high levels of political, economic and cultural sophistication. An alternative view of large empires is that they are almost invariably forged from the crucible of violence that leaves whole populations dead, dislocated or oppressed in their wake. Thus, the emergence of large states is not necessarily solid evidence of the level of social or economic development of the people who live in them; nor do they constitute a precondition of human progress or social happiness. In the specific context of Western Africa, we can safely assert that, while the creation of larger states and empires enlarged the ruling classes' control over political, economic and social resources, during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, the average African did not benefit from such formations at all.
Large states emerged at the expense of the well-being of their conquered peoples, many of whom were destroyed or sold wantonly into foreign captivity. Whatever we say about state development in Western Africa during the period under discussion, we cannot escape the fact that it was the principal states (with one or two exceptions) that sold the vast majority of persons into Atlantic slavery. While most of the captives came from among the newly conquered populations, or from communities that were targeted specifically as raiding grounds for captives, it was not unusual for rulers to raid their own citizens to acquire captives when they thought that the exigencies of the trade merited it.14 According to the Italian slaver, Theophilus Conneau (Theodore Canot), in other instances, though with much less frequency, people sold members of their family to resolve problems or simply for material gain.15 We therefore find a situation, in many African societies, where the poor and powerless, socially displaced persons, and others who might have been suffering from physical or mental illnesses became prey to the slave traders.16 Thus, the traditional social norms that would have led to these persons being considered as objects of care and concern within the community were often vitiated, all in the interest of obtaining material gain from the trade. But there was perhaps an even more insidious aspect to the trade. Its main victims were the healthy, robust, adult population, roughly between the ages of fifteen and thirty years of age. In any society, these constitute the most promising members of the human collective. They are usually the most adventurous, the most inquisitive, and the next generation of leaders, scientists, and nation builders. Thus, the trade constituted, in the words of one scholar, a "Darwinian perversion", in that it was the weakest, not the strongest, who were more likely to escape being sold as captives into the Atlantic trade.
While there were several instances in Upper Guinea and Angola in which Europeans infiltrated the interior in order to obtain captives for the trade, a practice confined largely to the early phase of slaving, there can be no doubt that it was the connivance and collaboration of various African rulers with the European slavers that explain the large-scale development of the trade. Without these rulers, the trade would have been restricted largely to kidnapping activities along the coast, and it would certainly not have been large enough to meet the demands for servile labour in the Americas. Scholars are unanimous on the point that neither the technological level nor the medical knowledge of the Europeans would have permitted them to engage the large empires of Western Africa in military dialogue on any sustained basis. It was only from the late eighteenth and especially the late nineteenth century, with the great advance in European technology on various fronts and some scientific gains in combating the most dreaded African diseases (especially smallpox and malaria), that the European advance into the interior of Africa became a possibility and, indeed, an actuality.
The trade was characterized by a good deal of chicanery on both sides, though John Newton, an enslaver turned reformer, accused the Europeans of being the principals behind it. According to him, "The natives are cheated, in the number, weight, measure, or quality of what they purchase, in every possible way: and, by habit and emulation, a marvellous dexterity is acquired in these practices. And thus the natives in their turn, in proportion to their commerce with the Europeans, and (I am sorry to add) particularly the English, become jealous, insidious, and revengeful." He went on to add that, "with few exceptions, the English and the Africans, reciprocally, consider each other as consummate villains".17
The Europeans introduced a large number of commodities into Africa, some of them of questionable utility. As noted, while guns had an important bearing on warfare, they also expanded the capacity of rulers to make war and obtain captives for the Atlantic trade. The possibility of utilizing them for hunting wild animals was always present, but no evidence has emerged so far that they were used extensively for this purpose until, perhaps, the late nineteenth century. In any event, most Africans at the time would have been much too poor to purchase these weapons, without even taking into account that the rulers made every attempt to appropriate guns for their own uses. European traders could guarantee that these rulers would buy any number of guns that were unloaded on the African coast. In the nineteenth century, and especially after the Napoleonic Wars, the Europeans found themselves with a great surplus of guns, some of which became quickly outmoded due to the rapid development of European gun technology in the nineteenth century. African armies thus became more fully equipped with such weapons, and a number of them also seem to have fallen into the hands of ordinary Africans in exchange for palm oil and other commodities that gradually replaced the slave trade.
Apart from guns, iron bars were very important. We must point out that a lot of the iron that European traders brought to Africa was inferior to what the locals manufactured. However, critical shortages of iron ore in certain parts of the region, or sometimes the lack of charcoal for the forges, made iron very expensive. In the relatively few areas of Western Africa where iron smitheries thrived, the local populations often came to view the blacksmiths as specially gifted craftsmen, and in some instances they viewed them almost as mystical beings.18
The range of trade goods that the Europeans brought to the region, in exchange for captives, also included copper bracelets (called "manillas"), copper wire, pots and other metal utensils, cloth (in the early days obtained from India), beads, mirrors, scissors, cowrie shells, tobacco, and alcohol. The unequal exchange that characterized transactions is emphasized in the following example, in which a "prime" enslaved man was typically exchanged in the Sherbo River area (located in modern Sierra Leone) in 1755 for four guns, two kegs of powder, one piece of blue bast (coarse cotton material), one kettle, two brass pans, one dozen knives, two basins, two iron bars, one head of beads, fifty flints, and one silk handkerchief.19 Many of these goods had limited durability. While metal goods were the most durable, they tended to displace local ceramic ware. More importantly, the European goods tended to retard the African initiative to produce local substitutes. This was notably the case with the cloth industry, which had reached a high level of technical development by the time that the slave trade became rampant. It is true that, in certain parts of the interior, the indigenous cloth industry continued to hold its own against the foreign cloths, the most outstanding examples being the industry in Kano (Northern Nigeria) and the kente cloth of Ghana. But these were exceptions. The African textile industry remained at basically the same technological level throughout the era of the slave trade. Though from the early nineteenth century European missions began to introduce somewhat more advanced spindles, these were too few and far between to affect the traditional patterns of textile manufacture appreciably. In fact, it was not until late in the colonial era, during the twentieth century, that Western African cloth making began to improve significantly both technically and technologically, employing European methods.
Alcohol had a distinctly baneful effect on Western African societies. This commodity was used to encourage Africans to go out and obtain captives.20 European traders commonly gave alcohol to African rulers as part of a package of "gifts" that they had to offer to these rulers before trading negotiations began. Alcohol became so common and in such demand that Africans often used it as a form of commodity currency (that is, a product that could be used as a medium of exchange similar to cowries or coins). The import and consumption of liquor became such a major problem in Southern Nigeria that, during the early colonial period, the British government imposed heavy taxes on it, and also adopted other measures to control its consumption.21
Some scholars argue that the slave trade introduced Africa to a number of food items from the Americas such as cassava (manioc), maize (Indian corn) and sweet potatoes. Other writers contend that the transfer of these and other crops identified above had nothing to do specifically with the slave trade and would have been transferred by regular contact and trade in other commodity items. They point to the fact that the white potato (called English potato and Irish potato in the Caribbean), corn and sunflower, to name a few food crops, were transferred to Europe by the Colombian exchange rather than by any special circumstance or niche trade. Moreover, they note that the crops transferred to West Africa for a long time supplemented, rather than displaced, African staples in the diet of the coastal and hinterland peoples, and it was only in the colonial period that cassava and corn, in some instances, displaced yam as the staple crop in the forest regions. The trade, therefore, did not create any staple or agricultural revolution in the region.
We have spoken so far of the trade in human beings, but a few writers are unhappy with the use of this term to explain the exchange of human beings for material goods or money. There is no doubt that both the European and the African merchants saw the exchange as a legitimate form of trade, at least until the nineteenth century. Of course, such was not always the case. The Englishman Richard Jobson, on his visit to West Africa between 1620 and 1621, took apparent delight in pointing out to some African traders that his countrymen "were a people who did not deale [sic] in any such commodity, neither did wee [sic] buy or sell one another or any that had our owne shaapes".22 This was, of course, not altogether accurate. In the 1560s, his predecessor, John Hawkins (in association with Queen Elizabeth I1 who helped to finance his second voyage to Africa and the Americas) had traded in such human cargoes with Spanish America.23 But Jobson was making both a practical and a philosophical point. The English had not yet developed plantation colonies in the Americas, and therefore were not among the main purveyors of the trade. Jobson, himself, appears to have been questioning the ethical principles, or lack thereof, that might have caused people to conduct a trade in their own kind. However, his views soon became anachronistic, for within only three decades of his declaration, his countrymen had begun to trade in humans in earnest, and by the end of the century they were to become the principal slave traders.
A growing number of black scholars insist that the events that took place should properly be called Maafa, that is, "Holocaust", rather than "Trade". Even if we retain the term "trade", we need to understand that commercial transactions normally benefit, or have the possibility of benefiting, all communities engaging in them, even if these exchanges prove to be unequal in some ways. However, the slave trade was unique in that it depended first and foremost upon robbery and rapine in order to obtain the human cargoes for sale. Thus, the supposed benefit to a given African community was at the direct expense of another one. It exemplifies the adage that one man's meat is another man's poison, rather than the other adage that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander too. The victims of this would-be trade often had to suffer their homes being destroyed, their households ravaged, their persons violated, their crops destroyed, their ancestral hearths desecrated, and their loved ones killed, maimed or taken away into captivity, mangled and shackled.
This leads us to consider in greater detail the impact of the slave trade on the victims and the larger community from which they were taken. The slave trade involved violence at several levels: Europeans against Africans, one African state against another, African rulers against their own citizens and so on. Apart from the general dehumanization of the individual by reducing him or her to a saleable or transferrable commodity, there were other and more powerful forms of dehumanization that the trade entailed, not only on the middle passage and the European plantations in the Americas, but also the African continent itself. As hinted above, victims of the traffic were commonly shackled together and led from the interior to the coast. As the trade penetrated more deeply into the hinterland, the journey became correspondingly more hazardous and entailed untold suffering. Individuals were often beaten along the route to make them comply with instructions or to make them summon the last ounce of their strength (so to speak) in order to make it to the destination at the coast. Persons who died along the route, or were simply unable to complete the journey, would be cut off from the rest of the shackled group, the slavers not bothering to unshackle them, but rather chopping off their heads or their limbs. Children, like adults, suffered the same fate. Poor nutrition, inclement weather conditions or simply the calvary of the route might reduce them to mere skeletons, as F.W.F. Owen, a British naval captain, graphically noted in respect of some captives brought into the Portuguese city of Benguela:
![View Image - Coffle en route to the coast(David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries [London: Murray, 1865])](https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/ORIG/10/4lG8C?_a=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&_s=BCjVQVWS%2BDrrSwwV5fFi3%2B5W9xo%3D "View Image - Coffle en route to the coast(David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries [London: Murray, 1865])")
Coffle en route to the coast(David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries [London: Murray, 1865])
We had here an opportunity of seeing bond-slaves of both sexes chained together in pairs. About one hundred of these unhappy beings had just arrived from a great distance in the interior; many were skeletons labouring under every misery that want and fatigue could produce. In some, the fetters had by their constant action worn through the lacerated flesh to the bare bones, the ulcerated wound having become the resort of myriads of flies, which had deposited their eggs in the gangrenous cavities.24
Once at the coast, the process of dehumanization continued. The "cargo" or "merchandise", as the enslaved persons were termed, had to be secured until sale and transportation overseas. They were herded into skeletal quarters known as barracoons. One writer described these structures as sheds comprising heavy piles, fastened together with bamboos and thatched with palm fronds. They were fitted with large iron collars about two feet from each other, into each of which a captive was padlocked. In some instances, where the captives were recalcitrant, they were further heavily shackled in groups of three to each other, and they might sometimes receive a brutal beating to make them compliant. The writer concludes by stating that "The walls of the barracoon extend from four to six feet high, and between them and the roof, is an opening about four feet, for the circulation of air. The floor is planked, not from any regard for the comfort of the slaves, but because a small insect [the chigger], being in the soil, might deteriorate the merchandise by causing a cutaneous disease."25 Barracoons offered little shelter from wind and rain and this, along with other factors, often led to a serious deterioration in the health of the captives.
Alternative, but not necessarily better, accommodation might be found in one of the many forts that were scattered along the coast, which the Europeans built not only for security reasons but in order to hold the captives until a ship should arrive. Among the largest and most well-known forts were those at Gorée (in modern Senegal), Elmina and Cape Coast on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), and Luanda and Benguela (in modern Angola). Elmina was thought to be capable of housing as many as a thousand captives cramped into its subterranean quarters. While this might be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the forts were often overstocked, and the captives suffered badly from polluted air. Many of them contracted a host of diseases, including ophthalmia, because of the poor lighting in these dungeons.
At the time of sale by the African to a European buyer, the process of human degradation was taken a step, or perhaps several steps, further. The captives were exposed naked, and the European buyer inspected them thoroughly, their eyes, ears, mouths, legs, rectum, genitalia and so on. One eye-witness on the African coast commented that they were examined more minutely than he had observed in any cattle market in Europe.26 Dr George Pinckard, a British surgeon, made a similar remark about a group he had seen examined in Guyana in 1796. He referred to what was taking place as the "sad traffic of human cattle" and noted further that the sale of newly arrived enslaved persons in that country was a family affair. Women turned out in their most gaudy attire to view and participate in the sale. Parents sometimes asked their children to choose one of the persons being auctioned.27
![View Image - Gorée island and citadel (Le Monde Illustré 35 [1874]: 309)](https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/ORIG/2/4lG8C?_a=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&_s=fdGSIYgmfYLwwzxoAEme9ugi9y8%3D "View Image - Gorée island and citadel (Le Monde Illustré 35 [1874]: 309)")
Once examined, and considered fit for purchase, the haggling then proceeded either for a "piece of India" (that is, a prime male between fifteen and thirty years and without any noticeable physical defects) or for others who fell short of that mark. Following purchase, their new enslavers often branded them, just as one would brand animals on a ranch or in a stockyard. Whenever a slave ship became available, they would be placed on it as naked as they were born and huddled in the holds of the slaving vessel if they were males, or sometimes on deck if they were females.
We may never be able to grasp the full psychological impact of the degradation that these human beings experienced on the African continent and what they would experience later on the middle passage and the plantations. However, we have the testimony of at least one victim on record - the Igbo, Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa), who, along with his sister, was wrested from friends and family and sold into Atlantic slavery, though not to the same purchaser. Let us listen to him: "I was in a state of distraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually and for several days I did not eat anything but what they forced into my mouth."28 Beautiful Princess Belia was sold by her father because she had allegedly disgraced her family by refusing to marry a person whom he had chosen for her. She did not have a gun, so she threatened "to knock her brains out against the rocks" in a fatal bid to retrieve her freedom, one way or the other. In this instance, her brother was able redeem her, but such was not always the case.29 In yet another incident, where an entire family, comprising a man, his wife, his sister and three children, were sold, the father attempted to exact revenge by burning down the barracoon in which he was lodged. He failed on that occasion and on another one when he attempted to light a powder keg and blow up the entire establishment. Eventually, his enslavers executed him.30 David Birmingham writes that the collective memory of the Mbundu peoples of modern Angola about the trade is that "The white men . . . brought trouble; they spat fire from their guns and captured the king's salt pans. The tradition concludes with the lament that from that time until the present day the whites brought nothing but wars and miseries."31
For some communities, the evil that the presence of the European slave traders represented was much more than physical; it was metaphysical or even spiritual. The slaver Conneau was quite candid about this when he wrote that the inhabitants of a village in Upper Guinea, from which he had purchased a group of captives, fled the next day at the sight of the "dreaded white man". The inhabitants of a neighbouring village not only fled to the last person, but also left their pots on the fire. Conneau continued to fish in troubled waters and observed with serene indifference:
As I took my usual walk every morning I found the children ran with great fright at my appearance. Since the seizure of the night before, all under the yoke of captivity on seeing me, thought their time had come, and I am certain the poor part of the population looked on me as their Satan. Once or twice I detected women pick up a handful of earth and throw it toward me, exclaiming a short sentence. This was done to drive the evil spirit from them.32
We do not know whether Conneau sought spiritual redemption later on, as a few slavers did, and as some persons are now doing on behalf of their ancestors. What we know is that many contemporary religious groups and persons, among them Christians, Muslims and African priests, participated in the trade and justified their actions on religious grounds (though many also criticized it). Columbus's statement to Queen Isabella in the early sixteenth century that he could send 4,000 Amerindian captives to Spain yearly, "in the name of the Holy Trinity", for the recapture of Jerusalem from the Muslims, found its parallel several years later in the Portuguese placing priests in Kongo and Angola to baptize the captives before their embarkation. Similarly, Muslim jihadists, especially in nineteenth-century Northern Nigeria, dispatched a number of captives to the coast for onward sale into the Americas. In the case of the African priests, the outstanding example was the AroChukwu priesthood among the Igbo of Southern Nigeria. They declared that the Oracle Chukwu ate the captives that were offered to him in settlement of disputes, who were to become the main purveyors of the trade in Igboland by the early nineteenth century. The line between the sacred and the sacrilegious had become blurred. Thus religion, like politics and economics, fell casualty to the demands of the slave trade. Society, or many aspects of it, had become infernal in pursuit of the god of mammon.
At various points in time, several African rulers, including those of the Kongo empire and the kingdom of Dahomey, sought to resist the selling of their people into slavery.33 This is what Basil Davidson had to say, on this score, about early Kongolese relations with the Portuguese:
What he [Affonso, the emperor or Mani-Kongo] wanted for the Congo was aid in the form of priests, schoolteachers, carpenters, boatbuilders and the like: the skills and education that could really give him and his people an opening to the new world of Europe. But what these newcomers wanted for themselves, increasingly and soon exclusively, was slaves. They saw no profit in sending "technical aid". Little or none was ever sent.34
Affonso, who by this time had converted to Catholicism (and who now often referred to his Portuguese counterpart as his brother), later asked for ships and an end to the slave trade. However, the Portuguese authorities in Lisbon refused to respond positively to his wishes, and their merchants, operating from their new base in Sao Tomé, proceeded to lay waste to the adjacent coast and interior in search of captives. Pushed to the edge of the abyss, in a final but futile attempt to extricate his people from the fatal embrace of the trade, Affonso wrote an even more poignant letter to his counterpart in Europe:
We cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the above-mentioned merchants daily seize our subjects, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives. . . . Thieves and men of evil conscience take them because they wish to possess the things and wares of this Kingdom. . . . They grab them and cause them to be sold: and so great, Sir, is their corruption and licentiousness that our country is being utterly depopulated. . . .[W]e need ... no other than priests and people to teach in schools, and no other goods but wine and flour for the holy sacraments: that is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter, commanding your factors that they should send here neither merchants nor wares, because it is our will that in these kingdoms [of Kongo] there should not be any trade in slaves nor market for slaves.35
As before, these pleas fell on deaf ears. Affonso came to the sad realization that those who had once offered their services as his mentors had now become his tormentors. Davidson writes that, within thirty years of the contact between Portugal and the Kongo empire, the slave trade had become "a social plague and a daily source of fear and dispute"; "As the years went by, and slaving grew in volume, the situation in the Congo states began gradually to shift towards a chaos not known before."36
Historians generally argue that the rulers of Dahomey were interested in prosecuting the trade well into the nineteenth century, but Robin Law's essay indicates that King Glele's regime (1818-1858) showed some interest in ending the practice. Individuals and various groups resisted both enslavement and the practice of slaving throughout the period of the Atlantic trade, and a small group in the Gold Coast voiced stronger sentiments for abolition than did the colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century.37
Economic stagnation for those areas caught up in the trammels of the trade, with wider effects on the region as a whole, was a fundamental impact of the slave trade. As noted above, by its very nature the trade was extractive: it involved the extraction of the labour resources from the region. This withdrawal of prime labour from West Africa constituted the withdrawal of an essential part of the productive process, thus upsetting the previous relationship between land and labour - the two most important factors of production. The devastation to crops and settlements, due to the depredations of the slave raiders, exacerbated the situation. For Western Africa as a whole, there were no significant improvements either in agricultural techniques or in the expansion of export agriculture. Indeed, official British policy, from the mid seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, was to promote the slave trade at the expense of export agriculture. A 1751 dispatch from the British Board of Trade to the governor of Cape Coast Castle, ordering him to stop the Fante from growing cotton, is quite lucid on this point:
The introduction of culture and industry amongst the Negroes is contrary to the known established policy of this country, there is no saying where this might stop, ... it might extend to tobacco, sugar, and every other commodity which we now take from our colonies; and thereby the Africans, who now support themselves by wars, would become planters and their slaves be employed in the culture of these articles in Africa, which they are employed in, in America.38
Economic stagnation led to retardation, or underdevelopment and dependency. Rodney explains that "underdevelopment is not the absence of development, because every people have developed in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent. Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of development."39 In the context of Western Africa, it had to do with the comparatively rapid strides that the European countries, especially the slave trading ones, made in industrial, shipbuilding and military technology in comparison with the virtually static state in which Western Africa found itself after some four centuries of direct contact between these two parts of the globe.
By the nineteenth century, and up to the time of the partition, few African rulers viewed the slave trade (both internal and external) as an economic anachronism. In fact, as time passed, many rulers had become increasingly dependent on the trade for the external commodities that they purchased, including guns that they deemed necessary for the security of their states. In the years immediately after British abolition, the burgeoning slave trade of the United States and of the Luso-Brazilians, in particular, made many African rulers rest comfortably in the view that a new era in slave trading had dawned. The main reasons for the termination of the external trade were a combination of gradually atrophying demand for enslaved persons for the external market, growing demand for commodity products and British unilateral naval activity to put down the trade at the African end.
In time, of course, the commodity trade that displaced the slave trade led to a much larger and diversified expansion of the trade between Europe and the region, and also to a much wider distribution of the profits deriving from that trade. But it also led to considerable dislocation in a number of Western African kingdoms that now sought to establish control over the natural or man-made sources of that trade, chiefly palm oil, with the notable exception of Senegal where the groundnut (peanut) trade flourished. The polities that felt these upheavals included Dahomey, Asante, Fante and the Delta states. The Europeans, largely the British and the French, intervened in the politics of these states to ensure compliance by their rulers with the wishes of the expatriates, and promote the economic and wider interests of the given European power.
It is important to point out here that the British push for international abolition of the slave trade after 1815 had more to do with pragmatism than principle, with their own economic self-interests than humanitarianism or altruism. This can be illustrated by reference to a number of examples. With respect to British investments in the sugar trade with the slave colonies of Brazil and Cuba, Eric Williams has done so admirably in his book, Capitalism and Slavery.40 At the African end, the British used part of their navy, the so-called Preventive Squadron, to put down the slave trade, ensconce themselves in the commodity trade and prevent the development of the commodity trade of their rivals. Perhaps the episode that is most illustrative - though not generally known - of British attitude towards abolition is the treaty that the government, through its representative, signed with Radama, the king of Imerina (recognized by the British as "King of Madagascar", a large island off the east coast of Africa). This treaty, which was later ratified in Westminster, sought to punish any Merina citizen who should be convicted of participating in the external trade by sentencing that individual to internal slavery!41 Another fact that is little known is that the abolition of the external slave trade led to considerable expansion of the regime of slavery in Africa itself to produce the very commodities that were to replace the external trade! While figures advanced by contemporary and modern scholars about the size of the enslaved population at the time of the European partition of the continent might be more speculative than scientific, it is widely agreed that the numbers grew significantly during the so-called period of abolition. Slaving had become a way of life to many Africans, with violence as its corollary.
The extreme and enduring bitterness that the slave trade left among various communities in Western Africa is best illustrated by the conduct of a seventy-seven-year-old ruler of one of the small states in Cape Mount, modern Liberia. According to Conneau, when he saw the "infuriated King", the latter was holding a bleeding knife and, with his foot resting on the inert body of a man, he was "addressing the carcass of his enemy". Giving vent to his pent-up anger, he continued to stab the dead man several times, declaring, "this was his bitterest enemy of 20 years' standing. And dealing a fresh blow, he accused him of having violated his daughters, butchered his sons, sold his people, and burnt his towns, dealing a blow at every accusation."42
A final point on this score is that many scholars argue, while slavery in Africa never reached the levels of social degradation associated with plantation slavery in the Americas, in a number of instances it became much harsher, especially in respect of those persons used as plantation hands in such places as Dahomey and the Sokoto Caliphate. Rodney views the proliferation of coastal slavery and the accompanying social degradation of those held in bondage as resulting partly from the presence of European businesses on these coasts that purchased Africans for a variety of purposes other than sale into transatlantic slavery.43 Davidson quotes a seventeenth-century eyewitness saying that Portuguese residents in Luanda held "a prodigious multitude of Blacks" who "serve as slaves to the whites, some of whom have fifty, some a hundred, two or three hundred, and even to three thousand".44
A growing number of scholars see a clear link between the retardation and dependency that the slave trade created in Western Africa and the European partition of the continent at the end of the nineteenth century. The exponents of this viewpoint hold that the slave trade allowed the Europeans to insinuate themselves increasingly into the political, economic and social lives of the African communities; this weakened Africa's capacity to resist the military onslaught of the Europeans when it finally came. While it would be impossible to trace clearly a linkage between the two events or processes, the argument is persuasive.
This discourse has sought to show how the Atlantic slave trade produced a good deal of haemorrhaging in the African body politic. It played a seminal role in retarding the continent's development, even in those areas that were not directly caught up in the traffic. It destroyed whole families and villagers, forced people to flee into desolate places to preserve life and limb and left a legacy of bitterness among neighbouring communities. It trivialized death and human suffering, or at best relegated it to an economic by-product. For about two centuries, it shuffled the commodity or non-human trade to the sidelines. It drastically and dramatically changed the course of Africa's development, and, in the wider context of the Americas and Europe, it attempted to offer a troubling and troublesome solution to human progress. The discourse does not suggest that all, or nearly all the blame for the trade, should fall on the shoulders of Europeans. As noted above, African rulers mainly, but on some occasions individuals also, participated actively in the trade. However, there is some merit in the view that African societies were caught up in the trammels of a trade that in several instances they sought to counteract, and which eventually overwhelmed them. The example of Kongo, cited above, is outstanding; the same might be said to some extent about the peoples of Dahomey in the early seventeenth century and of a number of decentralized polities in Upper Guinea. However, it is instructive that some contemporary writers blamed the Europeans for much of the horrors of the trade.
One Dutch slave trader commented concerning European relations with Africans: "From us they have learned strife, quarrelling, drunkenness, trickery, theft, unbridled desire for what is not one's own, misdeeds unknown to them before, and the accursed lust for gold."45 Another slave trader, the Englishman John Newton, opined that the vast majority of the wars in Africa would cease if the slave trade should be bought to an end.46 Conneau, an Italian slave trader, was even more forthright, putting the blame squarely on the Europeans and Americans for feeding the trade and the wars. This is what he had to say:
England today sends to Africa her cheap Birmingham muskets and Manchester goods, which are exchanged at Sierra Leone, Accra, and the Gold Coast, for Spanish or Brazilian bills on London. France sends her cheap brandies, her taffeta reds, her Rouen cottons, and her quelque-chose, the United States their leaf tobacco, their one-F powder, their domestic spun cotton goods, their New England rum and Yankee notions, with the same effect or the same purpose. Therefore I say it is our civilized commodities which bring the cause of the wars and the continual, now called inhuman, traffic.47
Conneau actually blamed himself for some of the vicious wars that took place. In his own words: "In this chapter, the public will see that I freely accuse myself of being the cause of these wars." While he declared that he was averse to the "barbarities" associated with the wars, he still continued to purchase enslaved persons resulting from these and other wars as well as kidnappings.48 Finally, in 1844, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, in a cathartic moment, declared: "If all the crimes which the human race has committed from the creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they would not exceed, the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind in connection with this diabolical Slave Trade."49
This lesson in human tragedy cannot be allowed to vanish into forgetfulness or even a distant memory. Those who fail to remember and learn from the lessons of history are likely to repeat their mistakes. Since the destruction that was a part of slave trading occurred in Africa and not in Europe, it is much easier for Europeans than Africans to walk away from it. But it is an historical absurdity to suggest that both Africans and Europeans should be blamed to the same extent for the African Holocaust or Maafa.
Notes
1. J.D. Fage, A History of West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 81.
2. Adu Boahen, Topics in West African History, 2nd ed. (1965; repr., London: Longman, 1986), 109.
3. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 1969), 88.
4. Adu Boahen, Topics in West African History |London: Longman, 1965), 112; ibid., revised edition of same work (1986), 109.
5. Quoted in Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, rev. ed. (1972; repr., Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 97.
6. Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545 to 1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 259; Winston McGowan, "African Resistance to the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa", Slavery and Abolition 11 (1990): 5-29; Alvin Thompson, "Aspects of the Impact of the Slave Trade between Western Africa and the Caribbean", in The African-Caribbean Connection, ed. Alan Gregor Cobley and Alvin Thompson (Bridgetown: Department of History, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and the National Cultural Foundation, 1990), 4; W.B. Morgan and J.C. Pugh, West Africa (London: Methuen, 1969), 26.
7. Fage, History of West Africa, 85-89.
8. Ibid.
9. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798).
10. Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The Years of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961); later published as The African Slave Trade (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
11. Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 256.
12. Davidson, Black Mother, 1961, 132; see also Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 259-60.
13. Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 78; see also Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Log Book or 20 Years' Residence in Africa (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1976), 68; John Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader (London: The Epworth Press, 1962), 108.
14. Mannix and Cowley, Black Cargoes, 78.
15. Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 105, 144-46.
16. Ibid., 71-72, 105.
17. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 106-7.
18. Alvin O. Thompson, Economic Parasitism: European Rule in West Africa 1880-1960 (Bridgetown: Department of History and Philosophy, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, 2006), 32.
19. Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave Dealer (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1930), 46. Elsewhere, the package of goods was sometimes larger (ibid., 45); see Davidson, Black Mother, 95 for a different package of goods.
20. Mannix and Cowley, Black Cargoes, 78; Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 173, 281; Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 101.
21. Simon Heap, "Transport and Liquor in Colonial Nigeria", Journal of Transport History 21, no. 1 (2000): 28-53.
22. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade (1623; repr., London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1968), 112.
23. Mannix and Cowley, Black Cargoes, 21-22.
24. F.W.F. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), 2: 234.
25. Quoted in Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 29-30.
26. Quoted in R. Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 184; see also Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 71.
27. George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies and the Coast of Guiana (London: Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), 2:325-30.
28. Olaudah Equiano, Equiano's Travels: His Autobiography abridged and ed. Paul Edwards. (1789; repr., London: Heinemann, 1967), 17.
29. Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 144-46; see also 173.
30. Ibid., 254.
31. David Birmingham, "Central Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade", in The Middle Ages of African History, ed. Roland Oliver (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 58.
32. Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 138, 142.
33. Winston McGowan, "African Resistance to the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa", Slavery and Abolition 11, no. 1 (1990): 5-29; W.B. Morgan and J.C. Pugh, West Africa (London: Methuen, 1969), 26. Davidson, Black Mother, 1961, 136-42.
34. Davidson, Black Mother, 136.
35. Ibid., 138-39.
36. Ibid., 138.
37. Robin Law, "An African Response to Abolition: Anglo-Dahomian Negotiations on Ending the Slave Trade, 1838-48", Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 281-310; Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry, " 'We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist': The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast", History in Africa 31 (2004): 19-42; Richard Ratbone, "Some Thoughts on Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa", Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 11-22; Winston McGowan, "African Resistance to the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa", Slavery and Abolition 11 (1990): 5-29; Femi Kolapo, "Documentary 'Silences' and Slave Resistance in West Africa during the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade" (paper presented at the Harriet Tubman Seminar, Founders College, York University, 9 October 2002).
38. Quoted in Boahen 1986, 110.
39. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle L'Ouverture, 1972), 13.
40. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: André Deutsch, 1944).
41. British Treaty with Imerina, 23 October 1817, State Papers (British and Foreign), vol. 7, 881-82.
42. Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 325-26.
43. Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 266-70.
44. Davidson, Black Mother, 147.
45. Basil Davidson, Africa in History: Themes and Outlines, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 198.
46. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 109.
47. Conneau, Slaver's Log Book, 104-5; italics in the original.
48. Ibid., 282 and passim.
49. Quoted in Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (1949; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1968), 4.
Alvin O. Thompson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados.
Copyright University of the West Indies Press 2008