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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.
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...