African slave trade

This article discusses the history and effects of the slavery trade upon Africa. See also Atlantic slave trade for the trans-Atlantic trade, and Islamic slave trade for the trans-Saharan trade.

Slave transport in Africa, from a 19th century engraving

The African slave trade dates back thousands of years to Biblical times and continues today unabated in most parts of Africa.

History

The earliest external slave trade was the trans-Saharan slave trade. Although there had long been some trading up the Nile River and very limited trading across the western desert, the transportation of large numbers of slaves did not become viable until camels were introduced from Arabia in the 10th century. At this point, a trans-Saharan trading network came into being to transport slaves north. There is little hard evidence of numbers, but it has been estimated that from the 10th to the 19th century some 6,000 to 7,000 slaves were transported north each year. Over time this added up to several million people moving north, however the annual numbers were small enough that it is thought by many scholars to have had relatively little demographic impact on either West Africa or the Maghreb. Frequent intermarriages meant that the slaves were quickly assimilated in North Africa. Unlike in the Americas, slaves in North Africa were mainly servants rather than labourers, and an equal or greater number of females than males were taken, who were often employed as chambermaids to women of harems. It was also not uncommon to turn male slaves into eunuchs.

Slaves purchased from black slave dealers in West African regions known as the Slave Coast, Gold Coast, and Côte d'Ivoire were sold into slavery as a result of a defeat in black on black tribal warfare. Mighty black kings in the Bight of Biafra near modern-day Senegal and Benin sold their captives internally and then to European slave traders for such things as metal cookware, rum, and livestock, seed grain. Also during this time, the European powers namely Portugal, Spain, France and England, were vying for majority control of the African slave trade, although having little effect on the continual internal black on black, or Arab trading. Great Britain's existing colonies in the Lesser Antilles and their effective naval control of the Mid Atlantic forced other countries to abandon their enterprises due to inefficiency in cost. The English crown provided a charter giving the Royal African Company monopoly over the African slave routes until 1712.

The trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Arab traders in the ninth century. It is estimated that only a few thousand slaves were taken each year from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coast. They were sold throughout the Middle East and India. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands per year were being taken.

The Atlantic slave trade developed much later, but it would eventually be by far the largest and have the greatest impact. The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of Guinea were the Portuguese; the first European to actually take slaves in the region was Antão Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer. Originally interested in trading mainly for gold and spices, they set up colonies on the uninhabited islands of Sao Tome. In the 16th century the Portuguese settlers found that these volcanic islands were ideal for growing sugar. Sugar growing is a laborious undertaking and Portuguese settlers were difficult to attract due to the heat, lack of infrastructure, and hard life. To cultivate the sugar the Portuguese turned to large numbers of African slaves. Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast, originally built by the Portuguese in 1482 to control the gold trade, became an important depot for slaves that were to be transported to the New World.

Increasing penetration of the Americas by the Portuguese created another huge demand for labour in Brazil, for farming, mining, and other tasks. To meet this, a trans-Atlantic slave trade soon developed. Slave-based economies quickly spread to the Caribbean and the southern portion of what is today the United States. These areas all developed an insatiable demand for slaves. From its beginning it is estimated that some 12 million slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas. The result of this trade is one of the largest migrations in history. These numbers are hotly disputed by scholars, precision is quite difficult, yet today the general consensus is that these numbers are fairly reliable. A small number of slaves were also shipped to Europe while some were also transported to other areas of Africa, mostly to South Africa.

Why African slaves?

In the late 15th century, Europeans (Spanish and Portuguese first) began to explore, colonise and settle the territory in the Americas. With their superior weapons they easily defeated often hostile indigenous people, whom they named "Indians". The European colonists attempted to enslave some the Indians to perform hard physical labour, but found they were not good workers, with the poor conditions and diseases like smallpox which the Europeans brought in with them, indigenous numbers gradually decreased. The idea of using black people from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves initially came from the existing Arabian and Persian slave trade along East Africa which Portuguese sailors came into contact with in the 15th century. The Europeans had also noted the West African practice of enslaving prisoners of war (a common phenomenon among many peoples on all of the continents). They soon started bartering these captive slaves with their black slave owners for guns, brandy and other goods, that were only produced outside of Africa, and this gave rise to an increasing demand for black tribes to continue capturing ever more Africans for the purpose of selling them into slavery to white Europeans, but trading with Arabs and other internal black tribes still continued. The African slaves were more resistant to European diseases than the Indians and a regular trade was soon established.

Effects

While, often, no one disputes the harm done to the slaves themselves, the effects of the trade on African societies are much debated due to the apparent massive wealth black Africans were making by selling their own enslaved people to the more profitable Europeans. In the 19th century, European Christian abolitionists, slowly began to see slavery as an unmitigated evil. This view continued with scholars into the 1960s and 70s such as Basil Davidson, who conceded it might have had some benefits while still acknowledging its largely negative impact on Africa. Today, however, many scholars, understandably of eurocentric inclination assert that slavery did not have a disastrous effect on those left behind in Africa, but a much beneficial effect often omitted from historical essays on the subject.

These scholars assert that the numbers of slaves exported were large, but so was the population from which they were drawn. At its peak, the Atlantic slave trade took about 90,000 slaves per year out of a total population of around 25 million in just Guinea, where the vast majority originated. This number was significant, yet only a moderate annual growth rate in population was enough to sustain it by replacement. Therefore, the slave trade is unlikely to have caused a decrease in the population of West Africa, even as it may have reduced or even halted population growth in some regions.

All three slave-trading routes tapped into local trading patterns. Europeans or Arabs in Africa very rarely mounted expeditions to capture slaves. It was far easier and more common to make use of existing black African middlemen and slave traders. Slavery has long been present in Africa for millennia, as some say it is still today even with children, though some historians prefer to describe African slavery as feudalism, arguing it was more like the system that controlled the peasantry of Western Europe during the Middle Ages or Russia into the 19th century than slavery as it was practiced in the Americas.

The slaves came from many different sources. About half came from the societies that sold them. These might be criminals, heretics, the mentally ill, the indebted and any others that had fallen out of favour with the rulers. Most came from captured tribes in black on black tribal warfare. Little is known about the details of practices before the arrival of Europeans, and so it is difficult to tell if the number of people considered as undesirables was artificially increased to provide more slaves for export. It is believed that capital punishment and human sacrifice in the region nearly disappeared since prisoners became far too valuable to dispose of in such a way.

Another source of slaves, comprising about half the total, came from military conquests of other states or tribes. It has long been contended that the slave trade greatly increased violence and warfare in the region due to the pursuit of slaves, but many argue that it is very hard to find any evidence to prove this; warfare was certainly common even before slave hunting had added such an extra inducement.

Slaves were an expensive commodity, and the traders and rulers of the African states supposedly received a great deal in exchange for condemning some of their population into slavery. At the peak of the slave trade, it is said that hundreds of thousands of muskets, vast quantities of cloth, gunpowder and metals were being shipped to Guinea. Guinea's trade with Europe at the peak of the slave trade—which also included significant exports of gold and ivory—was some 3.5 million pounds Sterling per year. By contrast, the trade of the United Kingdom, the economic superpower, was about 14 million pounds per year over this same period of the late 18th century. Thus, for those left behind in Africa the standard of living increased substantially and the region became divided into highly centralized and powerful nation states, such as Dahomey and the Ashanti Confederacy. It also created a class of very wealthy and highly Europeanized traders who began to send their children to European universities.

Abolition

Beginning in the late 18th century, reaction against the barbarities of the slave trade led to it being outlawed, first in the United Kingdom and then in the rest of Europe. The power of the Royal Navy was subsequently used to suppress the slave trade, and while some illegal trade, mostly with Brazil, continued, the Atlantic slave trade would be eradicated by the early 19th century. The Saharan and Indian Ocean trades continued, however, and even increased as new sources of slaves became available. According to Mordechai Abir, with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Ethiopia became the primary source to buy slaves for the Muslim world. The slave trade within Africa also increased. The British Navy could suppress much of the trade in the Indian Ocean, but the European powers could do little to affect the intra-continental trade.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse, and a trumped up reason, for the European penetration and colonisation of much of the African continent. In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between Imperialistic Europeans, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. In response to this public pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932. By the end of the colonial period they were mostly successful in this aim, and slavery is still very active in Africa even when it has gradually was moved to a wage economy. Independent nations attempting to westernise or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression, even as they, in the case of Egypt, hired European soldiers like Samuel White Baker's expedition up the Nile. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in states, such as Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.

External links

• Scale of African slavery revealed
• Nigeria's 'respectable' slave trade
• Africa's trade in children

See also

• Atlantic slave trade
• History of slavery in the United States
• Slavery
• Slave ship