History

C H A P T E R 3

Africa at the Time of the Atlantic

Slave Trade

The political, economic, and social structures of sub-Saharan Africa were well developed when the Europeans opened up the West African coast to international trade at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Advanced civilizations existed throughout the continent, most regions to the Cape had been settled, and the basic plants and animals had been domesticated for several centuries. Throughout the continent, advanced mining and industrial activity existed alongside agriculture and herding. Gold had been exported to the European and Middle Eastern markets for centuries, and iron was smelted from local ores throughout the continent. A large part of this region had already been in direct contact with North Africa and the Mediterranean world since the classic civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even before 1400 its eastern coast had been in contact with India and the Pacific islands. Finally, along the southern fringes of the Sahara from coast to coast it was a basic part of the Islamic world order.

Sub-Saharan society and economy developed later than North Africa. Complex societies, urban centers, and the spread of plants, ani- mals, and technology to all regions from the savannas of the Sudan to the Cape of Good Hope were not achieved until the post-Christian era. It took from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500 for advanced agricultural, grazing, and mining culture to reach all of central and southern Africa. By then there were complex stratified societies based on settled village agricul- ture everywhere in Africa. Moreover, not until the end of the great Bantu migrations by around a.d. 700 did the linguistic map of Africa finally become firmly established in its broadest aspects. Although increasingly sophisticated markets introduced ever wider regions into contact with each other after this date, migrations tended to be local, except for the

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slave trade and some modest movement of pastoralists responding to ecological change, and the map of population distributions remained fairly stable.

Most of the eastern and western Sudan above the equator, the best known regions to the Mediterranean world, were in contact with that culture from the earliest times. Even prior to the final desiccation of the Sahara around 2000 b.c., the Sudan was tied to North African developments, and the closing of this frontier did not end contact between these two worlds. Iron smelting, for example, which begins in North Africa with the rise of Carthage circa 1000 b.c., reached as far south as West Central Africa by 300 b.c., the same time as copper smelting arrives in this region. Thus, despite the sand barrier of the Sahara, the movement of ideas, people, and commodities continued at a slow but steady pace.

From 200 b.c. to around a.d. 500, the integration of societies and economies in the various ecological zones of savanna, tropical forest, coast, and dry lands had fully evolved. Moreover, many of these complex societies and economies were to be found in both central and southern Africa even before the final great migrations of the Bantu speakers from the north spread a more unified culture throughout Africa. Agriculture, grazing, mining, and settled village life were common to all Africa by the end of the first century a.d.

Though economic and social development in the post-Christian era brought with it the rise of complex stratified societies everywhere in Africa, only the political history of the Sudan area is well known because of its contacts with the Mediterranean world. Here the developments are familiar to the world north of the Sahara from at least the first century a.d. The western Sudan in the Christian era was intimately tied to the fate of the region of western North Africa known as the Maghreb. The domestication of the camel was crucial in making that relationship even more intense. Camel caravans finally became the norm after a.d. 300 and revolutionized the trans-Saharan trade. Camels could carry heavier loads than mules and do so over longer distances without water. They could also graze on more arid lands than was usable by goats. Horses and cattle were also soon an important part of the savanna culture north of the equator and south of the desert. An entire transhumance grazing culture developed from the western to the eastern Sudan region and as far south as the equator and the tsetse fly frontier – a line beyond which all cattle and horses died.

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 51

In the western Sudan, gold production at Bambuk, a site on the upper Senegal River near the Falémé River, was the first well-known export center from West Africa northward. Gold from Bambuk reached Roman imperial markets as early as a.d. 300. Several major empires developed here in the savanna interior near the upper reaches of the Senegal and Niger Rivers, all based on two factors – their dominance over gold exports and control over the southern cities of the caravan routes. The most famous of these early recorded empires was that of Ghana, which controlled both the Bambuk goldfields and the most western of the caravan routes that ended in Morocco. Given its intimate relationship with North Africa, it was inevitable that Ghana and its succeeding empires of the whole Sudan area would be influenced by the explosive expansion of the Islamic religion after its foundation in the seventh century a.d. All the empires that traded north were converted to Islam between the tenth and twelfth centuries a.d. In turn, these newly Islamicized traders brought Islam even further south toward the Lower Guinean Coast in the next centuries.

So intimate was the relationship between North Africa and the western Sudan that the seizure of the crucial trading city of Awdaghust, the southern terminus of the western caravan route, by the Almoravides Berbers in the 1050s marked the end of the Ghana Empire, which had controlled that city. Two centuries later the Mande peoples were able to establish a new imperial state in the western Sudan based on both the original Bambuk goldfields, as well as the newly opened ones in Buré on the Upper Niger and in the Akan region of present-day Ghana. The Mali Empire, which lasted from circa a.d. 1250 to 1350, was much more extensive than the Ghana Empire had been and stretched from the Gambia River on the Atlantic to the Upper Niger in the east and the Lower Guinean Coast in the south. Its center was the city of Timbuktu, which became the principal “desert port” of the western Sudan. It was also unusual in having a powerful bureaucracy, which was able to control the dynasty and maintain stability for a long period of time, while it developed a complex trading economy based on gold, textiles, salt, and a large number of products exported to both local and long-distance markets.

The Mali Empire slowly collapsed in the late fourteenth century and in turn was replaced by the empire that the Songhai peoples created around 1450. The Songhai Empire had its capital at Goa, but continued to use Timbuktu as its commercial center. This region of West Africa

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52 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

was thus well organized and well integrated into the Mediterranean world at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese. And it was this region that would first participate in the Atlantic slave trade.

In fact, the opening up of western Africa to the Atlantic world was intimately related to the developments in the Christian and Islamic Mediterranean worlds. The long conflict between Christianity and Islam would mark the history not only of Europe and the Mediterranean but also of sub-Saharan Africa. The most important development in this respect was the reorganization of the Islamic world under the dynamic Ottoman Turks, which began in the fourteenth century. Coming from Central Asia, the Turks created the Ottoman dynasty at Baghdad in the 1300s, and slowly expanded westward. By 1453 they captured Con- stantinople and renamed it Istanbul, thus destroying the last of the eastern Christian empire. The Ottoman Turks then pushed by land and sea toward the west and encountered the expanding Christian Euro- peans head on. Not only did the Turks pick up much of the Balkans, but they even besieged Vienna and attempted to conquer Italy and Mediterranean Europe by sea. They also moved into North Africa and took Egypt in 1517.

In the meantime, the two leading powers of the expanding world of Europe also moved into North Africa. The kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, with their long-term contacts with Islam, decided to expand into North Africa. In 1415 Portugal took the North African town of Ceuta just south of the Iberian Peninsula, and soon followed with the capture of Tangiers. It then slowly moved down the northwestern coast of Africa from the 1470s to the early 1500s, reaching as far south as the city of Agadir. All this was at the expense of the independent Kingdom of Morocco. In turn, Castile expanded not only into Sicily and the Italian peninsula in the early sixteenth century, but from 1590 to 1610 systematically seized many of the Maghrib cities to the east from Melilla to Tripoli. But local Berber and Arab groups allied with either Morocco or the Ottoman Turks eventually took the majority of these cities back from the Europeans. During their hold over these North African centers, however, the Portuguese especially came into intimate contact with the Saharan caravan routes and their sub-Saharan participants.

Given their longtime experience in the Atlantic fisheries and the recent stabilization of their society, which gave the merchant classes a major role in the state, the Portuguese were the first of the western European states to expand beyond the Atlantic and Mediterranean heartland. With footholds in their ports in North Africa and in theC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 53

eastern Atlantic islands of the Azores and Madeira, the Portuguese now moved their famous caravels into the South Atlantic. From 1430 to 1490 they would explore the West African coast from Agadir to the Cape of Good Hope. In the early 1440s the first Portuguese sailors returned from sailing beyond the Sahara. Sometime before the 1470s they had learned to sail offshore into the South Atlantic to pick up the northwestern trade winds, which brought them up to the Azores and made the return voyages viable for far southern exploration. By the end of the 1480s they had reached the Cape of Good Hope.

Thus was West Africa opened up to direct European contact and the previously closed Atlantic shore suddenly emerged as an alternative trade route for African societies. The Portuguese were quick to exploit this new trading zone. In the 1450s they obtained exclusive Christian rights for dealing with Africa south of Cape Bojador from the pope. In 1466 they settled the island of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands; in 1482 they built the fort of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina in current-day Ghana); by 1483 they were in contact with the Kingdom of the Kongo just south of the Congo (Zaire) River in Central Africa; in 1493 they had definitely settled the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, and by 1505 they had constructed the fort of Sofala on the Mozambique coast of East Africa.

Initially, the Portuguese treated their African contacts as they had the North Africans they encountered. They raided and attempted to forcibly take slaves and plunder along the coast they visited. Thus, when they landed at Rio de Oro just south of Cape Bojador in 1441, they seized several Berbers along with one of their black slaves. In 1443 a car- avel returned to the same Idzãgen Berbers to exchange two aristocratic members of the group for gold and 10 black slaves. In 1444 and 1445 merchants and nobles of the Algarve outfitted two major expeditions against the Idzãgen and the first brought back 235 Berber and black slaves who were sold in Lagos. Thus began the Atlantic slave trade.

But not only did the second and later expedition encounter serious hostility from the now prepared Berbers, but attempts to seize slaves directly from the black states on the Windward Coast ended in military defeat for the Portuguese. The result was that the Portuguese moved from a raiding style to peaceful trade, which was welcomed by Berber and African alike. In 1445 came the first peaceful trade with the Idzãgen Berbers at Rio Oro in which European goods were exchanged for African slaves. Trade with the Idzãgen led to the settlement of a trading post (called a “factory”) at Arguim Island off the Mauritanian coast; andC

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54 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

after 1448 direct trade began for slaves and gold with the West African states.

Quickly the Portuguese moved to control the uninhabited coastal and delta islands and erect local settlements and forts. They also trav- eled inland to explore their new markets. Well before 1500 they were familiar with West African geography and Portuguese travelers had already visited West Africa’s three leading goldfields. Gold was the pri- mary article the Portuguese sought in their trade with Africa, and they took slaves and other local products as secondary trading items. They built their first major continental fort, São Jorge da Mina (Elmina), on the Ghana coast just east of the Cape of Three Points on land at the edge of the rain forest and with direct access as well to open savanna lands. This fort, along with that of Axem settled in 1500 just east of the cape and also in Ghana, was built in the heart of what would become known to Europeans as the Gold Coast on the Gulf of Guinea. The Portuguese by the first two decades of the sixteenth century were pur- chasing over 400 kilograms per annum from inland traders, which was roughly one-fourth of West African gold production in that period. Portuguese ships even engaged in an active coastal trade, moving goods and slaves between other African states to these gold-exporting nations as well as shipping in products from Europe, Asia, and North Africa. In their desire for African gold, which had a major impact on royal finances in Europe, the Portuguese were willing to satisfy local demands for any goods desired, procuring them everywhere, even from North Africa and Benin. Most of the goods imported by the Portuguese had already been brought by overland routes to these coastal and interior peoples before the arrival of the Europeans. Major imports in the early Portuguese trade to the Gold Coast were North African dyed cloths and copper ingots and bracelets, all items that local consumers and smiths were used to purchasing from Muslim sources. It was the volume of these goods that was new to these West African markets, not the goods themselves. Thus, the major impact of the coming of the Europeans to Africa was the addition of new trading routes rather than strange or exotic products. Whereas the Niger River flowing mostly north toward the Sahara had been the great connecting link for the peoples of West Africa until then, now the Senegal, Gambia, and other local rivers run- ning west and south toward the Atlantic coasts became the major links to the outside world. So intense and widespread did this trading become over most of West Africa, that the Portuguese language quickly became the basis of a trading patois that was spoken throughout the region.C

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 55

In opening up the African Atlantic coast, it was the Europeans who provided the initiative and the communications with the outside world, however openly local peoples accepted this new trading possibility and reoriented their inland markets. The question worth exploring at this point is why Europe expanded at this time. After all western Europe in the fifteenth century was a relatively poor zone by world standards. China, India, and Asia Minor were all richer than Europe. Nor were the Europeans the only ones coming to Africa. Already Islamic traders had been shipping goods off the East African coast, and in this century as well a Chinese fleet had reached the same coast.

In the whole process of the so-called expansion of the West, which would make Europe the dominant region on the world stage from the fif- teenth to the twentieth century, it was not the exploring or first contacts that were so important as much as the maintenance of that contact. The whole opening up of Africa, which was the first major thrust of Europe overseas and the beginning of the age of Western domination, colonial- ism, and imperialism, exhibited many of the characteristics that defined that expansion and help to explain the extraordinary dynamism of the European response. Once opening up a market, the Portuguese could mobilize large quantities of capital and labor to outfit subsequent expe- ditions to exploit these newly discovered markets. After the first ship arrived, dozens followed, and regular systematic trade became the norm. This was the case in Africa, and it would be the same in the Indian Ocean, which the Portuguese also opened up to direct European trade at the end of the fifteenth century. Nor did the Portuguese enjoy their monopoly for long; even on the Gold Coast, interlopers from the major European naval powers had definitively broken that monopoly by the 1540s. Europe clearly was unique at that time in its ability to mobilize capital and labor over very long periods. This was the result of strong state institutions; a rising merchant class with access to government support; credit mechanisms that were capable of generating large quan- tities of capital for longtime investments; a reasonable distribution of wealth and savings due to control over natality through late marriages and limited bastardy; and a large free peasantry, recently released from serfdom and accustomed to responding to wage incentives and a free labor market.

While this explains why the next centuries have been labeled the “European Period” in world history, they do not fully explain the relative development of European and African contact. This, as we will see in the next chapter, is highly correlated with the opening up of the WesternC

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56 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Hemisphere to European conquest. But this was not the only factor influencing that contact. Aside from peaceful trading in gold, slaves, ivory, and other local products, the Portuguese were also concerned with conversion. Like the rest of southern and eastern Europe, they were locked into a deadly battle of survival with the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. Especially where Islam had not yet fully established itself, or did not exist, they saw a possibility of conversion. Already by the 1480s their agents had reached the Kingdom of Ethiopia in eastern Africa, the only independent Christian state in Africa. In 1490 they mounted a major fleet to support a Christian pretender to the Jolof throne in Senegambia, which failed in its effort. In 1491 Christian missionaries were sent to the Kingdom of the Kongo, south of the Congo River, and there had more successes, even enthroning Affonso, a powerful leader, and a Christianized African as head of the state in 1506. But within a generation the missionaries were expelled and the Kongo reverted to traditional religious beliefs. In 1514 they sent missionaries to the Oba of Benin, and this attempt ended in failure. Finally, in their desire to control the Shona goldfields of East Africa, the Portuguese in 1569 mounted a 1,000-man expedition, that included missionaries, to expel the Muslimized Swahili traders and Christianize the local miners. The Portuguese army went up the Zambezi River toward the mines only to see the majority of the Europeans die of malaria and the expedition end in failure.

The only result of all these Portuguese efforts at penetration and conversion was the unintended one of the creation, from Senegambia in the northwest of Africa to Mozambique in the southeastern part, of a mixed Afro-Portuguese free merchant class, which claimed Portuguese identity and adopted Catholicism but rejected the sovereignty of the Portuguese state. Some of these communities not only occupied key settlements along the coast, but often penetrated deep into the interior. They colonized the Benguela highlands in Angola and even created ministates with African followers and slave armies in the interior of Mozambique on their “estates” or prazos. This model in turn was followed to a lesser extent by the creation of local Afro-English and Afro-French merchant groups along the West African coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In each case, these were racially mixed elites who intermarried with members of the local African establishments and were deeply involved with the regional African states and societies and who no longer obeyed the commands of the European states that had fostered them.C

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 57

The great push toward Christianizing Africans through either con- quering the Islamic groups or evangelizing and converting the religiously “primitive” peoples ended with these Portuguese attempts. This also meant the end of any thought of actual conquest and colonization in Africa as well. This forced acceptance of African autonomy was due to several factors. First were the difficulties of maintaining troops, missionaries, and bureaucrats in the African environment because of extraordinarily high European deathrates from yellow fever and malaria. There was also the military balance that existed between Europeans and Africans. Though here as everywhere else in the post-1500 world the Europeans controlled the seas, the rapid transmission of Euro- pean and North African military techniques throughout Africa meant that firearms and even cavalry were used by African states, making it extremely difficult to conquer inland. Finally, the unqualified hostility of these states and/or their peoples to any intervention, or missionary activity, eventually destroyed the few military gains that the Portuguese obtained in either West or East Africa. Respect for religious and politi- cal autonomy therefore became the norm in African-European dealings, and the Portuguese and those Europeans who followed them were even forced to deal with the many Muslim groups of the western Sudan region in peace and acceptance.

This does not mean that the coming of the Europeans to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts of Africa had little impact on internal African society and economy. Far from it. But it should be stressed that the coming of the Europeans by sea varied in its impact depending on the nature of the local society and its previous contacts with the non- African world. In the region from Senegambia to the Cameroons, and in East Africa, it was less a revolutionary event than in the Central African regions of the Congo and Angola. This had to do with the prior existence of long-term trading arrangements across the Sahara, which reached as far south as the Bight of Biafra in the west and intimate long- term relationships with African trading communities along the entire Eastern African shoreline. While sea transport was cheaper than land transport, it did not eliminate traditional relationships or the constant movement of goods to North Africa. Even at the height of the gold trade in West Africa, for example, the Europeans only took a minority of the local output by sea, with a majority of the gold still crossing the Sahara. Nor was the political impact of the European arrival in this zone very profound. The slave trade initially was a minor movement of peoples with little influence over warfare or raiding and the Europeans’ inabilityC

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58 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

to conquer any territories or send in armies limited their influence over local events, no matter how much trade routes were reoriented. Thus, the great Songhai Empire in the Upper Niger region – the largest empire in West Africa – was weakened by the coming of the Europeans, but it was actually destroyed by a Moroccan invasion from across the desert. In 1591, a revived Moroccan state not only drove the Europeans out of most of its coastal cities and even killed one Portuguese king in doing so, but the Moroccans headed south across the desert and seized Timbuktu from the Songhai. The blow destroyed this Sudan empire. Though smaller secondary states continued in this region, the fall of the Songhai state meant the end of large empires in this area until the nineteenth century.

It was also clear that Swahili and Arabic traders had dominated the East African trade routes long before the arrival of the Portuguese. Though the Portuguese aggressively moved to control Mozambique, they could not drive further north against these Muslim traders or seize the independent state on Madagascar Island, and found that they could not even monopolize the gold trade of the Mozambique hinterland itself. Thus, many traditional trade networks initially remained unaffected by the European contact despite very aggressive European activity.

Moreover, so long as the Atlantic slave trade remained small, which was the case through most of its earlier period, it had a relatively limited impact even on the internal African slave markets. Estimates of all the slave trades to 1600 suggest that the Atlantic slave trade took only a quarter of all slaves leaving Africa and was still considerably smaller than the trans-Saharan slave trade. It was only in the seventeenth century that the Atlantic route forged ahead as the dominant slave trade, accounting for close to two-thirds of all Africans leaving the continent. Even so, until 1700, slaves were not the most valuable product taken by the Europeans from West Africa. Rather the most important export was gold, followed by ivory, hides, pepper, beeswax, and gum. Slaves were still only a small part of the total value of African exports. At the end of the fifteenth century the Atlantic slave trade involved the shipment of no more than 800 to 2,000 slaves per annum, all of whom were being sent to Portugal or its Atlantic island possessions, such as Madeira and São Tomé, that began using slaves to produce sugar starting in 1455 and the 1490s, respectively. Portuguese extraction of slaves was estimated to have risen to some 4,500 slaves per annum in the first decades of the sixteenth century as slave shipments to Spanish America had begun. This movement was still not that different in volume from the slave trade going across the Sahara or out of the Red Sea ports at this time. It

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 59

was also of a far different dimension than the close to 80,000 Africans per annum shipped to America at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the decade of the 1780s (see Table A.1, in the Appendix).

This changing volume of the Atlantic trade, as well as the wide regional variations of ecologies, economies, and political organization in Africa from which the slaves traded, most influenced the impact of the trade on the African continent. Though the Europeans could quickly tap into the local movement of slaves who were previously destined for domestic use or for export by land to North Africa and the Middle East, it was only through the establishment of new caravan routes and ports that they could generate more numerous slave purchases and steadier supplies. Even despite their best efforts to satisfy local African markets with the goods they desired, whether of Asian, European, American, or African origin, it was impossible to develop a major supply of slaves if the local groups or the interior states and trading communities did not wish to participate. This explains the varying nature of the origin of the slaves, both in terms of how they were taken and from where they were shipped.

In the period before the eighteenth century, American demand was steady but did not exceed local supplies, so that slave prices were rela- tively stable. This meant that the Europeans could purchase slaves from the regular flow of local slaves taken in limited raiding or as judicial offenders in any given region, plus the large quantities of slaves that were produced in local warfare. In almost all these later cases, the wars among the Africans were caused by local political, economic, or reli- gious conflict among competing peoples. The by-product of these wars was, of course, the male slaves of the defeated peoples who could be profitably eliminated through forced migration. This episodic origin of war captives explains why some regions would come in and out of the Atlantic trade over time, often without an increase or decrease of Euro- pean demand for slaves. Thus, places such as Senegambia suddenly had major slave exports in the years from the 1720s to the 1740s during local Islamic religious wars, only to return to a minor movement of slaves for many decades. The same occurred with the Gold Coast in the Gulf of Guinea, which shipped virtually no slaves until the Asante wars of expansion after the 1680s suddenly led to thousands of slaves leaving its local ports.

There were other cases, such as the Kingdom of the Kongo to the south of the Zaire or Congo River, which quickly organized the slave trade from a region that had only limited local slavery, and became a steady exporter of slaves from its hinterlands from the sixteenth to

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60 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

the late nineteenth century. Its peoples developed local raiding into a major source of slaves over long periods of time. There was also the case of the Kingdom of Benin, which was well located to become a major intermediary in the local slave trade from the Bight of Benin (also known as the Slave Coast): it simply decided in 1516 to restrict the export of male slaves from the kingdom, and eventually closed the trade altogether, just as its neighbors such as the Kingdom of Dahomey was, like the Kongo state, becoming a major and long-term trader of slaves.

Most scholars agree that the increasing American demand eventually brought about changes in the voluntary nature of the trade after the mid-eighteenth century. Though the Europeans could not force any region to enter the trade against its wishes, and many remained closed to the trade, the rising prices for slaves – driven by increasing American demand due to increasing European consumption of American slave- produced goods – powerfully influenced local African developments where the slave trade was well established. Large-scale warfare, in which obtaining slaves for the Atlantic trade was a major theme, now became more common. Entire trading networks, especially in such regions as the Congo and Angola, as well as the Bight of Biafra, produced a steady volume of slaves for America and large parts of their local economies became intimately tied to the supply of slaves to the Atlantic economy.

The evolution of the trade along the coasts of West and East Africa varied over time and place. The first region encountered by the Portuguese as they rounded Cape Bojador and arrived in the western Sudan just south of the Sahara, was the area called Senegambia, which took its name from the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, its two most promi- nent features. The Portuguese concentrated their effort on the zone south of Cabo Verde and tended to send their boats into the Gambia River to trade. They also settled the uninhabited Cabo Verde Islands in the 1460s, a zone that would eventually produce sugar with African slave labor. Very quickly, individual Portuguese traders also settled along the navigable Gambia River and by the end of the seventeenth century there arose a powerful set of Afro-Portuguese communities made up of Portuguese who had intermarried with the local African populations. Except for their island settlements and a few key coastal cities, this in fact would be a common pattern for the Portuguese from Senegambia to East Africa. Given the high mortality experienced by Europeans and their inability to conquer the interior, only mixed Afro-Portuguese merchant communities were capable of survival. For most of the first century here,C

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 61

the Portuguese traded for gold coming from the Bambuk goldfields in the Gambia-Senegal Rivers hinterland, hides from the interior savanna cattle herds, and other local products along with slaves, who came both from the coast and from the Upper Niger interior savannas. On these savanna coasts the Europeans dealt with the Muslim states long tied to the Mediterranean through the Sahara caravan routes. By the time of the arrival of the Portuguese the great empire of Mali had broken down into smaller states within the Gambia region, while the Senegambia successors to the great Jolof state were also quite small agricultural and trading communities of Mande speakers.

The Senegambia was an exclusively Portuguese zone of interest only for the first two centuries. By the late sixteenth century the region was being contacted by the English and French traders on a regular basis. The English settled the James Island in the Gambia River, and the French established themselves on the island of San Luis just off the Senegambia River, from which they concentrated their trading efforts. By then the local Afro-Portuguese trading river communities, though claiming to be Catholic and Portuguese, were totally independent of the mother country and traded freely with all Europeans along with all the local African merchant groups. Interior trading was in the hands of the Jahaanke peoples, who brought their slaves, ivory, and other local products by caravan from the Upper Niger to the river merchants, who then boated them down to the coast. They also brought such products as iron, cotton textiles, and kola nuts for the local coastal markets, and brought back not only imported products from Europe, but also mats, textiles, and sea salt produced on the coast for their interior customers.

In this complex of local, long-distance, and international trade, the slaves were just one element. The slaves taken here were mostly war captives and so the movement of slaves tended to be more random than steady. Though slaves were obtained from the coastal communities, after 1700, most of the slaves being sold to the Europeans came from the interior. They also were most definitely a by-product of the long series of Islamic wars among the states of the Upper Niger region. This included the Moroccan destruction of the Songhi Empire in the 1590s and the resulting local warfare, which lasted until well into the seventeenth century, as well as the mass movements of the 1720s to 1740s and again in the 1780s and 1790s when interior clerical-led jihads of fundamentalists against more lay-oriented leaders led to major civil wars in many of these Islamicized states. Europeans also obtained slaves after the droughts of the 1590s and those which struck the region againC

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62 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

from 1639 to 1643. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries represented the peak of the Senegambia slave trade. In the eighteenth century alone these two rivers produced something like 337,000 slaves for the Atlantic trade, though even in the nineteenth century the reduced trade from this region still produced over 200,000 Africans for the American plantations.

Further to the south the Europeans finally encountered the rain forest zones in the region called the Upper Guinea or Sierra Leone Coast (from current-day Guine-Bissau to southern Sierra Leone). Here, there were numerous ministates and even stateless local governing communities, and Islam was less well embedded in the local culture. The prime local product here was the kola nuts sold in the interior African markets. But the Europeans took beeswax, camwood, ivory, and gold as well as slaves from this coast. Although the migration of Mane peoples into the region produced lots of slaves in the mid-sixteenth century, the area languished as a slave-exporting zone until the Muslim religious wars of the eighteenth century, when slaves finally became the prime export. In fact, it was this region, more than Senegambia, to which the defeated troops of the jihad wars were sent. In the 1590s the Portuguese had set up a trading post at the north end of this coast at Cacheu and by the late eighteenth century the French were at Gambia Island in the Sierra Leone estuary and the English had settled a trading post on Bunce Island. During the eighteenth century this region sold some 726,000 slaves into the Atlantic slave trade – double the number of slaves that came from Senegambia. These Sierra Leone slaves represented 11 percent of the total leaving Africa in the eighteenth century. Although repatriated Africans taken in the illegal trade were landed by the British on this coast in the nineteenth century, forced migration still remained the norm from this region as a reduced but still important slave trade continued on these coasts until the 1840s.

Just south and due east of this zone were the so-called Grain and Ivory Coasts (including the contemporary states of Liberia and the Côte d’Ivoire), which, unlike the previous coastal zones encountered by the Europeans, had few decent harbors or viable beaches to land on. The Grain Coast got its name from the Malagueta pepper produced in the region, while the Ivory Coast was from early on a major exporter of ivory from the local elephant herds. By the eighteenth century pepper was no longer a major European import and the local elephant herds had been depleted. Thus, international trade was quite small in this region, and relatively few slaves were taken by the Europeans from this coast.C

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 63

Even here, however, the Fulbe jihad wars for Islamic religious purity in the Fuuta Jaalo kingdoms in the period from the 1720s to the 1740s led to significant slave exports in this otherwise little visited coast, since this region was more intimately integrated into the interior north-south caravan routes. But by the late eighteenth century the slave trade had ended from this region, and in fact this zone would be another net importer of previously exported slaves as Afro-American migrants from the United States began settling the Monrovia region in 1822.

The rain forest continued down southeastward along the coast from what is today central Sierra Leone to the so-called Gold Coast (Ghana), when the open savanna lands broke through the tropical rain forests and again reached the sea in what was called the “Benin Gap.” The Gold Coast was initially the most attractive to the Europeans, primarily because of its easy contact to the Akan goldfields centered at Begho on the Volta River. Here, there were good harbors and landing beaches, and because of the gold trade the Europeans quickly built some twenty-five fortified stone forts. Unlike the open “forts” used for regular commerce and the slave trade everywhere on the African coasts, which were really trading posts or “factories,” these gold-trading centers were all fortified to protect the gold from other European raiders. In fact, no fort on the African coast existed without the often formal approval of the local African state or community, to which it often paid taxes and from which it obtained its provisions and access to the interior trading routes. The first of these forts to be constructed was that of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) in the fifteenth century. By the eighteenth century the region was studded with forts from the major and minor powers of northern Europe as well. Several battles were fought among the Europeans from the 1630s until the 1720s for control of these strategic places, with many of these forts changing hands several times. By the late seventeenth century, it was the English and Dutch who predominated, with the French and Portuguese mostly excluded from the Gold Coast trade. Until the 1680s, this was a zone almost exclusively of gold exports, but the decline of gold arrivals to the coast, if not of local gold production, and the wars related to the rise of the local Akwanu and Asante states in the seventeenth century also provided slaves for exports. By the end of this century the value of slaves was approaching the value of all other exports, and they surpassed them in the eighteenth century. So important was this zone in gold and slaves that both the Royal African Company of England and the Dutch West India Company (WIC) had their African headquarters here – the latter at Elmina, which it tookC

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64 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

from the Portuguese in the late 1630s, and the former ten miles distant at Cape Coast castle. In the eighteenth century, 645,000 slaves were sent off this coast into the trade, which represented 10 percent of West African migrants, though virtually no slaves were sent from this coast after 1800.

The Gold Coast was also one of the first African regions to adapt American crops to African conditions. Although the slave trade was to bring a host of workers, plants, and diseases to America, it also brought many new plants from America to Africa. In this regard, the introduction of American food crops to the African continent would revolutionize food production here as much as did the American potato in Europe and Asia. Early in the period of the slave trade, manioc and maize were introduced into Africa. Manioc, which originated in Brazil, had a revolutionary impact on the forest agriculture, providing a crucial new food crop ideal for forest cultivation and one that could dependably feed and maintain more dense populations. In turn, maize became an important food crop on the savanna. Tobacco, cacao, peanuts, and a host of other American plants were also introduced, many of which would become important African commercial export crops in later centuries.

Next, eastward along the so-called Lower Guinea Coast region were the two Bights (defined as a wide bay formed by a bend or curve in the shoreline) of Benin and Biafra on either side of the Niger Delta. Together, they formed one of the most heavily slave-traded regions in all of Africa. The coast defined by the Bight of Benin was called the Slave Coast by contemporaries (current-day Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria). The three dominant powers in the region were the kingdoms of Benin and Dahomey close to the coast and the Oyo Empire of the Yoruba in the interior due north of the port of Lagos. This zone was well connected to the Saharan caravan routes and had major state formations going back at least to the eleventh century a.d. What is fascinating about local developments is the contrast that the two key states of Dahomey in the west and Benin in the eastern part of the Bight of Benin exhibited in their response to the slave trade. In Dahomey, the state controlled the port of Ouidah and used it to dominate local slave movements. The slave trade was at first a royal monopoly and, even in its nonmonopoly phase, was heavily taxed by the state. In turn, when the Oyo cavalry defeated the Dahomean musketeers in 1730, the Yoruba too became intimately tied to the trade, from which they derived significant wealth, opening up their own sea outlet at Porto Novo and reaching the height of their slave exports in the 1780s. In contrast, the more easterly Kingdom ofC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 65

the Benin prohibited the export of male slaves as early as 1516 and kept that embargo in force until the eighteenth century. Instead it traded for firearms and other European products by exporting ivory, pepper, cotton textiles (usually for African consumption), and beads.

So efficient did the Dahomey and then the Oyo trade systems become that the Bight of Benin became Africa’s second largest slave trading zone. In the eighteenth century, for example, the region shipped some 1.2 million slaves, or 18 percent of the total leaving West Africa in this period, and in the nineteenth century it shipped another 421,000 slaves. In fact, it was the most active West African region north of the equator and did not end its shipments of slaves until the 1860s. Though warfare was often a major source of slaves for these two regions, as the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the late eighteenth century showed when Yoruba slaves flooded the market, it was not the primary mechanism for obtaining slaves. Given the long-term and very steady nature of slave exports from this region, it is evident that the trade was obtaining slaves from systematic raiding on the frontier as well as from local religious, judicial, and political sources all along the trade routes from the interior.

The area from the Niger River delta east to the Cameroon coast, which formed the so-called Bight of Biafra region (today, eastern Nigeria and Cameroon), was already a well-developed trading area even before the arrival of the Europeans. The local coastal Igbo and Ibibio (Efik) peo- ples had coastal urban settlements as large as 2,000 people in the Niger and Cross River deltas that supported major fishing and shipping indus- tries – including canoes manned by as many as eighty rowers. These boat traders operated along the local rivers and estuaries formed by the Niger and Cross River deltas, as well as engaging in coastal trade. Though there was lots of commercial contact with the Europeans because of these long trading traditions, this zone did not become a major participant in the Atlantic slave trade until after the mid-seventeenth century. But as with the groups from Benin to the east, the local peoples, who were mostly organized in clan groups and organizations no more complex than multi- ple village associations, developed extensive peaceful trading networks for obtaining slaves over large territories in the interior. They also soon established ministates along the coast at their major trading towns of Bonny and New Calabar in the Niger Delta and the three towns that came to be known as Calabar or Old Calabar on the Cross River delta to the east. The interior trade was controlled by the Igbo who were orga- nized in merchant and religious associations. In the eighteenth century, these ports on the Cross and Niger Rivers shipped out almost the sameC

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66 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

number of slaves for America as did the Benin traders, 1.2 million slaves. But in the nineteenth century, although they added another 353,000 Africans to the Atlantic trade, they ended serious trading by the late 1830s several decades before it ended in the Bight of Benin.

From the Bight of Biafra south there were long stretches of lightly inhabited coast that had little appeal to the Europeans, though just off the coast of Gabon stood the islands of São Tomé and Principé just at the equator. These volcanic and fertile lands in the Gulf of Guinea were settled by the Portuguese in the last decade of the fifteenth century and by the 1520s had become a major producer of plantation sugar based on African slave labor. They soon replaced Madeira as Portugal’s prin- cipal sugar producer before the 1580s, when Brazilian sugar production began to dominate European imports. São Tomé nevertheless remained important after the decline of sugar, not only because it was a major provisioning stop for Portuguese and other European slavers, but also because it was a major center of Portuguese settlers who exercised con- siderable influence over Portuguese activities in the Congo-Angolan region. Not only did they engage in a major local coastal trade with Africans, but they often housed African slaves for subsequent export to America. In 1510, for example, between 5,000 and 6,000 slaves were being held on the island for American transshipment. It is estimated that these islands absorbed almost 64,000 African slaves in the sixteenth century and another 24,000 in the seventeenth century. With the abo- lition of the Atlantic slave trade they were among the most notorious of the importers of indentured contract laborers, whose service by the early twentieth century was finally defined as slavery in disguise. Its important coffee and cacao plantations in the late nineteenth century imported an average of 4,000 workers per annum, mostly from Angola, who were to serve five-year contracts, though few were ever repatriated.

For all the volume of slaves shipped from West Africa, Central Africa (Gabon, the Congo, and Angola) was to be the single most important source of African slaves for America from the sixteenth century until the late nineteenth century. This was a region that was well settled by the end of the first millennium and had already a thriving copper-mining industry. By 1400 there was a common culture and market encountered throughout most of the Congo River basin. There also arose a major empire called the Kongo in this same period, which was the largest state in Central Africa on either coast. By the time of the Portuguese arrival in the region in the late fifteenth century there were also emerging two other major states in the region: the Kingdom of Loango on the coastC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 67

north of the Congo River and the Tio Kingdom inland and upriver from the Kongo and Loango states, which was centered on the Melbo Pool – a body of water well up the Congo River. Finally, after 1500 emerged to the far south the Kingdom of Ndongo, which would be located near the Portuguese constructed port of Luanda.

From the beginning in Central Africa, the Portuguese took a very active role in local politics and made their greatest effort at control in the western part of Africa. Missionaries and technicians were sent to the court of the Kongo kings, and while they temporarily converted the royal family, their most successful effort was with Prince Affonso, who became king in 1506. A very dynamic ruler, he not only expanded his territory, but he also became closely associated with the Portuguese, paying for their support and aid through the sale of ivory, copper, and slaves. By the 1520s Affonso had monopolized the slave trade and prohibited the export of any Kongo peoples. He established Catholicism as the state religion and even had a local bishop appointed by Rome. But much of this effort at conversion eventually failed, though Portuguese association with the state remained strong. In 1658 when the Kongo was invaded by the so-called Jaga peoples, they sent in an army to restore the throne and expel the invaders, which took seven years to accomplish. But they also supported the Ndongo Kingdom when it defeated a Kongo army in 1556, and succeeded in extracting the right to establish the port of Luanda and the fortified town of Massangano in the interior of Angola shortly thereafter. But loyalties shifted quickly in West Central Africa and the Portuguese supported the Imbangla against both the Kongo and Ndongo armies when they established their own state at Kasanje.

But the Africans could utilize these political alliances as well as the Portuguese. When the Dutch arrived in 1641 all three states – Kongo, Ndongo, and Kasanje – joined the Dutch side and the Ndongo even laid siege to Portugal’s last outpost at Massangano in 1648. But at this point the arrival of a Portuguese armada from Brazil removed the Dutch and in 1665 the Portuguese defeated the Kongo state in the battle of Ambula. Though expelled by the Kongo state again a few years later, internal civil wars would finally lead to the end of the empire by the early eighteenth century.

Throughout all this effort, the Portuguese established settlers in Luanda and then far to the south in Benguela, and there emerged from these efforts and local traders moving into the interior the largest of the Afro-Portuguese communities in western Africa. Although African merchant trading clans controlled most of the trade from just northC

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68 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

of Luanda and in the Zaire watershed, most of the trade from Luanda south was in the hands of these Afro-Portuguese traders, at least along the coast and a moderate way into the interior. Although these mixed background traders were willing to deal with all Europeans, the heavy political and military presence of the Portuguese guaranteed a mini- mum of loyalty. Thus, most of the French, Dutch, and British slaving activity was north of Luanda with the ports of Ambriz and Loanga being important, while the Portuguese dominated to the south. Although con- trolling the coast influenced who took which slaves, the interior peoples supplying the slaves could easily sell to whomever they preferred, espe- cially given the length of water navigation on the Congo River, which made it a reasonable destination from most interior regions. Even in the Luanda-Benguela regions, it was the Ovimbundu who controlled the interior caravan routes from the 1790s for all of Central Africa. But it also should be stressed that the Portuguese penetrated deeper here than anywhere else in western Africa and by the late eighteenth century they had even begun to settle in the Benguela highlands. This effort resulted in an extraordinary volume of slave purchases. By the end of the century the Portuguese were shipping out 16,000 Africans per annum from the Angolan ports, a figure that would rise to 18,000 in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

The Loango coast in turn proved to be a major region for both British and French slaving activity from the earliest period. But it was in the eighteenth century that this region to the north of the Congo River became the prime trading zone for these two major traders. At the beginning of the century the French were taking 3,600 slaves per annum and by the 1790s they were averaging 12,800 captives per annum. The English experience was similar, beginning the century with annual movements of 2,600 slaves and rising to 11,600 per annum by the 1780s. Despite all the efforts of the Portuguese to close this crucial area to other Europeans, these two nations alone took over 1 million Africans from the Loango coast from 1700 to 1807, making it the single most important region for African slaves for both nations in the eighteenth century.

The volume of slaves leaving the Congo and Angolan coasts was so steady that it had to have originated with both political as well as mili- tary initiatives. Prisoners taken in warfare, villagers seized in low-level raids in nonfortified zones, and persons condemned by their respective communities for economic or religious reasons all went to supply such a steady movement of slaves. In the eighteenth century (to 1810), these two regions sent some 2.5 million slaves into the Atlantic trade, ofC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 69

which 1.3 million were carried away by the Portuguese, and another 1.3 million were taken after 1811. These 3.8 million slaves obtained between 1700 and the 1860s represented 40 percent of the total esti- mated Africans shipped in the Atlantic slave trade from East and West Africa over the entire course of its existence, making the Congo and Angola unquestionably the single most important slave-producing area in Africa from the earliest days until the end of the Atlantic slave trade.

Although the Portuguese would penetrate East Central Africa (Mozambique) as quickly and as pervasively as they did in Angola, the slave trade would be a late development in this area. Given the length- ening of the sailing routes, opening up East Africa to the Atlantic slave trade would require slave prices high enough to justify the extra cost and higher mortality suffered in this trade. Initially, it was gold and geographic location that attracted the Portuguese to these shores. The existence of major gold production in the Shona highlands south of the Zambezi River and west of the coast brought initial Portuguese efforts on taking this gold away from the Islamic Swahili traders, who had dominated its export for several hundred years before the arrival of the Portuguese in force in the early sixteenth century. In 1505 the Portuguese settled in the Muslim town of Sofala and in 1508 they were on the island of Mozambique, which they fortified and which became their central residence on the coast and a major provisioning port for the East Indies fleets. For the next few decades they raided all the Islamic towns on the coast as far north as Mombasa, but finally set- tled into peaceful dealings with the local Islamic trading networks by the 1520s.

At first the Portuguese concentrated on the gold trade, shipping major quantities to India to pay for European imports of Asian spices and other goods. But they never fully controlled the goldfields or the gold exports. They did, however, open up a whole new export in ivory to India, which had been of limited interest to the Islamic traders before their arrival. As had occurred in West Africa, shipwrecks and desertions soon created local Afro-Portuguese communities and by the 1560s all the ports from Mombasa southward had these resident Portuguese, and many had moved inland and intermarried with the local groups. All of these semiautonomous communities entered into trade with Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Finally, the major needs of provisioning of the fleets, which sometimes brought over a thousand Portuguese to Mozambique island at any one time, all promoted an integration of Portugal into the Islamic trading networks that had existed before their arrival.C

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70 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

In the 1560s Jesuit missions were in the goldfields attempting to convert the Mwene Mutapa peoples, but with relatively little success. But in the 1570s the Portuguese penetrated inland, using the port of Quelimane at the mouth of the Zambezi River as their starting point. Several major European-recruited armies of conquest were organized in this decade, but the end result was that the goldfields were too dispersed and the local states too small and too numerous to conquer. Malaria, the death of horses, and the iron weapons of the Africans all halted most of these formal expeditions. But the Portuguese did leave behind two forts at Sena and Tete several hundred miles inland, established firm relations with most of the major regional African states, and became a dominant player, either with their own troops or with their Afro-Portuguese allies, throughout the entire Zambezi River valley and most of the interior.

Although the Portuguese remained strong on the coast, it was the Afro-Portuguese who successfully settled the interior. This was a most dynamic community, and beginning in the seventeenth century these mixed background immigrants began to carve out large estates in the Zambezi River valley that soon resembled ministates, with their African followers and slave armies. These so-called prazero lords (named after their grants of lands or estates called prazos) dominated interior Mozam- bique until the nineteenth century. They also established an extraordi- narily tenacious European foothold on the East African coast that no other competitors could ever match or eliminate.

The Indian Ocean monopoly of the Portuguese was ended in the seventeenth century, with major effects on its East African holdings. The loss of its Persian Gulf fortresses of Hormuz and Muscat in 1622 and 1648, respectively, to English and Islamic assaults broke the power of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and saw foreign powers arriv- ing en masse into the Mozambique Channel. Turkish raids along the coast in the late sixteenth century resulted in the Portuguese fortify- ing Mombasa, but this port was lost to the Omans in 1698 and the Portuguese abandoned their northern ports and markets. The arrival of the Dutch and English in the 1590s and early 1600s brought constant warfare until peace was signed with both by midcentury. Mozambique itself withstood four major sieges by the Omans and the Dutch, the last of which ended in 1608. In fact, Mozambique and all the East African Portuguese cities were the only African possessions of Portugal to resist successfully Dutch conquest in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese were able to hold the coast south of Cape Delgado against all comers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, andC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 71

even revived the gold trade with new finds north of the Zambezi River in the later century. From Quelimani in the Zambezi Delta to Lorenço Marques at the far end of Delagoa Bay in the south and in the interior along the Zambezi River valley, it developed a major international trade, importing East Indian cloth and beads as payment for the exported gold and ivory. In recognition of its growing trade and importance, Mozam- bique was finally separated from the Goan viceroyalty of Portuguese India and made into an independent colony in 1752.

Although slavery was present among all the African and European groups living in East Africa and slave armies were common, the inter- national slave trade from this coast only began in the middle decades of the eighteenth century as slaves were shipped to the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion (Ile de Bourbon). The first port to engage in this trade was the southern one of Inhambane, which was shipping out some 1,500 slaves per year in the 1760s and some 3,000 Africans two decades later, making this the second most valuable export after ivory from this port. Although this international slave trade to Indian Ocean colonies of Europeans began in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the shipments of slaves to America did not begin on a seri- ous basis until the nineteenth century. There were some French and English attempts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to supply their West Indies with Mozambique slaves, but the steady vol- ume of shipments to America only occurred in the nineteenth century. The first reported ships from Mozambique arriving in Rio de Janeiro – which would be Mozambique’s major American destination port until the middle of the nineteenth century – reached the city only in March 1797. But only thirteen more arrived in Rio de Janeiro by 1811 and they averaged only 272 slaves per vessel compared with double that number for ships coming from the Congo and Angola. Moreover, the mortality of slaves during the crossing was extremely high, averaging 24 percent, when overall mortality was 9 percent for ships arriving from West Africa. Clearly, these were still experimental voyages of a few enterprising cap- tains who had yet to learn how to deliver slaves efficiently from East Africa, or who still found relatively few slaves to bring to America.

But a combination of severe droughts from 1790 to 1830 and major migrations through most of East Africa of war bands from the Transvaal region to the south of Delagoa Bay severely disrupted the economies and polities of the interior regions of Mozambique and promoted slave seizures. This was coupled with an ever-rising demand for slaves and consequent doubling of local prices on the African market. In responseC

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72 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

to this demand, the Portuguese government permitted free trade for the Brazilian slavers with all the ports of East Africa after 1811, and as a result 85 of the 430 slave ships arriving in Rio de Janeiro from 1825 to 1829 were from Mozambique. These vessels carried over 48,000 slaves for an average of 569 slaves per ship (compared with an overall average of 410 for ships arriving from Angola) and their slave mortality at sea, while still high, was down to 12 percent or only double the 6 percent mortality then experienced by the West African shippers. This mortality reflected the different times at sea between West and East Africa, with the average East African ship taking sixty days compared with just thirty-three days for those coming from Angola. Also, port specialization was now evident, with Quelimane on the Zambezi Delta being the second biggest port of exit for Brazil with 31 ships, following the island of Mozambique with its 44 slave ships. Also, the southern ports around Delagoa Bay were represented with Lorenço Marques (Maputo) from the southern end sending 7 ships and Inhambane on its northern edge organizing 4 slaving expeditions. By the late 1830s, it was estimated that on average some 10,800 slaves were still being shipped off the coast.

Whereas Mozambique had shipped some 90,000 slaves to the Indian Ocean islands and America before 1811, after that date 386,000 East Africans entered the Atlantic and were forced to migrate to America. This meant that Mozambique was the third largest supplier of slaves in the nineteenth century – ahead of Biafra and just behind Benin – accounting for 14 percent of those shipped in the nineteenth century from anywhere in Africa.

As can be seen from this survey of the evolution of the slave trade on the coasts of Africa, the Atlantic slave trade evolved relatively slowly over a long period of time. In the first three centuries the volume of shipments was relatively low and the trade simply tapped into the traditional internal slave markets of Africa and obtained slaves from the normal local sources. Thus, it was mostly war captives who filled the holds of the American slavers, though there were some Africans condemned to slavery in their local societies for various reasons, as well as small-scale raiding of unprotected peasant groups. In these first two or three centuries of the trade, it was mostly people living within fifty miles of the coast who were taken across the Atlantic. But rising demand in America and consequent rising prices increased the movement of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Atlantic slave trade then became a qualitatively and quantitatively different trade than before. Annual movement of slaves across the Atlantic in the secondC

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AFRICA AT THE TIME OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 73

half of the eighteenth century was constantly rising, reaching the 80,000 per annum level shipped by the peak decade of the 1780s. This increasing movement forced some significant changes in the provisioning of slaves. Regions such as the Bights of Benin and Biafra and the Congo-Angola area now developed more long-distance trade for slaves into the interior. Whole trading networks now evolved just to move slaves to the coast on a steadier basis. Equally, the sporadic nature of warfare was no longer a sufficient source for slaves. A steady level of raiding on the various open agricultural frontiers now became the norm in selected areas, and the slow abandoning of unprotected fields now began to occur as a response to the new intensity of the Atlantic trade. Moreover, the source of slaves now moved further inland and more of the West and East African population became involved in the trade.

The increasing intensity of the trade, which would remain a major movement of peoples into the middle decades of the nineteenth century, clearly began to distort traditional patterns of government and trade in certain selected regions of Africa. As we have seen, whole regions, such as Senegambia or the Gold Coast, simply ceased to trade slaves in the nineteenth century as local groups became involved in other trades or refused to engage in this particular commerce. Others, such as the populations in the Portuguese lands of East Africa, were in the throes of massive ecological and political change, which produced many slaves regardless of American or Indian Ocean demand for slaves. But in areas such as the Bight of Biafra or the Congo and Angola, no such local disasters or dynastic struggles or migrating war bands created a large enough pool of slaves to maintain the steady outpouring of Africans that these coasts experienced. Therefore, the trading states had to engage in systematic raiding to supply the steady demand for slaves, and, in so doing, the Atlantic slave trade can be said to have finally influenced in several important ways the evolution of local societies. Quite evidently, viable agricultural lands in the interior of many of these exporting regions were abandoned because of the raiding against defenseless peasants. Equally, the trade became so important that some groups were willing to engage in warfare to satisfy the demand for the imported goods that the slaves produced.

This said, that impact was not uniform across Africa, but varied by locality. It is generally agreed by most scholars that only one or two of the major civil or interstate wars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may have been influenced by this demand for slaves, but that the rest can be best explained by the usual problems of succession inC

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74 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

highly centralized regimes, migration of peoples for purposes of conquest of new resources, or conflicts for control of territories and economies. Equally, an internal slave trade existed both before and after the end of the Atlantic slave trade, and even as the export of humans was replaced by the export of palm oil in the early decades of the nineteenth century, slaves were often used to produce this product along with free workers. The end of the trade to America did not end slavery in Africa. Nor did its ending destroy the economy of any major African states or their basic source of wealth. Most of the major states of West Africa were able to compensate for the loss of slave sales by turning to palm oil or other exports, often producing more revenue for purchasing ever cheaper industrial imported goods than had been possible in the slave trade era. Moreover, it should be remembered that international trade was only a small part of the African economy, and that the internal market accounted for a much higher percentage of national production and exchange. Even the slave caravans brought ivory and other goods to the coast and returned with local coastal as well as imported products to the interior.

Thus, the Atlantic slave trade, while profoundly influencing many parts of West Africa over some five centuries, was only one part of the complex economic, social, and political history of the continent. It was brought to an end by European intervention, just as it had been created by those same Europeans. But it neither ended African relations with Europe, nor did it end slavery within Africa itself. How the trade interacted with various peoples over time and place and the costs and benefits of the trade for all the participants will be examined in the next chapters.

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