History Journal 3

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17

Western Africa in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1450–1800

605

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Many Western Africas FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural practices, and political arrangements typified western Africa in early modern times?

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in West Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Africa?

Land of the Blacksmith Kings: West Central Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Central Africa?

Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the Portuguese

FOCUS How did the early Portuguese slave trade in western Africa function?

Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1800

FOCUS What were the major changes in the Atlantic slave trade after 1600?

COUNTERPOINT: The Pygmies of Central Africa

FOCUS How did the Pygmies’ rainforest world differ from the better-known environment of savannas and farms?

backstory Prior to 1450, the lives of most western Afri-

cans focused on hoe agriculture, supplemen-

tary herding and hunting, and in some places

mining and metallurgy. Chiefdoms were the

dominant political form throughout the region,

from the southern fringes of Morocco to the

interior of Angola, although several expansive

kingdoms rose and fell along the Niger and

Volta Rivers, notably Old Ghana, which thrived

from about 300 to 1000, and most recently, as

the early modern period dawned, Mali, which

flourished from about 1200 to 1400.

Trade in many commodities stretched over

vast distances, often monopolized by extended

families or ethnic groups. Muslim traders were

dominant along the southern margins of the

Sahara Desert after about 1000 C.E. Some west-

ern African merchants traded slaves across the

Sahara to the Mediterranean basin, and others

raided vulnerable villages for captives, some of

whom were sent as far away as the Red Sea and

Indian Ocean. Islam predominated by 1450

along many trade routes into the savanna, or

grasslands, but most western Africans retained

local religious beliefs.

World in the Making This dramatic brass plaque depicts the oba, or king, of Benin in a royal procession, probably in the sixteenth century. He is seated side- saddle on a seemingly overburdened horse, probably imported and sold to him by Portuguese traders. The larger attendants to each side shade the monarch while the smaller ones hold his staff and other regal paraphernalia. Above, as if walking behind, are two armed guards. (Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, N Y)

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In 1594 a youth was captured in West Central Africa. The Portuguese, who con- trolled the Atlantic port of Luanda, where the young captive was taken, called this region Angola, a corruption of the Kimbundu term for “blacksmith.” The young man was branded, examined like a beast, and sold; he was also, in the words of his captors, “a black.” In Luanda, the captive was housed in a stifling barracks with others, whose words, looks, hairstyles, and “country marks,” or ritual scars, were unfamiliar.

Eventually, Roman Catholic priests who had just established a mission in Luanda appeared and spoke to the captives in mostly unintelligible words. After several weeks, each captive was sprinkled with water and given a lump of salt on the tongue. Then names were assigned. The young man was now called “Domingo.” Once in the Americas, scribes recorded his name as “Domingo Angola, black slave.”

Domingo was one of the lucky ones. He survived the barracks and then the grueling two-month voyage, or “middle passage,” to Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast of present-day Colombia. More than one in five died during these ordeals. Once ashore, Domingo Angola was washed, oiled, examined for signs of contagious illness, and fed maize gruel and tough, salted beef.

Domingo was sent to Panama, where he was sold to a merchant traveling to Quito, high in the Andes Mountains. There, in 1595, he was sold again to two merchants heading to the silver-mining town of Potosí, several thousand miles to the south. On the way, Domingo fell ill while waiting for a ship on the Pacific coast and had to be treated. In Potosí at last, he was sold yet again. He had not yet turned nineteen.1

Meanwhile, back in Angola, a story arose about men and women such as Domingo who had been sent across the sea. People began to imagine that they were being captured to feed a distant race of cannibals. These “people eaters,” red in color, lived somewhere beyond the sunset, on the far side of an enormous lake, and there they butchered ordinary Angolans. Human blood was their wine, brains their cheese, and roasted and ground long-bones their gunpowder. The red people—the sunburned Portuguese—were devotees of Mwene Puto, God of the Dead. How else to explain the massive, ceaseless traffic in souls, what Angolans called the “way of death”?2

Domingo’s long journey from Africa to South America was not unusual, and in fact he would have met many other Angolans arriving in Potosí via Buenos Aires. Victims of the Atlantic slave trade were constantly on the move, and slave mobility diminished only with the rise of plantation agriculture in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries. Shuffling of ethnic groups was typical of the Atlantic slave trade and what historians call the African diaspora, or “great scattering” of sub-Saharan

A frican diaspora The global dispersal, mostly through the Atlantic slave trade, of A frican peoples.

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African peoples. As we will see in the next chapter, millions of slaves were sent across the Indian Ocean from East Africa as well. This chapter focuses on western or “Atlantic” Africa, a vast portion of the continent that geographers normally split into two parts: West and West Central Africa (see Map 17.1, page 608).

Although slavery and slave trading were practiced in western Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, both institutions changed dramatically as a result of the surge in European demand for African slaves coinciding with colonization of the Americas. New patterns of behavior emerged. African warriors and mercenaries focused more on kidnapping their neighbors in order to trade them to foreign sla- vers for weapons, stimulants, and luxury goods; coastal farmers abandoned lands vulnerable to raiders; formerly protective customs were called into question; and Islam and Christianity made new inroads. We now know that even inland cultures such as the Batwa, or Pygmies, of the Congo rainforest were affected by the slave trade. They were driven deeper into the forest as other internal migrants, forced to move by slavers, expanded their farms and pasturelands. There, as we will see in the Counterpoint to this chapter, the Pygmies forged a lifestyle far different from that of their settled neighbors.

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS

The major global development in this chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on early modern A frican peoples and cultures.

As you read, consider:

1. How did ecological

diversity in western

Africa relate to cultural

developments?

2. What tied western

Africa to other parts of

the world prior to the ar-

rival of Europeans along

Atlantic shores?

3. How did the

Atlantic slave

trade arise,

and how was it

sustained?

Many Western Africas

FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural practices, and political arrangements typified western Africa in early modern times?

The A frican continent was home to an estimated one hundred million people at the time of Columbus’s 1492 voyage. About fifty million people inhabited West

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0

0 500 Kilometers

500 Miles

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Mediterranean Sea

Gulf of Guinea

Volta R.

Canary Is.

Madeira Is.

Cape Verde

Is.

Cape of Good Hope

São Tomé

Senegal R.

Nig er R

.

N ile R.

Uele R.

Kasai R.

Congo R.

Zam bezi R.

Lim popo R.

Lake Tanganyika

Lake Chad

Orang e R.

Gambia R.

Kwanza R .

MATAMBA

LOANGO KONGO

A�N

BENIN

BENIN

SONGHAI

MO RO

CC O

YORUBA

MALI

NDONGO

S a h a r a

Atlas Mt s.

N am

ibia D esert Kalahari

Desert

W E S T A F R I C A

WEST CENTRAL AFRICA

Gao

Cairo

Jenne-jeno

EdoIfe

Timbuktu S U D A N

M A G H R E B

ANGOL A

S A H E L LO

W E

R G

U IN

E A

U PPER

G U

IN E A

Western Africa, c. 1500 Trade goods Agriculture

Cola nuts Copper Cowry shells Gold Honey Iron Ivory Ra�a cloth Salt

Bananas Co�on Millet Rice Sorghum Yams

Equator 0º

20ºN

20ºS

Tropic of Capricorn

Tropic of Cancer

20ºW 0º 20ºE

BATWA

MANDE

MANE

TUAREG

KHOIKHOI

MAP 17.1 Western A frica, c. 1500 The huge regions of West and West Central A frica were of key importance to early modern global history as sources of both luxury commodities and enslaved immigrants. But western A frica was also marked by substantial internal dynamism. The Songhai Empire on the middle Niger rose to prominence about the time of Columbus. Large kingdoms and city-states also flourished on the Volta and lower Niger R ivers and near the mouth of the Congo (Zaire). Rainforests and deserts were home to gatherer-hunters such as the Batwa (Pygmies) and K hoikhoi.

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and West Central A frica, what we refer to here as “western A frica.” Western A frica thus had a population comparable to that of all the Americas at that time. It con- tained several dozen tributary states, along with numerous permanent agricultural and mobile, warrior-headed chiefdoms. There were also pastoral or herding groups, trading peoples, fishing folk, and bands of desert and rainforest gatherer-hunters. The array of livelihoods was wide, yet most western A fricans lived as hoe agricul- turalists, primarily cultivators of rice, sorghum, millet, and cotton (see Map 17.1).

Religious ideas and practices varied, but most A fricans south of the Sahara placed great emphasis on fertility. Fertility rituals were integral to everyday life; some entailed animal sacrifice, and others, rarely, human sacrifice. A lso as in many other early modern societies, discord, illness, and material hardship were often thought to be the products of witchcraft. Islam, introduced by long-distance trad- ers and warriors after the seventh century C.E ., became dominant in the dry sahel (from the Arabic for “shore”) and savanna, or grassland, regions just south of the Sahara, and along the rim of the Indian Ocean. Christian and Jewish communities were limited to tiny pockets in the northeastern Horn and along the Maghreb, or Mediterranean coast. Over two thousand languages were spoken on the continent, most of them derived from four roots. A ll told, A frica’s cultural and linguistic di- versity easily exceeded that of Europe in the era of Columbus.

Even where Islam predominated, local notions of the spirit world survived. Most western A fricans believed in a creator deity, and everyday ritual tended to empha- size communication with ancestor spirits, who helped placate other forces. Animal and plant spirits were considered especially potent.

Places were also sacred. Rather like Andean wakas, western A frican génies ( JEHN-ees) could be features in the landscape: boulders, springs, rivers, lakes, and groves. Trees were revered among peoples living along the southern margins of the savanna, and villagers built alongside patches of old-growth forest. Through periodic animal sacrifice, western A fricans sought the patronage of tree spirits, since they were most rooted in the land.

Western A frica fell entirely within the lowland tropics and was thus subject to many endemic diseases and pests. The deadly falciparum variety of malaria and other serious mosquito-borne fevers attacked humans in the hot lowlands, and the tsetse fly, carrier of the fatal trypanosomiasis virus, limited livestock grazing and horse breeding. Droughts could be severe and prolonged in some regions, spurring migration and warfare. Western A fricans nevertheless adapted to these and other environmental challenges, in the case of malaria developing at least some immu- nity against the disease.

génie A sacred site or feature in the West A frican landscape.

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In the arid north, beasts of burden included camels, donkeys, and horses. Cattle were also kept in the interior highlands and far south, where they were safe from tsetse flies. A rabian warhorses were greatly prized, and were traded among kingdoms and chiefdoms along the southern margins of the Sahara. They were most valued where fly-borne disease made breeding impossible. Other domestic animals included goats, swine, guinea fowl, sheep, and dogs. In general, animal husbandry, as in greater Eurasia, was far more developed in western A frica than in the A mericas. There were also more large wild mammals in sub-Saharan A frica than in any other part of the world, and these featured prominently in regional cosmologies.

Mining and metalsmithing technologies were also highly developed. Throughout West and West Central A frica, copper-based metallurg y had grow n complex by 1500. Goldsmithing was also advanced, though less w idespread. Th is was in part because A frican gold was being increasingly draw n away by

trade to the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. To a large extent, western Eurasia’s “ bullion famine” spurred European ex pansion into A frica.

A fricans had long been great producers and consumers of iron. W hether in Mali or Angola, A frican ironmongers were not simply artisans but also shaman-like figures and even paramount chiefs—heads of village clans. A frican met- alsmiths produced substantial tools, ornaments, and works of art. They made the iron hoes most people tended crops with, and some items were traded in bulk over vast distances.

A frica’s internal trade mostly redistributed basic commodities. Those who mined or col- lected salt, for example, usually bartered it for other necessities such as cloth. Saharan salt was an essential dietary supplement throughout the vast West A frican interior. Similarly, man- ufactured goods such as agricultural tools were traded for food, textiles, and livestock, but bits of gold, copper, and iron also served as currency. Another key trade good was the cola nut, the sharing of which cemented social relations in much of West A frica.

A Young Woman from West Africa Since at least medieval times, West African women surprised outside visitors with their independence, visibility, and political influence, in both Islamic and non-Islamic societies. This drawing by an English artist during a slave-trading voyage to West Africa around 1775 depicts a young woman with elaborately braided hair, pearl earrings, and a choker strung with coral or large stones. It is possible that she is a member of an elite family given these proudly displayed ornaments.

husbandry Human intervention in the breeding of animals.

paramount chief A chief who presided over several headmen and controlled a large area.

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Copper and bronze bracelets were prized by some of western A frica’s coastal peoples, and eventually they were standardized into currency called manillas (mah-K NEE-lahs). In some areas seashells such as the cowry functioned in the same way. The desire for cotton textiles from India fueled A frica’s west coast demand for shell and copper-bronze currency, which in time would also contrib- ute to the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. A frica’s east coast, meanwhile, re- mained integrated into the vast and mostly separate Indian Ocean trade circuit, as we will see in Chapter 18.

A frican societies linked by trade were sometimes also bound by politics. A shared desire to both expand household units and improve security led many A fricans to form confederations and conglomerates. Like the confederacies of eastern North America (discussed in Chapter 15), some of these alliances had a religious core, but just as often they were spurred by ecological stresses such as droughts. Political flux caused ethnic and other identity markers to blend and blur as groups merged and adopted each other’s languages, cosmologies, farming techniques, and modes of dress and adornment.

Nevertheless, as in the Americas, intergroup conflict was common in western A frica prior to the arrival of Europeans. Expansionist, tributary empires such as Mali and Songhai made lifelong enemies. The motives of A frican warfare varied, usually centering on the control of resources, and especially people, sometimes as slaves put to work on agricultural estates. European trading and political meddling on A frica’s Atlantic coast would spawn or exacerbate conflicts that would rever- berate deep within the continent. Full-blown imperialism would come much later, with the development of new technologies and antimalarial drugs, but it would benefit in part from this earlier political disruption.

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in West Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Africa?

West A fricans in the period following 700 C.E . faced radical new developments. Two catalysts for change were the introduction and spread of Islam after the eighth century and a long dry period lasting from roughly 1100 to 1500 C.E . At least one historian has characterized human relations in this era in terms of “land- lords” and “strangers,” a reference to the tendency toward small agricultural com- munities offering hospitality to travelers and craft specialists.3 In return, these

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“strangers”—traders, blacksmiths, tanners, bards, and clerics—offered goods and services. The model “landlord” was an esteemed personage capable of ensuring the security and prosperity of numerous dependents and affiliates, usually conceived of as members of an extended family.

Empire Builders and Traders The late medieval dry period also witnessed the rise of mounted warriors. On the banks of the middle and upper Niger River rose the kingdoms of Mali and Songhai, both linked to the Mediterranean world via the caravan terminus of Timbuktu (see again Map 17.1). Both empires were headed by devout, locally born Muslim rulers. One, Mansa Musa (mansa meaning “conqueror”) of Mali, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325. Musa spent so much gold during a stop in Cairo that his visit became legend.

It was gold that put sub-Saharan A frica on the minds—and maps—of European and Middle Eastern traders and monarchs. West A frican mines were worked by farming peoples who paid tribute in gold dust unearthed in the fallow (inactive) season (see Lives and Livelihoods: West A frica’s Gold Miners). In general, land was a less-prized commodity than labor in West A frica. Prestige derived not from ownership of farmland or mines but from control over productive people, some of whom were enslaved. Captive-taking was thus integral to warfare. Like the sea- sonal production of gold, the seasonal production of slaves would vastly expand once Europeans arrived on Atlantic shores.

With the exception, as we will see, of the Songhai Empire, West A frican politics in this period was mostly confederated. Dozens of paramount chiefs or regional kings relied on tributaries and enslaved laborers for their power, wealth, and sus- tenance. Most common was the rise of charismatic and aggressive rulers, with few bureaucrats and judges. Rulers typically extended their authority by offering to pro- tect agricultural groups from raiders. Some coastal rice growers in Upper Guinea drifted in and out of regional alliances, depending on political and environmental conditions. A lliances did not always spare them from disaster. Still, as actors in the Columbian Exchange, enslaved rice farmers from this region transferred tech- niques and perhaps grains to the plantations of North and South America.

From Western Sudan to Lower Guinea, town-sized units predominated, many of them walled. Archaeologists are still discovering traces of these enclosures, some of which housed thousands of inhabitants. As in medieval Europe, even when they shared a language, walled cities in neighboring territories could be fiercely competitive.

Dating to the first centuries C . E ., West A frica was also home to sizable k ing- doms. Old Ghana flourished from about 300 to 1000 C . E ., followed by Mali,

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which thrived from about 1200 to 1400. From about the time of Columbus, the Songhai Empire, centered at Gao, rose to prominence under Sunni A li (r.  1464 –1492). Similar to the mansas of Mali, Sunni A li was a conqueror, employ ing mounted lancers and squads of boatmen to great effect. Sunni A li ’s successor, Muhammad Touré, extended Songhai ’s rule even farther. At his zenith Touré,  who took the title askiya (A H-skee-yah), or hereditar y lord, and later caliph, or supreme lord, controlled a huge portion of West A frica (see again Map 17.1).

The wealth and power of Songhai derived from the merchant crossroads cities of the middle Niger: Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu. Here gold, salt, and forest products from the south such as cola nuts and raffia palm fiber were exchanged, along with other commodities. Slaves, many of them taken in Songhai’s wars of expansion, were also traded to distant buyers. Stately Timbuktu, meanwhile, retained its rep- utation as a major market for books and a center of Islamic teachings.

Touré’s successors were less aggressive than he, and as Songhai’s power waned in the sixteenth century, the empire fell victim to mounted raiders from distant Morocco. With alarming audacity, and greatly aided by their state-of-the-art fire- arms and swift mounts, the Moroccans (among them hundreds of exiled Spanish Muslims, or Moriscos) captured the cities of Gao and Timbuktu in 1591. As their victory texts attest, these conquistadors took home stunning quantities of gold and a number of slaves. Yet unlike their Spanish and Portuguese contem- poraries in the A mericas, they failed to hold on to their conquest. The mighty Sahara proved a more formidable barrier than the Atlantic Ocean. A fter the fall of Songhai there emerged a dynasty of Moroccan princes, the Sa’dis, who were in turn crushed by new, local waves of warfare in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Most fell victim to the Sahara’s best-known nomads, the Tuareg (T WA H-regh).

Sculptors and Priest-Kings Farther south, near the mouth of the Niger R iver, was the rainforest kingdom of Benin, with its capital at Edo. Under K ing Ewuare (EH-woo-A H-reh) (r. c. 1450– 1480), Benin reached the height of its power in the mid-fifteenth century, subject- ing many towns and chiefdoms to tributary status. Benin grew wealthy in part by exporting cloth made by women in tributary villages. This trade expanded with the arrival of Portuguese coastal traders around 1500, revitalizing Benin’s power. Some of the most accomplished sculptors in A frican history worked under K ing Ewuare and his successors, producing cast brass portraits of Benin royalty, prom- inent warriors, and even newly arrived Europeans. This was but one of the many

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LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS

West Africa’s Gold Miners

Until 1650, gold was a more valuable West A frican ex port than slaves, and it remained highly signif- icant for many years after ward. The mines and their workers, some of whom were enslaved, re- mained in the control of local k ings whose agents then traded gold to long-distance merchants w ith ties to Europeans on the coast. Gold diggings were concentrated along the upper reaches of the Senegal, Niger, and Volta R ivers, mostly in

and around streams flow ing dow n from eroded mountain ranges. Sources describing West A frican gold mining in early modern times are rare, but anecdotal descriptions combined w ith somewhat later eyew itness accounts suggest that women did many of the most strenuous tasks. The Scottish traveler Mungo Park described non-enslaved West A frican women miners among the Mande of the upper Niger in the 1790s as follows:

About the beginning of December, when the harvest is over, and the streams and torrents have greatly sub-

sided, the Mansa, or chief of the town, appoints a day to begin sanoo koo, “gold washing”; and the women are sure to have themselves in readiness by the time appointed. . . . On the morning of their departure, a bullock is killed for the first day’s entertainment, and a number of prayers and charms are used to ensure success; for a failure on that day is thought a bad omen. . . . The washing of the sands of the streams is by far the easiest

Implements of the Gold Trade West Africa was long legendary for its gold, which was first traded across the Sahara and later to Europeans arriving along the Atlantic coast. In the Akan region of present-day Ghana, gold dust circulated as currency, with portions measured by merchants in a hanging balance against tiny, fancifully designed brass weights. Gold dust was stored in brass boxes and dished out with decorated brass spoons. Smaller exchanges employed cowry shells, brought to Atlantic Africa from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.

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way of obtaining the gold dust, but in most places the sands have been so narrowly searched before that unless the stream takes some new course, the gold is found but in small quantities. W hile some of the party are busied in washing the sands, others employ themselves farther up the torrent, where the rapidity of the stream has carried away all the clay, sand, etc., and left nothing but small pebbles. The search among these is a very trou- blesome task. I have seen women who have had the skin worn off the tops of their fingers in this employment. Sometimes, however, they are re- warded by finding pieces [nuggets] of gold, which they call sanoo birro, “gold stones,” that amply repay them for their trouble. A woman and her daughter, inhabitants of Kamalia, found in one day two pieces of this kind.

Mande men, according to Park, participated in excavating deep pits in gold-bearing hills “in the height of the dry season,” producing clay and other sediments “for the women to wash; for though the pit is dug by the men, the gold is always washed by the women, who are accustomed from their infancy to a similar operation, in separating the husks of corn from the meal.” To be efficient, panning required in- tense concentration and careful eye-hand coordina- tion, and use of several pans to collect concentrates. This skill was appreciated, as Park explains: “Some women, by long practice, become so well acquainted with the nature of the sand, and the mode of wash- ing it, that they will collect gold where others cannot find a single particle.” Gold dust was then stored in quills (the hollow shafts of bird feathers) plugged with cotton, says Park, “and the washers are fond of dis- playing a number of these quills in their hair.”

Source: Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Masters (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2000), 264–267.

Questions to Consider

1. W hy was West A frican gold mining seasonal? 2. How were tasks divided between men and women, and why? 3. Was gold washing demeaning labor, or could it be a source of pride?

For Further Information:

Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

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SEEING THE PAST

Art of the Slave Trade: A Benin Bronze Plaque Copper and bronze metallurgy were advanced

arts in western Africa long before the arrival of

Europeans. Metal sculpture in the form of lifelike

busts, historical plaques, and complex represen-

tations of deities was most developed in western

Nigeria and the kingdom of Benin. Realistic rep-

resentations of elite men and women appear to

have served a commemorative function, as did

relief-sculpted plaques depicting kings, chiefs,

and warlords in full regalia. Beginning in the 1500s,

sculptors in Benin and neighboring lands began to

depict Portuguese slave traders and missionaries,

bearded men with helmets, heavy robes, and trade

goods, including primitive muskets. This plaque

depicts Portuguese slavers with a cargo of manillas,

the bronze bracelets that served as currency in the

slave trade until the mid-nineteenth century.

Examining the Evidence

1. How were Portuguese newcomers incorporated into this traditional Benin art form?

2. How might this bronze representation of foreigners and their trade goods been a commentary on the slave trade? Plaque of Portuguese Traders with Manillas

(Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of A rt. Image source: A rt Resource, N Y)

livelihoods afforded by urban living (see Seeing the Past: Art of the Slave Trade: A Benin Bronze Plaque).

Just west of Benin were city-states ruled by ethnic Yoruba clans. At their core was the city of Ife (EE-feh), founded in around 1000 C.E. Ife metalsmiths and sculptors

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were as accomplished as those of Benin, and their large cast works have been hailed as inimitable. Yoruba political leaders, called obas, performed a mix of political and religious duties. Most of these priest-kings were men, but a significant number were women. One of the oba’s main functions was to negotiate with ancestor deities thought to govern everyday life. Some slaves taken from this region to the Americas appear to have masked ancestor worship behind the Roman Catholic cult of saints.

Urban life also matured along the banks of the lower Volta R iver, in what is today Ghana. Here A kan peoples had formed city-states, mostly by controlling regional gold mines and trading networks. The A kan initially focused on transporting gold and cola nuts to the drier north, where these commodities found a ready market among the imperial societies of the middle Niger. With the arrival of Europeans on the Atlantic coast in the late fifteenth century, however, many A kan traders turned toward the south. Throughout early modern times, women held great power in A kan polities, and matrilineal inheritance was standard. Even in patrilineal em- pires such as Mali and Songhai, women could wield considerable power, especially in matters of succession.

Land of the Blacksmith Kings: West Central Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West central Africa?

Human interaction in West Central A frica, called by some historians “land of the blacksmith kings,” was in part defined by control of copper and iron deposits. As in West A frica, however, the vast majority of people practiced subsistence agri- culture, limited to hoe tilling because the tsetse fly eliminated livestock capable of pulling plows. For this reason, few people other than gatherer-hunters such as the Pygmies inhabited A frica’s great equatorial forest. Most preferred to farm the savanna and fish along the Atlantic coast and major riverbanks.

The Congo (Zaire) R iver basin, second only to the Amazon in terms of forest cover, was of central importance to human history in West Central A frica. A lthough patterns of belief and material culture varied, most people spoke deri- vations of Western Bantu. Islam was known in some areas but remained marginal in influence. Most inhabitants of West Central A frica lived in matrilineal or patri- lineal kin-based villages, a small minority of them under paramount chiefs. In all, the region was marked by a cultural coherence similar to that of Mesoamerica ( discussed in Chapter 15).

oba A priest-king or queen of the Yoruba culture (modern southern Nigeria).

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Farmers and Traders The hoe-agriculturalists who formed the vast majority of West Central A fricans grew millet and sorghum, complemented by yams and bananas in certain areas. Bananas, a crop introduced to the region some time before 1000 C.E ., enabled farm- ers to exploit the forest’s edge more effectively and devote more energy to textile making and other activities. Some forested areas were too wet for staple crops but still offered game, medicinal plants, and other products. Pygmy forest dwellers, for example, traded honey, ivory, and wild animal skins to farming neighbors for iron points and food items. Tsetse flies and other pests limited the development of animal husbandry in West Central A frica, except in the drier south.

W herever they lived, West Central A fricans, like Europeans and Asians, em- braced native American crops in the centuries following Columbus’s voyages. Maize became a staple throughout Central A frica, along with cassava (manioc), peanuts, chili peppers, beans, squash, and tobacco. Peanuts, probably introduced by the Portuguese from Brazil soon after 1500, were locally called nguba (NGOO- bah), from which the American term “goober peas” derives.

As the introduction of American crops demonstrates, West Central Africa may have had less direct ties to global trade than coastal West Africa, but it was part of the system. Likewise, Africa’s internal trade networks were vital to West Central African life. As in West Africa, salt was traded along with foods, textiles, metal goods, and other items. Raffia palm fiber was used to manufacture cloth, and coastal  lagoons

were exploited for cowry shells for trade. Throughout the region political power became increasingly

associated with control of trade goods and trade routes. For example, around 1300 two kingdoms arose above and below the Malebo Pool alongside the Congo R iver. This was the first major portage site for all traders moving between the coast and interior. The kings of Loango, living above the falls but also con- trolling access to the Atlantic coast, taxed trade and also drew legitimacy from their role as caretakers of an ancient religious shrine. Below the falls and to the south, in Kongo—a kingdom misnamed by the Portuguese after the title of its warlords, the manikongos (mah-nee-CONE-goes)—leaders came to power in part by monopolizing copper deposits and also access to cowry shells, the region’s main currency.

Smiths and Kings As in West A frica, power also derived from the mystique sur- rounding metallurgy. The introduction of ironworking to the

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manikongo A “ blacksmith” king of Kongo.

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region sometime early in the Common Era had made the majority of farmers dependent on smiths for hoes, blades, and other implements. Making the most of this reliance, some blacksmiths became kings. By 1500, Kongo commanded an area stretching inland from the right bank of the Congo R iver south and east some 185 miles, ab- sorbing numerous villages, slaves, and tributar- ies along the way. A few small kingdoms existed to the north and east, often with copper deposits serving as their lifeblood. These kingdoms even- tually challenged Kongo directly, in part because they were subjected to Kongo slave-raiding. In what is today Angola, just north of the Kwanza R iver, there emerged in the sixteenth century the Ndongo (NDOA N-go) kingdom. Just northeast of Ndongo lay the Matamba kingdom. Initially tributaries of Kongo, the people of Matamba shifted their relations in favor of Ndongo as Portuguese influence there grew in the sixteenth century. By 1600, the Portuguese held forts deep in Ndongo country, using them to procure slaves from farther inland.

Less is known about the peoples of the more iso- lated and forested middle Congo basin, but archae- ologists have recently shown that large chiefdoms were being consolidated there as early as the thir- teenth century, and they lasted into early modern times. Here, innovations in sword manufacture seem to have enabled some chiefs to monopolize trade along Congo River tributaries. Like elites everywhere, these chiefs considered themselves the spir- itual kin of predatory lords of the animal kingdom, in this case the leopard and eagle.

We know less about women’s livelihoods than men’s, but it appears that in early modern West Central A frica, as in many preindustrial societies, women tended to work mostly at domestic tasks such as child rearing, food preparation, and other aspects of household management. Men were frequently engaged in hunting, herd- ing, trade, and warfare, so women’s responsibilities often extended to agriculture. In many places, women planted yams in hard soils by slicing through the crust with machetes made by village men. A lmost every where, women tended the food crops and men cleared forest.

Mbundu Blacksmiths This late-seventeenth-century watercolor depicts a Mbundu blacksmith and assistant at work. As the assistant operates the typical A frican bellows with rods attached to airbags, the master smith hammers a crescent-shaped iron blade on an anvil. Other blades, including what may be a sickle or hoe, lie on the ground to the left of the anvil. In the background a curious audience looks on.

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Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the Portuguese

FOCUS how did the early Portuguese slave trade in western Africa function?

As we saw in Chapter 16, the Portuguese arrived in western A frica soon after 1400 in search of gold and a sea route to India. For over a century they were the only sig- nificant European presence in the region. During that time, Portuguese explorers, merchants, missionaries, and even criminal castaways established feitorias, or for- tified trading posts, and offshore island settlements. There were no great marches to the interior, no conquests of existing empires. Instead, the Portuguese focused on extracting A frica’s famed wealth in gold, ivory, and slaves through intermediar- ies. In a pattern repeated in Asia, the Portuguese dominated maritime trade.

From Voyages of Reconnaissance to Trading Forts 1415–1650 On the Gambia R iver the Portuguese sought the gold of Mali, at this time an empire in decline but still powerful in the interior (see again Map 17.1). The warring states of the region were happy to trade gold for horses, and chronic conflicts yielded a sur- plus of captives. With explicit backing from the pope, Portuguese merchants read- ily accepted African slaves as payment. Once in Portuguese hands, healthy young males were reduced to an accounting unit, the peça (PEH-sah), literally “piece.” Women, children, the disabled, and the elderly were discounted in terms of frac- tions of a peça.

A frican enslavement of fellow A fricans was widespread before the arrival of Europeans, and the daily experience of slavery was no doubt unpleasant. W hat differed with the arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century was a new in- sistence on innate A frican inferiority—in a word, racism—and with it a closing of traditional avenues of reentry into free society, if not for oneself, then for one’s children, such as faithful service, or in Islamic societies, religious conversion. The Portuguese followed the pope’s decree that enslaved sub-Saharan A fricans be converted to Catholicism, but they also adopted an unstated policy that regarded black A fricans as “slaves by nature.” To sidestep the paradox of A frican spiritual equality and alleged “ beastly” inferiority, the Portuguese claimed that they sold only captives taken in “ just war.” Many such slaves were sold, like young Domingo Angola, to the Spanish, who took the Portuguese sellers at their word (see Reading the Past: A lonso de Sandoval, “General Points Relating to Slavery”).

peça Portuguese for “piece,” used to describe enslaved A fricans as units of labor.

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Yet African slaves were in less demand than gold prior to American colonization. Word of goldfields in the African inte- rior encouraged the Portuguese to continue their dogged search for the yellow metal. By 1471 caravels reached West Africa’s so-called Gold Coast, and in 1482 the Portuguese estab- lished a feitoria in present-day Ghana. São Jorge da Mina, which served for over a cen- tury as Portugal’s major West African gold and slaving fort.

A fter 1500, as slave markets in Spanish America and Brazil emerged, new trading posts were established all along the West A frican coast. It so hap- pened that invasions of Mande and Mane (M A H-nay) peoples into modern Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries produced yet more captives through the seven- teenth century (see Map 17.2). The Portuguese continued to trade copper, iron, textiles, horses, and occasionally guns for gold, ivory, and a local spice called malaguetta pepper, but by the early 1500s the shift toward slave trading was evident.

The Portuguese were both extractors and transporters of wealth. They ferried luxury goods such as cola nuts and textiles, as well as slaves, between existing A frican trade zones. As we will see, a similar pattern developed in Asia. Virtually every where the Portuguese anchored their stout vessels, A fricans found that they  benefited as much from access to the foreigners’ shipping, which was rela- tively secure and efficient, as from their goods. Many competing coastal lords

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MAP 17.2 The Early Atlantic Slave Trade, c. 1450–1650 The first enslaved A fricans transported by ship in Atlantic waters arrived in Portugal in 1441. The Portuguese won a monopoly on A frican coastal trade from the pope, and until 1500, they shipped most enslaved A frican captives to the eastern Atlantic islands, where plantations were booming by the 1450s. Soon after 1500, Portuguese slave traders took captives first to the Spanish Caribbean (West Indies), then to the mainland colonies of New Spain and Peru. Claimed by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was initially a minor destination for enslaved A fricans, but this changed by about 1570, when the colony’s sugar production ballooned. A nother early Atlantic route took slaves south to Buenos A ires, where they were marched overland to the rich city of Potosí.

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READING THE PAST

Alonso de Sandoval, “General Points Relating to Slavery” Alonso de Sandoval (1577–c.1650) was a Jesuit priest

born in Seville, Spain, and raised in Lima, Peru. He

spent most of his adult life administering sacra-

ments to enslaved Africans arriving at the Caribbean

port city of Cartagena de Indias, in present-day

Colombia. In 1627 he published a book titled On

Restoring Ethiopian Salvation. In it, he focused on

cultural aspects of sub-Saharan African societies as

he understood them, all with the aim of preaching to

Africans more effectively, but he also discussed the

Atlantic slave trade and its justifications:

The debate among scholars on how to justify the

arduous and difficult business of slavery has per-

plexed me for a long time. I could have given up

on explaining it and just ignored it in this book.

However, I am determined to discuss it, although

I will leave the final justification of slavery to legal

and ecclesiastical authorities. . . . I will only men-

tion here what I have learned after many years of

working in this ministry. The readers can formulate

their own ideas on the justice of this issue. . . .

A short story helps me explain how to morally

justify black slavery. I was once consulted by a cap-

tain who owned slave ships that had made many

voyages to these places. He had enriched himself

through the slave trade, and his conscience was

burdened with concern over how these slaves had

fallen into his hands. His concern is not surprising,

because he also told me that one of their kings im-

prisoned anyone who angered him in order to sell

them as slaves to the Spaniards. So in this region,

people are enslaved if they anger the king. . . .

There is a more standard way in which slaves are

traded and later shipped in fleets of ships to the

Indies. Near Luanda are some black merchants called

made the most of these new trade ties, often to the detriment of more isolated and vulnerable neighbors.

At times commerce with the Portuguese upended a region’s balance of power, touching off a series of interior conflicts. Some such conflicts were ignited by Portuguese convicts who established marriage alliances with local chiefdoms. As seen in Chapter 16 in the case of Brazil, this was the Portuguese plan, to drop expendable subjects like seeds along the world’s coasts. Some took root, learned local languages, and built trading posts. In several West A frican coastal enclaves, mulatto or “Eurafrican” communities developed. These mixed communities were nominally Catholic, but culturally blended.

A fter 1510, the Portuguese moved eastward. Here among the Niger delta’s tidal flats and mangroves, Ijaw (EE-jaw) boatmen were willing to trade an adult male captive for fewer than a dozen copper manillas. Rates of exchange soon moderated,

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pombeiros worth a thousand pesos. They travel

inland eighty leagues [c. 250 miles], bringing porters

with them to carry trade goods. They meet in great

markets where merchants gather together to sell

slaves. These merchants travel 200 or 300 leagues

[c. 650–1000 miles] to sell blacks from many different

kingdoms to various merchants or pombeiros. The

pombeiros buy the slaves and transport them to the

coast. They must report to their masters how many

died on the road. They do this by bringing back the

hands of the dead, a stinking, horrific sight. . . .

I have spent a great deal of time discussing

this subject because slaves are captured in many

different ways, and this disturbs the slave traders’

consciences. One slave trader freely told me that

he felt guilty about how the slaves he had bought

in Guinea had come to be enslaved. Another slave

trader, who had bought 300 slaves on foot, ex-

pressed the same concerns, adding that half the

wars fought between blacks would not take place

if the Spanish [or more likely, Portuguese] did not

go there to buy slaves. . . . The evidence, along

with the moral justifications argued by scholars, is

the best we can do to carefully address this irre-

deemable situation and the very difficult business

of the slave trade.

Source: A lonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, ed. and trans. Nicole Von Germeten (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 50–55.

Examining the Evidence

1. W ho was A lonso de Sandoval, and why did he write this passage?

2. How does Sandoval try to justif y A frican enslavement?

3. A re A fricans themselves involved in this discussion?

but overall, Portuguese demand for slaves was met by other captive- producing zones. W hat historians call the “Nigerian diaspora” mostly developed later in this region, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By then rival Dutch and English slavers had established their own posts (see Map 17.4, page 628). A fter 1650 this region was known simply as the Slave Coast.

Portuguese Strategy in the Kingdom of Kongo Portuguese interest in Atlantic A frica shifted southeastward after 1500, based in part on alliances with the kingdom of Kongo. Within West Central A frica, cycles of trade, war, and drought influenced relationships with outsiders. Once again, local nobles forced the Portuguese to follow local rules. Still, whereas Portuguese slavers were to be largely displaced by northern Europeans in West A frica by 1650, in the southern portion of the continent they held on. As a result, the fortunes of

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Kongo and Angola became ever more intimately entwined with those of Brazil, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Portuguese religious initiatives in A frica had long been split between attacks on Muslim kingdoms in the far north, epitomized by the 1415 conquest of Ceuta in Morocco (see Chapter 16), and more peaceful, although scattered and in- consistent, missionar y efforts in the south. Portuguese missionaries rarely sur- vived in the tropical interior, where malaria and other diseases took a heav y toll. Thus scores of Franciscans, Jesuits, and others died denouncing the persistent fetishism (roughly, “idolatr y”) of their local hosts. The obvious solution was to train A frican priests, and for a time this option was sponsored by the Portuguese royal family.

In the early sixteenth century, A frican priests were trained in Lisbon, Coimbra, and even in Rome. A frican seminaries also were established in the Cape Verde Islands and on the island of São Tomé. Despite promising beginnings, however, sharp opposition came from an increasingly racist Portuguese clergy. Emerging colonial racial hierarchies trumped the universal ideal of spiritual equality. An A frican clergy could also subvert the slave trade and other such commercial proj- ects. A lready in decline before 1600, the A frican seminaries languished in the sev- enteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Only with the Enlightenment-inspired reforms of the later eighteenth century (discussed in Chapter 22) were A frican novices again encouraged to become priests beyond the parish level.

This did not mean that Christianity had no impact on early modern Atlantic A frica. Aside from the offshore islands, in Kongo and Angola, Christianity played a critical historical role. Beginning in the 1480s, the Portuguese applied their usual blend of trade, military alliances, and religious proselytizing to carve out a niche in West Central A frica. By 1491 they had converted much of the Kongo aristocracy to Roman Catholicism. Key among the converts was the paramount chief ’s son, Nzinga Mbemba, who later ruled as A fonso I (r. 1506–1543).

A fonso’s conversion was apparently genuine. He learned to read, studied theol- ogy, and renamed Mbanza, the capital city, São Salvador (“Holy Savior”). One of his sons became a priest in Lisbon and returned to Kongo following consecration in Rome. He was one of the earliest exemplars of western A frican clergy.

Ultimately, however, Christianity, like copper, tended to be monopolized by Kongo’s elites; the peasant and craft worker majority was virtually ignored. Most Kongolese commoners recognized deities called kitomi (key-TOE-mee), each looked after by a local (non-Catholic) priest. Meanwhile, Portuguese military aid buttressed Kongo politically while fueling the slave trade.

Here, as elsewhere in Africa, the slave trade, though it offered considerable gains, also exacerbated existing dangers and conflicts and created new ones. King Afonso

fetishism The derogatory term used by Europeans to describe western A frican use of religious objects.

kitomi Deities attended by Kongo priests prior to the arrival of Christian Europeans.

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wrote to the king of Portugal in 1526, complaining that “every day the merchants carry away our people, sons of our soil and sons of our nobles and vassals, and our relatives, whom thieves and people of bad conscience kidnap and sell to obtain the coveted things and trade goods of that [Portuguese] Kingdom.”4 Even in its earliest days, the slave trade in West Central Africa was taking on a life of its own.

As a result of Kongo’s slaving-based alliance with the Portuguese, King Afonso’s successors faced growing opposition. The kingdom of Kongo finally collapsed in 1569. São Salvador was sacked, and its Christian nobles were humiliated and sold into slavery in the interior. Lisbon responded to the fall of its staunchest African ally with troops. The monarchy was restored in 1574. In ex- change, Kongo traders called pombeiros (pohm-BEH-rohs) supplied their Portuguese saviors with slaves. The pro- cess of propping up regimes in exchange for captives was to continue throughout the long history of the slave trade.

Portuguese Strategy in Angola A second pillar of Portuguese strategy in West Central A frica was maintaining a per- manent military colony in Angola, home of the young man whose story began this chapter. Beginning with the port city of Luanda, Angola was to become one of the larg- est and longest-lived clear- inghouses for the Atlantic slave trade (see Map  17.3). It was perhaps here more than

pombeiro A slave- trade middleman in the West Central A frican interior.

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MAP 17.3 West Central A frica, c. 1500–1635 No A frican region was more affected by European interlopers in early modern times than West Central A frica, the Atlantic world’s main source of enslaved captives, nearly all of them shipped abroad by the Portuguese. Peoples of the interior suffered periodic slave raids as the Portuguese extended their networks south to Benguela. Some refugees migrated eastward, only to encounter new enemies—most of them allies of the Portuguese.

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any where else in A frica that the  Portuguese, aided again by droughts and other factors, managed to radically alter local livelihoods.

Evidence suggests that the early A ngolan slave trade ballooned as a result of a severe and prolonged drought affecting the interior in the 1590s. The drought uprooted villagers already weakened by slave-raiding, and these luckless refu- gees in turn were preyed upon by still more aggressive warrior-bandits calling themselves Imbangala. The Imbangala, organized around secret military societ- ies, soon became slaving allies of the Portuguese. These were probably Domingo A ngola’s captors.

Employing terrifying tactics, including human sacrifice and—allegedly— cannibalism, Imbangala raiders threatened to snuff out the Ndongo kingdom. That Ndongo survived at all depended on the creativity and wile of a powerful woman,

Queen Nzinga (r. 1624–1663). Queen Nzinga sought to thwart the Imbangala by allying with their sometime business partners, the Portuguese. In Luanda she was baptized “Dona Ana,” or “Queen Ann.”

Queen Nzinga promised to supply slaves to her new friends, only to discover that the Portuguese had little authority over the Imbangala. Their warriors continued to attack the Ndongo, who were forced to move to a new homeland, in Matamba. From this newer, more secure base Queen Nzinga built her own slaving and trading state. W hen the Dutch occupied Luanda in the 1640s, the queen adapted, trading slaves to them in exchange for immunity. Before her death at the age of eighty-one, Queen Nzinga reestablished ties with the Portuguese, who again controlled the coast in the 1650s.

To the south and west, meanwhile, Imbangala warriors helped establish the kingdom of Kasanje (see again Map 17.3). A fter 1630, Kasanje merchant- warriors operated as slavers and middlemen, procuring captives from the east. Farther south, other warriors began to interact with Portuguese settlers around the Atlantic port of Benguela. By the later seventeenth cen- tury Benguela rivaled Luanda.

Overall, West Central A frica, mostly Kongo and Angola, supplied over five million, or nearly half of the slaves sent to the Americas between 1519 and 1867. The victims were overwhelmingly poor millet and sorghum

Queen Nzinga’s Baptism Here the same late- seventeenth-century artist who painted the Mbundu blacksmiths (see page 619) portrays the baptism of the central A frican Queen Nzinga. Queen Nzinga’s Catholic baptism did not prevent her from making alliances with non-Catholics, both A frican and European, in long and violent struggles with neighbors and the Portuguese in her district of Matamba, A ngola. Some witnesses say she was attended by dozens of male servants dressed as concubines.

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farmers struggling to eke out a living in a drought-prone and war-torn region. At least two-thirds of all A frican captives sent across the Atlantic were men, a sig- nificant number of them boys. Into the vortex were thrust young men such as Domingo Angola, who was sent all the way to the Andean boomtown of Potosí.

Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1800

FOCUS What were the major changes in the Atlantic slave trade after 1600?

Other Europeans had vied for a share of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade since the mid-sixteenth century, including the English corsair Francis Drake, but it was only after 1600 that competition exploded. First the French, then the English, Dutch, Danish, and other northern Europeans forcibly displaced Portuguese trad- ers all along the western shores of A frica. Others set up competing posts nearby. By 1650, the Portuguese struggled to maintain a significant presence even in West Central A frica. They began to supplement western A frican slaves with captives trans-shipped from their outposts in the Indian Ocean, primarily Mozambique (see Map 17.4).

The slave trade was logistically complex, requiring thorough documentation. This has allowed historians to cross-check multiple documents for numbers of slaves boarded, origin place-names, and age or sex groupings. These sources, a bland accounting of mass death and suffering, suggest that volume grew slowly, expanding gradually after 1650 and very rapidly only after 1750. The British, de- spite profiting greatly from the slave trade in western A frica through the 1790s, when volume peaked, suddenly reversed policy under pressure from abolitionists in 1807. A fter 1808, the British Nav y helped suppress the Atlantic slave trade until it was abolished by treaty in 1850. Despite these measures, contraband slaving con- tinued, mostly between Angola and Brazil.

The Rise and Fall of Monopoly Trading Companies Following the example of the Spanish and Portuguese, northern European participation in the Atlantic slave trade grew in tandem with colonization ef- forts in the Americas. Tobacco-producing Caribbean islands such as Barbados and Martinique and mainland North American regions such as Virginia and the Carolinas were initially staffed with indentured, or contracted, European servants and only a small number of A frican slaves. As sugar cultivation increased in the

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�e Atlantic Slave Trade at Its Height, c. 1650–1800

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MAP 17.4 The Atlantic Slave Trade at Its Height, c. 1650–1800 The Atlantic slave trade grew dramatically after 1650. New slaving nations included the Netherlands, England, France, and Denmark, all of which had colonies in the Caribbean and on the North A merican mainland that relied on plantation agriculture. The regions from which enslaved A fricans came also shifted. West Central A frica remained a major source region, but the Upper Guinea Coast was increasingly overshadowed by the so-called Slave Coast located between the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra.

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Caribbean after 1650 and tobacco took off in Virginia, however, planters shifted to A frican slavery. This had been their wish, as their documents attest, and a declin- ing supply of poor European contract laborers accelerated the trend.

For historians of the North Atlantic, this transition from indentured servitude to A frican slavery has raised questions about the origins of American racism. In sum, can modern notions of racial difference be traced to early modern American slav- ery and the Atlantic slave trade? Some scholars have argued that racist ideologies grew mostly after this shift from European to A frican labor. Before that, they argue, “white” and “ black ” workers were treated by masters and overseers with equal cru- elty. In Virginia and Barbados during the early to mid-1600s, for instance, black and white indentured servants labored alongside each other, experiencing equal exploitation and limited legal protection. Scholars working in a broader historical context, however—one that takes into account Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian experiences in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and beyond—have been less convinced by this assertion. They argue that while racist notions hardened with the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean and North America after 1650—and grew harder still following the Scientific Revolution with its emphasis on biolog- ical classification—European views of sub-Saharan A fricans had never been positive. Put another way, racism was more a cause of slavery than a result.

Portuguese slavers suffered losses, but proved resilient. As we have seen, the Portuguese had spent several centuries establishing the financial in- struments and supply net- works necessary to run such a complex and risky business. To compete, northern Europeans established state-subsidized monopoly trading compa- nies. The highly belligerent Dutch West India Company was founded in 1621 to attack Spanish and Portuguese co- lonial outposts and take over Iberian commercial interests

Filling the Slave Ships The upper half of this 1732 engraving by Dutch artist Johannes K ip shows West A frican fishermen in canoes off the coast of present-day Ghana, with the old Portuguese fortress of São Jorge da Mina in the distance. The lower half shows slaves being ferried to a Dutch ship in a somewhat longer canoe, with a string of other European slave-trading forts in the distance. Slave ships often cruised A frican coasts for several months, acquiring a diverse range of captives before crossing the Atlantic.

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in the Atlantic. Several slaving forts in western A frica were eventually seized. São Jorge da Mina fell in 1638, and Luanda, Angola, in 1641. A lthough these colonial outposts were returned in subsequent decades, the era of Portuguese dominance was over.

The French, whose early overseas activities had been stunted by the religious wars described in Chapter 20, organized a monopoly trading company in 1664 to supply their growing Caribbean market. The English, fresh from their own civil conflicts, formed the Royal A frican Company in 1672. By 1700, the French and English were fighting bitterly to supply not only their own colonial holdings but also the lucrative Spanish-American market. Dutch slavers also competed, supply- ing slaves to the Spanish up to the 1730s. Spanish-Americans, unlike other col- onists, paid for slaves with gold and silver. Danish slavers also competed by the 1670s, when they established sugar plantations in the Virgin Islands.

The company model did not last. By 1725, most of the northern European mo- nopoly slaving companies had failed. Stuck with costly forts, salaried officers, and state-mandated obligations, they were too inflexible and inefficient to survive. Thus the French, English, and Dutch resorted to a Portuguese-style system, in which private merchants, often related to one another, pooled capital to finance individual voyages. Like their Mediterranean predecessors in Venice, Genoa, and elsewhere, the trade in slaves was but one of many overlapping ventures for most of these investors. Their profits, usually averaging 10 percent or so, were reinvested in land, light industry, and other endeavors. In time, investors had little to do with the organization of slaving voyages. Nonetheless, the profits slavery produced would help fuel Europe’s economic growth and development.

How the Mature Slave Trade Functioned The slave trade proved most lucrative when European investors cut every corner. Profit margins consistently trumped humanitarian concerns. By the late seven- teenth century, ships were packed tightly, food and water rationed sparingly, and crews kept as small as possible. Unlike other shipping ventures at this time, the value of the captives far exceeded the costs of ship and crew. In part this was a re- flection of the risks involved.

R isks and uncertainties abounded in the slave trade. Despite a growing number of European forts along A frica’s Atlantic coast, slavers were on their own in col- lecting captives. In short, the system was much more open and A frican-dominated than has generally been acknowledged. Ships spent an average of three months cruising coasts and estuaries in search of A frican middlemen willing to trade cap- tives for commodities. By the late seventeenth century, competition was on the

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rise, affecting supply and thus price. Violence, mostly in the form of slave uprisings and hostile attacks by fellow Europeans, was a constant concern.

European ship captains in charge of the African leg of the trip hoped to receive a bounty of 2 to 5 percent on all surviving slaves. Somewhat like modern human traffick- ers, they were betting their lives on a relatively small fortune. As we saw with regard to Portuguese missionaries, western Africa was notoriously unhealthy for “unseasoned” Europeans, due mostly to endemic falciparum malaria, and as many as one in ten ship captains died before leaving the African coast for the Americas. Few who survived repeated the trip. Ships’ doctors had scant remedies even for common ailments such as dysentery, which also afflicted slaves and crewmembers. When not ill themselves, doctors inspected slaves before embarkation, hoping to head off premature death or the spread of disease aboard ship and thereby to protect the investment.

The trade was also complicated in that few northern European products appealed to A frican consumers. More than anything, A fricans wanted colorful cotton fab- rics from India to supplement their own products. Thus northern Europeans fol- lowed the Portuguese example yet again by importing huge quantities of cotton cloth from South Asia, cowry shells from the Indian Ocean, and iron, brass, and copper from parts of Europe, particularly Spain and Sweden. Other tastes were introduced by Europeans. By 1700, American plantation commodities such as rum and tobacco were being exchanged for slaves in significant quantities. Thus, the Atlantic slave trade was a global concern.

Sources indicate that chiefs and kings throughout western Africa augmented their prestige by accumulating and redistributing commodities procured through the slave trade. The captives they sent abroad were not their kin, and western Africans appear to have had no sense of the overall magnitude of this commerce in human bodies. There were few internal brakes on captive-taking besides the diminishing pool of victims and shifting political ambitions; the African desire to hold dependents to boost prestige and provide domestic labor meshed with European demands. Along these lines, whereas female war captives might be absorbed into elite households, men and boys were generally considered dangerous elements and happily gotten rid of. It so happened that European planters and mine owners in the colonies valued men over women. Thus, however immoral and disruptive of African life it appears in retrospect, the slave trade probably seemed at the time to be mutually beneficial for European buyers and African sellers. Only the slaves themselves felt otherwise.

The Middle Passage It is difficult to imagine the suffering endured by the more than twelve million A frican captives forced to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The ordeal itself has come to

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be known as the Middle Passage (see again Map 17.4). As noted at the opening of this chapter, some West Central A fricans imagined the slavers’ ships to be floating slaughterhouses crossing a great lake or river to satisfy white cannibals inhabiting a distant, sterile land. Portuguese sailors unambiguously dubbed them “death ships” or “floating tombs.” Perhaps troubled by this sense of damnation, Portuguese priests baptized as many slaves as they could before departure.

Northern Europeans, increasingly in charge of the slave trade after 1650, took a more dispassionate approach. Slaves, as far as they were concerned, were a sort of highly valued livestock requiring efficient but impersonal handling. Put another way, the care and feeding of slaves were treated as pragmatic matters of health, not faith. Rations were the subsistence minimum of maize, rice, or millet gruel, with a bit of fish or dried meat added from time to time. Men, women, and children were as- signed separate quarters. Women were given a cotton cloth for a wrap, whereas men were often kept naked, both to save money and to discourage rebellion by adding to their humiliation. Exercise was required on deck in the form of dancing to drums during daylight hours. Like cattle, slaves were showered with seawater before the nighttime lockdown. The hold, ventilated on most ships after initial experiences with mass suffocation and heatstroke, was periodically splashed with vinegar.

Despite these measures, slave mortality on the one- to three-month voyage across the Atlantic was high. On average, between 10 and 20 percent of slaves did not survive. This high mortality rate is all the more alarming in that these slaves had been selected for their relative good health in the first place, leaving countless other captives behind to perish in makeshift barracks, dungeons, and coastal ag- ricultural plots. Many more died soon after landing in the Americas, often from dysentery. Some who were emotionally overwhelmed committed suicide along the way by hurling themselves into the ocean or strangling themselves in their chains. A few enraged men managed to kill a crewmember or even a captain before being executed. Slaves from different regions had trouble communicating, and thus suc- cessful slave mutinies remained rare.

The conditions of the Middle Passage worsened over time. In the name of in- creased efficiency, the situation below decks went from crowded to crammed be- tween the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On average, crews of 30 to 40 common sailors oversaw 200 to 300 slaves in around 1700, whereas the same number oversaw 300 to 400 slaves after 1750. These are only averages; even in the 1620s, some ships carried 600 or more slaves.

A lthough some Iberian clergymen protested the horrors of this crossing as early as the sixteenth century, it took the eighteenth-century deterioration of conditions aboard slave ships to awaken the conscience of participating nations. In England, most importantly, A frican survivors of the Middle Passage such as Olaudah

Middle Passage The Atlantic crossing made by slaves taken from A frica to the A mericas.

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Equiano (c. 1745–1797) testified before Parliament by the late eighteenth century. “Permit me, with the great- est deference and respect,” Equiano began his 1789 au- tobiography, “to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative, the chief design of which is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miser- ies which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortu- nate countrymen.”5 Such testimonies, backed by the pleas of prominent Quakers and other religious figures, were finally heard. Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, first enforced by the British in 1808, would come much more easily than abolition of slavery itself.

Volume of the Slave Trade It is important to note that the trans-Saharan and East A frican slave trades preceded the Atlantic one dis- cussed here, and that these trades continued through- out early modern times. In fact, the volume of the Atlantic trade appears to have eclipsed these other avenues to foreign captivity only after 1600. That said, the Atlantic slave trade ultimately constituted the greatest forced migration in early modern world his- tory. Compared with the roughly 2 million mostly free European migrants who made their way to all parts of the Americas between the voyage of Columbus in 1492 and the British abolition of the slave trade in 1808, the number of enslaved A fricans to cross the Atlantic and survive is astounding—between 10 and 12 million.

A lso astounding is the fact that the vast majority of these A fricans arrived in the last half century of the “legal” slave trade, that is, after 1750. Up until 1650 a total of approximately 710,000 slaves had been taken to American markets, most of them to Spanish America (262,700). Brazil was the next largest destination, ab- sorbing about a quarter of a million slaves to that date. São Tomé, the sugar island in the Gulf of Guinea, and Europe (mostly Iberia) absorbed about 95,000 and 112,000 slaves, respectively. Madeira and the Canaries imported about 25,000 A frican slaves, and the English and French West Indies, 21,000 and 2500, respec- tively. The average annual volume for the period up to 1650 was approximately 7500 slaves per year.

Olaudah Equiano Olaudah Equiano, whose slave name was Gustavus Vassa, became a celebrity critic of the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century after writing a memoir of his experiences as a slave and free man of color in A frica, North A merica, the Caribbean, and Europe.

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The second (1650–1750) and third (1750–1850) stages of the Atlantic slave trade witnessed enormous growth. By 1675, nearly 15,000 slaves were being car- ried to the colonies annually, and by 1700 nearly 30,000. The total volume of the trade between 1700 and 1750 was double that of the previous fifty years, bring- ing some 2.5  million slaves to the Americas. The trade nearly doubled yet again between 1750 and 1800, when some 4 million A fricans were transported. By this time the effect of the Atlantic slave trade on western A frican societies was consid- erable. The trade was restricted by the British after 1808, but slavers still managed to move some 3 million slaves, mostly to Brazil, and to a lesser extent Cuba and the United States, by 1850. Northern U.S. shipbuilders were key suppliers to Brazilian slavers to the very end.

It appears that in the first three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade most A frican captives came from the coastal hinterland. This changed only after about 1750, when colonial demand began to outstrip local sources of supply. Thereafter, slaves were brought to the coast from increasingly distant interior regions. In West A frica this amounted to something of an inversion of the caravan trading routes fanning out from the Niger R iver basin, but in West Central A frica entirely new trails and trade circuits were formed. A lso, whereas war captives and drought refugees had been the main victims in the past, now random kidnapping and slave-raiding became widespread.

COUNTERPOINT: The Pygmies of Central Africa

FOCUS how did the Pygmies’ rainforest world differ from the better-known environment of savannas and farms?

As in the Americas, certain forest, desert, and other margin-dwelling peoples of A frica appear to have remained largely immune to the effects of European con- quest, colonization, and trade. But such seeming immunity is difficult to gauge, especially since we now know some margin-dwelling groups once thought to be naturally isolated were in fact refugees from conquest and slaving wars. Many were driven from the more accessible regions where they had once hunted or other- wise exploited nature to survive. Distinct cultures such as the Batwa (BA H-twah), a major Pygmy group of the great Congo rainforest, and the K hoikhoi (COY-coy) and other tribespeople of southern A frica’s Kalahari Desert, were until only re- cently thought to have been unaffected by outsiders before the nineteenth century.

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Recent scholarship, and most surviv- ing gatherer-hunters themselves, sug- gest otherwise.

Life in the Congo Rainforest Still, for the Pygmies, as for many of the world’s tropical forest peoples, life has long been distinct from that of settled agriculturalists. Even now, Pygmies live by exploiting the nat- ural forest around them, unaided by manufactured goods. These forests, marked by rugged terrain and washed by superabundant rains, make agriculture and herding impossible. Short of cut- ting down huge swaths of trees, which in this region often leads to massive soil erosion, neither can be practiced. This is not to say space is limited. Indeed, the Congo R iver basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, after that of the Amazon in South America; it is vast. As in the Amazon, most forest animals are modest in size, with the important exception of the A frican elephant, which early modern Pygmies occasionally hunted for food and tusks.

Until recent times, most Pygmies were gatherer-hunters. Their superior track- ing abilities, limited material possessions, and knowledge of useful forest products such as leaves for dwellings and natural toxins for bow hunting allowed them to re- treat in times of external threats such as war. Herding and farming Bantu-speaking and Sudanic neighbors were at a disadvantage in Pygmy country, which seems to have prevented Pygmy militarization or formation of defensive confederacies. The Congo rainforest is also attractive in that it is much less affected by malarial mos- quitoes than the surrounding farmland. In recent times only a few Pygmy groups, such as the much-studied Mbuti (M-BOOH-tee), have remained separate enough from neighboring farmers and herders to retain their short stature and other dis- tinct characteristics. The Pygmies’ highly distinctive singing style and instrumen- tation, most of it Mbuti, have become famous with the rise of world music.

Everyday Pygmy life has been examined in most detail by anthropologists, who have emphasized differences between Pygmy and neighboring Bantu rit- uals. W hereas Bantu speakers have venerated dead ancestors in a way that has deeply affected their long-term settlement patterns, warfare, and kin groupings, the Pygmies have long preferred to “let go” of their dead—to move on, as it were.

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Similarly, whereas Bantu coming-of-age rituals such as circumci- sion have tended to be elaborate and essential to social reproduc- tion, Pygmies have traditionally marked few distinct phases in life. Most important, the Pygmies have venerated the forest itself as a life-giving spirit, whereas outsiders have treated it as a threat- ening space and potential source of evil. Has it always been so?

Legendary since ancient Egyptian times for their small, reed- like bodies, simple lifestyles, good-natured humor, and melo- dious music, the Pygmies have long been held up as the perfect counterpoint to urban civilization and its discontents. It is only recently that the Pygmies and other nonsedentary peoples like them have been treated historically, as makers rather than “non- actors” or victims of history. The absence of written records pro- duced by the Pygmies themselves has made this task difficult, but

anthropologists, historians, linguists, and archaeologists working together have made considerable headway.

Pygmy-Bantu Relations It seems that sometime after 1500, the introduction of iron tools and banana culti- vation to the central African interior began to alter settlement patterns and overall demography. This change placed Pygmies and Bantu neighbors in closer proximity, as more and more forest was cut for planting and Bantu moved into Pygmy territory. Bantu speakers, some of them refugees from areas attacked by slavers or afflicted by drought, appear to have displaced some Pygmy groups and to have intermarried with others. They seem to have adopted a variety of Pygmy religious beliefs, although Bantu languages mostly displaced original Pygmy ones. Also after 1500, American crops such as peanuts and manioc began to alter sedentary life at the forest’s edge, leading to still more interaction, not all of it peaceful, between the Pygmies and their neighbors. Pygmies adopted American capsicum peppers as an everyday spice.

Were the Pygmies driven from the rainforest’s edge into its heart by the slave trade? Perhaps in some places, yes, but the evidence is clearer for increased inter- action with Bantu migrants. Early effects of globalization on Pygmy life are more easily tracked in terms of foods adopted as a result of the Columbian Exchange. Despite these exchanges and conflicts, the Pygmies have managed to retain a dis- tinct identity that is as intertwined with the rhythms of the forest as it is with the rhythms of settled agriculture.

A lthough the story of the Pygmies’ survival is not as dramatic as that of the Mapuche of Chile (see Chapter 16), their culture’s richness and resilience serve as

Modern-Day Pygmies Here Baka Pygmies of Cameroon and the Central A frican Republic hunt in the Congo rainforest using nets, sticks, and vines. The woman also carries a machete for butchering the catch and a basket for the meat.

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testaments to their peoples’ imagination, will, and ingenuity. Their adaptation to the rainforest—probably in part a result of early modern historical stresses, which pushed them farther into the forest—reminds us of a shared human tendency to make the most of a given ecological setting, but also that the distinction between civilized and “primitive” lifestyles is a false one, or at least socially constructed.

Conclusion Western A frican societies grew and changed according to the rhythms of planting, harvest, trade, and war, and these rhythms continued to define everyday life in early modern times. Droughts, diseases, and pests made subsistence more chal- lenging in sub-Saharan A frica than in most parts of the world, yet people adapted and formed chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires, often underpinned, at least sym- bolically, by the control of iron and other metals. Iron tools helped farmers clear forest and till hard soils.

Islam influenced A frican society and politics across a broad belt south of the Sahara and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, but even this powerful reli- gious tradition was to a degree absorbed by local cultures. Most western A frican states and chiefdoms were not influenced by Christian missionaries until the late nineteenth century. It was malaria, a disease against which many sub-Saharan A fricans had at least some acquired immunity, that proved to be the continent’s best defense.

But A frica possessed commodities demanded by outsiders, and despite their failure to penetrate the interior in early modern times, it was these outsiders, first among them the seaborne Portuguese, who set the early modern phase of west- ern A frican history in motion. The Portuguese came looking for gold in the mid- fifteenth century, and once they discovered the dangers of malaria, they stuck to the coast and offshore islands to trade through intermediaries, including coastal chiefs and kings. First they traded for gold, but very soon for war captives. In return, the Portuguese brought horses, cloth, wine, metal goods, and guns. Local chiefs became powerful by allying with the newcomers, and they expanded their trading and raiding ventures deep into the continental interior. Thus began a sym- biotic relationship, copied and expanded by the English, Dutch, French, and other northern Europeans, that swelled over four centuries to supply the Americas with some 12 million enslaved A frican laborers, the largest forced migration in world history. Among these millions of captives, most of whose names we shall never know, was young Domingo Angola, a West Central A frican teenager caught up in a widening global web of trade, conquest, and religious conversion.

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review The major global development in this chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on early modern A frican peoples and cultures.

Important Events

c. 1100–1500 Extended dry period in West Africa prompts migrations

c. 1450 Kingdom of Benin reaches height of its power

1464–1492 Reign of Sunni Ali in the Songhai Empire

1482 Portuguese establish trading fort of São Jorge da Mina (Ghana)

1506–1543 Reign of Afonso I (Nzinga Mbemba) of kingdom of Kongo

1569 Collapse of kingdom of Kongo

1574 Portuguese-aided restoration of kingdom of Kongo

1591 Moroccan raiders conquer Songhai Empire

1621 Formation of Dutch West India Company

1624–1663 Reign of Queen Nzinga in the Ndongo kingdom of Angola

1638–1641 Dutch seize São Jorge da Mina and Luanda

1672 Formation of English Royal African Company

1750–1800 Atlantic slave trade reaches highest volume

1807 British declare Atlantic slave trade illegal

KEY TERMS A frican diaspora (p. 606) fetishism (p. 624) génie (p. 609) husbandry (p. 610)

kitomi (p. 624) manikongo (p. 618) Middle Passage (p. 632) oba (p. 617)

paramount chief (p. 610) peça (p. 620) pombeiro (p. 625)

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CHAPTER OVERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How did ecological diversity in western A frica

relate to cultural developments? 2. W hat tied western A frica to other parts of the

world prior to the arrival of Europeans along At- lantic shores?

3. How did the Atlantic slave trade arise, and how was it sustained?

MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. How does the Moroccan conquest of Songhai

compare with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs (see Chapter 16)?

2. How did gender roles differ between the kingdoms of West A frica and those of North A merica’s Eastern Woodlands (see Chapter 15)?

3. How did the Portuguese experience in A frica differ from events in Brazil (see Chapter 16)?

4. How did growing European competition for enslaved A fricans alter the nature of enslavement and trade in A frica itself?

For further research into the topics covered in this chapter, see the Bibliography at the end of the book. For additional primary sources from this period, see Sources for World in the Making.

M a k i n g C o n n e c t i o n s