African slave trade

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

Trade in slaves has carried on for thousands of years in Africa. The first main route passed through the Sahara. After the Age of Exploration, African slaves became part of the Atlantic slave trade, from which comes the modern, Western conception of slavery as an institution of African-derived slaves and non-African slave owners.

Despite its illegality, the African slave trade continues today in parts of the continent. The contemporary slave trade focuses on the theft and sale of children into slavery as child soldiers and sex workers as well as the forced sale of women into slavery, typically for use in the sex trade.

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[edit] History

The very earliest external slave trade was the trans-Saharan slave trade. Although there had long been some trading up the Nile River and very limited trading across the western desert, the transportation of large numbers of slaves did not become viable until camels were introduced from Arabia in the 10th century. By this point, a trans-Saharan trading network came into being to transport slaves north. It has been estimated that from the 10th to the 19th century some 6,000 to 7,000 slaves were transported north each year.[citation needed] Over time this added up to several million people moving north, however the annual numbers were small enough that it is thought by scholars to have had relatively little demographic impact on either West Africa or the Maghreb. Frequent intermarriages meant that the slaves were assimilated in North Africa. Unlike in the Americas, slaves in North Africa were mainly servants rather than labourers, and an equal or greater number of females than males were taken, who were often employed as chambermaids to women of harems. It was also not uncommon to turn male slaves into eunuchs.[1] Slaves purchased from black slave dealers in West African regions known as the Slave Coast, Gold Coast, and Côte d'Ivoire were sold into slavery as a result of a defeat in tribal warfare. Mighty black kings in the Bight of Biafra near modern-day Senegal and Benin sold their captives locally and later to European slave traders for goods such as metal cookware, rum, livestock, and seed grain.

As European nations grew more powerful, especially Portugal, Spain, France and England, they began vying for control of the African slave trade, with little effect on the local African and Arab trading. Great Britain's existing colonies in the Lesser Antilles and their effective naval control of the Mid Atlantic forced other countries to abandon their enterprises due to inefficiency in cost. The English crown provided a charter giving the Royal African Company monopoly over the African slave routes until 1712.[2]

The trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Arab traders in the ninth century. It is estimated that only a few thousand slaves were taken each year from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coast. They were sold throughout the Middle East and India. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands per year were being taken.[3]

The Atlantic slave trade developed much later, but it would eventually be by far the largest and have the greatest impact. The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of Guinea were the Portuguese; the first European to actually buy slaves in the region was Antão Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer. Originally interested in trading mainly for gold and spices, they set up colonies on the uninhabited islands of Sao Tome. In the 16th century the Portuguese settlers found that these volcanic islands were ideal for growing sugar. Sugar growing is a labour-intensive undertaking and Portuguese settlers were difficult to attract due to the heat, lack of infrastructure, and hard life. To cultivate the sugar the Portuguese turned to large numbers of African slaves. Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast, originally built by the Portuguese in 1482 to control the gold trade, became an important depot for slaves that were to be transported to the New World.[4]

Increasing penetration into the Americas by the Portuguese created more demand for labour in Brazil--primarily for farming and mining. To meet this demand, a trans-Atlantic slave trade soon developed. Slave-based economies quickly spread to the Caribbean and the southern portion of what is today the United States. These areas all developed an insatiable demand for slaves. From its beginning it is estimated that some 11 million people were enslaved and taken from Africa to the Americas; the result of which is one of the largest migrations in history. The precise amount of slaves is still disputed by scholars, yet today the general consensus is that these numbers are fairly reliable. [5] A small number of slaves were shipped to Europe and some were transported to other parts of Africa, mostly to South Africa.[6]

[edit] Slavery in Africa

In most African societies, there was very little difference between the free peasants and the feudal vassal peasants. Vassals of the Songhay Muslim Empire were used primarily in agriculture; they paid tribute to their masters in crop and service but they were slightly restricted in custom and convenience. These non-free people were more an occupational caste, as their bondage was relative. [7].

There is adequate evidence citing case after case of African control of segments of the trade. Several African nations such as the Ashanti of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria had economies depended solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans.Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group against another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.[8].

Slavery in the rigid form which existed in Europe and throughout the New World was not practiced in Africa nor in the Islamic Orient. "Slavery", as it is often referred to, in African cultures was generally more like indentured servitude: "slaves" were not made to be chattel of other men, nor enslaved for life. African "slaves" were paid wages and were able to accumulate property. They often bought their own freedom and could then achieve social promotion -just as freedman in ancient Rome- some even rose to the status of kings (e.g. Jaja of Opobo and Sunni Ali Ber). Similar arguments were used by western slave owners during the time of abolition, for example by John Wedderburn in Wedderburn v. Knight, the case that ended legal recognition of slavery in Scotland in 1776. Regardless of the legal options open to slave owners, rational cost-earning calculation and/or voluntary adoption of moral restraints often tended to mitigate (except with traders, who preferred to weed out the worthless weak individuals) the actual fate of slaves throughout history.

[edit] Why African Slaves?

In the late 15th century, Europeans (Spanish and Portuguese first) began to explore, colonize and conquer the territory in the Americas. The European colonists attempted to enslave some of the Native Americans to perform hard physical labour, but found them unaccustomed to hard agrarian labor and so familiar with the local environment that it was difficult to prevent their escape. Their lack of resistance to common European diseases was another factor against their suitability for slavery. The idea of using Africans from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves initially came from the existing Arabian and Persian slave trade along East Africa which Portuguese sailors came into contact with in the 15th century.[citation needed] The Europeans had also noted the West African practice of enslaving prisoners of war (a common phenomenon among many peoples on all of the continents). European colonial powers traded guns, brandy and other goods for these slaves, but this had little effect on the Arabian and African trade. The African slaves proved more resistant to European diseases than indigenous Americans, familiar with a tropical climate and accustomed to agricultural work. [1] As a result, regular trade was soon established.[2]

[edit] Effects

Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, but the effect of the trade on African societies is much debated due to the apparent influx of capital to Africans. In the 19th century, European abolitionists slowly began to see slavery as a moral ill. This view continued with scholars until the 1960s and 70s such as Basil Davidson, who conceded it might have had some benefits while still acknowledging its largely negative impact on Africa. Today, however, some scholars assert that slavery did not have a wholly disastrous effect on those left behind in Africa.[9]

These scholars assert that the numbers of slaves exported were large, but so was the population from which they were drawn. At its peak, the Atlantic slave trade took about 90,000 slaves per year out of a total population of around 25 million in just Guinea, where the vast majority originated. This number was significant, yet only a moderate annual growth rate in population was enough to sustain it by replacement. Therefore, the slave trade is unlikely to have caused a decrease in the population of West Africa, though it may have reduced or even halted population growth in some regions.[10]

All three slave-trading routes tapped into local trading patterns. Europeans or Arabs in Africa very rarely mounted expeditions to capture slaves. It was far easier and more common to make use of existing black African middlemen and slave traders. Slavery has been present in Africa for millennia, and still is today even with children, though some historians prefer to describe African slavery as feudalism, arguing it was more like the system that controlled the peasantry of Western Europe during the Middle Ages or Russia into the 19th century than slavery as it was practiced in the Americas.[11]

The slaves came from many different sources. About half came from the societies that sold them. These might be criminals, heretics, the mentally ill, the indebted and any others that had fallen out of favour with the rulers. Most came from captured tribes in inter-tribal warfare. Little is known about the details of practices before the arrival of Europeans, and so it is difficult to tell if the number of people considered as undesirables was artificially increased to provide more slaves for export. It is believed that capital punishment in the region nearly disappeared since prisoners became far too valuable to dispose of in such a way.[12]

Another source of slaves, comprising about half the total, came from military conquests of other states or tribes. It has long been contended that the slave trade greatly increased violence and warfare in the region due to the pursuit of slaves, but it is hard to provide evidence to prove this; warfare was certainly common even before slave hunting had added such an extra inducement.[13]

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

[edit] Abolition

Beginning in the late 18th century, reaction against the barbarities of the slave trade led to its being outlawed. France was Europe's first country to abolish slavery, in 1794, but it was revived by Napoleon in 1802, and banned for good in 1848. In 1807 the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, under which captains of slave ships could be fined for each slave transported. This was later superseded by the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which freed all slaves in the British Empire. Abolition was then extended to the rest of Europe. The power of the Royal Navy was subsequently used to suppress the slave trade, and while some illegal trade, mostly with Brazil, continued, the Atlantic slave trade would be eradicated by the middle of the 19th century. The Saharan and Indian Ocean trades continued, however, and even increased as new sources of slaves became available. According to Mordechai Abir, with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Ethiopia became the primary source to buy slaves for the Muslim world. The slave trade within Africa also increased. The British Navy could suppress much of the trade in the Indian Ocean, but the European powers could do little to affect the intra-continental trade.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse and a casus belli for the European conquest and colonisation of much of the African continent. In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between Imperialistic Europeans, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. In response to this public pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932. By the end of the colonial period they were mostly successful in this aim, though slavery is still very active in Africa even though it has gradually moved to a wage economy. Independent nations attempting to westernise or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression, even as they, in the case of Egypt, hired European soldiers like Samuel White Baker's expedition up the Nile. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in states, such as Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.[15]. See also Slavery in Sudan.

[edit] External links

Cree Humphries 41 n syracuse dr. 215-622-7396 Publisher Humphries

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Fage pg. 256
  2. ^ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/britain_trade.htm
  3. ^ Fage pg. 258
  4. ^ Fage pg. 232
  5. ^ Farragher pg. 54
  6. ^ Fage pg. 255
  7. ^ "African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD". "Owen 'Alik Shahadah". Retrieved on 2005-04-01.
  8. ^ "African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade". "Kwaku Person-Lynn". Retrieved on 2004-10-01.
  9. ^ Fage pg. 261
  10. ^ Fage pg. 260
  11. ^ Fage pg. 268
  12. ^ Fage pg. 267
  13. ^ Fage pg. 267
  14. ^ Fage pg. 274
  15. ^ Human Rights Watch Slavery and Slave Redemption in the Sudan

[edit] References

[edit] See also

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