22/07/2019 The impact of the slave trade on Africa, by Elikia M'bokolo (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, April

ish edition, April 1998)

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The impact of the slave

trade on Africa
On 27 April 1848 Victor Schoelcher, the French under-secretary of state for the
colonies, signed a decree abolishing slavery. To force the decision through, he had
warned of the danger of a general uprising if nothing was done. Resistance by the
slaves themselves was thus of capital importance in the French government’s decision,
and freedom, when it came, was due more to Africa’s own efforts than to a sudden
burst of humanitarian feeling on the part of the slave traders.

E M

T
course of human history is marked by appalling crimes. But even the hardened
historian is filled with horror, loathing and indignation on examining the record of
African slavery. How was it possible? How could it have gone on for so long, and on
such a scale? A tragedy of such dimensions has no parallel in any other part of the
world.

The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara,
through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries
of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth). Then more
than four centuries (from the end of the fifteenth to the nineteenth) of a regular slave trade to
build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe. The figures, even where
hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four
million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the
trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the
Atlantic Ocean (1).

Of all these slave routes, the “slave trade” in its purest form, i.e. the European Atlantic trade,
attracts most attention and gives rise to most debate. The Atlantic trade is the least poorly
documented to date, but this is not the only reason. More significantly, it was directed at Africans
only, whereas the Muslim countries enslaved both Blacks and Whites. And it was the form of
slavery that indisputably contributed most to the present situation of Africa. It permanently
weakened the continent, led to its colonisation by the Europeans in the nineteenth century, and
engendered the racism and contempt from which Africans still suffer.

While specialists squabble about the details, the basic questions raised by the enslavement of the
Africans have scarcely varied since the eighteenth century, when the issue first became the subject
of public debate as the result of the efforts of abolitionists in the Northern slave states, the
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demands of black intellectuals, and the unremitting struggle of the slaves themselves. Why the
Africans rather than other peoples? Who exactly should be held responsible for the slave trade?
The Europeans alone, or the Africans themselves? Did the slave trade do real damage to Africa,
or was it a marginal phenomenon affecting only a few coastal societies?

Trade or go under
We need to take a fresh look at the origins of the Atlantic slave trade. They shed light on the
enduring mechanisms that established and maintained the vicious spiral. It is not certain that the
European slave trade originally derived from the Arab trade. For a long time the Arab slave trade
appears to have been a supplement to a much more profitable commerce in Sudanese gold and
the precious, rare or exotic products of the African countries. Whereas, despite some exports of
gold, ivory and hardwoods, it was the trade in human beings that galvanised the energy of the
Europeans along the coast of Africa. Again, the Arab slave trade was geared mainly to the
satisfaction of domestic needs. In contrast, following the successful establishment of slave
plantations on the islands off the coast of Africa (Sao Tomé, Principe, Cap Verde), the export of
Africans to the New World supplied the workforce for the colonial plantations and mines whose
produce (gold, silver and, above all, sugar, cocoa, cotton, tobacco and coffee) was the prime
material of international trade.

The enslavement of Africans for production was tried in Iraq but proved a disaster. It provoked
widespread revolts, the largest of which lasted from 869 to 883 and put paid to the mass
exploitation of black labour in the Arab world (2). Not until the nineteenth century did slavery
for production re-emerge in a Muslim country, when black slaves were used on the plantations of
Zanzibar to produce goods such as cloves and coconuts that in any case were partly exported to
Western markets (3). The two slavery systems nevertheless shared the same justification of the
unjustifiable: a more or less explicit racism with a strong religious colouring. In both cases, we
find the same fallacious interpretation of Genesis, according to which the Blacks of Africa, as the
alleged descendants of Ham, are cursed and condemned to slavery.

The Europeans did not have an easy time establishing the trade in “ebony”. At first, they simply
raided the coast and carried people off. The powerful images in Alex Haley’s Roots (4) are
confirmed by the Guinea Chronicle written in the middle of the fifteenth century by a Portuguese,
Gomes Eanes de Zurara. But the regular exploitation of mines and plantations required an ever
larger workforce. A proper system had to be established to ensure a steady supply. In the early
sixteenth century the Spaniards began to issue “licences” (from 1513) and asientos or “contracts”
(from 1528) under which the state monopoly on the import of Blacks passed into private hands.

The great slaving companies were formed in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the
Americas, and other parts of the world which the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and various papal
edicts had reserved to the Spaniards and Portuguese, were redistributed among the nations of
Europe. The whole of Europe - France, England, Holland, Portugal and Spain, and even
Denmark, Sweden and Brandenburg shared in the spoils, establishing a chain of monopoly
companies, forts, trading posts and colonies that stretched from Senegal to Mozambique. Only
distant Russia and the Balkan countries were missing from the pack - and they received their own
small contingents of slaves via the Ottoman Empire.

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In Africa itself, sporadic raids by Europeans soon gave way to regular commerce. African
societies were drawn into the slavery system under duress, hoping that, once inside it, they would
be able to derive maximum benefit for themselves. Nzinga Mbemba, ruler of the Kongo
Kingdom, is a good example. He had converted to Christianity in 1491 and referred to the king
of Portugal as his brother. When he came to power in 1506, he protested strongly at the fact that
the Portuguese, his brother’s subjects, felt entitled to rob his possessions and carry off his people
into slavery. It was to no avail. The African monarch gradually allowed himself to be convinced
that the slave trade was both useful and necessary. Among the goods offered in exchange for
human beings, rifles took pride of place. And only states equipped with rifles, i.e. participating in
the slave trade, were able to resist attacks from their neighbours and pursue expansionist policies.

The African states fell into the trap set by the European slavers. Trade or go under. All the states
along the coast or close to the slave trading areas were riven by the conflict between national
interest, which demands that no resource necessary to security and prosperity be neglected, and
the founding charters of kingdoms, which impose on sovereigns the obligation to defend the lives,
property and rights of their subjects. The states involved in the slave trade strove to keep it within
strict limits. In 1670, when the French requested permission to establish a trading post on his
territory, King Tezifon of Allada made the following clear-sighted reply: “You will make a house
in which you will put at first two little pieces of cannon, the next year you will mount four, and in
a little time your factory will metamorphosed into a fort that will make you master of my
dominions and enable you to give laws to me (5)”. From Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal to the Congo
estuary, the local societies and states mostly succeeded in pursuing an ambiguous policy of
collaboration, suspicion and control.

In Angola, Mozambique and certain parts of Guinea, however, Europeans got directly involved in
the African warfare and trade networks with the help of local black accomplices or half-castes
who were the offspring of white adventurers. These adventurers had a reputation that was
unenviable even in an age of extreme cruelty. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the
Portuguese lançados (those who dared to “take off” into the interior) were described as “the seed
of the devil”, “the essence of evil”, and “murderers, thieves and degenerates”. In time, this group
of intermediaries grew large enough to constitute, at several points along the coast, the class of
“merchant princes” on whom the slave trade came to rest.

How profitable was it? Scrupulous accounts were kept of the slaving ships’ outgoing cargo. They
give us a very clear picture of what was traded in exchange for millions of African lives. Rifles,
gunpowder, brandy, cloth, glassware, and ironmongery. A surprisingly unequal exchange?
Perhaps. But the same sort of thing is still going on today. The countries of the North stop at
nothing to convince African heads of state to import white elephants in exchange for mediocre
personal profit.

Clearly, the ideological weapons used to justify the slave trade reflected neither the reality nor the
dynamics of African society. Africans, like all other peoples, had no particular liking for slavery.
Slavery was generated and maintained by a specific system. While the revolts of black slaves
during the Atlantic crossing and in America are well documented, there is much less awareness of
the scale and diversity of resistance to slavery within Africa. Both to the Atlantic slave trade as
such and to the slavery in Africa which it induced or aggravated.

One long neglected source is Lloyd’s List. It throws unexpected light on the rejection of the slave
trade in the African coastal societies. It is packed full of details of damage to vessels insured by

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the famous London company from its foundation in 1689. The figures show that in more than
17% of cases, the damage was due to local rebellion or plundering in Africa. The perpetrators of
these revolts were the slaves themselves, assisted by the coastal population. It is as if there were
two separate interests at work: the interest of states that had allowed themselves to become
incorporated in the slavery system, and the interest of free peoples who were under constant
threat of enslavement and were moved to act in solidarity with those already reduced to slavery.

As for slavery within African society itself, everything appears to indicate that it grew in parallel
with the Atlantic slave trade and was reinforced by it. It similarly gave rise to many forms of
resistance: flight, open rebellion, and recourse to the protection afforded by religion (attested in
both Islamic and Christian countries). In the Senegal valley, for example, the attempts by certain
monarchs to enslave and sell their own subjects gave rise, at the end of the 17th century, to the
Marabout war and the Toubenan movement (from the word tuub, meaning to convert to Islam).
Its founder, Nasir al-Din, proclaimed that “God does not permit kings to pillage, kill or enslave
their peoples. He appointed them, on the contrary, to preserve their subjects and protect them
from their enemies. Peoples were not made for kings, but kings for peoples.”

Further south, in what is now Angola, the Kongo peoples invoked Christianity in the same way,
both against the missionaries, who were compromised in the slave trade, and against the local
powers. At the beginning of the 18th century a prophetess in her twenties, Kimpa Vita (also
known as Doña Beatrice), turned the slave traders’ racist arguments on their head and began to
preach that “there are no Blacks or Whites in heaven” and that “Jesus Christ and other saints are
black and come from the Congo”. Similar appeals to religion are still a feature of demands for
freedom and equality in various parts of Africa. Clearly, the slave trade was far from marginal. It
is central to modern African history, and resistance to it engendered attitudes and practices that
have persisted to the present day.

A continent of “savages”
The ideas of abolitionist propaganda, which certain ways of commemorating the abolition of
slavery tend to reinforce, should not be accepted uncritically. The desire for freedom, and
freedom itself, did not come to the Africans from outside, whether from Enlightenment
philosophers, abolitionist agitators or republican humanists. They came from internal
developments within the African societies themselves. Moreover, from the end of the 18th
century, merchants in countries bordering on the Gulf of Guinea, who had mostly grown rich on
the slave trade, began to distance themselves from slavery and send their children to Britain to
train in the sciences and other professions useful for the development of commerce. That is why,
throughout the 19th century, African societies had no trouble responding positively to the
inducements of industrialised Europe, which had converted to “lawful” trade in the produce of
the land and was henceforth hostile to the “unlawful” and “shameful” trade in slaves.

But the Africa of the 19th century was very different from the continent which Europeans had
encountered four hundred years earlier. As the Trinidadian historian, Walter Rodney, has tried to
show, Africa had been drawn by the slave trade down a dangerous path, and it was now well and
truly underdeveloped (6). The racism rooted in the slave-trade era blossomed anew in these
propitious circumstances. European discourse on Africa now centred on the “backwardness” and
“savagery” of the continent. On the basis of such value judgements, the West was postulated as a

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model. African upheavals and regression were attributed, not to real historical developments in
which Europe had played a part, but to the “innate nature” of the Africans themselves. Emergent
colonialism and imperialism cloaked themselves in humanitarian garb and invoked “racial
superiority” and the “White Man’s burden”. The former slave-trading states now spoke only of
liberating Africa from “Arab” slavers and the black potentates who were also engaged in slavery.

However, once the colonial powers had carved up the continent between them, they took great
care not to abolish the slavery structures they had found in place. Any change would have to be
gradual, they argued, and “native” customs had to be respected. Slavery thus persisted within the
colonial system, as we can see from the League of Nations surveys conducted between the two
world wars  (7). Worse still, in order to drive the economic machine, they created a new type of
slavery in the form of forced labour. “Whatever it is called, nothing can disguise the fact that
forced labour is de facto and de jure simply the reintroduction and promotion of slavery (8).”
Here again, to look no further than the French example, the impulse for freedom came from
Africa. It was due to the efforts of the African deputies, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny and
Léopold Sédar Senghor, that forced labour was at last abolished in 1946.

E M

Translated by Barry Smerin

Director of studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

(1) Ralph Austen, African Economic History, James Curey, London, 1987, p. 275; Elikia M’Bokolo, Afrique noire. Histoire et
Civilisations, Vol. I, Haiter-Aupelf, Paris, 1995, p. 264; Joseph E. Inikori (ed.) Forced Migration. The impact of the export
slave trade on African societies, Hutchinson, London, 1982; P. D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census, University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969.

(2) Alexandre Popovic, La révolte des esclaves en Iraq au IIIe/IXe siècle, Geuthner, Paris, 1976.

(3) Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory. Integration of an African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, James
Curry, London, 1988.

(4) Alex Haley, Roots, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1976.

(5) Akinjogbin, Dahomey and its Neighbours, 1708-1818, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967, p. 26.

(6) Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Bogle-L’Ouverture, London, 1972.

(7) Claude Meillassoux, L’Esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, Maspero, Paris, 1975.

(8) Letter from the French deputies to the minister for the colonies, 22 February 1946.

Mot clés: Racism History Human rights Africa

>>
FRANÇAIS La dimension africaine de la traite des Noirs (fr)
DEUTSCH Der afrikanische Kontinent - ein Beutestück des Sklavenhandels (de)
ESPAÑOL La dimensión africana de la trata de negros (es)
ITALIANO La tratta dei neri vista dall' Africa (it)

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