In the words of Martin A.

Klein, “slave trading and slave production became the

most important economic activities for many African states.”

From the middle of the 15th century, Africa entered into a unique relationship
with Europe that led to the devastation and depopulation of Africa, but
contributed to the wealth and development of Europe. From then until the end
of the 19th century, Europeans began to establish a trade for African captives.

The transatlantic slave trade began during the 15th century when Portugal, and
subsequently other European kingdoms, were finally able to expand overseas
and reach Africa. Portuguese ambitions during the first two centuries of contact
with Africa were diffuse. One was to secure manpower to exploit in Brazil and
the island colonies, but the Portuguese state and Portuguese merchants were
equally interested in the spice trade, in precious metals, particularly gold.
Nothing in Africa fascinated the Portuguese more than the prospect of gold.
Everywhere they went they inquired after it. In two regions this developed into
a strong, permanent interest. One was on the stretch of the West African coast
that became known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. The other gold-bearing
region of Africa of which the Portuguese became aware was the plateau zone of
south-central Africa now known as Zimbabwe. As soon as they reached the East
African coast the Portuguese ascertained that this gold was exported to Asia via
Sofala, a port on the coast of modem Mozambique under the control of the city
of Kilwa. Sofala was quickly seized and an attempt was made to redirect the
trade to Mozambique island where the Portuguese bullt their fort and town.
This tactic proved unsuccessful and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the
gold trade quickly dried up. It has been suggested that the gold supplies were in
any case petering out at this time. However, the Portuguese persisted. They
found a highway to the interior in the form of the Zambesi River which they
followed inland, establishing forts and trading settlements in strategic locations.
The only region other than Zambesi where Portuguese involvement had some
lasting significance lay across the continent where the savanna that stretches
south of the Congo basin reaches the Atlantic. Here the Portuguese encountered
the one powerful African state that fronted the sea coast in the fifteenth century
- the kingdom of the Kongo. Impressed by the state of order and control and the
more open terrain which made possible physical penetration into the interior,
the first Portuguese quickly established an alliance with the Kongo state. South
of the Kongo state the Portuguese presence intruded markedly in the area that
became known after the title of a Iocal ruIer: Angola. Angola was a particularly
early focus for the slave trade and the one place other than the Zambesi valley
where the Portuguese tried consistently to sustain a territorial empire in the
course of wars in the seventeenth century.

The Portuguese had an effective base for the penetration of Kongo and Angola
in the island colony of Säo Tome. Säo Tome proved to be only one in a chain of
land exhausting sugar plantation centres which the slave trade serviced. In
economic terms the organisation and evolution of the sugar plantation,
demanding large inputs of firmly controlled, hard-worked human labour,
determined the history of the trade. Säo Tome at the end of the fifteenth
century was the earliest slave plantation to rely overwhelmingly on African
labour. From the Atlantic islands the focus of sugar production then shifted to
the tropical colonies of the New World whose vast lands required settlers to be
exploited effectively. The very weakness of Portuguese power, political and
economic, was ironically a factor in the spread of the plantation. During the
1630s the Dutch temporarily succeeded in conquering part of Brazil and, in
doing so, mastered the art of sugar-milling. They introduced the system into the
Caribbean region and seized upon the growing importance of the Portuguese
slave trade in providing a vast coerced work force. In 1654 a Brazilian force
under Salvador da Sa, representing a revival of Portuguese power, threw the
Dutch out of Angola. The merchant fleets of France, and especially
industrialising Britain, overtook the Dutch to become the major slaving powers
of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese too expanded their slave trade and
remained the third most important agent while most of the other European
powers, as weIl as Brazil and New England, were active participants.

Men have long associated the cruelties of the slave trade with unimaginably
great profits and tainted wealth. In truth, the slave trade was immensely
profitable for European merchants during the seventeenth century. In that the
price of goods bought in Europe for sale to Africa was very low compared with
the money value of slaves sold in the Caribbean. The business was a risky one,
though, subject to European wars, piracies, shipwrecks and disease. Throughout
the slaving period voyages could be extremely remunerative, but during the
eighteenth century, despite the insatiable demands of the plantations which
were prepared to pay ever higher prices, profits on average appear to have
diminished as African traders improved their bargaining power in this repellent
business. The slave trade was a factor in the accumulation of capital which
helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution. The casual link cannot be traced
directly for the trade itself was just one element in a great complex of economic
activities: the plantations, their exports, their consumption of foodstuffs and
textiles from Europe, North America (and, on a small scale, Africa) and the
general development of shipping, to name only the most obvious. Slaving played
its part in laying the foundations of capitalism within this broader structure
made possible by the expansion of world commerce. At its height the slave trade
overtook or entirely replaced other forms of commerce between Europe and
Africa.

Regions such as the Swahili coast and Ethiopia which appeared to be less likely
major slave exporters were neglected, although a slave trade arose in the late
eighteenth century from Kilwa and the off-shore island of Zanzibar to service the
plantations founded by the French on the fertile, previously uninhabited islands
of Mauritius and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The gold export trade of Elmina
virtually disappeared in the eighteenth century as the Gold Coast too became a
major slave exporter. The Senegambian region, largely transformed into an
exporter of gum arabic, was an exception, as was the extreme south of Africa
where a colony of settlement developed under Dutch rule and into which the
slaves were imported. However, it is generally fitting to treat the period of
contact from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century as the era of
the slave trade. While the treatment and use of slaves in Africa was very
different from the commercially-orientated plantations of the New World,
nevertheless Africans were sometimes being seized violently, captured and
made available for exchange purposes as commodities. But the Atlantic slave
trade did increase enormously the amount of slaving in Africa.

For Africa the trade involved the import of new commodities as much as the
export of human beings. In exchange for slaves Africans accepted from
Europeans a wide range of goods, the most important being Indian and
European textiles. These and a range of others, notably metalware and salt,
replaced domestically produced goods that were highly valued, traded for
centuries and scarce in many regions. A noteworthy item in the trade was the
cowrie shell of the Indian Ocean, brought in perhaps as replacement for local
shell currendes that had already existed in parts of West Africa. A number of
other durable trade items such as bolts of cloth and brass manillas became
widely diffused bases for exchange. The slave trade gave a fillip to a vast
expansion in the exchange economy and the role of commodities in African life.

Powerful ruling classes were never so foolish as to seIl their own manpower in
any significant numbers. Slaves from say, Asante, were generally procured
either through tribute or through raiding expeditions on the frontiers and this
seems to hold as weIl for Kongo, Benin and Dahomey. Some slaves were debtors,
prisoners or the victims of famine, but the majority were obtained through
violence: wars, raids and kidnapping. It was the small-scale societies unable to
resist either systematic or random violen ce of this kind that suffered the most
and were obliged, in order to survive, to retreat to remote and defensible
locales. The most successful states retained many slaves. For domestic purposes
African households preferred to absorb women; the Atlantic trade demanded
male labour. Male slaves in Africa were used as soldiers, and thus as sustainers
of class or state power, a practice that intensified under the slave trade.

In recent years there has been considerable research into quantifying the slave
trade. Philip Curtin inaugurated this tendency with his 'census', published in
1969, which estimated that between eight and nine million slaves were
despatched from Africa to the Americas. Subsequent studies have raised these
figures by some twenty-five to fifty per cent to include those who died before
reaching the African coast or on the coast waiting to be sold. The qualitative loss
of slaves to Africa is even harder to measure. It may best be imagined in terms
of land not cleared, settlements not established, cultivation becoming cruder or
more laborious but, like any other counter-factual view of history as it might
have been, this cannot be assumed to have been the case. What is more sure is
that the increase in insecurity and violence brought by slaving affected the
quality of life.

All along the African coast there arose intermediary strata whose way of life
centred on negotioation between European and African traders. These children
of the slave trade formed what may be described loosely as a class of
compradores by analogy with those powerful Chinese merchants who
controlled the contemporary trade at the Chinese ports between Europe and
the Celestial Kingdom. Sometimes they were Europeans, particularly
Portuguese, who had become half- absorbed into African society. Thus a major
consequence of the slave trade was the creation of a dass that depended for its
existence on Euro-African commerce. More broadly, in many parts of Africa
those who could appropriate surplus and command force developed a general
orientation towards the hunting and sale of people, rather than the systematic
production of exchange values through agriculture or crafts as a means of
acquiring desirable commodities. The slave trade did not introduce predatory
ruling classes to Africa, who indeed could be found in areas relatively untouched
by it, but intensified internal slavery, violence and what the radical West Indian
historian Walter Rodney aptly called 'social oppression' without any
corresponding development of the forces of production. From a class
perspective, this was its principal significance to the African continent.
It was at the height of the slave trade that a different, directly colonial, form of
European penetration crystallised at the southern tip of Africa. In 1652
the Dutch East India Company established a permanent base at Cape Town to
regularise this contact as a useful staging point in its Asian commerce. Nearer to
the Cape something like a plantation economy developed. Land was granted in
freehold to farmers who cultivated European grains such as wheat, and
vineyards. The Dutch East India Company imported slaves from Mozambique,
Madagascar and Asia to work the fields. The racism that accompanied European
imperial expansion in the age of plantation slavery prevailed at the Cape as a
concommitant of the high level of social stratification and the realities of
conquest and slavery. However, class society at the Cape was less racially
determined than the typical Caribbean plantation colony. The crudal
relationships of domination were those between slave owner and slave, master
and servant. Intermarriage and concubinage were very common, particularly
between poorer whites and Asian slave. women, and legal distinctions were
made over status rather than race. Many of the offspring of mixed unions were
accepted into the Afrikaner community. The small stratum of 'free blacks' held
a shadowy and insignificant social position. By the opening of the nineteenth
century, the Cape was mainland Africa's first real colony. In time it was to
witness the most intense form of capitalist exploitation and development on the
continent, but this was in long years to come. Where European penetration of
Africa went deepest, in the Kongo kingdom, Angola and Mozambique, it did so
by adapting to the existing political and social ideologies and relationships.

Slavery, Slave-ship, slave rebellion

Between 1700 and 1808, British and American merchants sent ships to gather
slaves in six basic regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone /the Windward
Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central
Africa (Kongo, Angola). Ships carried the captives primarily to the British sugar
islands (where more than 70 percent of all slaves were purchased, almost half
of these at Jamaica), but sizable numbers were also sent to French and Spanish
buyers as a result of special treaty arrangements called the Asiento. About one
in ten was shipped to North American destinations. The largest share of these
went to South Carolina and Georgia, with substantial numbers also to the
Chesapeake. The drama would continue in a new act after the captives stumbled
off the ships.

On the rolling decks of the slave ship, many distinct but related human dramas
were staged, again and again, over the course of the long eighteenth century.
Each was meaningful in its own day and again in ours. One of the dramas grew
from conflict and cooperation among the enslaved themselves as people of
different classes, ethnicities, and genders were thrown together down in the
horror-filled lower deck of the slave ship. How would this "multitude of black
people, of every description chained together" communicate? They found ways
to exchange valuable information about all aspects of their predicament, where
they were going, and what their fate would be. Amid the brutal imprisonment,
terror, and premature death, they managed a creative, life-affirming response:
they fashioned new languages, new cultural practices, new bonds, and a nascent
community among themselves aboard the ship. They called each other
"shipmate," the equivalent of brother and sister, and thereby inaugurated a
"fictive" but very real kinship to replace what had been destroyed by their
abduction and enslavement in Africa. Their creativity and resistance made them
collectively indestructible, and herein lay the greatest magnificence of the
drama.

Despite shifts in the numbers of people shipped, as well as their sources and
destinations, the slave ship itself changed relatively little between 1700 and
1808. Slaving vessels grew somewhat larger in size over time, and they grew
more efficient, employing smaller crews in relation to the number of the
enslaved shipped. They certainly grew in number, to handle the greater volume
of bodies to be transported. And their atmosphere grew healthier: the death
rate, for sailors and for slaves, declined, especially in the late eighteenth
century. Yet the essentials of running a slave ship, from the sailing to the
stowing, feeding, and exercising of the human cargo, remained roughly the
same over time. To put the matter another way, a captain, a sailor, or an African
captive who had experienced a slave ship in 1700 would have found most
everything familiar a century later.

What was found in the slave ship was a strange and potent combination of war
machine, mobile prison, and factory. Loaded with cannon and possessed of
extraordinary destructive power, the ship's war-making capacity could be
turned against other European vessels, forts, and ports in a traditional war of
nations, or it could be turned to and sometimes against non-European vessels
and ports in imperial trade or conquest. The slave ship also contained a war
within, as the crew, the one training its guns on the others, who plotted escape
and insurrection. Sailors also "produced" slaves within the ship as factory,
doubling their economic value as they moved them from a market on the
eastern Atlantic to one on the west and helping to create the labor power that
animated a growing world economy in the eighteenth century and after.
Resistance on Board the Ships
It is important to remember that there was resistance throughout
the Transatlantic Slave Trade system, not just resistance when Africans got to
the Caribbean. There is a great deal of evidence of resistance when Africans
were first kidnapped and of resistance on shore and on ships. In some cases
‘resistance' involved attacks from the shore, as well as ‘insurrections' aboard
ships. Some captive Africans refused to be enslaved and took their own lives
by jumping from slave ships or refusing to eat or just ‘giving up' and dying in
despair.