Between 1400 – 1900, the continent of Africa saw four waves of slave trading that in total would diminish the continent’s population by 50% by 1800.
The Trans-Saharan slave trade saw slaves being taken from south of the Saharan desert and shipped to Northern Africa.
In the Red Sea slave trade, slaves were taken from the area around the Red Sea and transported to the Middle East and India.
The Indian Ocean slave trade, had the slaves being taken from Eastern Africa and shipped either to the Middle East, India, or the plantation islands in the Indian Ocean.
Compared to the TransAtlantic slave trade, the above three above three paled in scope. Beginning in the 15th century, men, women and even children were shipped from Western, Central and Eastern Africa to the European colonies in the Americas.
Slaves were captured through kidnappings, raids, and warfare. None of them went willingly into the slave ships. A conservative estimate is that 20 million Africans were taken away as slaves. Then are the countless men, women, and children who died during the raids, during the marches to the slave castles, in the slave castles and during the Middle Passage.
Even though the institution of slavery has existed worldwide for centuries, the fact that slavery existed in Africa turned out to be catastrophic.
Slavery as an institution is inhumane but slavery that was present in Africa was way benign and adaptable compared to what the Europeans established in the Americas. Slaves in Africa were prisoners of war, payments for family debts, criminals or as part of a dowry payment. No one went on raids to capture slaves or kidnapped others to enslave them.
Most won their freedom by the next generation, could marry and were often part of the extended family. Even though there was some viciousness towards slaves, what happened to slaves in the Americas paled in comparison to that.
When the Europeans arrived in Africa, the age-old practice morphed into a frank holocaust.
A good example of this complex dynamic is shown by what happened in the Congo after the Portuguese arrived in 1493 led by Diogo Cão. The kingdom of Congo was about 300 square miles and had been in existence over a century before the Portuguese showed up. It was ruled by a king called the ManiKongo.
Cão was soon followed by other Portuguese merchants and priests from the Catholic Church in 1491. Schools and churches were built. Copper, ivory and textiles were traded.The people of the Congo also wanted to acquire skills – the skills of masons and carpenters to build European style buildings, and education and literacy, in order to communicate directly with Europe.
In the interim, the Portuguese had discovered the worth of African labor and were interested in acquiring slaves. Initially, only war captives were traded but the Portuguese wanted more slaves for the plantations in Brazil. They started colluding with Congolese noblemen and chiefs to kidnap Congolese and sell them as slave. By 1500, the trade had hit a frenzy. Hochschild reports how “men sent out from Lisbon to be masons or teachers at Mbanza Kongo soon made far more money by herding convoys of chained Africans to the coast and selling them to the captains of slave-carrying caravels.”
Even the Catholic priests got into the act. They “abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery”. Interestingly after the Reformation, these Catholic-priests-turned-slave-traders refused to sell to Protestants.
It is into this melee that Nzinga Mbemba of Affonso I became the King of the Congo or the ManiKongo in 1506. A very smart man, he was a provincial chief and in his thirties when the first Portuguese missionaries arrived in 1491. He studied with them for 10 years. In the process, he converted to Catholicism and gained a great command of the Portuguese language.
As king, he sought to modernize his kingdom by harnessing the knowledge the Portuguese had, held back prospectors who wanted gold and tried to control the slave trade which had gotten out of hand. In his despair, he even wrote to two Portuguese kings and the Pope for help.
This from a letter he wrote to King Joao III of Portugal in 1526:
“Each day the traders are kidnapping our people — children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family… This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated…We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise unless it is wine and flour for Mass. ..It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.”
Later, he would also write:
“Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . They sell them … after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night…As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.”
On the issue of the priests turned slave traders:
In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts of the world and lure of wealth have turned them away from the truth. Just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covetousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.
If he was expecting sympathy from King Joao III, he got none. This was part of his reply to Affonso:
“You … tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains because this trade is depopulating your country. … The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it seems as if no slave has ever left.”
Due to his efforts to reign in the activities of the Portuguese slave traders, an attempt was made to assassinate him. It was unsuccessful. However, when he sent 10 of his young nephews and grandsons to Lisbon to study, they were captured en route and sold off as slaves in Brazil.
In the meantime, the slave trade went on turning wide swaths of the once populous kingdom into wastelands as countless people died in war or as they marched to the slave forts or fled the advance of the raiders. One can imagine how the livelihood of millions all over sub-Saharan Africa was destroyed in this fashion.
After the death of Affonso in 1542 or 1543, the power of the Congo continued to decline until it finally became a colony of Belgium in the 1800s and furthered suffered under the atrocities of King Leopold.
Thus we see how the trade in slaves morphed from its small beginnings into a terrible institution that the locals could hardly control.
By all measures, the trade had a huge impact in reshaping the continent. Quoting from a paper by the economist Nathan Nunn from 2017:
“The evidence suggests that it (the slave trade) has affected a wide range of important outcomes, including economic prosperity, ethnic diversity, institutional quality, the prevalence of conflict, the prevalence of HIV, trust levels, female labor force participation rates, and the practice of polygyny. Thus, the slave trades appear to have played an important role in shaping the fabric of African society today.”
In spite of all the evidence a lot of people, even smart and well-meaning Africans and African-Americans, seek to discount the impact of this holocaust on our continent. Some even blame it all on Africans. Even the publisher, McGraw Hill in a World Geography book had this sentence: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
The slave trade has been over for ages but Africans and blacks in the Americas and even Europe have to live with the consequences. The least that part of the world that benefited most from the trade can do is study the heinous practice and the circumstances that led to it, learn from it and seek to help those whose lives are affected by the consequence of this practice to overcome the impediments that litter their way.
By studying the slave trade widely, we Africans get to understand some of the socio-pathology that plague our societies and can find ways to combat and change them.
We need to that to understand who we are. Like Charles Siefert’s wrote in his 1938 pamphlet, “The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art”:
“A Race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots.”
References:
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Pan Books, 2012.
Nunn, Nathan. “Understanding the long-run effects of Africa’s slave trades” from “The Long Economic and Political Shadow of History, Volume 2”
by Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou. A VoxEU eBook. 14 February 2017.