Following up on Trans-Saharan Trade Network: The Ancient Kingdom of Ghana (Wagadu), this week we’ll start to look at the transatlantic slave trade, starting with West Africa.
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Along the west coast of Africa, from the Cameroons in the south to Senegal in the north, Europeans built more than 50 forts that served as trading posts for slave trade.
They were attracted by West Africa’s ivory, gold and other trade resources. As demand for cheap labor to work on plantations in the Americas grew, people enslaved in West Africa became the most valuable ‘commodity’ for European traders.
From their first contacts, European traders kidnapped and bought Africans for sale in Europe. However, it was not until the 17th century, when plantation owners wanted more and more slaves to satisfy the increasing demand for sugar in Europe that transatlantic slaving became the dominant trade.
African kings, warlords, and private kidnappers also sold captives who were usually force-marched to these ports along the western coast of Africa, where they were held for sale to the European or American slave traders.
From the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, over twelve million African men, women, and children were enslaved, transported to the Americas, and bought and sold as chattel, used for their labor and skills. This installed the French and British as the primary colonizers in the region.
European traders exchanged metals, cloth, beads, guns, and ammunition for captive Africans brought to the coast from the African interior, primarily by African traders. Many captives died during the long overland journeys from the interior to the coast. European traders then held the enslaved Africans who survived in fortified slave castles such as Elmina in the central region (now Ghana), Goree Island (now in present day Senegal), and Bunce Island (now in present day Sierra Leone), before forcing them into ships for the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean.
These captives were about to embark on the Middle Passage, so called because it was the middle leg of a three-part voyage -- a voyage that began and ended in Europe. The first leg of the voyage carried cargo from Europe where it was exchanged for Africans upon arrival to the African coast. Fully loaded with its human cargo, the ship set sail for the Americas, where the slaves were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, or other products. The final trip brought the ship back to Europe.
Conditions on board slave ships were appalling: huge numbers of people were crammed into very small spaces. Men, women and children were separated, families torn apart.
In the fifteenth century, Portugal became the first European nation to take significant part in African slave trading.
The owners of slave ships embarked as many slaves as possible to make the voyage more profitable. They did so by cramming, chaining, and selectively grouping slaves to maximize the use of space. Slaves began to die of lack of oxygen due to these cramped conditions.
Those who arrived at various ports in the Americas were then sold in public auctions or smaller trading venues to plantation owners, merchants, small farmers, prosperous tradesmen, and other slave traders. These traders could then transport slaves many miles further to sell on other Caribbean islands or into the North or South American interior.
Slavery was abolished in the early 19th century and replaced by a lucrative palm oil trade. Palm oil production encouraged domestic slavery to provide labor for palm plantations and to haul palm oil from the interior to merchants in the coast…. slaves were still sent on ships leaving from cities along the coast.
The slave trade devastated African life. Culture and traditions were torn apart as families, especially young men, were abducted. Guns were introduced and slave raids and even wars increased.
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