The African Slave Trade

1650-1860

The Largest Forced Migration

• Which country imported the most slaves?

Asian –European trade fundamental…

• While many are aware of the 'triangular' slave trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the 18th century, few people realize that Asian-European trade was also instrumental in sustaining the exchange of human slaves. For example, French ships taking European goods to Asia returned with cowry shells and Indian textiles valued by West Africans.

• On the African coast, traders exchanged these Asian products for slaves who, in turn, were sent to France's New World colonies. The circle was completed when sugar and other goods from the Americas were loaded on board and shipped back to France.

• The Asian-European trading relationship, as a fundamental step in the African slave trade, thus played a crucial role in the development of an integrated global economy in the early modern era. – (YaleGloba )

Triangular Trade

Europeans rarely went inland…

Hunt depicts soldiers from Sokoto raiding a village to capture slaves

Capture of Slaves

Slave CoffleMany people died along the way to captivity…

Barracoons

• Ghana slave traders fort

Slave Ships Crammed

Economics and Prejudice• With slavery came the development of all kinds of pseudo-scientific,

racist theories designed to justify the enslavement of African peoples. These, combined with barbarous violence, were crucial for the slave owners to maintain power. After all, the white slave owners were a small minority.

• For example, in 1745, 877,000 people lived in the British Caribbean of whom 85% were slaves. Such were the extremes of prejudice required by the system of slavery that people were categorized by the degree of ‘black blood’ in their veins – right down to 1/16th! (Sexual exploitation of slave women by slave owners meant that many mixed-race children were born producing more slaves.)

• The racism created by slavery still affects society today. When slavery no longer suited the purposes of the ruling class, racism was adapted to justify the subjugation and exploitation of Africa, Asia and Latin America under colonial rule. Today variants of these theories linger on and are used to disguise the continued exploitation of the neo-colonial world.

The need for labor increases

• In the 17th century Europeans began to establish settlements in the Americas. Crops grown on these plantations such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane and cotton were labor intensive. European immigrants had gone to America to own their own land and were reluctant to work for others. Convicts were sent over from Britain but there had not been enough to satisfy the tremendous demand for labor. Planters therefore began to purchase slaves.

(At first these came from the West Indies but by the late 18th century they came directly from Africa and busy slave-markets were established in Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and New Orleans.)

Auctions

Olaudah Equiano

• “That part of Africa, known by the name of Guinea, to which the trade for slaves is carried on, extends along the coast above 3400 miles, from Senegal to Angola, and includes a variety of kingdoms. Of these, the most considerable is the kingdom of Benin, both as to extent and wealth, the richness and cultivation of the soil, the power of the king and the number and warlike disposition of the inhabitants.

• This kingdom is divided into many provinces or districts; in one of the most remote and fertile of which, called Eboe, I was born in the year 1745, in a charming fruitful vale named Essaka. The distance of the province from the capital of Benin and the sea coast must be very considerable; for I had never heard of white men or Europeans.”

“Our land is uncommonly rich and fruitful, and produces all kinds of vegetables in abundance. We have plenty of Indian corn, and vast quantities of cotton and tobacco. Our pineapples grow with culture; they are about the size of the largest sugar loaf, and finely flavored. We have also spices of different kinds, particularly pepper; and a variety of delicious fruits which I have never seen in Europe; together with gum of various kinds and honey in abundance. All our industry is exerted to improve those blessings of nature. Agriculture is our chief employment; and everyone, even the children and women, are engaged in it. Thus we all habituated to labor from our earliest years.”

“Our tillage is exercised in a plain or common, some hours walk from our dwellings, and all the neighbors resort thither in a body. They use no beasts of husbandry; and their only instruments are hoes, axes, shovels and beaks, or pointed iron to dig with. Sometimes we are visited by locusts, which come in large clouds, so as to darken the air, and destroy our harvest. This however happens rarely, but when it does, a famine is produced by it.”

• “As our manners are simple, our luxuries are few. The dress of both sexes is nearly the same. It generally consists of a long piece of calico, or Muslin, wrapped loosely around the body, somewhat in the form of a highland plaid. This is usually dyed blue, which is our favorite color. It is extracted from a berry, and is brighter and richer than any I have seen in Europe.

• Besides this, our women of distinction wear golden ornaments, which they dispose with some profusion on their arms and legs. When our women are not employed with the men in tillage, their usual occupation is spinning and weaving cotton, which they afterwards dye and make into garments. They also manufacture earthen vessels, of which we have many kinds.

“ Among the rest, tobacco pipes, made after the same fashion, and used in the same manner, as those in Turkey.” “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets. Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing, is celebrated in public dances which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion. We have many musical instruments, particularly drums of different kinds, a piece of music which resembles a guitar, and another much like a stickado. These last are chiefly used by betrothed virgins, who play on them, all grand festivals.”

• Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) was kidnapped from his African village at the age of eleven, shipped through the arduous "Middle Passage" of the Atlantic Ocean, seasoned in the West Indies and sold to a Virginia planter. He was later bought by a British naval Officer, Captain Pascal, as a present for his cousins in London. After ten years of enslavement throughout the North American continent, where he assisted his merchant slave master and worked as a seaman, Equiano bought his freedom.

• At the age of forty four he wrote and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself, which he registered at Stationer's Hall, London, in 1789. More than two centuries later, this work is recognized not only as one of the first works written in English by a former slave, but perhaps more important as the paradigm of the slave narrative, a new literary genre.

Equiano recalls his childhood in Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where he was adorned in the tradition of the "greatest warriors." He is unique in his recollection of traditional African life before the advent of the European slave trade. Equally significant is Equiano's life on the high seas, which included not only travels throughout the Americas, Turkey and the Mediterranean; but also participation in major naval battles during the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), as well as in the search for a northwest passage led by the Phipps expedition of 1772-1773. Equiano also records his central role, along with Granville Sharpe, in the British Abolishionist Movement. As a major voice in this movement, Equiano petitioned the Queen of England in 1788. He was appointed to the expedition to settle London's poor Blacks in Sierra Leone, a British colony on the west coast of Africa. Sadly, he did not complete the journey back to his native land.

How do you think Olaudah’s life changed after this early stage?