Slavery, the treatment of human beings as property deprived of personal rights, has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but one institution stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Numbers involved in the Atlantic slave trade are truly staggering. From 1500 to 1880 CE, somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas, and about 15 percent of those people died during the journey. The majority of enslaved Africans were taken from six primary regions: Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa, also known as Congo and Angola. An estimated 12.4 million people were loaded on slave ships and carried through what became known as the Middle Passage, which moved across the Atlantic and included many different destinations. Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves were sold at a market very similar to the way cattle would be sold. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, again, just as they would do with cattle.
“The lives of slaves were dominated by work and terror. The idea that I am not human, but I have no soul; that I am a beast. Brand me, burn me, whatever; and no recourse, nothing.”
The history of humanity is filled with oppression, dominance, war, and slavery. Since the beginning of time, people in different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery. The tale of the Atlantic slave trade is the history of millions of Africans who were forced out of their communities by European slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. When Portugal and Spain started conquering and establishing colonies in the New World in the early 1500s, they forcefully made the Indians work their plantations. However, European diseases and the violence of conquest led to the death of many of the Indian slaves. This led to a labor shortage in Europe and made the Europeans look towards Africa for a solution. As voyages to Africa progressed and with many expeditions by Portuguese and Spanish explorers, Africa became a major source of supply of slaves to Europe and the Spanish West Indies, as well as the Portuguese colonies in Brazil. The Indian slaves were gradually replaced by Africans.
These Africans were stripped of their identity and occupation. To refer to them as just slaves is incorrect, because before being captured by the Europeans, many of them were farmers, merchants, soldiers, musicians, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, and many more. They were husbands, fathers, wives, children, and mothers. They had origins and heritage, but when the Europeans came and took over their communities, they became captives and had to be boarded on large ships and taken to Europe. The European slavers dispersed them across the Americas and different parts of Europe. They were forced to lead lives under terrible conditions and face severe labor conditions. They were stripped and flogged and forced to work very long hours, often under terrible weather and health conditions. The transatlantic slave trade transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved black Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.
You might have heard of the Triangular Trade, right? And how Africa was a major part of this trade, although suffering economically while the other two parts that made up the triangle enjoyed huge economic benefits. We’ll get to that shortly. The first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas is believed to have sailed in 1526, but even before this period, Africans were bought as slaves directly from Europe, and even native inhabitants of America were also enslaved by European explorers. Before 1518, the Spanish monarchy didn’t permit the transportation of African slaves from Africa, not due to a sense of moral value or humanity, but because they believed Africans were barbaric and that they would corrupt the European society and introduce pagan and non-Christian practices to the country. However, over the years, due to economic reasons, there was a U-turn in that decision, and on August 18, 1518, King Charles V granted a charter to Lorenzo de Gorovod to transport 4,000 slaves directly from Africa to the Spanish-American colonies.
Over time, King Charles changed the law established by his grandparents and then permitted slaves to be brought into Spanish colonies in America from Africa on the condition that they would be converted to Christianity during their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. With this new decree in place, there was an explosion in the number of slaves moved from Africa to America. There was an immediate expansion of the slave trade in the Western Hemisphere. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Generally, the European slave traders did not participate in the raids because their life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa was less than a year due to the widespread malaria infection. So, the majority of people that were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that were captured by other West Africans and sold to the Western European slave traders. The transatlantic slave trade was essential to the whole economics of the Triangular Trade route, and European colonies in America needed the supply of slaves for their plantations.
The Triangular Trade route is simply the trade structure that operated across the Atlantic region. This Triangular Trade route across the Atlantic took goods from Europe to Africa. Some of the goods taken to Africa include arms, textiles, and wine. On the other side of the triangle was the movement of African slaves to the Americas and the West Indies. The last side of the triangle was the movement of raw materials such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, and cotton produced on American plantations back to Europe. The triangle involved three continents, with Europe providing the capital, Africa providing the labor, and America providing the land and resources. There was always a supply to the European market.
The story of the transatlantic slave trade involves the story of all people in the three continents, but most importantly those involved in the Middle Passage voyage. The trade route that transported slaves is known as the Middle Passage. The voyage is often marked with a lot of difficulties and even death. Depending on the weather, the voyage could take about three to six months. The passage was so brutal that the ships not only lost the people being transported as slaves, but in some cases, the crew also lost their lives. The mortality rate for sailors on slave ships was approximately 20 percent. The ships had a particular design and varied in size and passenger capacity. The conditions of these ships were inhumane. The African slaves were locked up below the deck in cramped quarters and only had a little opportunity to be out in the sunlight, and they were forced to carry out certain enforced exercises in the form of dancing to ensure that they were healthy and in good posture when they get to Europe. Inside of these decks was sticky and filled with the stench of dirt, feces, and urine.
Research published in 1794 estimated that a man inside the deck had just a space of six feet by one foot four inches, and a woman had five feet by one foot four inches. The girls had four feet six inches by one foot. The air inside the deck was hot, stale, and filled with the incessant smell of dirt and human excreta. The slaves suffered from starvation and thirst and only had 24 ounces of water every day—i.e., the equivalent of two 12-ounce soda cans of fluid per day. Their major food was horse beans and rice. The captives were packed tightly in tiers below decks and were chained together, hands and feet. The voyage was characterized by many difficulties, and the captives were faced with issues that included epidemic diseases and attacks by pirates. They also experienced physical, sexual, and psychological abuse by slave traders and crewmen. An estimate by historians put it that between 15 and 25 percent of the enslaved Africans bound for the Americas died during this voyage.
The conditions were so severe that only a tiny percentage of the Africans transported in enslaved trade came directly to North America. Just about four percent of the total Africans transported—not more than 400,000—arrived in North America directly. A vast majority of the slaves were sent to the Caribbean and South America, and almost half of the slaves that were captured and transported out from Africa, totaling about 5 million, were sent to Brazil. I know you will be wondering how thousands of slaves couldn’t overpower hundreds of crewmen. Well, there was one popular situation where African slave trades revolted and took over their ships. The detail of this story is as chilling as it is fascinating. We will get to that shortly, but keep in mind that the slave traders were armed and typically had the slaves in chains before transporting them.
Anyways, let’s finish up on the journey and the economics of the transatlantic slave trade. And while we may think that all slaves transported out of Africa were through the transatlantic route, that is not entirely true. The transatlantic slave only made up for half of the total slaves traded and transported out of Africa. It is reported that from AD 650 to 1900, Islamic traders were also exporting slaves out of Africa and sent out a total of 10 million slaves to Arabia, Yemen, Iran, India, and Iraq. The slaves were transported across the Sahara Desert, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. While some slaves were also enslaved but remained in Africa, many of the slaves captured and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were taken from the region bordering the Gulf of Guinea. The slave activities in this region were excessive, that the section of the African coast and countries like Togo, Benin, and Nigeria was even referred to as the Slave Coast.
A majority of the slaves were taken from West Central Africa. In the early stages of the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese generally bought Africans who were captured as slaves during tribal wars, but as the demand for slaves increased, the Portuguese began to enter the interior of Africa to forcibly take captives. In the 1690s, the number of people taken out of Africa yearly reached about 30,000, and a century later, the number grew to about 85,000 per year. During the 1700 and 1850, it was estimated that more than 8 out of 10 Africans who were forced into the slave trade successfully crossed the Atlantic. In the period between 1821 and 1830, about 80,000 people were leaving Africa yearly, and within the next 20 years before the abolition of slave trade, over a million more Africans were sent across the Atlantic to America. By 1820, almost four Africans for every one European had been transported across the Atlantic, and 4 out of 5 women who crossed the Atlantic were from Africa.
The majority of enslaved Africans brought to British North America arrived between 1720 and 1780. The Africans who were sent to Brazil were mostly from Angola, and those who were transported to North America, including the Caribbean, were taken mainly from West Africa. Although just about six percent of African captives were sent to British North America, in 1825, the U.S. population included about one quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. Interestingly, the condition of slavery in America was totally different from that in the U.S. But before we delve into these mind-boggling details, let’s talk about the revolt of 1839. Remember I mentioned this earlier? In 1839, slave traders were once again hoping to get another shipment of slaves across the Atlantic, but unlike previous voyages, they were not ready for the surprise this particular voyage would be bringing their way.
The slave ship named Amistad had about a hundred slaves on board. As the ship moved near the coast of Cuba, the unwilling passengers of the ship, who were recently abducted from Africa, numbering about 53, revolted aggressively. The revolters were led by Joseph Cinque. They killed the captain and cook and only spared the life of the Spanish navigator so that he can sail them home back to Sierra Leone. However, the navigator managed to sail the Amistad northward. Two months later, the U.S. Navy intercepted and seized the ship off Long Island, New York. The ship was towed to New London, Connecticut, and the mutineers were held in jail in New Haven, Connecticut. This event had significant political and legal repercussions in the American abolition movement at that time.
The Spanish Embassy demanded that the African slaves are returned to Cuba, and this led to the 1840 trial in Hartford, Connecticut Federal Court. New England abolitionist Lewis Tappan was successful in drawing public sympathy to the Africans and was able to battle it with the pro-slavery U.S. Government. However, the U.S. President at the time, Martin Van Buren, ordered a Navy ship sent to Connecticut to return the Africans to Cuba immediately after the trial. The interesting part of this was the legal proceeding that ensued. The prosecutors argued that as slaves, the mutineers were subject to the laws governing conduct between slaves and their masters. And this is where it gets interesting. The trial testimony showed that while slavery was legal in Cuba, the importation of slaves from Africa was not. The judge therefore ruled that the Africans were not merchandise but were victims of kidnapping, and so had the right to escape their captors in any way they could.
When the U.S. government appealed the case before the U.S. Supreme Court the following year, former President John Quincy Adams was able to win the Court ruling in favor of the Amistad rebels. The Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the lower court. Through contributions from private and missionary societies, the 35 surviving Africans secured a passage home. They arrived in Sierra Leone in January 1842, alongside five missionaries and teachers who later founded a Christian mission in the country.
While we could definitely blame the Europeans for the activities of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans were also involved in slave trade activities. Africans were involved in kidnapping adults and stealing children for the purpose of selling them. They used European intermediaries or agents to sell off these captives in exchange for merchandise or arms. In most cases, those sold into slavery were usually from a different ethnic group than those who captured them, and it didn’t matter if they were enemies or indigenous of a neighboring village. The captive slaves were stripped of any identity they had and simply referred to as “other.” They were not seen as part of the people of the ethnic group or tribe. Also, while African kings were very much interested in protecting their villages, in some instances, thieves and criminals were sold out into slavery as a way to get rid of them. Many other slaves were gotten through raids at gunpoint, which were organized by different ethnic groups and in some instances as a joint venture with the Europeans.
Also, recorded in the book Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast, the author, Bernal Ibsen, shared that Africans on the Gold Coast, which is present-day Ghana, also participated in the slave trade through intermarriage. The term used was “casare,” which gets its origins from Portuguese and means to marry. Casare was used to form political bonds and economic connections between the slave traders and the Europeans. In the initial stages of slave trade, it was common practice for the powerful West African families to marry off their women to the European traders in alliance and to further enforce the syndicate. While the marriages had to be performed based on African customs, the Europeans offered no objection, as they were fully aware of how vital these connections were to the success of their businesses.
In the initial stages, we may argue that Africans had no idea of the exact condition of the slave trade and the experience of those sold into the slave trade. However, according to Robin Law, there is a possibility that the royal elites of the Dahomey Kingdom must have had an informed understanding of the fates of the Africans sold into slavery. This is because the King of Dahomey sent diplomats to Brazil and Portugal who returned with information about their trips. Also, some of the elites of Dahomey had experienced slavery in America before returning home. So, the only opposition the Kingdom of Dahomey had against slavery was the law that prohibited the enslavement of a fellow Dahomean; anyone caught doing this faced the death penalty. And while the kingdom was against this, they had no issue with the institution of slavery.
The case was different on the Gold Coast, which is present-day Ghana. Here, elites sent their kids to learn about the slave trade from the Europeans by sailing with them and living inside their forts. Some even sent their children to Europe and America to be educated. Elites on the Gold Coast also had agreements with the Dutch and British governments to rescue some of their friends who were tricked into slavery in America. However, a common assumption by many Africans who were not aware of the true purpose of the Atlantic slave trade was that the Europeans were cannibals who planned on cooking and eating their captives. This rumor even made it more distressing for the captives who were locked in ships sailing to Europe.
The transatlantic slave trade led to an uncountable loss of lives for both captives in and outside America. A BBC report indicated that more than a million people are thought to have died during their transport to the New World. More died soon after their arrival due to terrible health conditions. Although the number of slaves that died when bought as slaves is unclear, one thing we are sure of is that this number may exceed the number of those that survive to be enslaved. The Atlantic slave trade led to the destruction of lives and cultures. It is estimated that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries and about 1.5 million died on board slave ships. And apart from those who died in the Middle Passage, it is also estimated that many Africans were killed during the slave raids and wars in Africa.
Canadian scholar Adam Jones has characterized the deaths of millions of Africans in this period as a genocide. He referred to it as one of the worst holocausts in human history. Many believe that these deaths were not intentional and it was in the slave owner’s interest to keep slaves alive and not exterminate them. Jones argues that the killing and destruction were intentional.
“Whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation, to revisit the issue of intent already touched on: if an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?”
Saidiya Hartman, an American writer and academic focusing on African-American studies, argues that the deaths of enslaved people were incidental to the acquisition of profit and the rise of capitalism. She argues that death wasn’t a goal of its own but just a byproduct of commerce, which has the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is in effect seen as already dead. Saidiya Hartman goes on to say that although, unlike the concentration camp or the Gulag, the Atlantic slave trade also led to the millions of corpses. In this case, extermination was not the major goal; it was a major corollary to the making of commodities.
Who do we blame? While we could blame the Germans for the genocide attempt on the Jews, who do we blame for this slave trade? Seven nations were actively involved in the activities of the slave trade and took most of the slaves to their colonies in the New World. We have the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Americans, and the Danish. The major sources of slaves include Angola Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Gold Coast, Senegambia, Southeast Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, Sierra Leone, and Windward Coast. The presence of European slavers also affected how the legal code in Africa worked. According to Kamani Nahusi, many African societies changed the punishment for certain crimes and the way they responded to certain offenders. Some crimes which were traditionally punishable by some other form of punishment became punishable by enslavement, and offenders were now sold to slave traders.
David Stannard, the author of American Holocaust, showed in his book that 50% of African deaths occurred in Africa as a result of wars between native kingdoms, which produced the majority of slaves. The practice of enslaving enemy combatants and their villages was widely practiced in West Africa. Indeed, the slave trade was largely a byproduct of tribal and state warfare. By selling off captives, they were also able to finance future warfare and also remove potential dissidents after victory. However, some of the African nations, such as Igala, Kabu, Bono State, Oyo, Ashanti, Dahomey, and the Aro Confederacy, were more brutal in this practice.
Truly, Africans were fully involved in the slave trade and even aided it in many ways, but we can’t take away the fact that the Europeans provided the incentives that made this activity thrive. In one of the letters written by ManiCongo and Nzinga Mbemba Afonso to the King João III of Portugal, he writes to the king requesting that the king stop sending merchandise that is fueling the war between the different tribes. He begs the king to stop sending merchandise and rather send more missionaries.
In one of his letters, he writes: “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 school teachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. It is our wish that this kingdom is not a place for the trade or transport of slaves. Many of our subjects eagerly lust over 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.”
Despite the vast consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, there have been worldwide apologies from different nations that benefited and grew their economy based on labor from the slave trade. In 1998, UNESCO designated 23 August as International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. This led to several other events that recognized the adverse effects of slavery on the African continent. In 2001, during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, African nations demanded a clear apology for slavery from the former slave-trading countries. Some nations were ready to express an apology, however, the opposing countries—majorly the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States—blocked any attempt to do so. The reason for this opposition by these countries could be due to concerns that accepting their involvement in slavery would also require that they make monetary compensations to the affected African nations. Since 2009, there has been a continuous effort by the U.N. to create the U.N. Slavery Memorial as a permanent remembrance of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade.
