Slavery has existed in many different forms throughout history. The reduction of another human being to the status of property, used for labor at the command of another, has been a feature of almost every society on Earth until the 19th century or so.
No system of slavery has attracted more attention than the transatlantic slave trade, established by Europeans to provide slave labor for their American colonies. Around 12 million souls were taken from Africa and forced onto perilous journeys across the Atlantic, where they and their descendants were condemned to a life of servitude.
However, retellings of the horrors of Atlantic slavery too often turn into stories of how Europeans alone determined the course of that history. In reality, Africans were not just passive victims; millions of them were slaves, but many others profited from, produced, and protected that slave trade.
In this video, we look at the untold story of the African slave trade. Stick around until the end to learn how some of Africa’s greatest kingdoms were built on the profits of slavery and how Africans fought tooth and nail to protect it from the Abolitionist European Empires.
Slavery has existed in Africa for as long as recorded history. Ancient Egypt had slaves toiling away in its fields and on its monuments. Ancient Carthage trafficked in slaves across the Mediterranean, and the Ethiopian Kings of Axum wrote proudly of the slaves they took in war.
Slaves were also exported from Africa for centuries before Europeans arrived. The trans-Saharan slave trade lasted for over a thousand years and dragged about 10 million people across the desert to be slaves in the Islamic world. The Indian Ocean also had a similarly long-lasting, oceangoing slave trade, with about 5 million ending up in slave ships bound and branded for use in foreign lands. These slaves ended up as laborers, domestic servants, soldiers, or more. Male slaves in the Islamic world would typically be castrated, which meant that new slaves had to be regularly imported to maintain the population.
For this video, we’ll focus on Western Africa, where the Atlantic slave trade was centered. West Africa was removed from the Indian Ocean trade and mostly secure from Islamic slave raids, but slavery was still a feature of life there long before the Atlantic slave trade began. A succession of powerful empires occupied the region, which all rested on complex slave systems.
The Ghana Empire, from the 3rd to the 13th century, began a tradition of powerful West African Imperial States and built much of its wealth through trans-Saharan trading of slaves or goods acquired through slave labor. The salt, copper, and gold that made the Mali Empire and Mansa Musa fabulously wealthy were all extracted with slave labor. Domestic slavery was also common, and Mali was known to import female slaves from the Mediterranean to act as domestic servants in the households of the elites.
Most of the slaves were acquired through conquest of neighboring kingdoms or tribal groups who were too weak to defend themselves from the organized Imperial militaries. Successor empires like the Jolof and Kaabu inherited the social and economic structures of slavery and continued to acquire slaves as they scrambled to establish their own territories. Elites in these empires used slaves as a status symbol, and ownership of slaves came to represent someone’s wealth and power.
Slavery took many different forms in West Africa. Some worked the land or the mines; others served as soldiers or even political advisers. In some places, slaves were permitted to own land that they cultivated in their free time and might earn enough from this land to buy their own freedom. In other places, the lot of slaves was more miserable. In Benin, for example, slaves were regularly sacrificed to mark important occasions like the anniversary of a King’s death.
All of this is to say that when Europeans arrived, they did not find an empty land of scattered peoples ripe for enslavement, but complex societies and slave-holding empires whose roots were even older than those of the Europeans themselves.
The Atlantic slave trade was started by the Portuguese in the mid-15th century. Originally, slaves were taken to Europe, but this changed in 1526 when the first Portuguese ships carried slaves across the Atlantic to their new American colonies. However, the vision of Europeans landing on an African shore, frightening a tribe of natives into submission, and dragging them in chains to their ship is not representative of what happened for most slaves. Some slaves were indeed taken in European slave raids, but the vast majority was sold to the Europeans by other Africans.
The European arrival in West Africa came at the same time as the collapse of the Mali Empire. Various splinter states scrambled over each other to seize territory for themselves. The Europeans, with their firearms, offered these competing rulers a potential advantage over their enemies. In turn, the huge amounts of captives that these kingdoms acquired in their wars were useful currency to trade with the Europeans. Additionally, the other goods, like cloth and ceramics that the Europeans brought, were status symbols that the new African elite could use to showcase their wealth and power.
Different peoples responded in different ways to the opportunities of European slave trading. The Kingdom of Kongo made contact with Portuguese explorers in 1483 and traded thousands of slaves every year. The slaving relationship between the two powers was sophisticated and mutually beneficial. For example, Congolese King Alfonso I saw the Portuguese as a useful outlet for the excess slaves he acquired during his expansionary wars, and he was an eager participant in slave trading.
However, he also asserted his own power over it in 1526 by forcing Portugal to submit to his legal framework for slavery, which governed how exactly someone might be enslaved and provided protections for those who were not legitimately enslaved—mostly his own subjects taken by criminal raiders or opportunists.
A similar enthusiasm was seen among the various Akan peoples of modern Nigeria. They occupied an area known as the Gold Coast and were similarly prolific as both sellers and purchasers of slave labor. The gold mines that made the Akan so wealthy in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were filled by slaves they purchased from both African and European merchants. As many as a third of the population of the various Akan states were enslaved people. In almost every case, these slaves were from non-Akan ethnic groups; any sense of African solidarity in the face of European slave trading was almost non-existent. The ethnic divides that split Africa were far older than European contact; it would not be quickly changed by the arrival of foreigners on their shores.
There was, of course, resistance. Many European slave ships were attacked by coastal raiders, but these reactions were rare and relatively ineffective. Most of the time, these were small-scale attacks by small tribes or villages near where the Europeans dropped anchor. It was these tiny, disconnected groups who were most vulnerable to slavery, and that show of defiance rarely saved them in the end.
One state that did turn against European slaving was the Kingdom of Benin. The Kingdom of Benin was not the Benin we know today, but a small territory in modern-day Nigeria. Initially a partner in slave trading, by the mid-16th century, the kingdom was facing a serious drain on population, especially among its men. Two rulers, Oba Esigie and Oba Orhogbua, are credited with ending Benin’s participation in Atlantic slave trading and closed Benin’s ports to European traders.
Slavery was not abolished in the country; in fact, the Kingdom of Benin would fight to uphold domestic slavery against Britain in the late 19th century. But this kingdom shows that Africans responded in many different ways to slavery. Each kingdom and ethnic group assessed their own situations and reacted accordingly, whether that was to sell slaves or prohibit it as they saw fit.
Of all the slaving states of Africa, none is more infamous than Dahomey. First emerging around 1600 along the southern coast of modern-day Nigeria, Dahomey soared to prominence under the warrior king Agaja in the early 18th century. Dahomey’s ace in the hole was a well-trained and well-organized standing army, perhaps as large as 50,000 men or more at its height, which Agaja used to conquer the kingdoms of Allada and Whydah in the 1720s. Allada and Whydah were prolific slave-trading kingdoms with tens of thousands of slaves passing through their ports. Dahomey’s consolidated control of so many slave ports made it one of the most formidable slaving powers in history.
The colossal army pushed Dahomey towards slavery for two additional reasons. Firstly, its military culture discouraged men from non-military careers, meaning that slaves were needed to carry out other jobs like agriculture. Secondly, a standing army had to be kept occupied, or else it might grow restless and rebel. So, Dahomey was constantly attacking other neighboring powers or sending out slave raids to bring back captives.
The result was a colossal slave population. According to some estimates, by the 19th century, two-thirds of the kingdom’s population were enslaved people. Slavery was so intrinsic to Dahomean society that one scholar remarked:
“It’s difficult to determine whether Dahomey was a slaving gang turned into a state or a state that existed purely for the sake of slaving.”
Slaves weren’t just laborers and domestic servants in Dahomey but became woven into the political fabric of the society. Ownership of slaves became a status symbol for Dahomean elites, as it did for others in West Africa. This led to tension between the king and the elites who fought for control over the slave trade. Although it is often characterized as a royal monopoly, even the absolute power of the monarch was not enough to rein in elites who established power bases of their own thanks to their trading slaves.
Slaves also became a part of Dahomean religion. The annual customs of Dahomey were a day of rituals and public celebration involving military parades, political debates, and human sacrifice of slaves to appease the spirits and protect the kingdom for another year. Hundreds of slaves were killed, usually with decapitation, and in some years, as many as 4,000 people were sacrificed on a single day. A similar display of mass sacrifice was required for the funeral of a king and might occur on a smaller scale for any number of other rituals or social events.
Dahomey remained committed to slavery even as the European powers began their crusade against it. In 1818, King Gezo was forced to make concessions to the British, including the abolition of slave sacrifices. By the 1840s, Gezo was being pressured to end the slave trade altogether, but he refused.
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people,” Gezo told the British.
“It is the source and glory of their wealth. The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.”
When the British managed to force a treaty on Gezo that ended slave trading from Dahomey’s ports, it was a source of bitter resentment. The Dahomeans subverted it by selling slaves overland to be sold through ports not bound by the treaty terms. Eventually, the resentment caused a total breakdown of relations, and Dahomey abandoned the treaty entirely. By the late 1850s, they pivoted towards an alliance with France, who were less zealous in their anti-slavery attitudes.
But the collapse of the slave trade would soon bring down the kingdom. As the kingdom’s main source of wealth failed, it was forced into desperate raiding and conquest that antagonized the French. After attacking a French-allied town in 1889, France waged two wars against Dahomey, citing its penchant for slavery as a legitimizing moral cause, and toppled the kingdom in 1894.
A common misconception about European imperialism in Africa is that colonization and slavery always worked hand in hand. The Europeans staked down their claims in Africa to furnish their endless desire for slaves. This was true at certain times. Portugal’s colonies, such as those in Angola, were an important source of slaves. By the late 1700s, Portugal’s thirst for able-bodied male slaves to work their American plantations meant that Angolan women outnumbered men in their homeland by at least 2 to 1.
However, the vast majority of European colonization in Africa occurred after the abolition of slavery. It would be more accurate to say that anti-slavery motivated European colonization. We have already seen how France conquered Dahomey in part to end its slave trading. A similarly hard line against slavery was taken by the British. For example, in 1851, the Royal Navy laid siege to the Nigerian city of Lagos and its king, Kosoko, because the king refused to end the slave trade.
After a furious naval bombardment, the British compelled Lagos to abolish the trade, forcibly freed every slave in Lagos’ territory, and expelled all slave traders from their land. The British later imposed abolition on all of Nigeria. Some historians have noted that while Britain was quick to abolish trading, domestic slavery took a lot longer to root out in Nigeria. The British were concerned that moving too quickly to end slavery there would provoke unrest and resistance from the Nigerians themselves.
Abolitionism was similarly evident in the British conquest of Benin in 1897. After the massacre of a British merchant expedition in January of that year, the British launched a punitive military strike against Benin City. Slavery was once again among the justifying causes of the attack and subsequent colonization of the kingdom. According to eyewitness accounts, the King of Benin sacrificed hundreds of its slaves in hopes of acquiring divine protections against the approaching British. The British repopulated the decimated city with freed slaves and offered total emancipation and resettlement to any slave who escaped to their territory. Benin’s elites were slow to embrace the change, and British authorities were still trying to stamp out native slavery there into the 1920s.
That is not to say that there weren’t African abolitionists; there certainly were, not least of all the slaves themselves. But there were many in Africa willing to fight and die to uphold the ancient institution.
No discussion of slavery should ever gloss over the fact that millions of Africans suffered unspeakable cruelty across the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, the Sahara, or in Africa itself. The scale of the deportations from Africa deserves unique attention. But that suffering was not solely the product of foreigners imposing themselves on a passive continent. Africans were active in their own history and helped to create, expand, and uphold the systems of slavery that shackled other Africans.
The story of Africa’s support for slavery is as much a part of its history as it being a victim of it. While the experiences of millions of African slaves deserves all the attention it gets, that doesn’t mean we should pretend that other Africans were not traders, raiders, and rulers who facilitated the enslavement of others on their continent.
Africa was not uniquely guilty or innocent of slavery but part of a shared human story of suffering, exploitation, and eventually, abolition. Telling that history gets us closer to the truth and puts African history in its rightful place in world history as a continent full of people who are as complicated and flawed as anyone else.
