Slavery
an intro
 What is unique about slavery in the
Atlantic world is both its magnitude (a very large number of slaves) and
its modernity (slavery occurred in the very recent past there). When
studying slavery in the Atlantic, then, we must account for why slavery
should be so intimately connected with modernity and with the rise of the
modern economies and societies of Europe, the Africa's and the Americas.
This is an important point. Many people tend to think of slavery as some
archaic feature of a long dead past, a bygone practice with little relevance
to our lives today.
Of course we are one century and several generations
away from the age of slavery and Africans are even closer to it (slavery
was ended in Africa only during the early twentieth century). The truth
is that in terms of social time, slavery is right in our back yard and
often pushed into insignificance. The modern Atlantic world--including
the countries, cultures and practices we know today in Africa, Europe and
America--was significantly shaped by the institution of slavery. We continue
to live the legacy of slavery (for example, we can hardly imagine what
an Atlantic world without slavery would look like today). We should
not, indeed we cannot, ever forget slavery. If we do, we lose our humanity
by refusing to reflect on one of the fundamental institutions of the past
which "got us where we are." Understanding slavery in modern
life means looking at four continents: Africa, Europe, South America, North
America, and of course the Caribbean.
Slaves were an important minority of the population in
both the Africa's and the Americas (and in certain places on both continents
slaves constituted the majority of the population). At least as many slaves
were made and kept in the Africa's as were forcibly transported as human
cargo westward across the Atlantic. People on the western side of the Atlantic
are usually ignorant of this fact because they know so little about Africans
and their history. There were far fewer slaves in Europe than in the Africa's
or the Americas, but Europeans and their economies were central to creating
the demand which sparked enslavement's within Africa, financing the Atlantic
slave trade, transporting slaves, and benefiting economically from slave
labour both in the Americas and in the Africa's. Africans, of course, were
the people enslaved in this modern system of Atlantic slavery. It is especially
important to study Africa and Africans in the Atlantic, then, because unlike
Europeans or Americans of any origin, Africans were both slaves and slave
owners in the Atlantic.
Enslavement refers to the process of making slaves. This
may sound funny, but most slaves who were captured and transported across
the Atlantic had to be enslaved (they had to be created as slaves); few
were born in bondage. What this means is that the vast majority of those
slaves transported were not simply enslaved persons living in African
societies whose masters decided to get rid of them, they were free people
who were captured by a variety of means and sold away to a different land.
The existence of a transatlantic trade in slaves then, meant that many
new persons would be enslaved within Africa to supply the demand for slaves
in the Americas. In Africa, slaves were created through a variety
of means with differing implications. The first point to consider is that
most African slaves were captured by other Africans and not Europeans.
People generally have in their minds the image of Europeans landing on
the African coast and conducting raids on African villages, kidnapping
persons and taking them back on board their ships. This image was powerfully
reinforced by the popular television series entitled Roots by Alex Hailey.
There were indeed some European raids on African villages to create slaves,
especially during the first several decades of the transatlantic slave
trade, but very few slaves indeed were captured this way. This is not to
suggest that Europeans were not responsible for slavery. The Planaters
demand for slaves is what drove the Atlantic slave trade. The stories slaves
and later free African Americans told about the enslavement of their ancestors
expressed a harsh judgement of both Europeans and those Africans who enslaved
other Africans. During the 1930s, long after slavery was abolished, members
of the Works Progress ministration
conducted interviews with the descendants of slaves.
Many of them told stories like the following.
 Europeans
probably would have enslaved Africans themselves in large numbers had they
been able to. The fact is that Europeans were unable to colonise Africa
until the late nineteenth century because, unlike in the Americas and in
parts of Asia, they could not win military victories in Africa. Although
they generally navigated their coasts in canoes of varying sizes, Africans
were skilful in protecting their coastlines. Europeans could not simply
march in and do what they wanted. African chiefs and wealthy persons, who
were the most implicated in making slaves of other Africans, prevented
Europeans (with armies) from simply marching into the African interior
and doing what they wanted. African rulers effectively ruled their own
territories and allowed Europeans in only as traders, diplomats, and guests,
like they do today. Because Africans maintained political control over
themselves throughout the entire period of the slave trade (ca. 1450 to
1850) they themselves conducted the business of enslavement, selling the
slaves to Europeans at the coastline where they were loaded on to
European ships. This has led to a wide misinterpretation
of African slavery, which is by no means comparable to the Atlantic Slave
Trade.
 Africans
were captured as slaves by other Africans in the following ways: prisoners
of war, slave raids, condemned criminals, condemned debtors, persons accused
of witchcraft, kidnapped. In any one region and time slaves were created
by a mixture of these methods, but one or two tended to predominate at
any time and place. In the Senegambia, Guinea Coast, and Slave Coasts of
West Africa, war tended to predominate as the most important source of
slaves. In places like Angola enslavement by kidnapping and condemnation
for debts was quite important. Slaves were almost always captured in situations
of conflict. Sometimes, if a family member learned of the capture of one
of its members, it could bargain with the person who had enslaved him or
her to redeem (purchase) the slave back Sometimes families traded a slave
they themselves owned for a member of their family. This practice, which
occurred in many places in Africa, was symbolic of the great tragedy of
the slave trade. In order to save members of their own families, many persons
engaged in capturing others.
In the first years of the slave trade slaves tended to
come from the coastal areas of Africa. Over time, however, the source of
slaves moved further into the African interior. Historians have often referred
to this moving source of slaves as the "slaving frontier." Slaves captured
hundreds of miles in the interior of Africa were forced to walk all the
way to the coast and many died and suffered severe deprivations on these
"marches of death." Americans tend to think of the mortality on board ship
in the "middle passage," but the mortality of slaves walking to the coast
was probably as high as mortality in the oceanic passage.
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