History Journal 3 - Paper Answers

750 words

read all of the following pdf documents before doing the journal entry

APA source

Try to answer the following questions in each of your journal entries:

What interested you the most in the week’s course content? Why?
What about the concepts discussed this week? (use the syllabus, course schedule, to see each week’s concepts). Did they help you understand the historical process better, or not? How come? Comment on at least one concept and related event/process discussed in the textbook or lectures.
What event, concept, or historical process remained unclear to you? Why?
How do you evaluate your learning process about world history so far?

The Transatlantic Slave
Trade
History 111 – World History since 1500
Spring 2022
Jorge Minella (jminella@umass.edu)

Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Before the Americas: 500/year peak, 1480s.
 To Europe.
 To Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic Islands.

 After the Americas: 35,000/year peak, 1760-1820.

Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Portuguese foundations of the transatlantic slave trade.

 The mature slave trade.
 Northern Europeans.



The Middle Passage

 Volume of trade.

Foundations of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade

Early Portuguese Slave Trade

 Early stages of the maritime expansion.

 Portuguese in-land raids too risky.

 Trade outposts.

 Existing African slave markets.

Feitoria

 Fortified trading posts.

 Used to store goods
and slaves.

 Little risk to European
merchants.

 Influenced the
development of New
World colonies.

São Jorge da Mina (Elmina), current-day
Ghana.

Portuguese Strategies

 Relations through trade.

 Offer of freight service.

 Conversion of the elites to Roman Catholicism.

 Examples: Kongo, Ndongo, Benin.

 5 million captives from West Central Africa to Americas (1519-
1867)

In Short – Origins of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Portuguese Feitorias.

 Existing African slave markets.

 African elites benefit.

 Slave-based plantations in the Atlantic Islands (15th century).

 Slave-based plantations in the Americas (16th century).

 No African collective identity.

The Mature Transatlantic
Slave Trade

Mature Slave Trade

 Northern European Traders replace

Portuguese.
 Dutch, British, French, Danish, and

others.

 Increased demand in the colonies.

 Colonies also became suppliers of trade
goods sent to Africa.

 Formation of the Atlantic World: set of
relations allowed for by the Atlantic.

 Rivalry between European powers.
Depiction of Recife’s slave Market, Brazil,
17th century. Zacaharias Wagner.

Profitability

 Decrease in transportation cost.

 Profits reinvested in Europe.

 European development.
 Benefitted from slave trade.

 And from the products of slavery.

The Middle
Passage
 Hundreds of captives per ship.

 10 to 20% death rate.

 Suicide or attack on crew
members.

 Mutinies rare.

 Difficult communication.

 Exemplary and brutal
violence and humiliation
against dissenters.

Detail of a British broadside depicting the ship Brooks and the manner (c. 1790)
in which more than 420 enslaved adults and children could be carried on board.

Traffic to the
Americas

 1492-1808

 2 million free European
migrants.

 10 to 12 million enslaved
Africans.

Opposition to the
Trade

 Not relevant among Europeans.

 Racism strong.

 Visibility achieved in the late 18th
century.

 Olaudah Equiano.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Transatlantic Slave Trade
Transatlantic Slave Trade

Foundations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Early Portuguese Slave Trade
Feitoria
Portuguese Strategies
In Short – Origins of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Mature Transatlantic Slave Trade

Mature Slave Trade
Profitability
The Middle Passage

Traffic to the Americas
Opposition to the Trade

Western African Societies

History 111 – World History since 1500
Spring 2022
Jorge Minella (jminella@umass.edu)

Northern Africa
Western Africa
Central Africa
Eastern Africa
Southern Africa

UN Subregions of Africa

West and

West Central Africa

, 15th century

 Hoe agriculture.

 Chiefdoms.

 Some kingdoms (Mali, Benin, Loango, others).

 Long distance land-based trade.

 Islam in trade routes and Northern West Africa.

West and West Central
African Kingdoms

Mali and Songhai

 Mali (~1200-1400 c.e.)
 Gold.

 Trade caravans, gateway to the Sahara.

 Cultural crossroads.

 Songhai (~1400-1590s)
 Took most of Mali’s territory.

 Thriving trade of gold, salt, forest products.

 Some slavery in both.

Benin and Yoruba

 Benin.

 Confederation in the twelfth
century.

 Centralized kingdom by the
fifteenth century.

 Yoruba.

 City-states.

 Thriving religious tradition.

Depiction of Benin City in the seventeenth century. D. O.
Drapper (Dutch physician and writer).

West Central Africa

 Kingdoms of Loango and Kongo (~1300 c.e.)

 Ndongo (~1500 c.e.)

 Well developed metallurgy.
 Iron works with political importance.

 Columbian Exchange diversified agriculture.

Slavery in Africa

Slavery in Africa before European Interlopers

 How did it work?

 Understand European slave traders’ strategies.

 Understand changes after European slave trade.

 Consequences for Africa.

Slavery in Africa

 War captives.

 Debt.

 Condition not passed to descendants.

 Pathways to freedom.

 Household service, military service, agricultural work.

African Slave Trade

 Internal African trade.

 External trade (since the
eight century).
 To the Arabian

Peninsula and Indian
Ocean.

 To the Mediterranean.

 Small if compared to the
transatlantic slave trade
(16th to 19th centuries).

An important distinction

Societies with slaves.

Slave societies.

Slavery in Early Modernity

 Slavery in Africa: societies with slaves.

 Slavery in Iberia (1440s): societies with slaves.

 Slavery in parts of America: slave societies.

 Europeans based enslavement on race.
 Major difference in relation to slavery in African societies.

Número do slide 2

West and West Central Africa, 15th century

West and West Central African Kingdoms

Mali and Songhai
Benin and Yoruba
West Central Africa

Número do slide 8

Slavery in Africa

Slavery in Africa before European Interlopers

Slavery in Africa
African Slave Trade
An important distinction
Slavery in Early Modernity

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Western Africa in the Era
of the Atlantic Slave Trade
1450–1800

605

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Many Western Africa

FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural
practices, and political arrangements typified
western Africa in early modern times?

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and
States in West Afric

FOCUS What economic, social, and political
patterns characterized early modern West
Africa?

Land of the Blacksmith Kings: West
Central Afr

FOCUS What economic, social, and political
patterns characterized early modern West
Central Africa?

Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the
Portuguese

FOCUS How did the early Portuguese slave
trade in western Africa function?

Northern Europeans and the Expansion
of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–180

FOCUS What were the major changes in the
Atlantic slave trade after 1600?

COUNTERPOINT: The Pygmies of Central
Africa

FOCUS How did the Pygmies’ rainforest world
differ from the better-known environment of
savannas and farms?

backstory
Prior to 1450, the lives of most western Afri-

cans focused on hoe agriculture, supplemen-

tary herding and hunting, and in some places

mining and metallurgy. Chiefdoms were the

dominant political form throughout the region,

from the southern fringes of Morocco to the

interior of Angola, although several expansive

kingdoms rose and fell along the Niger and

Volta Rivers, notably Old Ghana, which thrived

from about 300 to 1000, and most recently, as

the early modern period dawned, Mali, which

flourished from about 1200 to 1400

Trade in many commodities stretched over

vast distances, often monopolized by extended

families or ethnic groups. Muslim traders were

dominant along the southern margins of the

Sahara Desert after about 1000 C.E. Some west-

ern African merchants traded slaves across the

Sahara to the Mediterranean basin, and others

raided vulnerable villages for captives, some of

whom were sent as far away as the Red Sea and

Indian Ocean. Islam predominated by 1450

along many trade routes into the savanna, or

grasslands, but most western Africans retained

local religious beliefs.

World in the Making This dramatic brass plaque
depicts the oba, or king, of Benin in a royal procession,
probably in the sixteenth century. He is seated side-
saddle on a seemingly overburdened horse, probably
imported and sold to him by Portuguese traders. The
larger attendants to each side shade the monarch
while the smaller ones hold his staff and other regal
paraphernalia. Above, as if walking behind, are two
armed guards. (Image copyright © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, N Y)

606

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In 1594 a youth was captured in West Central Africa. The Portuguese, who con-
trolled the Atlantic port of Luanda, where the young captive was taken, called this
region Angola, a corruption of the Kimbundu term for “blacksmith.” The young
man was branded, examined like a beast, and sold; he was also, in the words of his
captors, “a black.” In Luanda, the captive was housed in a stifling barracks with
others, whose words, looks, hairstyles, and “country marks,” or ritual scars, were
unfamiliar.

Eventually, Roman Catholic priests who had just established a mission in Luanda
appeared and spoke to the captives in mostly unintelligible words. After several
weeks, each captive was sprinkled with water and given a lump of salt on the tongue.
Then names were assigned. The young man was now called “Domingo.” Once in the
Americas, scribes recorded his name as “Domingo Angola, black slave.”

Domingo was one of the lucky ones. He survived the barracks and then the grueling
two-month voyage, or “middle passage,” to Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean
coast of present-day Colombia. More than one in five died during these ordeals.
Once ashore, Domingo Angola was washed, oiled, examined for signs of contagious
illness, and fed maize gruel and tough, salted beef.

Domingo was sent to Panama, where he was sold to a merchant traveling to Quito,
high in the Andes Mountains. There, in 1595, he was sold again to two merchants
heading to the silver-mining town of Potosí, several thousand miles to the south.
On the way, Domingo fell ill while waiting for a ship on the Pacific coast and had to
be treated. In Potosí at last, he was sold yet again. He had not yet turned nineteen.

Meanwhile, back in Angola, a story arose about men and women such as Domingo
who had been sent across the sea. People began to imagine that they were being
captured to feed a distant race of cannibals. These “people eaters,” red in color, lived
somewhere beyond the sunset, on the far side of an enormous lake, and there they
butchered ordinary Angolans. Human blood was their wine, brains their cheese, and
roasted and ground long-bones their gunpowder. The red people—the sunburned
Portuguese—were devotees of Mwene Puto, God of the Dead. How else to explain
the massive, ceaseless traffic in souls, what Angolans called the “way of death”?

Domingo’s long journey from Africa to South America was not unusual, and in
fact he would have met many other Angolans arriving in Potosí via Buenos Aires.
Victims of the Atlantic slave trade were constantly on the move, and slave mobility
diminished only with the rise of plantation agriculture in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. Shuffling of ethnic groups was typical of the Atlantic slave trade
and what historians call the African diaspora, or “great scattering” of sub-Saharan

A frican diaspora
The global dispersal,
mostly through the
Atlantic slave trade, of
A frican peoples.

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African peoples. As we will see in the next chapter, millions of slaves were sent
across the Indian Ocean from East Africa as well. This chapter focuses on western
or “Atlantic” Africa, a vast portion of the continent that geographers normally split
into two parts: West and West Central Africa (see Map 17.1, page 608).

Although slavery and slave trading were practiced in western Africa prior to the
arrival of Europeans, both institutions changed dramatically as a result of the
surge in European demand for African slaves coinciding with colonization of the
Americas. New patterns of behavior emerged. African warriors and mercenaries
focused more on kidnapping their neighbors in order to trade them to foreign sla-
vers for weapons, stimulants, and luxury goods; coastal farmers abandoned lands
vulnerable to raiders; formerly protective customs were called into question; and
Islam and Christianity made new inroads. We now know that even inland cultures
such as the Batwa, or Pygmies, of the Congo rainforest were affected by the slave
trade. They were driven deeper into the forest as other internal migrants, forced to
move by slavers, expanded their farms and pasturelands. There, as we will see in the
Counterpoint to this chapter, the Pygmies forged a lifestyle far different from that
of their settled neighbors.

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS

The major global development in this chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave
trade and its impact on early modern A frican peoples and cultures.

As you read, consider:

1. How did ecological

diversity in western

Africa relate to cultural

developments?

2. What tied western

Africa to other parts of

the world prior to the ar-

rival of Europeans along

Atlantic shores?

3. How did the

Atlantic slave

trade arise,

and how was it

sustained?

Many Western Africas

FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural practices, and political
arrangements typified western Africa in early modern times?

The A frican continent was home to an estimated one hundred million people at
the time of Columbus’s 1492 voyage. About fifty million people inhabited West

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0 500 Kilometers

500 Miles

ATLANTIC
OCEA

Mediterranean Sea

Gulf of Guinea

Volta

Canary

Is.

Madeira Is.

Verde

Is.

Cape of
Good Hope

São Tomé

Senegal R.

Nig
er R

N
ile R.

Uele R.

Kasai R.

Congo R.

Zam
bezi R.

Lim
popo R.

Lake
Tanganyika

Lake
Chad

Orang e R.

Gambia R.

Kwanza

R
.

MATAMBA

LOANG

KONGO

A�N

BENIN

SONGHAI

MO
RO

CC
O

YORUBA

MALI

NDONGO

S a h a r a

Atlas
Mt s.

N
am

ibia D
esert Kalahari

Desert

W E S T A F R I C A

WEST
CENTRAL

AFRICA

Gao

Cairo

Jenne-jeno

EdoIfe

Timbuktu

S U D A N

M A G H R E B

ANGOL A

S A H E L
LO

W
E

R
G

U
IN

E
A

U
PPER

G
U

IN
E A

Western Africa, c. 1500
Trade goods Agriculture

Cola nuts
Copper
Cowry shells
Gold
Honey
Iron
Ivory
Ra�a cloth
Salt

Bananas
Co�on
Millet
Ri

Sorghum
Yams

Equator

0º

20ºN

20ºS

Tropic of Capricorn

Tropic of Cancer

20ºW 0º

20ºE

BATWA

MANDE

MANE

TUAREG

KHOIKHOI

MAP 17.1 Western A frica, c. 1500 The huge regions of West and West Central
A frica were of key importance to early modern global history as sources of both
luxury commodities and enslaved immigrants. But western A frica was also marked
by substantial internal dynamism. The Songhai Empire on the middle Niger rose
to prominence about the time of Columbus. Large kingdoms and city-states also
flourished on the Volta and lower Niger R ivers and near the mouth of the Congo
(Zaire). Rainforests and deserts were home to gatherer-hunters such as the Batwa
(Pygmies) and K hoikhoi.

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and West Central A frica, what we refer to here as “western A frica.” Western A frica
thus had a population comparable to that of all the Americas at that time. It con-
tained several dozen tributary states, along with numerous permanent agricultural
and mobile, warrior-headed chiefdoms. There were also pastoral or herding groups,
trading peoples, fishing folk, and bands of desert and rainforest gatherer-hunters.
The array of livelihoods was wide, yet most western A fricans lived as hoe agricul-
turalists, primarily cultivators of rice, sorghum, millet, and cotton (see Map 17.1).

Religious ideas and practices varied, but most A fricans south of the Sahara
placed great emphasis on fertility. Fertility rituals were integral to everyday life;
some entailed animal sacrifice, and others, rarely, human sacrifice. A lso as in many
other early modern societies, discord, illness, and material hardship were often
thought to be the products of witchcraft. Islam, introduced by long-distance trad-
ers and warriors after the seventh century C.E ., became dominant in the dry sahel
(from the Arabic for “shore”) and savanna, or grassland, regions just south of the
Sahara, and along the rim of the Indian Ocean. Christian and Jewish communities
were limited to tiny pockets in the northeastern Horn and along the Maghreb, or
Mediterranean coast. Over two thousand languages were spoken on the continent,
most of them derived from four roots. A ll told, A frica’s cultural and linguistic di-
versity easily exceeded that of Europe in the era of Columbus.

Even where Islam predominated, local notions of the spirit world survived. Most
western A fricans believed in a creator deity, and everyday ritual tended to empha-
size communication with ancestor spirits, who helped placate other forces. Animal
and plant spirits were considered especially potent.

Places were also sacred. Rather like Andean wakas, western A frican génies
( JEHN-ees) could be features in the landscape: boulders, springs, rivers, lakes,
and groves. Trees were revered among peoples living along the southern margins
of the savanna, and villagers built alongside patches of old-growth forest. Through
periodic animal sacrifice, western A fricans sought the patronage of tree spirits,
since they were most rooted in the land.

Western A frica fell entirely within the lowland tropics and was thus subject to
many endemic diseases and pests. The deadly falciparum variety of malaria and
other serious mosquito-borne fevers attacked humans in the hot lowlands, and the
tsetse fly, carrier of the fatal trypanosomiasis virus, limited livestock grazing and
horse breeding. Droughts could be severe and prolonged in some regions, spurring
migration and warfare. Western A fricans nevertheless adapted to these and other
environmental challenges, in the case of malaria developing at least some immu-
nity against the disease.

génie A sacred site or
feature in the West
A frican landscape.

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In the arid north, beasts of burden included camels, donkeys, and horses.
Cattle were also kept in the interior highlands and far south, where they were safe
from tsetse flies. A rabian warhorses were greatly prized, and were traded among
kingdoms and chiefdoms along the southern margins of the Sahara. They were
most valued where fly-borne disease made breeding impossible. Other domestic
animals included goats, swine, guinea fowl, sheep, and dogs. In general, animal
husbandry, as in greater Eurasia, was far more developed in western A frica than
in the A mericas. There were also more large wild mammals in sub-Saharan A frica
than in any other part of the world, and these featured prominently in regional
cosmologies.

Mining and metalsmithing technologies were also highly developed.
Throughout West and West Central A frica, copper-based metallurg y had grow n
complex by 1500. Goldsmithing was also advanced, though less w idespread.
Th is was in part because A frican gold was being increasingly draw n away by

trade to the Mediterranean Sea and Indian
Ocean. To a large extent, western Eurasia’s
“ bullion famine” spurred European ex pansion
into A frica.

A fricans had long been great producers and
consumers of iron. W hether in Mali or Angola,
A frican ironmongers were not simply artisans but
also shaman-like figures and even paramount
chiefs—heads of village clans. A frican met-
alsmiths produced substantial tools, ornaments,
and works of art. They made the iron hoes most
people tended crops with, and some items were
traded in bulk over vast distances.

A frica’s internal trade mostly redistributed
basic commodities. Those who mined or col-
lected salt, for example, usually bartered it for
other necessities such as cloth. Saharan salt was
an essential dietary supplement throughout
the vast West A frican interior. Similarly, man-
ufactured goods such as agricultural tools were
traded for food, textiles, and livestock, but bits
of gold, copper, and iron also served as currency.
Another key trade good was the cola nut, the
sharing of which cemented social relations in
much of West A frica.

A Young Woman from West Africa Since at least
medieval times, West African women surprised outside
visitors with their independence, visibility, and political
influence, in both Islamic and non-Islamic societies. This
drawing by an English artist during a slave-trading voyage
to West Africa around 1775 depicts a young woman with
elaborately braided hair, pearl earrings, and a choker strung
with coral or large stones. It is possible that she is a member
of an elite family given these proudly displayed ornaments.

husbandry Human
intervention in the
breeding of animals.

paramount chief A
chief who presided
over several headmen
and controlled a large
area.

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Copper and bronze bracelets were prized by some of western A frica’s coastal
peoples, and eventually they were standardized into currency called manillas
(mah-K NEE-lahs). In some areas seashells such as the cowry functioned in the
same way. The desire for cotton textiles from India fueled A frica’s west coast
demand for shell and copper-bronze currency, which in time would also contrib-
ute to the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. A frica’s east coast, meanwhile, re-
mained integrated into the vast and mostly separate Indian Ocean trade circuit, as
we will see in Chapter 18.

A frican societies linked by trade were sometimes also bound by politics. A shared
desire to both expand household units and improve security led many A fricans to
form confederations and conglomerates. Like the confederacies of eastern North
America (discussed in Chapter 15), some of these alliances had a religious core,
but just as often they were spurred by ecological stresses such as droughts. Political
flux caused ethnic and other identity markers to blend and blur as groups merged
and adopted each other’s languages, cosmologies, farming techniques, and modes
of dress and adornment.

Nevertheless, as in the Americas, intergroup conflict was common in western
A frica prior to the arrival of Europeans. Expansionist, tributary empires such as
Mali and Songhai made lifelong enemies. The motives of A frican warfare varied,
usually centering on the control of resources, and especially people, sometimes as
slaves put to work on agricultural estates. European trading and political meddling
on A frica’s Atlantic coast would spawn or exacerbate conflicts that would rever-
berate deep within the continent. Full-blown imperialism would come much later,
with the development of new technologies and antimalarial drugs, but it would
benefit in part from this earlier political disruption.

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in
West Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns
characterized early modern West Africa?

West A fricans in the period following 700 C.E . faced radical new developments.
Two catalysts for change were the introduction and spread of Islam after the
eighth century and a long dry period lasting from roughly 1100 to 1500 C.E . At
least one historian has characterized human relations in this era in terms of “land-
lords” and “strangers,” a reference to the tendency toward small agricultural com-
munities offering hospitality to travelers and craft specialists.3 In return, these

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“strangers”—traders, blacksmiths, tanners, bards, and clerics—offered goods and
services. The model “landlord” was an esteemed personage capable of ensuring the
security and prosperity of numerous dependents and affiliates, usually conceived
of as members of an extended family.

Empire Builders and Traders
The late medieval dry period also witnessed the rise of mounted warriors. On the banks
of the middle and upper Niger River rose the kingdoms of Mali and Songhai, both
linked to the Mediterranean world via the caravan terminus of Timbuktu (see again
Map 17.1). Both empires were headed by devout, locally born Muslim rulers. One,
Mansa Musa (mansa meaning “conqueror”) of Mali, made the pilgrimage to Mecca
in 1325. Musa spent so much gold during a stop in Cairo that his visit became legend.

It was gold that put sub-Saharan A frica on the minds—and maps—of European
and Middle Eastern traders and monarchs. West A frican mines were worked by
farming peoples who paid tribute in gold dust unearthed in the fallow (inactive)
season (see Lives and Livelihoods: West A frica’s Gold Miners). In general, land
was a less-prized commodity than labor in West A frica. Prestige derived not from
ownership of farmland or mines but from control over productive people, some of
whom were enslaved. Captive-taking was thus integral to warfare. Like the sea-
sonal production of gold, the seasonal production of slaves would vastly expand
once Europeans arrived on Atlantic shores.

With the exception, as we will see, of the Songhai Empire, West A frican politics
in this period was mostly confederated. Dozens of paramount chiefs or regional
kings relied on tributaries and enslaved laborers for their power, wealth, and sus-
tenance. Most common was the rise of charismatic and aggressive rulers, with few
bureaucrats and judges. Rulers typically extended their authority by offering to pro-
tect agricultural groups from raiders. Some coastal rice growers in Upper Guinea
drifted in and out of regional alliances, depending on political and environmental
conditions. A lliances did not always spare them from disaster. Still, as actors in
the Columbian Exchange, enslaved rice farmers from this region transferred tech-
niques and perhaps grains to the plantations of North and South America.

From Western Sudan to Lower Guinea, town-sized units predominated, many
of them walled. Archaeologists are still discovering traces of these enclosures,
some of which housed thousands of inhabitants. As in medieval Europe, even
when they shared a language, walled cities in neighboring territories could be
fiercely competitive.

Dating to the first centuries C . E ., West A frica was also home to sizable k ing-
doms. Old Ghana flourished from about 300 to 1000 C . E ., followed by Mali,

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which thrived from about 1200 to 1400. From about the time of Columbus,
the Songhai Empire, centered at Gao, rose to prominence under Sunni A li
(r. 1464 –1492). Similar to the mansas of Mali, Sunni A li was a conqueror,
employ ing mounted lancers and squads of boatmen to great effect. Sunni A li ’s
successor, Muhammad Touré, extended Songhai ’s rule even farther. At his
zenith Touré, who took the title askiya (A H-skee-yah), or hereditar y lord, and
later caliph, or supreme lord, controlled a huge portion of West A frica (see again
Map 17.1).

The wealth and power of Songhai derived from the merchant crossroads cities of
the middle Niger: Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu. Here gold, salt, and forest products
from the south such as cola nuts and raffia palm fiber were exchanged, along with
other commodities. Slaves, many of them taken in Songhai’s wars of expansion,
were also traded to distant buyers. Stately Timbuktu, meanwhile, retained its rep-
utation as a major market for books and a center of Islamic teachings.

Touré’s successors were less aggressive than he, and as Songhai’s power waned
in the sixteenth century, the empire fell victim to mounted raiders from distant
Morocco. With alarming audacity, and greatly aided by their state-of-the-art fire-
arms and swift mounts, the Moroccans (among them hundreds of exiled Spanish
Muslims, or Moriscos) captured the cities of Gao and Timbuktu in 1591. As
their victory texts attest, these conquistadors took home stunning quantities of
gold and a number of slaves. Yet unlike their Spanish and Portuguese contem-
poraries in the A mericas, they failed to hold on to their conquest. The mighty
Sahara proved a more formidable barrier than the Atlantic Ocean. A fter the fall
of Songhai there emerged a dynasty of Moroccan princes, the Sa’dis, who were
in turn crushed by new, local waves of warfare in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Most fell victim to the Sahara’s best-known nomads, the
Tuareg (T WA H-regh).

Sculptors and Priest-Kings
Farther south, near the mouth of the Niger R iver, was the rainforest kingdom of
Benin, with its capital at Edo. Under K ing Ewuare (EH-woo-A H-reh) (r. c. 1450–
1480), Benin reached the height of its power in the mid-fifteenth century, subject-
ing many towns and chiefdoms to tributary status. Benin grew wealthy in part by
exporting cloth made by women in tributary villages. This trade expanded with
the arrival of Portuguese coastal traders around 1500, revitalizing Benin’s power.
Some of the most accomplished sculptors in A frican history worked under K ing
Ewuare and his successors, producing cast brass portraits of Benin royalty, prom-
inent warriors, and even newly arrived Europeans. This was but one of the many

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LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS

West Africa’s Gold Miners

Until 1650, gold was a more valuable West A frican
ex port than slaves, and it remained highly signif-
icant for many years after ward. The mines and
their workers, some of whom were enslaved, re-
mained in the control of local k ings whose agents
then traded gold to long-distance merchants w ith
ties to Europeans on the coast. Gold diggings
were concentrated along the upper reaches of
the Senegal, Niger, and Volta R ivers, mostly in

and around streams flow ing
dow n from eroded mountain
ranges. Sources describing
West A frican gold mining in
early modern times are rare,
but anecdotal descriptions
combined w ith somewhat
later eyew itness accounts
suggest that women did many
of the most strenuous tasks.
The Scottish traveler Mungo
Park described non-enslaved
West A frican women miners
among the Mande of the
upper Niger in the 1790s as
follows:

About the beginning of
December, when the harvest
is over, and the streams and
torrents have greatly sub-

sided, the Mansa, or chief of the town, appoints
a day to begin sanoo koo, “gold washing”; and the
women are sure to have themselves in readiness
by the time appointed. . . . On the morning of
their departure, a bullock is killed for the first
day’s entertainment, and a number of prayers and
charms are used to ensure success; for a failure on
that day is thought a bad omen. . . . The washing
of the sands of the streams is by far the easiest

Implements of the Gold Trade West Africa was long legendary for its gold, which
was first traded across the Sahara and later to Europeans arriving along the Atlantic
coast. In the Akan region of present-day Ghana, gold dust circulated as currency,
with portions measured by merchants in a hanging balance against tiny, fancifully
designed brass weights. Gold dust was stored in brass boxes and dished out with
decorated brass spoons. Smaller exchanges employed cowry shells, brought to
Atlantic Africa from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.

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way of obtaining the gold dust, but in most places
the sands have been so narrowly searched before
that unless the stream takes some new course, the
gold is found but in small quantities. W hile some
of the party are busied in washing the sands,
others employ themselves farther up the torrent,
where the rapidity of the stream has carried away
all the clay, sand, etc., and left nothing but small
pebbles. The search among these is a very trou-
blesome task. I have seen women who have had
the skin worn off the tops of their fingers in this
employment. Sometimes, however, they are re-
warded by finding pieces [nuggets] of gold, which
they call sanoo birro, “gold stones,” that amply
repay them for their trouble. A woman and her
daughter, inhabitants of Kamalia, found in one
day two pieces of this kind.

Mande men, according to Park, participated in
excavating deep pits in gold-bearing hills “in the
height of the dry season,” producing clay and other
sediments “for the women to wash; for though the pit
is dug by the men, the gold is always washed by the
women, who are accustomed from their infancy to
a similar operation, in separating the husks of corn
from the meal.” To be efficient, panning required in-
tense concentration and careful eye-hand coordina-
tion, and use of several pans to collect concentrates.
This skill was appreciated, as Park explains: “Some
women, by long practice, become so well acquainted
with the nature of the sand, and the mode of wash-
ing it, that they will collect gold where others cannot
find a single particle.” Gold dust was then stored in
quills (the hollow shafts of bird feathers) plugged with
cotton, says Park, “and the washers are fond of dis-
playing a number of these quills in their hair.”

Source: Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Masters (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2000), 264–267.

Questions to Consider

1. W hy was West A frican gold mining seasonal?
2. How were tasks divided between men and women, and why?
3. Was gold washing demeaning labor, or could it be a source of pride?

For Further Information:

Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

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SEEING THE PAST

Art of the Slave Trade: A Benin Bronze Plaque
Copper and bronze metallurgy were advanced

arts in western Africa long before the arrival of

Europeans. Metal sculpture in the form of lifelike

busts, historical plaques, and complex represen-

tations of deities was most developed in western

Nigeria and the kingdom of Benin. Realistic rep-

resentations of elite men and women appear to

have served a commemorative function, as did

relief-sculpted plaques depicting kings, chiefs,

and warlords in full regalia. Beginning in the 1500s,

sculptors in Benin and neighboring lands began to

depict Portuguese slave traders and missionaries,

bearded men with helmets, heavy robes, and trade

goods, including primitive muskets. This plaque

depicts Portuguese slavers with a cargo of manillas,

the bronze bracelets that served as currency in the

slave trade until the mid-nineteenth century.

Examining the Evidence

1. How were Portuguese newcomers incorporated into
this traditional Benin art form?

2. How might this bronze representation of foreigners
and their trade goods been a commentary on the slave
trade? Plaque of Portuguese Traders with Manillas

(Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of A rt.
Image source: A rt Resource, N Y)

livelihoods afforded by urban living (see Seeing the Past: Art of the Slave Trade: A
Benin Bronze Plaque).

Just west of Benin were city-states ruled by ethnic Yoruba clans. At their core was
the city of Ife (EE-feh), founded in around 1000 C.E. Ife metalsmiths and sculptors

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were as accomplished as those of Benin, and their large cast works have been hailed
as inimitable. Yoruba political leaders, called obas, performed a mix of political
and religious duties. Most of these priest-kings were men, but a significant number
were women. One of the oba’s main functions was to negotiate with ancestor deities
thought to govern everyday life. Some slaves taken from this region to the Americas
appear to have masked ancestor worship behind the Roman Catholic cult of saints.

Urban life also matured along the banks of the lower Volta R iver, in what is today
Ghana. Here A kan peoples had formed city-states, mostly by controlling regional
gold mines and trading networks. The A kan initially focused on transporting gold
and cola nuts to the drier north, where these commodities found a ready market
among the imperial societies of the middle Niger. With the arrival of Europeans on
the Atlantic coast in the late fifteenth century, however, many A kan traders turned
toward the south. Throughout early modern times, women held great power in
A kan polities, and matrilineal inheritance was standard. Even in patrilineal em-
pires such as Mali and Songhai, women could wield considerable power, especially
in matters of succession.

Land of the Blacksmith Kings:
West Central Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns
characterized early modern West central Africa?

Human interaction in West Central A frica, called by some historians “land of the
blacksmith kings,” was in part defined by control of copper and iron deposits. As
in West A frica, however, the vast majority of people practiced subsistence agri-
culture, limited to hoe tilling because the tsetse fly eliminated livestock capable
of pulling plows. For this reason, few people other than gatherer-hunters such as
the Pygmies inhabited A frica’s great equatorial forest. Most preferred to farm the
savanna and fish along the Atlantic coast and major riverbanks.

The Congo (Zaire) R iver basin, second only to the Amazon in terms of forest
cover, was of central importance to human history in West Central A frica.
A lthough patterns of belief and material culture varied, most people spoke deri-
vations of Western Bantu. Islam was known in some areas but remained marginal
in influence. Most inhabitants of West Central A frica lived in matrilineal or patri-
lineal kin-based villages, a small minority of them under paramount chiefs. In all,
the region was marked by a cultural coherence similar to that of Mesoamerica
( discussed in Chapter 15).

oba A priest-king or
queen of the Yoruba
culture (modern
southern Nigeria).

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Farmers and Traders
The hoe-agriculturalists who formed the vast majority of West Central A fricans
grew millet and sorghum, complemented by yams and bananas in certain areas.
Bananas, a crop introduced to the region some time before 1000 C.E ., enabled farm-
ers to exploit the forest’s edge more effectively and devote more energy to textile
making and other activities. Some forested areas were too wet for staple crops but
still offered game, medicinal plants, and other products. Pygmy forest dwellers,
for example, traded honey, ivory, and wild animal skins to farming neighbors for
iron points and food items. Tsetse flies and other pests limited the development of
animal husbandry in West Central A frica, except in the drier south.

W herever they lived, West Central A fricans, like Europeans and Asians, em-
braced native American crops in the centuries following Columbus’s voyages.
Maize became a staple throughout Central A frica, along with cassava (manioc),
peanuts, chili peppers, beans, squash, and tobacco. Peanuts, probably introduced
by the Portuguese from Brazil soon after 1500, were locally called nguba (NGOO-
bah), from which the American term “goober peas” derives.

As the introduction of American crops demonstrates, West Central Africa may
have had less direct ties to global trade than coastal West Africa, but it was part of the
system. Likewise, Africa’s internal trade networks were vital to West Central African
life. As in West Africa, salt was traded along with foods, textiles, metal goods, and
other items. Raffia palm fiber was used to manufacture cloth, and coastal lagoons

were exploited for cowry shells for trade.
Throughout the region political power became increasingly

associated with control of trade goods and trade routes. For
example, around 1300 two kingdoms arose above and below
the Malebo Pool alongside the Congo R iver. This was the first
major portage site for all traders moving between the coast and
interior. The kings of Loango, living above the falls but also con-
trolling access to the Atlantic coast, taxed trade and also drew
legitimacy from their role as caretakers of an ancient religious
shrine. Below the falls and to the south, in Kongo—a kingdom
misnamed by the Portuguese after the title of its warlords, the
manikongos (mah-nee-CONE-goes)—leaders came to power
in part by monopolizing copper deposits and also access to
cowry shells, the region’s main currency.

Smiths and Kings
As in West A frica, power also derived from the mystique sur-
rounding metallurgy. The introduction of ironworking to the

0 180 Kilometers

180 Miles

Luanda

Mpinda

1501

Loango

Mbanza
(São Salvador)

Portuguese fort, with date of occupation

Kongo Territory,
c. 1500

Kasai R.

C
o

ng
o

R
.

Kwanza R.

K
w

a R
.

Malebo
PoolLOANGO

MATAMBA
NDONGO

KONGO

Kongo Territory, c. 1500

manikongo A
“ blacksmith” king of
Kongo.

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region sometime early in the Common Era had
made the majority of farmers dependent on smiths
for hoes, blades, and other implements. Making
the most of this reliance, some blacksmiths
became kings. By 1500, Kongo commanded an
area stretching inland from the right bank of the
Congo R iver south and east some 185 miles, ab-
sorbing numerous villages, slaves, and tributar-
ies along the way. A few small kingdoms existed
to the north and east, often with copper deposits
serving as their lifeblood. These kingdoms even-
tually challenged Kongo directly, in part because
they were subjected to Kongo slave-raiding. In
what is today Angola, just north of the Kwanza
R iver, there emerged in the sixteenth century the
Ndongo (NDOA N-go) kingdom. Just northeast
of Ndongo lay the Matamba kingdom. Initially
tributaries of Kongo, the people of Matamba
shifted their relations in favor of Ndongo as
Portuguese influence there grew in the sixteenth
century. By 1600, the Portuguese held forts deep
in Ndongo country, using them to procure slaves
from farther inland.

Less is known about the peoples of the more iso-
lated and forested middle Congo basin, but archae-
ologists have recently shown that large chiefdoms
were being consolidated there as early as the thir-
teenth century, and they lasted into early modern times. Here, innovations in sword
manufacture seem to have enabled some chiefs to monopolize trade along Congo
River tributaries. Like elites everywhere, these chiefs considered themselves the spir-
itual kin of predatory lords of the animal kingdom, in this case the leopard and eagle.

We know less about women’s livelihoods than men’s, but it appears that in early
modern West Central A frica, as in many preindustrial societies, women tended to
work mostly at domestic tasks such as child rearing, food preparation, and other
aspects of household management. Men were frequently engaged in hunting, herd-
ing, trade, and warfare, so women’s responsibilities often extended to agriculture.
In many places, women planted yams in hard soils by slicing through the crust with
machetes made by village men. A lmost every where, women tended the food crops
and men cleared forest.

Mbundu Blacksmiths This late-seventeenth-century
watercolor depicts a Mbundu blacksmith and assistant at
work. As the assistant operates the typical A frican bellows
with rods attached to airbags, the master smith hammers
a crescent-shaped iron blade on an anvil. Other blades,
including what may be a sickle or hoe, lie on the ground to
the left of the anvil. In the background a curious audience
looks on.

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Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the
Portuguese

FOCUS how did the early Portuguese slave trade in western
Africa function?

As we saw in Chapter 16, the Portuguese arrived in western A frica soon after 1400
in search of gold and a sea route to India. For over a century they were the only sig-
nificant European presence in the region. During that time, Portuguese explorers,
merchants, missionaries, and even criminal castaways established feitorias, or for-
tified trading posts, and offshore island settlements. There were no great marches
to the interior, no conquests of existing empires. Instead, the Portuguese focused
on extracting A frica’s famed wealth in gold, ivory, and slaves through intermediar-
ies. In a pattern repeated in Asia, the Portuguese dominated maritime trade.

From Voyages of Reconnaissance to Trading Forts
1415–1650
On the Gambia R iver the Portuguese sought the gold of Mali, at this time an empire
in decline but still powerful in the interior (see again Map 17.1). The warring states
of the region were happy to trade gold for horses, and chronic conflicts yielded a sur-
plus of captives. With explicit backing from the pope, Portuguese merchants read-
ily accepted African slaves as payment. Once in Portuguese hands, healthy young
males were reduced to an accounting unit, the peça (PEH-sah), literally “piece.”
Women, children, the disabled, and the elderly were discounted in terms of frac-
tions of a peça.

A frican enslavement of fellow A fricans was widespread before the arrival of
Europeans, and the daily experience of slavery was no doubt unpleasant. W hat
differed with the arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century was a new in-
sistence on innate A frican inferiority—in a word, racism—and with it a closing
of traditional avenues of reentry into free society, if not for oneself, then for one’s
children, such as faithful service, or in Islamic societies, religious conversion. The
Portuguese followed the pope’s decree that enslaved sub-Saharan A fricans be
converted to Catholicism, but they also adopted an unstated policy that regarded
black A fricans as “slaves by nature.” To sidestep the paradox of A frican spiritual
equality and alleged “ beastly” inferiority, the Portuguese claimed that they sold
only captives taken in “ just war.” Many such slaves were sold, like young Domingo
Angola, to the Spanish, who took the Portuguese sellers at their word (see Reading
the Past: A lonso de Sandoval, “General Points Relating to Slavery”).

peça Portuguese
for “piece,” used to
describe enslaved
A fricans as units of
labor.

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Yet African slaves were in
less demand than gold prior to
American colonization. Word
of goldfields in the African inte-
rior encouraged the Portuguese
to continue their dogged search
for the yellow metal. By 1471
caravels reached West Africa’s
so-called Gold Coast, and in
1482 the Portuguese estab-
lished a feitoria in present-day
Ghana. São Jorge da Mina,
which served for over a cen-
tury as Portugal’s major West
African gold and slaving fort.

A fter 1500, as slave markets
in Spanish America and Brazil
emerged, new trading posts
were established all along the
West A frican coast. It so hap-
pened that invasions of Mande
and Mane (M A H-nay) peoples
into modern Guinea, Liberia,
Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast
in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries produced yet more
captives through the seven-
teenth century (see Map 17.2).
The Portuguese continued to
trade copper, iron, textiles,
horses, and occasionally guns
for gold, ivory, and a local spice called malaguetta pepper, but by the early 1500s
the shift toward slave trading was evident.

The Portuguese were both extractors and transporters of wealth. They ferried
luxury goods such as cola nuts and textiles, as well as slaves, between existing
A frican trade zones. As we will see, a similar pattern developed in Asia. Virtually
every where the Portuguese anchored their stout vessels, A fricans found that
they benefited as much from access to the foreigners’ shipping, which was rela-
tively secure and efficient, as from their goods. Many competing coastal lords

0 1000 Kilometers

1000 Miles

PACIFIC
OCEAN

ATLANTIC
OCEAN

Gulf of
Mexico

West Indies
Cape

Verde Is.

São
Tomé

Azores
Madeira Is.

Canary Is.

SPAINPORTUGAL

ENGLAND

SONGHAI
A�N

MALI YORUBA
BENIN

KONGO

F�NCE

S a h a r a
MANDE

MANE
IJAW

Potosí

Lima

Cartagena
de Indias

Quito

Mexico
City

Buenos
Aires

São Paulo
São
Vicente

Rio de Janeiro

Salvador

Recife
Luanda

Benguela

São Jorge
da Mina

SevilleLisbon

ANGOLA
PERU

B�ZIL

E
W

S
P

A
I N

Main source of slaves

Main destination of slaves

Main slave trade route

�e Early Atlantic Slave
Trade, c. 1450–1650

Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Capiricorn

Equator

NORTH
AMERICA

SOUTH
AMERICA

AFRICA

EUROPE

0º

30ºS

30ºN

60ºN

30ºW

60ºW90ºW120ºW

0º

MAP 17.2 The Early Atlantic Slave Trade, c. 1450–1650 The first enslaved
A fricans transported by ship in Atlantic waters arrived in Portugal in 1441.
The Portuguese won a monopoly on A frican coastal trade from the pope,
and until 1500, they shipped most enslaved A frican captives to the eastern
Atlantic islands, where plantations were booming by the 1450s. Soon after
1500, Portuguese slave traders took captives first to the Spanish Caribbean
(West Indies), then to the mainland colonies of New Spain and Peru. Claimed
by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was initially a minor destination for enslaved
A fricans, but this changed by about 1570, when the colony’s sugar production
ballooned. A nother early Atlantic route took slaves south to Buenos A ires,
where they were marched overland to the rich city of Potosí.

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READING THE PAST

Alonso de Sandoval, “General Points Relating to Slavery”
Alonso de Sandoval (1577–c.1650) was a Jesuit priest

born in Seville, Spain, and raised in Lima, Peru. He

spent most of his adult life administering sacra-

ments to enslaved Africans arriving at the Caribbean

port city of Cartagena de Indias, in present-day

Colombia. In 1627 he published a book titled On

Restoring Ethiopian Salvation. In it, he focused on

cultural aspects of sub-Saharan African societies as

he understood them, all with the aim of preaching to

Africans more effectively, but he also discussed the

Atlantic slave trade and its justifications:

The debate among scholars on how to justify the

arduous and difficult business of slavery has per-

plexed me for a long time. I could have given up

on explaining it and just ignored it in this book.

However, I am determined to discuss it, although

I will leave the final justification of slavery to legal

and ecclesiastical authorities. . . . I will only men-

tion here what I have learned after many years of

working in this ministry. The readers can formulate

their own ideas on the justice of this issue. . . .

A short story helps me explain how to morally

justify black slavery. I was once consulted by a cap-

tain who owned slave ships that had made many

voyages to these places. He had enriched himself

through the slave trade, and his conscience was

burdened with concern over how these slaves had

fallen into his hands. His concern is not surprising,

because he also told me that one of their kings im-

prisoned anyone who angered him in order to sell

them as slaves to the Spaniards. So in this region,

people are enslaved if they anger the king. . . .

There is a more standard way in which slaves are

traded and later shipped in fleets of ships to the

Indies. Near Luanda are some black merchants called

made the most of these new trade ties, often to the detriment of more isolated and
vulnerable neighbors.

At times commerce with the Portuguese upended a region’s balance of power,
touching off a series of interior conflicts. Some such conflicts were ignited by
Portuguese convicts who established marriage alliances with local chiefdoms.
As seen in Chapter 16 in the case of Brazil, this was the Portuguese plan, to drop
expendable subjects like seeds along the world’s coasts. Some took root, learned
local languages, and built trading posts. In several West A frican coastal enclaves,
mulatto or “Eurafrican” communities developed. These mixed communities were
nominally Catholic, but culturally blended.

A fter 1510, the Portuguese moved eastward. Here among the Niger delta’s tidal
flats and mangroves, Ijaw (EE-jaw) boatmen were willing to trade an adult male
captive for fewer than a dozen copper manillas. Rates of exchange soon moderated,

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pombeiros worth a thousand pesos. They travel

inland eighty leagues [c. 250 miles], bringing porters

with them to carry trade goods. They meet in great

markets where merchants gather together to sell

slaves. These merchants travel 200 or 300 leagues

[c. 650–1000 miles] to sell blacks from many different

kingdoms to various merchants or pombeiros. The

pombeiros buy the slaves and transport them to the

coast. They must report to their masters how many

died on the road. They do this by bringing back the

hands of the dead, a stinking, horrific sight. . . .

I have spent a great deal of time discussing

this subject because slaves are captured in many

different ways, and this disturbs the slave traders’

consciences. One slave trader freely told me that

he felt guilty about how the slaves he had bought

in Guinea had come to be enslaved. Another slave

trader, who had bought 300 slaves on foot, ex-

pressed the same concerns, adding that half the

wars fought between blacks would not take place

if the Spanish [or more likely, Portuguese] did not

go there to buy slaves. . . . The evidence, along

with the moral justifications argued by scholars, is

the best we can do to carefully address this irre-

deemable situation and the very difficult business

of the slave trade.

Source: A lonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, ed. and trans. Nicole Von Germeten (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 50–55.

Examining the Evidence

1. W ho was A lonso de Sandoval, and why did he write this passage?

2. How does Sandoval try to justif y A frican enslavement?

3. A re A fricans themselves involved in this discussion?

but overall, Portuguese demand for slaves was met by other captive- producing
zones. W hat historians call the “Nigerian diaspora” mostly developed later in
this region, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By then rival Dutch and
English slavers had established their own posts (see Map 17.4, page 628). A fter
1650 this region was known simply as the Slave Coast.

Portuguese Strategy in the Kingdom of Kongo
Portuguese interest in Atlantic A frica shifted southeastward after 1500, based in
part on alliances with the kingdom of Kongo. Within West Central A frica, cycles
of trade, war, and drought influenced relationships with outsiders. Once again,
local nobles forced the Portuguese to follow local rules. Still, whereas Portuguese
slavers were to be largely displaced by northern Europeans in West A frica by 1650,
in the southern portion of the continent they held on. As a result, the fortunes of

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Kongo and Angola became ever more intimately entwined with those of Brazil, on
the other side of the Atlantic.

Portuguese religious initiatives in A frica had long been split between attacks
on Muslim kingdoms in the far north, epitomized by the 1415 conquest of Ceuta
in Morocco (see Chapter 16), and more peaceful, although scattered and in-
consistent, missionar y efforts in the south. Portuguese missionaries rarely sur-
vived in the tropical interior, where malaria and other diseases took a heav y toll.
Thus scores of Franciscans, Jesuits, and others died denouncing the persistent
fetishism (roughly, “idolatr y”) of their local hosts. The obvious solution was to
train A frican priests, and for a time this option was sponsored by the Portuguese
royal family.

In the early sixteenth century, A frican priests were trained in Lisbon, Coimbra,
and even in Rome. A frican seminaries also were established in the Cape Verde
Islands and on the island of São Tomé. Despite promising beginnings, however,
sharp opposition came from an increasingly racist Portuguese clergy. Emerging
colonial racial hierarchies trumped the universal ideal of spiritual equality. An
A frican clergy could also subvert the slave trade and other such commercial proj-
ects. A lready in decline before 1600, the A frican seminaries languished in the sev-
enteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Only with the Enlightenment-inspired
reforms of the later eighteenth century (discussed in Chapter 22) were A frican
novices again encouraged to become priests beyond the parish level.

This did not mean that Christianity had no impact on early modern Atlantic
A frica. Aside from the offshore islands, in Kongo and Angola, Christianity played
a critical historical role. Beginning in the 1480s, the Portuguese applied their usual
blend of trade, military alliances, and religious proselytizing to carve out a niche in
West Central A frica. By 1491 they had converted much of the Kongo aristocracy
to Roman Catholicism. Key among the converts was the paramount chief ’s son,
Nzinga Mbemba, who later ruled as A fonso I (r. 1506–1543).

A fonso’s conversion was apparently genuine. He learned to read, studied theol-
ogy, and renamed Mbanza, the capital city, São Salvador (“Holy Savior”). One of
his sons became a priest in Lisbon and returned to Kongo following consecration
in Rome. He was one of the earliest exemplars of western A frican clergy.

Ultimately, however, Christianity, like copper, tended to be monopolized by
Kongo’s elites; the peasant and craft worker majority was virtually ignored. Most
Kongolese commoners recognized deities called kitomi (key-TOE-mee), each
looked after by a local (non-Catholic) priest. Meanwhile, Portuguese military aid
buttressed Kongo politically while fueling the slave trade.

Here, as elsewhere in Africa, the slave trade, though it offered considerable gains,
also exacerbated existing dangers and conflicts and created new ones. King Afonso

fetishism The
derogatory term
used by Europeans
to describe western
A frican use of
religious objects.

kitomi Deities
attended by Kongo
priests prior to the
arrival of Christian
Europeans.

St r a n g e r s i n S h i p s: G o l d, S l ave r y, a n d t h e Po r t u g u e s e 625

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wrote to the king of Portugal in 1526, complaining that “every day the merchants
carry away our people, sons of our soil and sons of our nobles and vassals, and our
relatives, whom thieves and people of bad conscience kidnap and sell to obtain the
coveted things and trade goods of that [Portuguese] Kingdom.”4 Even in its earliest
days, the slave trade in West Central Africa was taking on a life of its own.

As a result of Kongo’s slaving-based alliance with the Portuguese, King Afonso’s
successors faced growing opposition. The kingdom of Kongo finally collapsed
in 1569. São Salvador was
sacked, and its Christian
nobles were humiliated and
sold into slavery in the interior.
Lisbon responded to the fall
of its staunchest African ally
with troops. The monarchy
was restored in 1574. In ex-
change, Kongo traders called
pombeiros (pohm-BEH-rohs)
supplied their Portuguese
saviors with slaves. The pro-
cess of propping up regimes in
exchange for captives was to
continue throughout the long
history of the slave trade.

Portuguese Strategy
in Angola
A second pillar of Portuguese
strategy in West Central
A frica was maintaining a per-
manent military colony in
Angola, home of the young
man whose story began this
chapter. Beginning with the
port city of Luanda, Angola
was to become one of the larg-
est and longest-lived clear-
inghouses for the Atlantic
slave trade (see Map 17.3). It
was perhaps here more than

pombeiro A slave-
trade middleman
in the West Central
A frican interior.

0 200 Kilometers

200 Miles

ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Kasai R.

Co
ngo

Kw
anza R

Malebo
Pool

MATAMBA
LOANGO
KONGO
NDONGO

�SANJE

Mpinda
Luanda
Benguela
Loango
Mbanza
(São Salvador)

Kasanje

1501

1575

1614

ANGOL A

Ndongo migration, c. 1630

Portuguese colony of Angola,
by c. 1635

Portuguese fort, with date
of occupation

West Central Africa,
c. 1500–1635

10ºE

10ºS

20ºE

IMBANGALA

MAP 17.3 West Central A frica, c. 1500–1635 No A frican region was more
affected by European interlopers in early modern times than West Central
A frica, the Atlantic world’s main source of enslaved captives, nearly all of them
shipped abroad by the Portuguese. Peoples of the interior suffered periodic
slave raids as the Portuguese extended their networks south to Benguela. Some
refugees migrated eastward, only to encounter new enemies—most of them
allies of the Portuguese.

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any where else in A frica that the Portuguese, aided again by droughts and other
factors, managed to radically alter local livelihoods.

Evidence suggests that the early A ngolan slave trade ballooned as a result of
a severe and prolonged drought affecting the interior in the 1590s. The drought
uprooted villagers already weakened by slave-raiding, and these luckless refu-
gees in turn were preyed upon by still more aggressive warrior-bandits calling
themselves Imbangala. The Imbangala, organized around secret military societ-
ies, soon became slaving allies of the Portuguese. These were probably Domingo
A ngola’s captors.

Employing terrifying tactics, including human sacrifice and—allegedly—
cannibalism, Imbangala raiders threatened to snuff out the Ndongo kingdom. That
Ndongo survived at all depended on the creativity and wile of a powerful woman,

Queen Nzinga (r. 1624–1663). Queen Nzinga sought
to thwart the Imbangala by allying with their sometime
business partners, the Portuguese. In Luanda she was
baptized “Dona Ana,” or “Queen Ann.”

Queen Nzinga promised to supply slaves to her new
friends, only to discover that the Portuguese had little
authority over the Imbangala. Their warriors continued
to attack the Ndongo, who were forced to move to a new
homeland, in Matamba. From this newer, more secure
base Queen Nzinga built her own slaving and trading
state. W hen the Dutch occupied Luanda in the 1640s,
the queen adapted, trading slaves to them in exchange
for immunity. Before her death at the age of eighty-one,
Queen Nzinga reestablished ties with the Portuguese,
who again controlled the coast in the 1650s.

To the south and west, meanwhile, Imbangala
warriors helped establish the kingdom of Kasanje
(see again Map 17.3). A fter 1630, Kasanje merchant-
warriors operated as slavers and middlemen, procuring
captives from the east. Farther south, other warriors
began to interact with Portuguese settlers around the
Atlantic port of Benguela. By the later seventeenth cen-
tury Benguela rivaled Luanda.

Overall, West Central A frica, mostly Kongo and
Angola, supplied over five million, or nearly half of the
slaves sent to the Americas between 1519 and 1867. The
victims were overwhelmingly poor millet and sorghum

Queen Nzinga’s Baptism Here the same late-
seventeenth-century artist who painted the
Mbundu blacksmiths (see page 619) portrays the
baptism of the central A frican Queen Nzinga.
Queen Nzinga’s Catholic baptism did not prevent
her from making alliances with non-Catholics, both
A frican and European, in long and violent struggles
with neighbors and the Portuguese in her district
of Matamba, A ngola. Some witnesses say she was
attended by dozens of male servants dressed as
concubines.

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farmers struggling to eke out a living in a drought-prone and war-torn region. At
least two-thirds of all A frican captives sent across the Atlantic were men, a sig-
nificant number of them boys. Into the vortex were thrust young men such as
Domingo Angola, who was sent all the way to the Andean boomtown of Potosí.

Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the
Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1800

FOCUS What were the major changes in the Atlantic slave trade
after 1600?

Other Europeans had vied for a share of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade since
the mid-sixteenth century, including the English corsair Francis Drake, but it was
only after 1600 that competition exploded. First the French, then the English,
Dutch, Danish, and other northern Europeans forcibly displaced Portuguese trad-
ers all along the western shores of A frica. Others set up competing posts nearby.
By 1650, the Portuguese struggled to maintain a significant presence even in West
Central A frica. They began to supplement western A frican slaves with captives
trans-shipped from their outposts in the Indian Ocean, primarily Mozambique
(see Map 17.4).

The slave trade was logistically complex, requiring thorough documentation.
This has allowed historians to cross-check multiple documents for numbers of
slaves boarded, origin place-names, and age or sex groupings. These sources, a
bland accounting of mass death and suffering, suggest that volume grew slowly,
expanding gradually after 1650 and very rapidly only after 1750. The British, de-
spite profiting greatly from the slave trade in western A frica through the 1790s,
when volume peaked, suddenly reversed policy under pressure from abolitionists
in 1807. A fter 1808, the British Nav y helped suppress the Atlantic slave trade until
it was abolished by treaty in 1850. Despite these measures, contraband slaving con-
tinued, mostly between Angola and Brazil.

The Rise and Fall of Monopoly Trading Companies
Following the example of the Spanish and Portuguese, northern European
participation in the Atlantic slave trade grew in tandem with colonization ef-
forts in the Americas. Tobacco-producing Caribbean islands such as Barbados
and Martinique and mainland North American regions such as Virginia and the
Carolinas were initially staffed with indentured, or contracted, European servants
and only a small number of A frican slaves. As sugar cultivation increased in the

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Atlantic slave trade, 1650–1800
3

2
1
0

M
ill

io
n
s

o
f

sl
av

e
s

Destinations of slaves

Af
ric

Eu
ro

Da
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sh
W

es
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ie

Sp
an

ish
A

m
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M
ain

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Sources of of slaves

So
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eo

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as
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gh

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iaf
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es

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en
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3
2
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0
M
ill
io
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Slave traders

Sp
ain

De
nm

ar
k

U.
S.

N
et

he
rla

nd
s

Fr
an

Po
rtu

ga
l

G
re

at
B

rit
ain

0
0 1000 Kilometers
1000 Miles
PACIFIC
OCEAN
ATLANTIC
OCEAN

Caribbean
Sea

Gulf of
Mexico
Mediterranean Sea

Barbados
(Gr.Br.)

Martinique
(Fr.)Virgin Is.

(Denmark)

Madagascar

C
o
ng
o
R
.

N
iger R.

Amazon
R.

N
ile R.
SPAINPORTUGAL

G�T
BRITAIN DENMARK

NETHERLANDS

F�NCE
O�OMAN EMPIRE

GUYANA

SENEGAMBIA

WEST
CENTRAL
AFRICA

BIGHT OF
BIAFRA

BIGHT OF
BENIN

UPPER GUINEA

WINDWARD
COAST

GOLD
COAST

SLAVE
COAST

Jenne-
Jeno

Potosí

Córdoba

Luanda
Benguela

Nantes

Liverpool

SevilleLisbon
Gao

Rio de Janiero

Salvador

Rome

Cairo
Timbuktu

M
iddle Passage

MOZAMBIQUE

SIER�
LEONENEW

G�NADA

PERU

NEW
F�NCE

LOUISIANA

CAROLINAS
VIRGINIA

B�ZIL

A�BIA

TH
IR

TE
EN

CO
LO

NIE
S

N
EW

SPAIN

Main source of slaves
Main destination of slaves

Main slave trade route
European trading ports

�e Atlantic Slave
Trade at Its Height,
c. 1650–1800

British
Dutch
French
Portuguese

Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capiricorn
Equator
NORTH
AMERICA
SOUTH
AMERICA
AFRICA

EURASIA

0º
30ºS
30ºN

60ºN
60ºE30ºE30ºW60ºW90ºW120ºW 0º

60ºS

MAP 17.4 The Atlantic Slave Trade at Its Height, c. 1650–1800 The Atlantic slave trade grew dramatically after
1650. New slaving nations included the Netherlands, England, France, and Denmark, all of which had colonies in
the Caribbean and on the North A merican mainland that relied on plantation agriculture. The regions from which
enslaved A fricans came also shifted. West Central A frica remained a major source region, but the Upper Guinea
Coast was increasingly overshadowed by the so-called Slave Coast located between the Bight of Benin and the Bight
of Biafra.

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Caribbean after 1650 and tobacco took off in Virginia, however, planters shifted to
A frican slavery. This had been their wish, as their documents attest, and a declin-
ing supply of poor European contract laborers accelerated the trend.

For historians of the North Atlantic, this transition from indentured servitude to
A frican slavery has raised questions about the origins of American racism. In sum,
can modern notions of racial difference be traced to early modern American slav-
ery and the Atlantic slave trade? Some scholars have argued that racist ideologies
grew mostly after this shift from European to A frican labor. Before that, they argue,
“white” and “ black ” workers were treated by masters and overseers with equal cru-
elty. In Virginia and Barbados during the early to mid-1600s, for instance, black
and white indentured servants labored alongside each other, experiencing equal
exploitation and limited legal protection. Scholars working in a broader historical
context, however—one that takes into account Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and
Italian experiences in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and beyond—have been less
convinced by this assertion. They argue that while racist notions hardened with
the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean and North America after 1650—and
grew harder still following the Scientific Revolution with its emphasis on biolog-
ical classification—European
views of sub-Saharan A fricans
had never been positive. Put
another way, racism was more
a cause of slavery than a result.

Portuguese slavers suffered
losses, but proved resilient. As
we have seen, the Portuguese
had spent several centuries
establishing the financial in-
struments and supply net-
works necessary to run such a
complex and risky business. To
compete, northern Europeans
established state-subsidized
monopoly trading compa-
nies. The highly belligerent
Dutch West India Company
was founded in 1621 to attack
Spanish and Portuguese co-
lonial outposts and take over
Iberian commercial interests

Filling the Slave Ships The upper half of this 1732 engraving by Dutch
artist Johannes K ip shows West A frican fishermen in canoes off the coast of
present-day Ghana, with the old Portuguese fortress of São Jorge da Mina in
the distance. The lower half shows slaves being ferried to a Dutch ship in a
somewhat longer canoe, with a string of other European slave-trading forts
in the distance. Slave ships often cruised A frican coasts for several months,
acquiring a diverse range of captives before crossing the Atlantic.

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in the Atlantic. Several slaving forts in western A frica were eventually seized. São
Jorge da Mina fell in 1638, and Luanda, Angola, in 1641. A lthough these colonial
outposts were returned in subsequent decades, the era of Portuguese dominance
was over.

The French, whose early overseas activities had been stunted by the religious
wars described in Chapter 20, organized a monopoly trading company in 1664 to
supply their growing Caribbean market. The English, fresh from their own civil
conflicts, formed the Royal A frican Company in 1672. By 1700, the French and
English were fighting bitterly to supply not only their own colonial holdings but
also the lucrative Spanish-American market. Dutch slavers also competed, supply-
ing slaves to the Spanish up to the 1730s. Spanish-Americans, unlike other col-
onists, paid for slaves with gold and silver. Danish slavers also competed by the
1670s, when they established sugar plantations in the Virgin Islands.

The company model did not last. By 1725, most of the northern European mo-
nopoly slaving companies had failed. Stuck with costly forts, salaried officers, and
state-mandated obligations, they were too inflexible and inefficient to survive.
Thus the French, English, and Dutch resorted to a Portuguese-style system, in
which private merchants, often related to one another, pooled capital to finance
individual voyages. Like their Mediterranean predecessors in Venice, Genoa, and
elsewhere, the trade in slaves was but one of many overlapping ventures for most of
these investors. Their profits, usually averaging 10 percent or so, were reinvested in
land, light industry, and other endeavors. In time, investors had little to do with the
organization of slaving voyages. Nonetheless, the profits slavery produced would
help fuel Europe’s economic growth and development.

How the Mature Slave Trade Functioned
The slave trade proved most lucrative when European investors cut every corner.
Profit margins consistently trumped humanitarian concerns. By the late seven-
teenth century, ships were packed tightly, food and water rationed sparingly, and
crews kept as small as possible. Unlike other shipping ventures at this time, the
value of the captives far exceeded the costs of ship and crew. In part this was a re-
flection of the risks involved.

R isks and uncertainties abounded in the slave trade. Despite a growing number
of European forts along A frica’s Atlantic coast, slavers were on their own in col-
lecting captives. In short, the system was much more open and A frican-dominated
than has generally been acknowledged. Ships spent an average of three months
cruising coasts and estuaries in search of A frican middlemen willing to trade cap-
tives for commodities. By the late seventeenth century, competition was on the

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rise, affecting supply and thus price. Violence, mostly in the form of slave uprisings
and hostile attacks by fellow Europeans, was a constant concern.

European ship captains in charge of the African leg of the trip hoped to receive a
bounty of 2 to 5 percent on all surviving slaves. Somewhat like modern human traffick-
ers, they were betting their lives on a relatively small fortune. As we saw with regard to
Portuguese missionaries, western Africa was notoriously unhealthy for “unseasoned”
Europeans, due mostly to endemic falciparum malaria, and as many as one in ten ship
captains died before leaving the African coast for the Americas. Few who survived
repeated the trip. Ships’ doctors had scant remedies even for common ailments such
as dysentery, which also afflicted slaves and crewmembers. When not ill themselves,
doctors inspected slaves before embarkation, hoping to head off premature death or
the spread of disease aboard ship and thereby to protect the investment.

The trade was also complicated in that few northern European products appealed
to A frican consumers. More than anything, A fricans wanted colorful cotton fab-
rics from India to supplement their own products. Thus northern Europeans fol-
lowed the Portuguese example yet again by importing huge quantities of cotton
cloth from South Asia, cowry shells from the Indian Ocean, and iron, brass, and
copper from parts of Europe, particularly Spain and Sweden. Other tastes were
introduced by Europeans. By 1700, American plantation commodities such as rum
and tobacco were being exchanged for slaves in significant quantities. Thus, the
Atlantic slave trade was a global concern.

Sources indicate that chiefs and kings throughout western Africa augmented their
prestige by accumulating and redistributing commodities procured through the slave
trade. The captives they sent abroad were not their kin, and western Africans appear
to have had no sense of the overall magnitude of this commerce in human bodies.
There were few internal brakes on captive-taking besides the diminishing pool of
victims and shifting political ambitions; the African desire to hold dependents to
boost prestige and provide domestic labor meshed with European demands. Along
these lines, whereas female war captives might be absorbed into elite households,
men and boys were generally considered dangerous elements and happily gotten rid
of. It so happened that European planters and mine owners in the colonies valued
men over women. Thus, however immoral and disruptive of African life it appears
in retrospect, the slave trade probably seemed at the time to be mutually beneficial
for European buyers and African sellers. Only the slaves themselves felt otherwise.

The Middle Passage
It is difficult to imagine the suffering endured by the more than twelve million
A frican captives forced to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The ordeal itself has come to

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be known as the Middle Passage (see again Map 17.4). As noted at the opening of
this chapter, some West Central A fricans imagined the slavers’ ships to be floating
slaughterhouses crossing a great lake or river to satisfy white cannibals inhabiting a
distant, sterile land. Portuguese sailors unambiguously dubbed them “death ships”
or “floating tombs.” Perhaps troubled by this sense of damnation, Portuguese
priests baptized as many slaves as they could before departure.

Northern Europeans, increasingly in charge of the slave trade after 1650, took
a more dispassionate approach. Slaves, as far as they were concerned, were a sort
of highly valued livestock requiring efficient but impersonal handling. Put another
way, the care and feeding of slaves were treated as pragmatic matters of health, not
faith. Rations were the subsistence minimum of maize, rice, or millet gruel, with a
bit of fish or dried meat added from time to time. Men, women, and children were as-
signed separate quarters. Women were given a cotton cloth for a wrap, whereas men
were often kept naked, both to save money and to discourage rebellion by adding to
their humiliation. Exercise was required on deck in the form of dancing to drums
during daylight hours. Like cattle, slaves were showered with seawater before the
nighttime lockdown. The hold, ventilated on most ships after initial experiences
with mass suffocation and heatstroke, was periodically splashed with vinegar.

Despite these measures, slave mortality on the one- to three-month voyage
across the Atlantic was high. On average, between 10 and 20 percent of slaves did
not survive. This high mortality rate is all the more alarming in that these slaves
had been selected for their relative good health in the first place, leaving countless
other captives behind to perish in makeshift barracks, dungeons, and coastal ag-
ricultural plots. Many more died soon after landing in the Americas, often from
dysentery. Some who were emotionally overwhelmed committed suicide along the
way by hurling themselves into the ocean or strangling themselves in their chains.
A few enraged men managed to kill a crewmember or even a captain before being
executed. Slaves from different regions had trouble communicating, and thus suc-
cessful slave mutinies remained rare.

The conditions of the Middle Passage worsened over time. In the name of in-
creased efficiency, the situation below decks went from crowded to crammed be-
tween the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On average, crews of 30 to 40
common sailors oversaw 200 to 300 slaves in around 1700, whereas the same
number oversaw 300 to 400 slaves after 1750. These are only averages; even in the
1620s, some ships carried 600 or more slaves.

A lthough some Iberian clergymen protested the horrors of this crossing as early
as the sixteenth century, it took the eighteenth-century deterioration of conditions
aboard slave ships to awaken the conscience of participating nations. In England,
most importantly, A frican survivors of the Middle Passage such as Olaudah

Middle Passage The
Atlantic crossing
made by slaves taken
from A frica to the
A mericas.

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Equiano (c. 1745–1797) testified before Parliament by
the late eighteenth century. “Permit me, with the great-
est deference and respect,” Equiano began his 1789 au-
tobiography, “to lay at your feet the following genuine
Narrative, the chief design of which is to excite in your
august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miser-
ies which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortu-
nate countrymen.”5 Such testimonies, backed by the
pleas of prominent Quakers and other religious figures,
were finally heard. Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade,
first enforced by the British in 1808, would come much
more easily than abolition of slavery itself.

Volume of the Slave Trade
It is important to note that the trans-Saharan and East
A frican slave trades preceded the Atlantic one dis-
cussed here, and that these trades continued through-
out early modern times. In fact, the volume of the
Atlantic trade appears to have eclipsed these other
avenues to foreign captivity only after 1600. That said,
the Atlantic slave trade ultimately constituted the
greatest forced migration in early modern world his-
tory. Compared with the roughly 2 million mostly free
European migrants who made their way to all parts of
the Americas between the voyage of Columbus in 1492
and the British abolition of the slave trade in 1808, the
number of enslaved A fricans to cross the Atlantic and
survive is astounding—between 10 and 12 million.

A lso astounding is the fact that the vast majority of
these A fricans arrived in the last half century of the
“legal” slave trade, that is, after 1750. Up until 1650 a
total of approximately 710,000 slaves had been taken to American markets, most
of them to Spanish America (262,700). Brazil was the next largest destination, ab-
sorbing about a quarter of a million slaves to that date. São Tomé, the sugar island
in the Gulf of Guinea, and Europe (mostly Iberia) absorbed about 95,000 and
112,000 slaves, respectively. Madeira and the Canaries imported about 25,000
A frican slaves, and the English and French West Indies, 21,000 and 2500, respec-
tively. The average annual volume for the period up to 1650 was approximately
7500 slaves per year.

Olaudah Equiano Olaudah Equiano, whose slave
name was Gustavus Vassa, became a celebrity critic
of the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth
century after writing a memoir of his experiences
as a slave and free man of color in A frica, North
A merica, the Caribbean, and Europe.

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The second (1650–1750) and third (1750–1850) stages of the Atlantic slave
trade witnessed enormous growth. By 1675, nearly 15,000 slaves were being car-
ried to the colonies annually, and by 1700 nearly 30,000. The total volume of the
trade between 1700 and 1750 was double that of the previous fifty years, bring-
ing some 2.5 million slaves to the Americas. The trade nearly doubled yet again
between 1750 and 1800, when some 4 million A fricans were transported. By this
time the effect of the Atlantic slave trade on western A frican societies was consid-
erable. The trade was restricted by the British after 1808, but slavers still managed
to move some 3 million slaves, mostly to Brazil, and to a lesser extent Cuba and the
United States, by 1850. Northern U.S. shipbuilders were key suppliers to Brazilian
slavers to the very end.

It appears that in the first three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade most A frican
captives came from the coastal hinterland. This changed only after about 1750,
when colonial demand began to outstrip local sources of supply. Thereafter, slaves
were brought to the coast from increasingly distant interior regions. In West A frica
this amounted to something of an inversion of the caravan trading routes fanning
out from the Niger R iver basin, but in West Central A frica entirely new trails and
trade circuits were formed. A lso, whereas war captives and drought refugees had
been the main victims in the past, now random kidnapping and slave-raiding
became widespread.

COUNTERPOINT: The Pygmies of
Central Africa

FOCUS how did the Pygmies’ rainforest world differ from the
better-known environment of savannas and farms?

As in the Americas, certain forest, desert, and other margin-dwelling peoples of
A frica appear to have remained largely immune to the effects of European con-
quest, colonization, and trade. But such seeming immunity is difficult to gauge,
especially since we now know some margin-dwelling groups once thought to be
naturally isolated were in fact refugees from conquest and slaving wars. Many
were driven from the more accessible regions where they had once hunted or other-
wise exploited nature to survive. Distinct cultures such as the Batwa (BA H-twah),
a major Pygmy group of the great Congo rainforest, and the K hoikhoi (COY-coy)
and other tribespeople of southern A frica’s Kalahari Desert, were until only re-
cently thought to have been unaffected by outsiders before the nineteenth century.

CO U N T ER P O I N T: T h e P yg m i e s o f C e n t r a l Af r i c a 635

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Recent scholarship, and most surviv-
ing gatherer-hunters themselves, sug-
gest otherwise.

Life in the Congo
Rainforest
Still, for the Pygmies, as for many of
the world’s tropical forest peoples,
life has long been distinct from that
of settled agriculturalists. Even now,
Pygmies live by exploiting the nat-
ural forest around them, unaided by
manufactured goods. These forests,
marked by rugged terrain and washed
by superabundant rains, make agriculture and herding impossible. Short of cut-
ting down huge swaths of trees, which in this region often leads to massive soil
erosion, neither can be practiced. This is not to say space is limited. Indeed, the
Congo R iver basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, after that of
the Amazon in South America; it is vast. As in the Amazon, most forest animals are
modest in size, with the important exception of the A frican elephant, which early
modern Pygmies occasionally hunted for food and tusks.

Until recent times, most Pygmies were gatherer-hunters. Their superior track-
ing abilities, limited material possessions, and knowledge of useful forest products
such as leaves for dwellings and natural toxins for bow hunting allowed them to re-
treat in times of external threats such as war. Herding and farming Bantu-speaking
and Sudanic neighbors were at a disadvantage in Pygmy country, which seems to
have prevented Pygmy militarization or formation of defensive confederacies. The
Congo rainforest is also attractive in that it is much less affected by malarial mos-
quitoes than the surrounding farmland. In recent times only a few Pygmy groups,
such as the much-studied Mbuti (M-BOOH-tee), have remained separate enough
from neighboring farmers and herders to retain their short stature and other dis-
tinct characteristics. The Pygmies’ highly distinctive singing style and instrumen-
tation, most of it Mbuti, have become famous with the rise of world music.

Everyday Pygmy life has been examined in most detail by anthropologists,
who have emphasized differences between Pygmy and neighboring Bantu rit-
uals. W hereas Bantu speakers have venerated dead ancestors in a way that has
deeply affected their long-term settlement patterns, warfare, and kin groupings,
the Pygmies have long preferred to “let go” of their dead—to move on, as it were.

0
0 200 Kilometers
200 Miles
ATLANTIC
OCEAN

Pygmies of the Congo Rainforest

Pygmy group
Pygmy subgroup
Rain forest

Mbuti

B AT WA

C o n g o
B a s i n

Lake
Tanganyika
Congo R.

C
on

go
R

. Kasai R.

N
ig

e
r

R
.
Uele R.
KONGO

M BU T I
A SOU

GU N DI
M B E N G A

G Y E L E

BO
NG

BAKA AK
A

B AT WA

K A N G O

C WA

E F E

Pygmies of the Congo Rainforest

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smi49245_ch17_604-639 636 07/13/18 01:24 PM

Similarly, whereas Bantu coming-of-age rituals such as circumci-
sion have tended to be elaborate and essential to social reproduc-
tion, Pygmies have traditionally marked few distinct phases in
life. Most important, the Pygmies have venerated the forest itself
as a life-giving spirit, whereas outsiders have treated it as a threat-
ening space and potential source of evil. Has it always been so?

Legendary since ancient Egyptian times for their small, reed-
like bodies, simple lifestyles, good-natured humor, and melo-
dious music, the Pygmies have long been held up as the perfect
counterpoint to urban civilization and its discontents. It is only
recently that the Pygmies and other nonsedentary peoples like
them have been treated historically, as makers rather than “non-
actors” or victims of history. The absence of written records pro-
duced by the Pygmies themselves has made this task difficult, but

anthropologists, historians, linguists, and archaeologists working together have
made considerable headway.

Pygmy-Bantu Relations
It seems that sometime after 1500, the introduction of iron tools and banana culti-
vation to the central African interior began to alter settlement patterns and overall
demography. This change placed Pygmies and Bantu neighbors in closer proximity,
as more and more forest was cut for planting and Bantu moved into Pygmy territory.
Bantu speakers, some of them refugees from areas attacked by slavers or afflicted
by drought, appear to have displaced some Pygmy groups and to have intermarried
with others. They seem to have adopted a variety of Pygmy religious beliefs, although
Bantu languages mostly displaced original Pygmy ones. Also after 1500, American
crops such as peanuts and manioc began to alter sedentary life at the forest’s edge,
leading to still more interaction, not all of it peaceful, between the Pygmies and their
neighbors. Pygmies adopted American capsicum peppers as an everyday spice.

Were the Pygmies driven from the rainforest’s edge into its heart by the slave
trade? Perhaps in some places, yes, but the evidence is clearer for increased inter-
action with Bantu migrants. Early effects of globalization on Pygmy life are more
easily tracked in terms of foods adopted as a result of the Columbian Exchange.
Despite these exchanges and conflicts, the Pygmies have managed to retain a dis-
tinct identity that is as intertwined with the rhythms of the forest as it is with the
rhythms of settled agriculture.

A lthough the story of the Pygmies’ survival is not as dramatic as that of the
Mapuche of Chile (see Chapter 16), their culture’s richness and resilience serve as

Modern-Day Pygmies Here Baka
Pygmies of Cameroon and the Central
A frican Republic hunt in the Congo
rainforest using nets, sticks, and vines.
The woman also carries a machete for
butchering the catch and a basket for the
meat.

C o n c l u s i o n 637

smi49245_ch17_604-639 637 07/13/18 01:24 PM

testaments to their peoples’ imagination, will, and ingenuity. Their adaptation to
the rainforest—probably in part a result of early modern historical stresses, which
pushed them farther into the forest—reminds us of a shared human tendency to
make the most of a given ecological setting, but also that the distinction between
civilized and “primitive” lifestyles is a false one, or at least socially constructed.

Conclusion
Western A frican societies grew and changed according to the rhythms of planting,
harvest, trade, and war, and these rhythms continued to define everyday life in
early modern times. Droughts, diseases, and pests made subsistence more chal-
lenging in sub-Saharan A frica than in most parts of the world, yet people adapted
and formed chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires, often underpinned, at least sym-
bolically, by the control of iron and other metals. Iron tools helped farmers clear
forest and till hard soils.

Islam influenced A frican society and politics across a broad belt south of the
Sahara and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, but even this powerful reli-
gious tradition was to a degree absorbed by local cultures. Most western A frican
states and chiefdoms were not influenced by Christian missionaries until the late
nineteenth century. It was malaria, a disease against which many sub-Saharan
A fricans had at least some acquired immunity, that proved to be the continent’s
best defense.

But A frica possessed commodities demanded by outsiders, and despite their
failure to penetrate the interior in early modern times, it was these outsiders, first
among them the seaborne Portuguese, who set the early modern phase of west-
ern A frican history in motion. The Portuguese came looking for gold in the mid-
fifteenth century, and once they discovered the dangers of malaria, they stuck to
the coast and offshore islands to trade through intermediaries, including coastal
chiefs and kings. First they traded for gold, but very soon for war captives. In
return, the Portuguese brought horses, cloth, wine, metal goods, and guns. Local
chiefs became powerful by allying with the newcomers, and they expanded their
trading and raiding ventures deep into the continental interior. Thus began a sym-
biotic relationship, copied and expanded by the English, Dutch, French, and other
northern Europeans, that swelled over four centuries to supply the Americas with
some 12 million enslaved A frican laborers, the largest forced migration in world
history. Among these millions of captives, most of whose names we shall never
know, was young Domingo Angola, a West Central A frican teenager caught up in a
widening global web of trade, conquest, and religious conversion.

638

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review
The major global development in this chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on early
modern A frican peoples and cultures.

Important Events

c. 1100–1500 Extended dry period in West Africa prompts migrations

c. 1450 Kingdom of Benin reaches height of its power

1464–1492 Reign of Sunni Ali in the Songhai Empire

1482 Portuguese establish trading fort of São Jorge da Mina (Ghana)

1506–1543 Reign of Afonso I (Nzinga Mbemba) of kingdom of Kongo

1569 Collapse of kingdom of Kongo

1574 Portuguese-aided restoration of kingdom of Kongo

1591 Moroccan raiders conquer Songhai Empire

1621 Formation of Dutch West India Company

1624–1663 Reign of Queen Nzinga in the Ndongo kingdom of Angola

1638–1641 Dutch seize São Jorge da Mina and Luanda

1672 Formation of English Royal African Company

1750–1800 Atlantic slave trade reaches highest volume

1807 British declare Atlantic slave trade illegal

KEY TERMS
A frican diaspora (p. 606)
fetishism (p. 624)
génie (p. 609)
husbandry (p. 610)

kitomi (p. 624)
manikongo (p. 618)
Middle Passage (p. 632)
oba (p. 617)

paramount chief (p. 610)
peça (p. 620)
pombeiro (p. 625)

639

smi49245_ch17_604-639 639 07/13/18 01:24 PM

CHAPTER OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How did ecological diversity in western A frica

relate to cultural developments?
2. W hat tied western A frica to other parts of the

world prior to the arrival of Europeans along At-
lantic shores?

3. How did the Atlantic slave trade arise, and how
was it sustained?

MAKING CONNECTIONS
1. How does the Moroccan conquest of Songhai

compare with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs
(see Chapter 16)?

2. How did gender roles differ between the
kingdoms of West A frica and those of North
A merica’s Eastern Woodlands (see Chapter 15)?

3. How did the Portuguese experience in A frica
differ from events in Brazil (see Chapter 16)?

4. How did growing European competition for
enslaved A fricans alter the nature of enslavement
and trade in A frica itself?

For further research into the topics covered in this chapter, see the Bibliography at the end of the book.
For additional primary sources from this period, see Sources for World in the Making.

M a k i n g C o n n e c t i o n s

PART 3: The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

17: Western Africa in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1450–1800
The Major Global Development in this Chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on early modern African peoples and cultures.
backstory
Many Western Africas
Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in West Africa
Empire Builders and Traders
Sculptors and Priest-Kings
Land of the Blacksmith Kings: West Central Africa
Farmers and Traders
Smiths and Kings
Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the Portuguese
From Voyages of Reconnaissance to Trading Forts 1415–1650
Portuguese Strategy in the Kingdom of Kongo
Portuguese Strategy in Angola
Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1800
The Rise and Fall of Monopoly Trading Companies
How the Mature Slave Trade Functioned
The Middle Passage
Volume of the Slave Trade
COUNTERPOINT The Pygmies of Central Africa
Life in the Congo Rainforest
Pygmy-Bantu Relations
Conclusion
Review
SPECIAL FEATURES
LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS: West Africa’s Gold Miners
SEEING THE PAST: Art of the Slave Trade: A Benin Bronze Plaque
READING THE PAST: Alonso de Sandoval, “General Points Relating to Slavery”

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