Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis

sean_harris

Cadet
Joined
Feb 20, 2005
I figured this would stir up a conversation. It is a two parter!!
My question's are,

1. Why due Southern States seem to take the blame for everyones responsibility. (North, South, Middle East, Europe, Africa)

2. Why are the true facts of joint responsibility glazed over in our educational system.

3. Slavery is a cruel, barbaric system. However, it was a viable system in Africa long before we engaged them. With this in mind, why did and due Africans' still engage in the trading of humans'.

4. Could we not say past African Leaders greed was the reason for so many people being transported into slavery. Europe the Middle East and the America's developed a strong economic base from slavery and proffited. Why were educated African leaders not more concerned about there peoples welfare, education, and possible industrial base. It seems like Europe would have given more than muskets, gunpowder, and gin if the leaders would have asked for it.


Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis

By Tunde Obadina

"The past is what makes the present coherent," said Afro-American writer James Baldwin, and the past "will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

Why go back five centuries to start an explanation of Africa's crisis in the late 1990s? Must every story of Africa's political and economic under-development begin with the contact with Europe? The intention is not to produce another nationalist tract on how whites, driven by lust for material possession and armed with firearms, gin and a bag full of tricks, subjugated innocent Africans who were living blissfully close to nature. The reason for looking back is that the root of the crisis facing African societies is their failure to come to terms with the consequences of that contact.

Portuguese seamen first landed in Africa in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. From the outset they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe. In 1441 ten Africans were kidnapped from the Guinea coast and taken to Portugal as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. In subsequent expeditions to the West African coast, inhabitants were taken and shipped to Portugal to be sold as servants and objects of curiosity to households. In the Portuguese port of Lagos, where the first African slaves landed in 1442, the old slave market now serves as an art gallery.

Portuguese adventurers who sailed southeast along the Gulf of Guinea in 1472 landed on the coast of what became Nigeria. Others followed. They found people of varying cultures. Some lived in towns ruled by kings with nobility and courtiers, very much like the medieval societies they left behind them. A Dutch visitor to Benin City wrote in around 1600: "As you enter it, the town appears very great. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam...The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand..." More than a century earlier Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal. But not all African societies were as developed. Some enjoyed village existence in primeval forests remote from outside influences.

Economics was the driving force

From the outset, relations between Europe and Africa were economic. Portuguese merchants traded with Africans from trading posts they set up along the coast. They exchanged items like brass and copper bracelets for such products as pepper, cloth, beads and slaves - all part of an existing internal African trade. Domestic slavery was common in Africa and well before European slave buyers arrived, there was trading in humans. Black slaves were captured or bought by Arabs and exported across the Saharan desert to the Mediterranean and Near East.

In 1492, the Spaniard Christopher Columbus discovered for Europe a 'New World'. The find proved disastrous not only for the 'discovered' people but also for Africans. It marked the beginning of a triangular trade between Africa, Europe and the New World. European slave ships, mainly British and French, took people from Africa to the New World. They were initially taken to the West Indies to supplement local Indians decimated by the Spanish Conquistadors. The slave trade grew from a trickle to a flood, particularly from the seventeenth century onwards.

Portugal's monopoly in the obnoxious trade was broken in the sixteenth century when England followed by France and other European nations entered the trade. The English led in the business of transporting young Africans from their homeland to work in mines and till lands in the Americas.

Most slaves sold by Africans

Estimates of the total human loss to Africa over the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade range from 30 million to 200 million. At the initial stage of the trade parties of Europeans captured Africans in raids on communities in the coastal areas. But this soon gave way to buying slaves from African rulers and traders. The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping. The Portuguese Duatre Pacheco Pereire wrote in the early sixteenth century after a visit to Benin that the kingdom "is usually at war with its neighbours and takes many captives, whom we buy at twelve or fifteen brass bracelets each, or for copper bracelets, which they prize more." Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave, described in his memoirs published in 1789 how African rulers carried out raids to capture slaves. "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary, if on this occasion he yields to the temptation with as little firmness, and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as little reluctance, as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly, he falls upon his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues...if he prevails, and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them." Equiano was born in 1745 in an area under the kingdom of Benin. At the age of ten he was kidnapped by slave hunters who also took his sister. He was more fortunate than most other slaves. After serving in America, the West Indies and England he was able to save for and buy his freedom in 1756 at the age of twenty-one.

Ottobah Cugoano, who was about 13 years old when he was kidnapped in 1770 in Ajumako in today's Ghana, had no doubt the shared responsibility of Africans for the horrid business. Referring to his own capture Cugoano wrote after he regained his freedom "I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery." But he added, "If there were no buyers there would be no sellers." By the same token, if there were no sellers there would be no buyers.

A profitable trade

European slave buyers made the greater profit from the despicable trade, but their African partners also prospered. Many grew strong and fat on profits made from selling their brethren. Tinubu square, commercial centre of today's Lagos and home to Nigeria's Central Bank, is named after a major nineteenth century slave trader. Madam Tinubu was born in Egbaland and rose from rags to riches by trading in slaves , salt and tobacco in Badagry. She later became one of Nigeria's pioneering nationalists.

Africa's rulers, traders and military aristocracy protected their interest in the slave trade. They discouraged Europeans from leaving the coastal areas to venture into the interior of the continent. European trading companies realised the benefit of dealing with African suppliers and not unnecessarily antagonising them. The companies could not have mustered the resources it would have taken to directly capture the tens of millions of people shipped out of Africa. It was far more sensible and safer to give Africans guns to fight the many wars that yielded captives for the trade. The slave trading network stretched deep into the Africa's interior. Slave trading firms were aware of their dependency on African suppliers. The Royal African Company, for instance, instructed its agents on the West coast "if any differences happen, to endeavour an amicable accommodation rather than use force." They were "to endeavour to live in all friendship with them" and "to hold frequent palavers with the Kings and the Great Men of the Country, and keep up a good correspondent with them, ingratiating yourself by such prudent methods" as may be deemed appropriate.
 
Back
Top