AP Chapter 20 Africa and the Africans in the Age of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Factories As the Portuguese pushed down the West coast of Africa they established factories which were forts and trading posts with resident merchants The most important factory established in Africa was El Mina (1482) in the heart of the gold producing region of the forest zone

El Mina

Continued Much of the Portuguese success resulted from their ability to penetrate the existing African trade routes, to which they could also add specialized items Trade was the basis of Portuguese relations with Africans, but in the wake of commerce came political, religious, and social relations

Missionary Efforts Missionary efforts were made to convert the rulers of Benin, Kongo, and other African Kingdoms The Missionaries achieved major success in Kongo, where members of the Royal family were converted Their ruler, Nzinga Muemba (r ) with the help of Portuguese advisors and missionaries, brought the whole kingdom to Christianity

Continued Eventual enslavement of his subjects, led Nzinga Muemba to try to end the slave trade and limit Portuguese activities The Portuguese founded Luanda, south of Kongo in the 1570s This brought them in contact with the Mbundu people This would be the Portuguese colony of Angola

Map of Angola

Continued The Portuguese effort (on both the east and west coast of Africa) was primarily commercial and military, although it was always accompanied by a strong missionary effort The Dutch, English and French used the Portuguese model in their competition with the Portuguese A central element in the pattern of trade was the slave trade

Continued The Portuguese voyages now opened a direct channel to sub-Saharan Africa for slave trade By 1600, the slave trade predominated over all other kinds of commerce on the African coast

Trend Toward Expansion Between 1450 and 1850, it is estimated that about 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic About 10 to 11 million survived the voyages The high volume of the slave trade was necessary to the slave owners because, in most of the slave regimes in the Caribbean and Latin American, slave mortality was high and fertility was low (partly because more men than women were imported)

Slave Map

Continued The only way to maintain or expand the number of slaves was by importing more from Africa The one exception to this pattern was the southern United States, where the slave population grew, perhaps because of the temperate climate and the fact that few worked in the most dangerous and unhealthy occupations, such as sugar growing and mining

Continued In terms of population, slaves in British North America were never more than one-fourth of the whole population, whereas in the British and French Caribbean they made-up 80 to 90 % of the population

Demographic Patterns The majority of the trans-Saharan slave trade consisted of women to be used as concubines and domestic servants in north Africa and the Middle East, but the Atlantic slave trade concentrated on men African societies that sold captives into slavery often preferred to sell men and keep the women and children as domestic slaves or to extend existing kin groups

Continued One estimate says the population of west and central Africa was cut in half in 1850 due to the slave trade

Organization of the Trade The Royal African Company was chartered to provide slaves to the English colonies in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia Each nation established merchant towns or trade forts at places such as Axim, Nembe, Bonny, Whydah, and Luanda from which a steady source of slaves came

The Royal African Company

Continued European agents for the companies often had to deal directly with local kings, paying a tax or offering gifts The Spanish developed a complicated system in which a healthy man called an Indian piece. And children and women were priced at fractions of that value Slaves were brought to the coast by a variety of means In Dahomey, a Royal monopoly was established to control the flow of slaves

Dahomey

Royal Throne of Dahomey

Continued Clearly, both European and Africans were actively involved in the slave trade Some argue that the profits were so great and constant that they were a major element in the rise of commercial capitalism and later, the origins of the Industrial Revolution During some periods, a triangular trade existed in which slaves were carried to the Americas; sugar, tobacco and other goods were then carried to Europe, and European products were sent to the coast of Africa to begin the triangle again

Triangle Trade

Continued In Africa itself, the slave trade often drew economies into dependence on trade with Europeans and suppressed the growth of other economic activities

African Societies, Slavery, and the Slave Trade Europeans in the age of the slave trade sometimes justified the enslavement of Africans by pointing out that slavery already existed on that continent African society had developed many forms of servitude, which varied from a peasant status to something much more like chattel slavery, in which people were considered things: “property with a soul,” as Aristotle put it

Continued Muslim traders of West Africa who linked the forest region to the savanna had slave porters as well as villages of slaves to supply their caravans Among the forest states of West Africa, such as Benin and in the Kongo Kingdom in Central Africa, slavery was already an important institution before European arrival, but the Atlantic trade opened up new opportunities for expansion and intensification of slavery in these societies

Continued It is important to remember that the enslavement of women was a central feature of African slavery Slavery was viewed as a legitimate fate for nonbelievers but was illegal for Muslims Slavery was a widely diffused form of labor control and wealth in Africa

Continued The existence of slavery in Africa and the preexisting trade in people allowed Europeans to mobilize the commerce in slaves quickly by tapping existing routes and supplies In this venture they were aided by the Rulers of certain African states, who were anxious to acquire more slaves for themselves and to supply slaves to the Europeans in exchange for aid and commodities

Slaving and African Politics Endless wars in the Kongo Kingdom and Dahomey promoted the importance of the military and made the sale of captives into the slave trade an extension of the politics of regions of Africa Although increasing centralization and hierarchy could be seen in the enslaving African societies, a contrary trend of self-sufficiency and antiauthoritarian ideas developed among the peoples who bore the brunt of the slaving attacks

Captured Slave

Continued One result of the presence of Europeans on the coast was a shift in the locus of power within Africa Central African kingdoms began to redirect trade toward the coast and to expand their influence

Asante and Dahomey The Asante were members of the Akan people (the major group of modern Ghana) who had settled in and around Kumasi, a region of gold and kola nut production that lay between the coast and the Hausa and Mande trading centers to the north Under the vigorous Osei Tutu (d.1717), the supreme civil and religious leader He linked the many Akan clans under the authority of the asantehene but recognized the autonomy of subordinate areas

Continued An all Asante council advised the ruler, and an ideology of unity was used to overcome the traditional clan divisions With control of the gold producing zones and a constant supply of prisoners to be sold as slaves for more firearms, Asante maintained its power until the 1820s as the dominant status of the Gold Coast

Continued Its kings ruled with the advice of powerful councils, but by the 1720s access to firearms allowed the rulers to create an autocratic and sometimes brutal political regime based on the slave trade In the 1720s, under King Agaju ( ), the kingdom of Dahomey moved toward the coast, seizing in 1727 the port town of Whydah, which had attracted many European traders

King Agaju

Continued Dahomey maintained its autonomy and turned increasingly to the cycle of firearms and slaves The trade was controlled by the royal court, whose armies (including a regiment of women) were used to raid for more captives Well into the 19 th Century, Dahomey was a slaving state, and dependence on the trade in human beings had negative effects on the society as a whole

East Africa and the Sudan In East Africa many of the slaves were destined for the harems and households of Arabia and the Middle East, but a small number were carried away by the Europeans for their plantation colonies Europeans did establish some plantation style colonies on islands such as Maurites in the Indian Ocean and these depended on the East African slave trade

Continued On Zanzibar and the other offshore islands, and later on the coast itself, Swahili, Indian, and Arabian merchants followed the European model and set-up clove producing plantations Slavery became a prominent feature of the East African coast, and the slave trade from the interior to these plantations and to the traditional slave markets of the Red Sea continued until the end of the 19 th Century

Zanzibar

Continued In 1808, Usuman Dan Fodio, a studious and charismatic Muslim Fulani scholar, began to prevent the reformist ideology in the Hausa Kingdoms (Western Sudan) His movement became a revolution when in 1804, seeing himself as Allah’s instrument, he preached a jihad against the Hausa Kings, who he felt, were not following the teachings of Muhammad

Usuman Dan Fodio

Continued The Fulani took control of most of the Hausa states of Northern Nigeria in the Western Sudan The result of this upheaval was the creation of a powerful Sokoto State under a Caliph, whose authority was established over cities such as Kano and Zaria and whose rulers became emirs of provinces within the Sokoto Caliphate

Continued Large numbers of captives resulting from the wars were exported down to the coast for sale to the Europeans, while another stream of slaves crossed the Sahara to North Africa From Senegamia region of Futa Jallon, across the Niger and Senegal basins. And to the east of Lake Chad, slavery became a central feature of the Sudanic states and remained so through the 19 th Century

Africa

White Settlers and Africans in Southern Africa One area of Africa little affected by the slave trade in the early modern period was the southern end of the continent In 1652, the Dutch East Indies Company established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope to serve as a provisioning post for ships sailing to Asia

Dutch Founding Cape Town Colony

Continued The Cape colony depended on slave labor brought from Asia for a while, but it soon enslaved local Africans as well Expansion of the Colony and its labor needs led to a series of wars with the San and Koi Khoi populations who were pushed farther to the north and west

Continued Matters were also complicated by European events when Great Britain seized the Cape Colony in 1795 and then took it under formal British control in 1815 While the British government helped the settlers to clear out Africans from potential farming lands, government attempts to limit the Boer settlements were unsuccessful

British Take Cape Town

Continued After 1834, when Britain abolished slavery and imposed restrictions on land holding groups of Boer staged a great trek far to the north to be free of government interference

Boer Great Trek

The Mfecane and the Zulu Rise to Power In 1818, leadership of the Nguni peoples fell to Shaka, a brilliant military tactician, who formed the loose forces into regiments organized by lineage and age Iron discipline and new tactics were introduced, including the use of a short stabbing spear to be used at close range Shaka’s own Zulu chiefdom became the center of this new military and political organization, which began to absorb or destroy its neighbors

Shaka Zulu

Continued Zulu power was still growing in the 1840s, and the Zulu remained the most impressive military force in black Africa until the end of the Century The rise of the Zulu and other Nguni chiefdoms was the beginning of the Mfecane, or wars of crushing and wandering It was not until the Zulu Wars of the 1870s that Zulu power was crushed by Great Britain, and even then only at great cost

Battle of Isandlwana

The African Diaspora The important into Africa of European firearms, Indian textiles, Indonesian cowrie shells, and American tobacco in return for African ivory, gold, and especially slaves demonstrated Africa’s integration into the mercantile structure of the world

Slave Lives Conditions were deadly; perhaps as many as one-third of the captives died along the way or in the slave pens The Middle Passage, or slave voyage to the Americas was traumatic Their situation sometimes led to suicide or resistance and mutiny on the ships

Atlantic Voyage for Slaves

Africans in the Americas The slaves carried across the Atlantic were brought mainly to the plantations and mines of the Americas After attempts to use native American laborers in places such as Brazil and Hispaniola, Africans were brought in In the English colonies of Barbados and Virginia, indentured servants from England eventually were replaced by enslaved Africans when new crops, such as sugar, were introduced or when indentured servants became less available

Continued The plantation system of farming with a dependent or enslaved workforce characterized the production of many tropical and semitropical crops in demand in Europe, and thus the plantation became the locus of African and American life

Slave Maltreatment

American Slave Societies In all American slave societies, a hierarchy of status evolved in which free whites were at the top, slaves were at the bottom, and free people of color had an intermediate position Among the slaves, slave holders also created a hierarchy based on origin and color Creole and especially Mullato slaves were given more opportunities to acquire skilled jobs or to work as house servants rather than in the fields or mines

Continued They were also more likely to win their freedom by manumission, the voluntary freeing of slaves Many of the slaves rebellions in the Caribbean and Brazil were organized along African ethnic and political lines In Jamaica and St. Domingue, slaves made up more than 80% of the population

Haiti Slave Revolt

Continued In North America, Creole slaves predominated, but manumission was less common and free people of color made up less than 10% of the total Afro-American population

The People and Gods in Exile Family formation was made difficult because of the general shortage of female slaves; the ratio of men to women was as much as three to one in some places To this was added the insecurity of slave status: family members might be separated by sale or by a master’s whim Religion was an obvious example of continuity and adaption

Continue African religious ideas and practices did not die out In the English islands, Obeah was the name given to the African religious practices In Brazilian candomble (Yoruba) and Hatian vodun (Aia) fully developed versions of African religions flourished and continue today, despite attempts to surpass them

Continued In many cases, slaves held their new faith in Christianity and their beliefs at the same time, and tried to fuse the two

Obeah

The End of the Slave Trade and the Abolition of Slavery The end of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic world resulted from economic, political, and religious changes in Europe and its overseas American colonies and former colonies British slave trade was abolished in 1807 The full end of slavery in the Americas did not occur until 1888, when it was abolished in Brazil

British Emancipation of Slaves