Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

Author:John Reader
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: General, Africa, History
ISBN: 9780140266757
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 1998-11-05T10:15:01.075000+00:00

CHAPTER 38

Africa Transformed

The significance of the slave trade for Africa lay less in the number of people lost than in the changed social patterns and reproductive capabilities of those who remained behind. The importation of firearms had a profound effect on these developments.

By the time the Atlantic slave trade was running at its peak average of over 60,000 transactions per year during the eighteenth century, the trade and its ramifications had touched every region and every community in Africa. This statement cannot be proved beyond all reasonable doubt, but the export of slaves via the Sahara and the East African coast ensured that the influence of the trade pervaded the continent from three out of four cardinal directions, and given what is known of the trade routes that criss-crossed Africa before the advent of the slave trade, it is improbable that slavers and the proceeds of the slave trade did not also travel just as widely.

Seashells found at a northern Kalahari archaeological site indicate contact with the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean coast (or both) and a capacity for transcontinental travel by the ninth century A D1 at the latest; at that rate, word of mouth, if not always actual involvement, would have spread a fearful awareness of the slave trade across the entire continent by the eighteenth century.

On a map of West Africa, the area in which cowries became the shell money of the slave trade during the eighteenth century extends 1,000 kilometres inland from the coast, then spreads like a broad ugly stain along the Sahelian latitudes: 1,500 kilometres west across Upper Volta and Mali to the borders of Senegal, and another 1,500 kilometres east across Nigeria and northern Cameroon and into Chad.2 Trade goods, cloth, copper, iron, guns, and gunpowder spread even more widely. In this way the slave trade commercialized even those local indigenous economies which were not directly involved, creating a demand for imported goods which, ultimately, could be supplied only by the export of slaves. Commentators write of Africa developing ‘an unquenchable thirst for foreign imports’ which tended ‘to gain an uncontrollable momentum’.3

The mass of information that has been extracted from archival records of the slave trade – trading invoices, shipping manifests, customs declarations, and so forth – provides substantive detail on the volume and execution of the trade but gives no conclusive answer to one very important question: what effect did the slave trade have upon human society in Africa? Academics who venture to express a definitive opinion on this question tend to group in two camps: one believes that the slave trade transformed African societies from whatever they might have been into societies that relied on slavery more extensively than ever before; and the other contends that the impact of the slave trade, though horrific in its totality, was spread so thinly through the centuries and across vast areas that it could not have transformed African society. Historian Paul Lovejoy formulated the transformation thesis; economist David Eltis is prominent among those opposing it.

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