African History by John Parker & Richard Rathbone

Author:John Parker & Richard Rathbone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Way of death: the slave trade in African history

Nowhere is this debate more pronounced or more impassioned than with regard to the Atlantic slave trade. It is not difficult to understand why. Between the 1440s, when Portuguese mariners first began to kidnap and to purchase Africans, and 1867, the year of the last recorded slaving voyage to the Americas, some 12 million men, women, and children were turned into commodities and exported from the continent. This bare statistic only goes so far in capturing the violence, the devastation, and the degradation initiated by what anti-slave trade campaigners called this ‘odious commerce’. It does not include the countless lives lost through slave raiding, warfare, and social breakdown within Africa, nor those captives who succumbed to disease or maltreatment before embarkation. Neither does it include those enslaved but not exported, as Atlantic commerce acted as a catalyst for the expansion and intensification of slavery in African societies. And it does not include those Africans who were born and then died in the cauldron of the American slave system. Joseph Miller captures in one phrase this history of systemized suffering: the slave trade in Angola, he writes, became a ‘way of death’.

The Atlantic trade, moreover, was not the only African slave trade. By the end of the first millennium ad, captives were also being taken across the Sahara, over the Red Sea, and from the coast of East Africa, destined for servitude in North Africa and the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and throughout the Indian Ocean. Much of this commerce was in the hands of Muslims. Far less is known about it than the Atlantic trade, and the rarity of statistical data means that the overall numbers of enslaved can only be guessed at. Yet historians estimate that over more than 1,000 years, these combined trades may have involved a similar number of victims: perhaps another 12 million Africans. The ‘Muslim’ trades differed from the Atlantic trade in one important respect: whereas the victims of the latter were bound overwhelmingly for productive labour in the plantations and mines of the Americas, most victims of the former were destined for some form of domestic servitude, including concubinage. Twice as many African men as women were therefore transported across the Atlantic, whereas it is estimated that twice as many women as men were carried to the Muslim world.

When concerted research on the Atlantic slave trade began in the 1960s, the first priority was simply getting the numbers straight. One sometimes still reads wildly inflated figures like 20 million, or even 50 million, Africans having traversed the so-called Middle Passage. These do a disservice to decades of painstaking investigation – as well as to the memory of those who did fall victim to the slavers. The overall magnitude of the trade was confirmed in 1999 with the landmark publication of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, which details more than 27,000 slaving voyages from Africa to the New World from 1527 to 1867.

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