The Slave Ship

by Marcus Rediker

  The main engine of enslavement in the region was the expansion of the Lunda Empire in the interior of Angola. Most of the enslaved were

  captured in wars of conquest, after formal battle and in quick-strike raids. A substantial number of slaves came as tribute the Lunda collected from the various groups and states they ruled. The Lunda deployed a highly effective administrative system and used middle-size intermediary states such as Kasanje and Matamba to facilitate the movement of their slaves to the ships on the coast. Other active parties in West-Central Africa’s far-reaching human commerce, in addition to the Bobangi, were Vili merchants, who in the seventeenth century linked the northern inland regions to the Kongo coast. Southern states such as Humbe and Ovimbundu also served as middlemen in an extensive, lucrative trade.

  West-Central Africa was an area of extraordinary cultural diversity and dozens of languages, although all of them were Bantu in origin, and this would serve as a commonality for the peoples in diaspora. Political organization also spanned a broad spectrum, ranging from small autonomous villages to huge kingdoms, most important the Kongo, Loango, and Tio, and the Portuguese colonial state based in Luanda.The lifeways of the commoners who were most likely to be enslaved varied by ecological zone. Those from the coast, rivers, and swamps necessarily made their livings by water, usually fishing, while those from the forest and savanna zones tended to combine farming, usually the domain of women, and hunting, done by the men. Many communities were organized along matrilineal lines. Because of the frequency of warfare, many of the men had military experience of one kind or another. As the tentacles of the slave trade grew, many communities stratified internally, and kumu, “big men,” emerged to facilitate the commerce. The main ports of the region, from north to south, were Loango, Cabinda, Ambriz, Luanda, and Benguela, the last built by the Portuguese for the slave trade. Between 1700 and 1807, traders funneled a million souls through Loango and growing numbers after 1750 to Molembo and Cabinda, the Kongo estuary ports. In the eighteenth century alone, more than 2.7 million slaves were delivered. They constituted 38 percent of the century’s total, making West-Central Africa the most important region of the slave trade by a considerable margin. 25

  A Social Portrait of the Captives

  As the summaries of the six main slaving regions suggest, most people who found themselves on slave ships did so in the aftermath of war, especially during historic moments when one or another group, the Fon or the Asante, for example, was extending its political dominance over its neighbors. What one observer called the “eternal wars” among smaller groups were another major source of slaves. Like the conflict between the Gola and the Ibau, these wars had their own geopolitical logic and causes, and were not always influenced by the slave trade. Indeed, as slave-trade merchant and historian Robert Norris noted, wars had gone on in Africa long before the arrival of the Europeans, with the same causes that motivated conflict in all times and places: “Ambition, Avarice, Resentment, &c.” Advocates and opponents of the slave trade agreed that war was a major source of slaves in West Africa. 26

  Yet they disagreed vehemently about what constituted a war. Most advocates of the trade agreed that “war” was simply whatever African traders said it was. But they had to admit that the term covered a multitude of activities. “Depredations . . . are denominated wars!” exclaimed a Liverpool trader in 1784. John Matthews, a fierce defender of human commerce, noted that in Sierra Leone every “petty quarrel” was called a war. Sea surgeon John Atkins observed that war in West Africa was just another name for “robbery of inland, defenceless creatures.” Those opposed to the trade went even further, insisting that “wars” were nothing more than “pyratical expeditions,” and they even found a witness to prove it: British seaman Isaac Parker had participated in such marauding raids out of New Town in Old Calabar in the 1760s. Abolitionists contended that what was called “war” was for the most part simply kidnapping. Moreover, “wars” often commenced when a slave ship appeared on the coast, whereupon the local traders (with the help—and guns—of the slave-ship captain) would equip war parties (usually canoes) to head inland to wage war and gather slaves, who would then be sold to the captain who had helped to finance the expedition in the first place. Otherwise, as one African explained to a member of a slaving crew, “Suppose ship no come, massa, no takee slavee.” War was a euphemism for the organized theft of human beings.27

  Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains. This was not unlike the transportation of convicted English felons to the American colonies until 1776 and to Botany Bay, Australia, beginning in 1786. Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible. Royal African Company official Francis Moore noted that for those found guilty of crime around 1730 in the Gambia region, “All Punishments are chang’d into Slavery.” Walter Rodney observed that on the Upper Guinea Coast local ruling groups made law “into the handmaid of the slave trade.”28

  A third major source was the purchase of slaves at markets and fairs located in the interior, some distance from the coast, often linked to the Islamic slave-trade circuits to the north, east, and west. The purchase of these people (the vast majority of whom had been free, but enslaved farther inland) was especially common in Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Bight of Benin. By the 1780s many of the slaves sold at New Calabar, Bonny, and Old Calabar had been bought a hundred miles or more inland, and for other ports the catchment area was even deeper. Slave-ship captains assumed that the people they purchased had become slaves by war or judicial process, but in truth they did not know—and did not care—how their “cargo” had been enslaved. That was not their business, testified one after another in parliamentary hearings between 1788 and 1791.29

  In the seventeenth century, most captives seem to have come from within fifty miles of the coast. But in the early eighteenth century, especially after the European deregulation of the slave trade (the eclipse of chartered companies by private traders), both the trade and catchment areas expanded, in some cases several hundred miles into the interior. Most commentators thought that somewhere between a tenth and a third of the enslaved came from coastal regions, the rest from the interior. The “bulk” of the slaves, wrote John Atkins of his experience of the early 1720s, were “country People,” whose wits, in his condescending view, grew dimmer the farther from the coast they had come. The “coast-Negroes,” on the other hand, were sharp, even roguish, more likely to speak English, and more knowledgeable about slave ships and the trade. Those who came from the waterside had likely been enslaved through judicial process, while those from the country were more likely taken in one or another kind of “war.” By the end of the century, more and more slaves were arriving from “a very great distance,” traveling “many moons,” and having been sold numerous times along the way. The captain of the Sandown was sure that five men he purchased in October 1793 had traveled a thousand miles.30

  Enslavement produced immediate and spontaneous resistance, especially when the mode was raiding or kidnapping. People fought back, fled, did whatever they could to escape the enslavers. Once they had been captured and organized into coffles, the main form of resistance was running away, which the captors tried to prevent by armed vigilance and various technologies of control. The newly enslaved, especially the men, were sometimes individually bound, using vines, cords, or chains, then strapped by the neck in groups of two and four, and finally tied to other groups of the same size. African captors sometimes attached to the men a long, heavy log to burden their movements, tire them out, and discourage resistance. Every member of the coffle would be required to labor as a porter—that is, carry food and merchandis
e, sometimes large tusks of ivory. One clever group of raiders devised and attached a contraption to the mouth of the prisoners to prevent them from crying out to gain the attention and perhaps assistance of sympathetic folk during the long march. Other forms of resistance included a refusal to eat and, occasionally, coordinated insurrection. The enslaved might even escape into the forest to form a kind of maroon community. All these forms of resistance would be carried onto the slave ships and, upon the completion of the voyage, into the plantation societies of the New World.31

  The overwhelming majority of those enslaved were commoners—agriculturalists of one kind or another, though a few were nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. From the larger societies came artisans, domestic slaves, and waged workers. Two-thirds of those sent overseas were male, mostly young men, many of whom had been soldiers and were therefore trained in the ways of war. Roughly a third were female and a quarter children, the portion of each increasing in the late eighteenth century. Very few Africans of high station and authority found themselves enslaved and thrown aboard a slave ship. African military elites frequently executed their leading adversaries after battle to prevent their encouragement of resistance to new rulers. Moreover, the slave raiders usually chose “the roughest and most hardy” and avoided the privileged “smooth negroes” (like Job Ben Solomon), who had a harder time adjusting to the ship and slavery. And in any case, the slave trader’s preference for the young also excluded most of those who were the older, wiser, natural leaders in many African cultures.32

  As a result of this process of selection, enslavement and shipment created a deep and enduring rupture between African commoners and ruling groups, which in turn had enormous implications for cultural and political practice in the diaspora. Those many unfairly convicted and enslaved lost respect for rulers and their institutions, and the absence of a dominant class in diaspora meant that the commoners would, of necessity, do things their own way, more freely and creatively, on the slave ship and in the New World. More egalitarian relations and practices would be the order of the day, as Hugh Crow saw among the Igbo on his own ships: “I have seen them, when their allowance happened to be short, divide the last morsel of meat amongst each other thread by thread.”33

  Grand Pillage: Louis Asa-Asa

  One of the main ways of making slaves was what the French called “grand pillage”—a sudden, organized raid upon a village, usually in the middle of the night. The marauders burned homes and captured the terrified villagers as they fled, then marched them to the coast in coffles and sold them. A man named Louis Asa-Asa experienced enslavement by “grand pillage” when he was a boy, thirteen years old. He described the trauma, and his own path to the ship, in detail.34

  Asa-Asa lived with his parents and five brothers and sisters “in a country called Bycla, near Egie, a large town” located inland, “some way from the sea.” His family was respectable. His father, who had land and a horse, was not one of the “great men” of the village, but his uncle was, for he had a lot of land and cattle and “could make men come and work for him.” His father worked with his oldest son on their land, making charcoal, but Asa-Asa was “too little” to join them as they worked. The strongest memory of his African family and life before slavery was simple and telling: “we were all very happy.”35

  The happiness soon went up in flames, as “some thousands” of Adinyé warriors converged on Egie one morning before daybreak, setting fire to the huts, creating chaos, killing some, and over two days capturing many others. They bound the captives by the feet until it was time to tie them into coffles and march them toward the coast, whereupon “they let them loose; but if they offered to run away, they would shoot them”—with European guns. The Adinyés were expert, even professional marauders: “They burnt all the country wherever they found villages.” They took any and all, “brothers, and sisters, and husbands, and wives; they did not care about this.” Those taken in the initial raid included about a dozen people Asa-Asa counted as “friends and relations.” Everyone carried away was sold as a slave to the Europeans, some for “cloth or gunpowder,” others for “salt or guns.” Sometimes “they got four or five guns for a man.” Asa-Asa knew these to be “English guns.”36

  Asa-Asa and his family saw their home set afire, but they escaped by running from the village, keeping together, and living for two days in the woods. When the Adinyés left, they returned home “and found every thing burnt.” They also found “several of our neighbours lying about wounded; they had been shot.” Asa-Asa himself “saw the bodies of four or five little children whom they had killed with blows on the head. They had carried away their fathers and mothers, but the children were too small for slaves, so they killed them. They had killed several others, but these were all that I saw. I saw them lying in the street like dead dogs.”

  The family built a “little shed” for their shelter and slowly began “to get comfortable again,” but a week later the Adinyés returned, torching the sheds and any houses that they had missed the first time. Asa-Asa and his family, uncle included, ran again to the woods, but the next day the warriors came after them, forcing them deeper into the forest, where they stayed “about four days and nights.” They subsisted on “a few potatoes” and were “half starved.” The Adinyés soon found them. Asa-Asa recalled the moment: “They called my uncle to go to them; but he refused, and they shot him immediately: they killed him.” The rest ran in terror, but Asa-Asa, the youngest of the group, fell behind. He climbed a tree in an effort to elude his pursuers, but in vain as they spotted and caught him, tying his feet. He recalled sadly, “I do not know if they found my father and mother, and brothers and sisters: they had run faster than me, and were half a mile farther when I got up into the tree: I have never seen them since.” Asa-Asa also remembered a man who had climbed the tree with him: “I believe they shot him, for I never saw him again.”

  Young Asa-Asa joined twenty others in a march to the sea, each person carrying a load, part of it the food they would eat along the way. The newly enslaved were not beaten, he noted, but one man, formerly a neighbor, was killed. He was ill and too weak to carry his load, so “they ran him through the body with a sword.” He was the only one who died along the way.

  Soon began a series of sales, each one bringing Asa-Asa and the others closer to the slave ship. The thirteen-year-old was “sold six times over, sometimes for money, sometimes for cloth, and sometimes for a gun.” Even after he and his coffle-mates reached the coast, they continued to be sold: “We were taken in a boat from place to place, and sold at every place we stopped at.” It took about six months after his capture to reach the “white people” and their “very large ship.”37

  Kidnapping: Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

  A less-common but still-important means of enslavement was trickery, which was used by slave traders to prey upon the naive and unsuspecting. Among European sailors and indentured servants, the wily labor agent was called a “spirit,” the process itself “spiriting” or alternatively trepanning or kidnapping. In this instance a path to the ship began with a degree of consent and evolved into coercion, as discovered by a boy named Ukawsaw Gronniosaw in 1725.38

  The merchant had traveled far to reach the village of Borno, near Lake Chad in today’s northeastern Nigeria, and when he arrived, he told a magical tale. He spoke of a place by the sea where “houses with wings upon them . . . walk on water.” He also spoke of peculiar “white folks” aboard the winged, waterborne abodes. These words mesmerized the teenage Gronniosaw, the youngest of six children and the grandson of the king of Zaara. Gronniosaw later recalled, “I was highly pleased with the account of this strange place, and was very desirous of going.” His family agreed to let him go. He traveled a thousand miles with the merchant, whose demeanor changed once he had gotten the boy away from his parents and village. Gronniosaw grew “unhappy and discontented,” fearful that he would be killed. When he arrived on the Gold Coast, he found himself “without a friend or any means to procure
one.” He was enslaved.

  The coastal king announced that Gronniosaw was a spy and should be killed, but the boy spoke up in protest: “I came . . . there to see houses walk upon the water with wings to them, and the white folks.” The king relented and allowed Gronniosaw to have his wish, but with a wicked twist: he would be sold to the white master of one of those winged houses. The boy was offered to a French captain, who refused to buy him because he was too small. Taken aboard a Dutch Guineaman, and terrified that he would be killed if he were once again rejected, Gronniosaw threw himself on the captain and begged to be taken. The captain obliged, trading “two yards of check” (cloth) for him. During the Middle Passage, Gronniosaw “was exceedingly sea-sick at first; but when I became more accustomed to the sea, it wore off.” He noted that he was treated well by the captain until they arrived in Barbados, where he was sold for “fifty dollars.”

  The slave ship—or the “house with wings,” as Gronniosaw called it—would be astonishing to anyone who had never seen one. The explorer Mungo Park relayed another such reaction in 1797, when he and his guide, Karfa, ended their travels into the interior of West Africa by arriving at the river Gambia, where they saw a schooner lying at anchor. “This was,” wrote Park, “the most surprising object which Karfa had yet seen.” The inland African surveyed the deep-sea vessel carefully. He wondered about the “manner of fastening together the different planks which composed the vessel, and filling up the seams so as to exclude the water.” He was fascinated by “the use of masts, sails, and rigging.” Most of all he marveled about how “it was possible, by any sort of contrivance, to make so large a body move forwards by the common force of the wind.” All of this, wrote Park, “was perfectly new to him.” Park concluded that “the schooner with her cable and her anchor, kept Karfa in deep meditation the greater part of the day.”39