by Hugh Thomas
The sacred Aro shrine at Arochuku, the so-called Long Juju, was the focus of slave dealing in this part of Africa at the end of the eighteenth century. The oracle was offered slaves as fees or fines, and the priests then sold them. This trade came to be dominated by mercenaries, the Akpa, their power based on firearms, the first such to be used inland of the Bight of Bonny.
An English traveler, John Adams, said that here was a “wholesale market for slaves, as not fewer than 20,000 are annually sold here; 16,000 of whom are . . . Heebo [Ibo], so that this single nation has not exported less than . . . during the last twenty years . . . 320,000.”11 He probably exaggerated. More important, he failed to realize that the majority of the slaves sold by the Ibo at Bonny were brought from the interior, and were, therefore, of many origins. Nor did he notice the even more interesting characteristic of the slaves exported from the Bonny River: that they included the highest percentage of females in all West Africa.
In 1789, some account of how the trade was managed here was given to the British Privy Council: “These traders go up . . . the rivers to the distance of about eighty miles from Bonny, and the same from New Calabar, in large canoes with two or three principal persons and about forty men in each. . . . At the head of these two rivers, there is a mart for trade, where the black traders purchase these slaves of other black traders who bring them down from the interior. . . .” These traders came down the river about once a fortnight with twenty or thirty canoes, each with twenty or thirty slaves, who had their arms tied behind their backs with twigs, canes, grass rope, or other “ligaments of the country.” They were treated roughly, but when they came to the coast they were oiled, fed, and “made up for sale.”12 Another description was given by Isaac Parker, an English shipkeeper who jumped ship in Duke Town in 1765. He told how he had gone on an expedition to find slaves with a dealer named Dick Ebro—it was a journey of kidnappers, pure and simple. His African friends armed some canoes and went up the river, “lying in the bushes in the day when they came near a village, and taking hold of everyone they could see. These they handcuffed, brought down to the canoes, and so proceeded up the river, till they got . . . forty-five, with whom they returned to New Town. . . . About a fortnight after, they went again, and were out eight or nine days, plundering villages higher up the river. They seized on much the same number as before, brought them to New Town, gave the same notice and disposed of them as before among the ships [that is, the slavers].”13
This zone reached its peak as a slave exporter in the years 1711-20, when there were exports of over 150,000. Exports continued high throughout the eighteenth century, never falling below seventy thousand in a single period of ten years. The territory’s importance in the Atlantic slave traffic continued well into the nineteenth century. Canoes, sometimes eighty feet long and carrying 120 people, were the chief instrument of the traffic.
Beyond the delta of the Niger, the coast of Africa at last begins to turn south again and there, in the Cameroons, in the late eighteenth century, Liverpool merchants from England pioneered a new branch of the slave trade. Farther on, and well to the south, the river Gabon, just north of Cape Lopez, was also coming into full activity as a slave region in the 1780s. This area seemed, to the Reverend John Newton, to possess “the most humane and moral people I ever met with in Africa,” perhaps “because they were the people who had the least intercourse with Europe at that time.” But off the coast, the Dutch had for a long time used the island of Corisco (the word in Portuguese means “flash of lightning”) as a trading center, though not specifically for slaves.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the main slave emporium in this whole region was São Tomé, that tragic island-prison of four hundred square miles nearly 170 miles off the mainland. The equator runs through the island’s southern tip. For generations, slave traders from there had dominated the Niger Delta, the Cameroons, and the northern Congo. From there, the Hispano-American markets were accustomed to buying slaves whom they spoke of as “casta de São Tomé,” “novos,” “Terra Nova,” or merely “Congos.” São Tomé was, by nature, a delightful place, for it was dominated by a high, wooded mountain, the vegetation was lush, and fresh fruit (including pineapples and grapes) and vegetables were always available. Numerous lemon trees grew in the valleys, and there were plenty of wild turkeys, geese, ducks, and even partridges, as well as fish. In its capital were four churches. For a short time in the seventeenth century, the Danes had a lodge there. But the place remained Portuguese, and there was always a Portuguese governor. For many generations, slave ships provisioned there and took on water. Prices were high, but São Tomé was too convenient to be avoided.
The nearby smaller island of O Principe (so called because the taxes of the island had been settled on the heir to the throne of Portugal) had similar benefits, if on a more modest scale. Its water was good, and it contained innumerable monkeys and two churches.
All these territories, like the Cape Verde Islands, had, as a result of continual contact between the Portuguese and the Africans, a thoroughly mulatto population.
To the south, on the mainland, there were various minor trading places, such as Cape Saint Catharine, and then several harbors belonging to the Vili kingdom of Loango: Mayumba, the large harbor of Loango itself, and the two smaller ports, Malemba and Cabinda, beyond. The charm of the Loango kingdom for traders was that, despite Portuguese opposition, the maloangos, the strong monarchs of the Vili kingdom, were able, over many generations, to maintain free trade to all the Europeans (much as the kings of Dahomey had done). Thus the Dutch had established a trading post at Mayumba and at Loango in the late sixteenth century, and the French were the favored customers in the eighteenth. At first these Europeans had concerned themselves with ivory, redwood, copper, and palm cloth, but the Dutch began to trade a few slaves in the 1640s and, by 1670, the Vili traders were finding slaves more profitable than ivory. The Dutch West India Company was that year carrying three thousand slaves a year from Loango. The king, the maloango, now entered into the commerce with a will, usually obtaining slaves along the rivers to the south, and dealing with the Europeans through a special official, the mafouk, in each of his main ports. The slave traders of Loango were soon competing successfully with those from Luanda, and obtained many slaves from the same sources. The success of the region was such that the British decided to establish a fort there, and appointed a governor, Captain Nurse Hereford, who left England for Cabinda with nine staff and six soldiers in 1721. The fort was built, but it was destroyed by the Portuguese with the help of Congo soldiers. Despite this setback, the English colonies, including those in North America, were probably getting a fifth of their slaves from this region in the eighteenth century. In the 1760s, and again in the 1780s, energetic Portuguese governors of Angola tried to prevent this by sending a Portuguese garrison there; but the soldiers sickened, many died, and the remainder were expelled by a French squadron in 1784.
In the 1770s, a Portuguese expedition of inquiry sent up from Luanda reported that there were seventeen ships on the Loango coast: nine French, four English, and four Dutch. Twenty thousand slaves were said to be carried from there by these carriers every year, but fourteen to eighteen thousand would be a probable annual average between 1765 and 1790. Many of the slaves were Monteques or Quibangues, who had been seized in the far interior, and carried to the coast along waterways earlier developed for trade by copper and ivory merchants.
The Vili state of Loango was in decline in the late eighteenth century, partly because of the adverse effects of the slave trade. This commerce had opened up many opportunities for merchants outside the old oligarchy which had once run the place, and the maloango’s power declined in relation to that of the port officials, the mafouks. A symbolic change occurred. In the past, when a maloango died, he was succeeded by his sister’s son. But a new ruler could only be chosen when the late maloango had been buried. In the late eighteenth century, the last maloango was not buried for fifty years, so no suc
cessor was installed. The kingdom began to split up into small entities.
To the south of the Vili kingdom of Loango, the more ancient and long-Christian kingdom of Congo was now a weak semi-Christian monarchy, dependent on Portugal, with a large mulatto community in all the important towns. Congo had exported many slaves in the seventeenth century, but that enterprise seemed beyond the capacity of the incoherent princelings. The now independent Sonyo were, however, trading extensively, and there was some slaving from the estuary of the Congo itself, where a people named the Zombo became the main traders in the mid-eighteenth century.
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To the south of the Congo lay the great center of Angola. “Casta Angola,” “Manicongos,” “Loandas” (from Luanda), or “Benguelas,” the last from the city of that name, were the products of that market when as slaves they reached their destinations. From the middle of the seventeenth century, the coasts here produced a steady supply of slaves, for Brazil above all but also for the whole of Latin America. Perhaps three-quarters of the slaves imported into Brazil derived from Angola. A study of African slaves in Mexico suggested that two-thirds of them were originally from Angola, too.
The main exporting harbor here was Luanda, the city on the island in the estuary of the river Cuanza, established in 1575, for two centuries the biggest European town in Africa (though still with only four hundred “whites”), which probably supplied five to seven thousand slaves a year in the seventeenth century, and seven to ten thousand a year throughout the eighteenth, in twenty or thirty ships; but Benguela, two hundred miles to the south, was supplying about a quarter of the Brazilian trade in the late eighteenth century. The majority of the slaves carried by the Portuguese Pernambuco-Paraíba Company derived from here.
Luanda was described by a Portuguese, Pacheco Pereira, as long ago as 1504. He spoke of the little “low and level and sparsely wooded islands” at the mouth of the Cuanza, where African women busied themselves looking for the shells known as nzimbus. (By now, only slaves judged inferior could be bought for these once-prized objects.) Luanda, like Benguela, was set in decidedly dry territory, and needed supplies of food to be brought from remote places. Drinking water was also always in short supply. Thus the slaves carried from here to Brazil, and elsewhere, were often suffering from malnutrition and dehydration even before they were put on the ships which would carry them to Brazil.
Luanda in the eighteenth century was on the estuary not just of a river but of a huge network of trading waterways which penetrated far into the interior of Africa. Near the coast these constituted a narrow corridor, along the lower rivers Bengo and Cuanza but, in the interior, the ways broadened, and there were also footpaths which connected the rivers with Kasanje in the middle valley of the Kwango, and the internal monarchies of the forest.
The slave trade from these ports was a complicated affair. First the slaves themselves were procured, almost always bought in the interior, by Luso-Africans—mulattoes of half-Portuguese, half-Angolan descent—who kept their captives in barracoons, waiting for ships to take them to Brazil. In contrast with what obtained elsewhere, these merchants were the owners of the slaves till they were sold in the Americas. The captains of the slave ships were usually paid by these merchants and so had not themselves a direct economic interest in the lives of their charges. In the eighteenth century, these were usually Brazilians, not Portuguese. The Portuguese officials in Luanda had an interest in the trade, since government income (hence their own salaries) depended on duties levied on slaves: and those taxes were farmed out to Lisbon merchants until 1769, but paid direct to officials of the exchequer thereafter.
Benguela was, for most of the eighteenth century, almost a colony of Brazil and, with the hand of Lisbon’s law running lighter, evasions of rules, such as the law of 1684 about the treatment of slaves on the journey across the Atlantic,III were the more easily accomplished. There, the so-called arqueação—the capacity tonnage—permitted under that law seemed no more than an invention for giving money to the officials in charge of the measurements.
Benguela’s slave trade grew greatly after the 1760s, thanks to the growth of farming in southern Brazil, as well as to the activities of French interlopers. Most slaves from Benguela were marked out from Africa as being destined for Brazil but they were often smuggled into Cuba or other parts of the Spanish empire. The Overseas Council in Lisbon was so perturbed by the risk of losing taxes through the growth in the trade from Benguela that it even forbade all sailings from there to Brazil—an unusually ineffective decree.
These two Portuguese cities of Luanda and Benguela were, in the eighteenth century, managed by a powerful white or mulatto slave-owning and -trading class of merchants. This oligarchy was sustained largely by Brazilian food and alcohol. The slaves were brought down to the sea in “coffles”IV of about a hundred each, of which one or two would typically come every week, and were held on the coast till an appropriate buyer appeared. Now no African monarchy threatened the Portuguese dominion, but the Portuguese themselves had long before ceased to be aggressive, or curious, imperial adventurers. In 1760, the expulsion of the Jesuits had exacerbated the intellectual decline. The dedication of the enlightened and energetic Governor CoutinhoV had little permanent effect. An intelligent historian, Fernando da Silva Correa, reported about 1789 that 88 percent of the income of Luanda derived from the trade in slaves.14
Behind these kingdoms, and still acting as a center of supply in the eighteenth century, lay the Lunda people, whose headquarters was on the river Kasai, about six hundred miles inland. The Lunda wars of expansion had taken them as far as Lake Tanganyika in the east and the river Kwango in the west. These conquests led to a great channel of tribute being opened for slaves from the heart of Africa. The Lunda were a commercially active people by the mid-eighteenth century; their old capital, Mussumba, was the site of a great fair, and one at which the trading of slaves was the most profitable business. A trade route ran from Mussumba to the coast at Loango, bypassing Angola and Congo, sometimes providing the Vili with slaves from what would now be Zambia.
The Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo, ruled by the ngola, the ruler from whom Angola takes its name, also survived. The ngola’s capital, Kabasa, (whence he still purported to govern from a series of interlocking huts roofed with peacock feathers) lay in fertile and hence prosperous territory, its palm trees produced wine, its women were concerned with raising cattle, and the currency had become rock salt, obtained in square blocks from the mines of Kisama. The river Cuanza gave easy access to the interior.
The Portuguese colonists in Angola also had a great many slaves of their own; some individuals are said to have enjoyed the service of as many as three thousand. These were employed either in farming or in fishing, and some were hired out, or performed the functions of barbers or even doctors, while no Portuguese in Angola in the late eighteenth century would have dreamed of going outdoors without two slaves who carried a hammock, while a third would carry a parasol.
Angola was thus primarily maintained for trading slaves who, indeed, were everywhere to be seen. Many came from the center of the continent, or even farther away: Captain Louis de Grandpré, a French explorer, in 1787 met a black African who, he realized, must have come from East Africa, since she remembered “seeing the sun rising over the water.”15
Benguela was the last slave-trading harbor on the long coast of West and West Central Africa. The explanation was partly the lack of harbors but also because the Africans there fiercely resisted the Portuguese. But from the earliest days of the terrible traffic, slaves were often carried across the Atlantic from Mozambique and Madagascar, and also from the Portuguese Asian possessions. There was a substantial trade in slaves to the Indian islands, too: 125,000 are said to have left Mozambique in European ships for those harbors between 1720 and 1800. French interest in this East African trade was considerable. For example, the Trois Cousins left Saint-Malo on January 11, 1784, for India and Mauritius. On its return, the ship reached W
est Africa on June 2, 1785, and, at Malembo, just to the south of Loango, bought 888 slaves, who were carried to Cap François, in Saint-Domingue, where seven hundred were delivered live. But the main trade was still under the auspices of the Portuguese, who had had a decisive influence in the whole region since they first opened it up in the early sixteenth century. As early as 1520, Simão de Miranda had been in control of the captaincy of Sofala and Mozambique, and concerned himself to send home slaves to Portugal. By the eighteenth century, this commerce, directed to the Americas, was more important on that coast than anything else.
Many captives were also obtained from Madagascar, “a vast island abounding with slaves,” in the words of William Beckford, lord mayor of London.16 In the seventeenth century, these were sometimes shipped eastward, via Manila across the Pacific to Acapulco, where they were sold as “chinos.”VI But this trade died out, because even the Spaniards found that distance excessive. In the late eighteenth century, English traders, from Bristol, were much involved. The South Sea Company, inadequately supplied by the RAC, dispatched slaves to the Americas from Madagascar, in considerable numbers. Like Frederick Philipse of New York, they were warned off by the East India Company, which looked on Madagascar as one of its reserved trading zones. But Bristol merchants continued their activities. New England merchants intervened, too, and the taste for slaves from here was strong in Charleston. One advertisement there ran: “The character of the slaves from the East coast of Africa is now so well-known that it is unnecessary to mention the decided preference they have over all other negroes.” The port of Quelimane also entered the international slave trade about 1780. The pioneer was a French Portuguese, Pedro Monero, one of those innumerable personalities of mixed blood to be found in powerful positions throughout the checkered history of the Atlantic slave trade.
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