by Hugh Thomas
IOffra was also known to the Europeans as Little Ardra (Allada).
IIOn the throne since 1708.
IIISee page 419.
IVFrom the Arabic kafilah, meaning a string of men, or animals, forced to travel together.
VFor whom see page 279.
VINot to be confused with the small number of Chinese and Filipinos, also known as chinos, who, after the opening up of the Pacific by Miguel de Legazpi in 1564-65, were carried to Mexico in the “Manila galleons.”
19
A Great Strait for Slaves
“[The king of Whydah] often, when ships are in a great strait for slaves and cannot be supply’d otherwise, will sell 300 or 400 of his wives to complete their number. . . .”
Captain Thomas Phillips, c. 1695
BY THE END of the eighteenth century, something approaching eighty thousand black African slaves were being carried every year across the Atlantic. The question how those slaves were obtained troubles people now, and it troubled them at the time. In 1721, the Royal African Company (RAC) of London set afoot one of those inquiries for which Britain is still famous: it asked its agents in Africa to discover how slaves were originally taken, how many days they spent on their march down to the coast from their own country, whether they had become slaves in any manner other than by “being taken prisoners in war time [and] whether they have any other method of trading for them than this bringing them down to the coast of Africa to sell to the Europeans.”1 The conclusion was obscure even after the meticulous gathering of evidence.
The overwhelming majority of slaves were certainly obtained by the European traders in Africa by purchase or negotiation with local rulers, merchants, or noblemen. Some were obtained directly through European wars, principally in Angola; except the first days of the Portuguese on the coast, up till 1448, only a small number were obtained by Europeans by kidnapping.
The Africans from whom the Europeans obtained most of the slaves to be shipped acquired them much as in antiquity in the Mediterranean, or in medieval Europe: first, as a result of war; second, in consequence of enslavement as a punishment for the people concerned; third, from poverty, resulting in someone’s being constrained to sell his children, or even himself; or, fourth, from kidnapping, which was as frequent among Africans as it was rare among Europeans.
African monarchs also often bought slaves (who might earlier have been obtained in any of these ways) from dealers, in order to sell them again to Europeans (or to other Africans, and especially Arabs).
Different observers made different judgments, often decisive, as far as they themselves were concerned. In the fifteenth century, the Venetian Alvise Ca’da Mosto reported that most slaves had been captured in war, many of them having been for a time integrated into the local economy, whereas others were regularly sold to “Moors” in exchange for horses. Over a hundred years later, in 1600, Pieter de Marees thought that the slaves on the Gold Coast were, first, “poor people who are enslaved because they could not earn a living; secondly, persons who owe their King some fines which they cannot afford to pay; thirdly, they are young children who are sold by their parents because they do not have the means to bring them up.” Jean Barbot, after two slave voyages in the late seventeenth century, believed that “the slaves [whom the African monarchs] possess and sell are prisoners of war . . . or, if from among themselves, are condemned to slavery for some crime. But there are also those who have been kidnapped by their compatriots, these being mainly children who had been stationed in the fields to guard the mill, or who had been seized when traveling along the main roads.”2 A little later, Willem Bosman, of the Dutch West India Company, was of the view that war explained the existence of slaves: “It sometimes happens, when the inland countries are at peace, here are no slaves to be got. So . . . the trade of this place is utterly uncertain.”3 In 1730, Francis Moore, an experienced English trader in slaves, for he had been a factor of the RAC at Fort George on the river Gambia, described how the Mandingos, then the middlemen in the slave traffic in the region, brought down to the coast “slaves to the amount of two thousand, which, they say, are prisoners taken in war: they buy them from the different princes who take them.”4 Some years later, John Newton, who spent some years at Bissau as well as serving on slave ships, as mate as well as captain, believed that most slaves came from wars, that the wars would cease if the slave trade ceased, but that the Europeans did not especially foment these conflicts.
In 1789, a witness at another British inquiry into the nature of the traffic, this time of the Privy Council, Sir George Young, captain in the Royal Navy (subsequently an admiral of the blue), thought that the greatest number of slaves were taken as prisoners of war, “one village that was stronger than another seizing that which was weaker, and disposing of the inhabitants to the ship.”5 James Penny, a Liverpool captain who had made eleven slaving voyages to Africa, told the same investigation: “At Bonny . . . traders go up into the country to purchase slaves . . . in large canoes with two or three principal persons, about fifty men in each. The canoes go in a body altogether, to defend themselves if attacked. At the head of these two rivers there is a mart for trade where the black traders purchase these slaves of other black slave traders, who bring them from the interior country.” When asked if he had ever observed whether these slaves had marks of any fresh wounds, Penny replied, “Not often”; but he had sometimes done so.
He added: “From the great number of slaves which [sic] are annually exported . . . one would be led to imagine the country would in time be depopulated; instead of which no diminution of their numbers is perceived; and from every account we have been able to acquire from the natives themselves, who travel into the interior country, it is extraordinarily populous; but how such a number of slaves are procured, is a circumstance which I believe no European was ever fully acquainted with. The best information . . . is that great numbers are prisoners taken in war, and are brought down, fifty or a hundred together, by the black slave merchants; that many are sold for witchcraft, and other real or imputed crimes; and are purchased in the country with European goods and salt; which is an article so highly valued and so eagerly sought after by the natives, that they will part with their wives and their children and everything dear to them to obtain it, when they have not slaves to dispose of and it always makes part of the merchandise for the purchase of slaves in the interior country. . . . Death or slavery were, and still are, the penalties for almost every offence. . . . The fate of prisoners was also in a great measure determined by the season of the year, and the occasion they had for their services. If they were taken after the harvest was over, they were seldom spared; but those who were captured before the commencement of the rice season experienced a different fate, as they were reserved to cultivate the rice ground; and sold, after the harvest, to those tribes bordering the sea who had no other means of acquiring slaves than by purchase; or were kept as labouring slaves and forever fixed to the spot.”6
Thirty years later, Eyo Honesty II of Creek Town, on the Old Calabar River, told the English missionary Hope Waddell that slaves came “from different countries and were sold for different reasons—some as prisoners of war, some for debt, some for breaking their country’s laws, and some by great men who hated them. The king of a town sells whom he dislikes or fears; his wives are sold in turn by his successor. A man inveigles his brother’s children into his house and sells them. The brother says nothing, but watches his opportunity and sells the children of the other.”
After these differing views, based on partial if personal observation, and asserted with conviction by many persons of contrasting experience, it is a relief to find some statistical evidence. This derives from an analysis of the origins of slaves brought to Sierra Leone, then a colony of freed slaves, made by a dedicated philologist, Sigismund Koelle, in the 1850s. It could not be accurate for the whole era of slave trading throughout West Africa, from Arguin to Mozambique, but the figures show that 34 percent of Koelle’s informants w
ere taken in war, 30 percent had been kidnapped (by Africans), 11 percent had been sold after being condemned by judicial process (adultery figured largely because that was one of the few “crimes” to which people would confess), 7 percent had been sold to pay debts, and another 7 percent had been sold by relations or friends. (The remaining 11 percent were slaves who fitted into more than one category: for example, refugees who were kidnapped.) Of those stated to have been taken in war, most had been victims, in one way or another, of a recent Fulani Islamic jihad, the greatest manufactory of slaves in the later eighteenth century—though the Fula and the Mande had both been sellers of slaves on a substantial scale for generations before the jihad.
During the debates in North America and England about the abolition of the trade in slaves, the philanthropists would often insist that wars were deliberately undertaken by Africans to obtain slaves for the Europeans. Yet wars were frequent before the Europeans arrived in West Africa, and were probably sometimes undertaken in order to obtain slaves even then: Ca’da Mosto, for example, remarked, “The black chiefs are continually at war with one another”; and Pacheco, as has been seen,I said the same when talking of Benin. In the late eighteenth century, King Kpengla of Dahomey and King Osei Bonsu of Ashanti were both asked by European visitors (Archibald Dalzell, a friend of the slave trade in the case of Kpengla, Jean-Louis Dupuis, an opponent, in the case of Osei Bonsu) whether they went to war to provide the Atlantic slave trade with captives; they both said that they did not, and had their own political motives for their conflicts. They may have been lying, but it is unclear why they should have done so. Yet the kings of Dahomey more than once appealed to their European trading partners for arms to enable them to carry out the raids on their northern neighbors which alone could provide the slaves needed to fill the European boats.
There were certainly some occasions when wars were undertaken to provide slaves for sale, to Europeans as to Arabs. For example, a governor of Cape Verde, de Almada, thought in 1576 that the ruler of Cayor, on the river Gambia, had embarked upon fighting his neighbor simply to enable him to pay a debt which he owed to a merchant of Cape Verde. Even if the war concerned might have had an indigenous origin, it might very well have been pursued further than it was because of the potential sale of captives offered by the Atlantic trade. This was specially so in the region of Senegambia, a mainstay of slaving in the early seventeenth century. Then there were certainly instances of war being undertaken by Europeans in order to obtain slaves. One such conflict was that embarked upon by Mendes de Vasconcelos, the governor of Angola, in 1620, so helping to swell the large exports of slaves in those days. The Portuguese also sometimes acted as military advisers to African rulers—to those of the Congo, as of Benin, both in the sixteenth century—and their arms were useful in achieving victories, and hence slaves. Sometimes, in the monarchies of West Africa, if there was a big demand for slaves, or poverty in the region, a chief might exaggerate some slight, and order the alleged guilty party’s village to be razed and the people of it reduced to slavery. Sometimes such a thing no doubt occurred because the African chief desired European goods. In the early eighteenth century, the RAC plainly convinced itself that wars were good for business: for example, an agent of that body, Josiah Pierson, in Cape Coast in 1712, commented that “the battle is expected shortly, after which ’tis hoped the trade will flourish.”7
In the late eighteenth century, the Newport Mercury reported that there had been a time “when the Akims and the [A]shanties were fighting, the worthy Fanties [people on the coast] were very busy pillaging and stealing the Akims, who were so reduced by famine, that they have given themselves up in great number to any body which would promise them victuals, so that slaves became very plenty. . . . Neither did they confine themselves to stealing the Akims only: for the Shanties began to pillage the Fanty Crooms [towns] and plantations, by which conduct the Fanties picked up about 1,000 of them, 300 of which we [the Royal Africa Company] purchased in eight or nine days, in Castle Brew [the headquarters of Richard Brew].”8
On the other hand, a witness at a House of Commons inquiry, John Matthews, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, who knew the west coast of Africa well, said: “That slaves are often captives taken in war is a position I readily accede to; but that those wars are undertaken merely for the purpose of procuring slaves is by no means the case; for . . . the king or chief of a tribe has not power to make war upon any other tribe without the consent and approbation of the principal people of his nation; and it can scarcely be conceived that such consent could be obtained to a measure that would draw down upon them the resentment of the neighbouring states.” The fact was, he went on, quite fairly, “the nations which inhabit the interior parts of Africa . . . profess the Mahometan religion; and, following the means prescribed by their prophet, are perpetually at war with the surrounding nations who refuse to embrace their religious doctrines. . . . The prisoners made in these religious wars furnish a great part of the slaves which are sold to the Europeans; and would . . . be put to death if they had not the means of disposing of them. . . .”9
All the same, the Swedish mineralogist Carl Bernard Wadström, a disinterested observer, commented: “The wars which the inhabitants of the interior parts of the country . . . carry on with each other are chiefly of a predatory nature, and owe their origin to the yearly number of slaves, which the Mandingos, or the island traders, suppose will be wanted by the vessels which arrive on the coast. Indeed, these predatory incursions depend so much on the demand for slaves that, if in any one year, there be a greater concourse of European ships than usual, it is observed that a much greater number of captives from the interior parts of the country is brought to market the next.”10
The variations were considerable. For the Bight of Biafra, for instance, there is nothing to show that raids and war produced more than a small percentage of slaves exported in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. War, though it was always being waged, was on too small a scale to produce many captives. In some places in that part of Africa, the locally accepted rules even prevented prisoners from being sold as slaves. Instead, the prisoners might be eaten; or the heads of enemy captains cut off as trophies, as Europeans cut off the heads of animals which they killed when hunting. Alexander Falconbridge, a ship’s surgeon in Bonny in the 1780s, wrote: “I never saw any negroes with recent wounds; which must have been the consequence at least with some of them, if they had been taken in battle. And it being the particular province of the surgeon to examine the slaves when they are purchased, such a circumstance could not have escaped my observation.”11
Nevertheless, in Central Africa—whence, after all, most slaves were exported, through Congo and Angola—there can be no question but that the slave trade stimulated wars. The guns traded by the Northern Europeans exacerbated the aggressive characteristics of anyway aggressive peoples. The constant raids of the Lunda on their neighbors, those of the Jaggas on theirs, and the Angolan troops—white, mulatto, or black—on the borders of their dominions are to be explained largely by the demand for slaves. Many of the problems of Central African monarchies would no doubt have occurred without the Atlantic slave trade. But the connection between the trade and the collapse of some kingdoms and the rise of others is certain; there had in this region before 1500 never been a large slave trade to the north, as had occurred in the land known so generally as “Guinea,” and one historian of the “kingdoms of the Savannah,” Vansina, has said that “the trade explains most of the history of the kingdoms of Central Africa between 1500 and 1900.”12
The Dutch, meantime, persuaded themselves that their trade had a peaceable effect on the Africans: reports of the Dutch West India Company show that its employees thought that peace was essential to get the slaves to the coast: “That the fire of war among the natives there has been to a large degree extinguished is very sweet and pleasant news,” ran one report.13 Yet the Dutch, in the seventeenth century, unlike the Portuguese before them, had no hesitation about e
xchanging guns, principally muskets, for slaves. The English and French were similarly unconcerned.
• • •
There was often little difference in practice between a war of two peoples and a raid by one leader on his neighbor’s town or village. Nor was there much difference between capturing prisoners on the field of battle and seizing them in a village after it had been captured. Still, kidnapping of individuals by kings in “general pillage” was performed almost every day in Africa, at least in the dry season, in Dr. Wadström’s opinion, and practiced by all the kings on the coast. This was certainly sometimes encouraged by Europeans. For example, the militaristic Bissagos Islanders in their devastating canoes were seeking no territory and no strategic alterations when, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they launched their raids on each other and on the mainland: they wanted to obtain slaves for the Portuguese. In the late eighteenth century, Sir George Young thought that, in Senegambia, slaving was “excited by the French officers and the mulattoes that accompanied the embassy by means of a constant intoxication.” The surgeon John Atkins described how the king of Whydah was “as absolute as a boar, making sometimes fair agreements with his country neighbours, . . . but, if he cannot obtain a sufficient number of slaves that way, he marches an army, and depopulates. He and the King of Ardra [Allada],” added this witness, “commit great depredations inland.”14
In such raids, old men and women, as well as children, were considered valueless and often killed. Sometimes, as the German explorer Heinrich Barth recorded as late as the 1850s, at Bornu in northern Nigeria, men in the prime of life to the number of 170 were left to bleed to death after a raid. The British naval officer Sir George Young once found a beautiful infant boy who had been kidnapped the night before and whom the Africans could not sell. They had said that they would throw him into the sea; at this, Young bought the boy for “a quarter cask of vidonia [Canary Island] wine,” and presented him in England to the prime minister, Lord Shelburne (who, he believed, still seems to have owned him ten years later). In Angola most slaves were obtained through kidnapping (by black middlemen); but razzias were common in the north, where such raids accompanied the consolidation of the Sokoto caliphate.
