by Hugh Thomas
Occasionally, kings of Africa would resort to raids among their own people so as to satisfy the European demand for slaves, but this was unusual: had it not been through such a practice that the Akwamu empire had collapsed? All the same, in the 1730s, a king on the river Saalum, between Cape Verde and Gambia, often attacked his own villages at night, set fire to the houses, and seized the escaping residents for slaves; the Ashanti kings Kusi Obudum and Osei Kodwo, in the 1760s, also permitted the defeated King Ebicram to raid their dependent cities in regions of Akwapim and Accra.
Kidnapping by merchants or individuals was a “general way of procuring single slaves,” in the words of Wadström. The consequence was that, if people had to travel at all, they traveled in large, and armed, groups. Wadström explained: “Every town having their own cabiceers or ruling men . . . [are] all so jealous of the others’ panyarring [that is, kidnapping] that they never care to walk even a mile or two from home without firearms; each knows it is their [own] villainies and robberies upon one another that enables them to carry out a slave trade with Europeans; and, as the strength fluctuates, it is not infrequent for him who sells you slaves to-day to be a few days hence sold himself at some neighbouring town. . . .”15
Children were almost always left with neighbors if their parents were away, and many of them spent numerous hours sitting in trees watching for kidnappers. Olaudah Equiano, a slave from the region of the Gambia, and one of the very few who lived to describe their experience of the trade, explained: “Generally, when the grown people in the neighbourhood were gone far in the fields to labour, the children assembled together in some of the neighbours’ premises to play; and, commonly, some of us used to get up a tree to look out for an assaillant or kidnapper. . . . One day, as I was watching at the top of a tree in our yard, I saw one of those people come into the yard of our next neighbour but one, to kidnap, there being many stout young people in it. Immediately . . . I gave the alarm of the rogue, and he was surrounded . . . so that he could not escape till some of the grown people came and secured him. But . . . one day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls and, in a moment, seized us both and, without giving us time to cry out, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands and continued to carry us as far as they could.” Equiano explained that, when they reached a neighborhood which he recognized, he tried to cry out, whereupon his captors put him in a sack. He was soon separated from his sister, and sold to an African chief, who was reasonably kind. He escaped from him, returned home, was captured again, resold, and subsequently sold again to people who sold him to the English.16
Wadström described how this “pillage” was “practised by individuals who, tempted by the merchandise brought by the Europeans, lie in wait for one another. For this purpose, they beset the roads, so that a travelling negro can hardly ever escape them. . . . A Moor [a Muslim] seized a negro and . . . brought him to Sénégal and sold him to the [French Sénégal] company. A few days afterwards, this Moor was himself taken by some negroes in the same manner and brought to be sold in his turn. The Company [of Sénégal] seldom buy Moors: but, as they were obliged, in consequence of their privileges, to supply the colony of Cayenne with a certain number of slaves, and as several ships then in the road . . . could not complete their cargoes, they made the less scruple to buy him. . . . Chance so directed that the Moor, after he had been purchased, was carried on board the same ship in which the negro lay. They no sooner met than a quarrel took place between them, which occasioned for some days a great tumult in the vessel. Such encounters frequently happen on slave ships,” added the Swede, “and the uproars occasioned are seldom or never quieted, till some mischief has been done.”17
Willem Bosman, speaking from forty years’ experience on the African coast, wrote in the early eighteenth century that “nine parts in ten of the slaves are of other countries.”18 That comment suggested that the tenth part would have been obtained from the people who were doing the selling. There were two possibilities: either that the slaves became so as a result of being enslaved as a punishment; or that they were sold as slaves because of the poverty of their parents. Sir George Young thought that punishment was, indeed, the second-most-usual way of making slaves available. Judicial enslavement was certainly frequent in Angola. Debtors, murderers, and adulterers were also often punished in West African societies by being sold into slavery. Sometimes, the most minor offenses were so punished: “Every trifling crime is punish’d in the same manner,” wrote Francis Moore of the RAC in the 1730s. Insolvency was sometimes treated in the same way. The mere existence of the Atlantic slave trade, Moore thought, meant that more and more offenses were punished by slavery and, there being an advantage to such condemnations, “they strain for crimes very hard, in order to sell into slavery. . . . In Cantor [on the Gambia] a man seeing a tiger [presumably a lion] eating a deer which he had killed and hung up near his house fired at the tiger and the bullet killed a man; the King not only condemned him, but also his Mother, three brothers and three sisters to be sold. . . .”19
Bonny, on the way to becoming the largest slave market in the delta of the Niger at the end of the eighteenth century, was usually provided with slaves in consequence of fines levied by the oracle Chukwu. These slaves were demanded from convicted individuals or even families. It was then said that the oracle had eaten them. In fact, they were passed to the merchants on the coast by the Aro priests—a clerical commitment which was certainly not excelled by the Jesuits. Votaries who consulted the oracle, and whose questions were thought to be stupid, were also sometimes seized as slaves, an unusual treatment of folly. It has been suggested, perhaps with exaggeration, that more than half the slaves from the delta ports passed through this medium.
Sale as a slave was a frequent punishment in all parts of Africa for repeated theft. Kidnapping another for purposes of sale was also often rewarded by being enslaved oneself. Adultery by a woman, or by a man if he were to seduce a wife of an important man, could also lead to enslavement. In 1821, an Efik was sold at Calabar for “ravishing his father’s wives.” Oddities were also often sold into slavery: twins, the mothers of twins, children with deformities, even girls who menstruated before the expected age.
Thomas Poplett, of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in Gorée during its control by the British during the Seven Years’ War, reported that very often slaves in his neighborhood were supplied by villages in the region of the Sénégal in default of tribute: “To furnish the revenues . . . every village pays a regular custom to the King. . . . This . . . is paid in slaves, powder, shot, brandy, tobacco and other merchandise brought from Europe; when this custom is not paid regularly, the King gives notice to pay it and, if not then paid within a certain time, he comes down with a force, and breaks the village; that is, he takes a great number of the inhabitants prisoners, whom he detains for some time; if the duties are paid, he restores the prisoners; if not, they are sold as slaves.” Captain Phillips recalled in 1694 that 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. . . .”20
The sale of children sometimes occurred when a family had nothing to eat. The children might be pawned. Domestic slaves might also be sold: indeed, in the 1850s, 30 percent of Sigismund Koelle’s informants had been domestics before they were sold by masters.
The Europeans kidnapped some Africans. But most European traders, especially if working for a great national company such as the RAC, were always determined to keep on good terms with the Africans and, therefore, to avoid random kidnapping, which would deprive the African trader of his payment; but the “separate traders,” the interlopers, men from Nantes or Bristol in the early eighteenth century, “had little concern for the future in comparison with their desire for immediate profit,” and so sometimes brok
e the rules. Sometimes those who kidnapped came to grief: Dr. Wadström described how, on the island of Gorée, the captain of an English ship, which had been for some time on the river Gambia, enticed several natives on board and then sailed away with them. “His vessel was . . . driven back to the coast from which it set sail, and was obliged to cast anchor on the very spot where this act of treachery had been committed. At this time, two other English vessels were lying in the same river. The natives, ever since the transaction, had determined to retaliate. . . . They accordingly boarded the three vessels and, having made themselves masters of them, killed most of their crews. The few who escaped to tell the tale were obliged to take refuge in a neighbouring French factory.”21
In general, therefore, experienced slave traders from Europe avoided seizing Africans without negotiation and payment, because such a practice damaged future prospects. But this prudent self-denial did not apply to the lançados, those interesting Afro-Portuguese settlers whose families had lived in the estuaries of the rivers of Guinea for three centuries. They conducted themselves as if they were Africans and raided coasts for slaves in the region of Bissau or Cacheu. Captain Towerson, the first English trader to go to the Gold Coast, was told by the king of Shama in the 1550s that “the Portugals were bad men and . . . they made them [the Africans] slaves if they could take them.”22
Yet Europeans always obtained a few slaves by “stealing” them. In 1702, the Africans near Cape Mesurado complained to Willem Bosman of the Dutch West India Company that “the English had been there, with two large vessels and had ravaged the country, destroyed all their canoes, plundered their houses, and carried off some of their people as slaves.”23 In 1716, the monarch of Fooni received five men from the RAC’s chief agent on the river Gambia, whose mission was to “take a place up the river named Geogray and to ‘panyar’ [kidnap] the people and make them slaves.”24 Two years later, Bennet, the RAC’s man at Commenda, on the Gold Coast, was accused of encouraging his gunner, an African, to seize black girls and boys in order to sell them to English captains. John Douglas, on the Warwick Castle, a slave ship, reported that he went ashore at Bonny in 1771 and “saw a young woman come out of the wood to the waterside to bathe; afterwards, I saw two men come out of the wood who seized the woman, secured her hands behind her back, beat her and ill-used her, on account of the resistance she made, and brought her down to me, and desired me to put her on board, which I did; for it was the captain’s orders to the ship’s company whenever anybody came down with slaves, instantly to put them on board the ship.” Richard Drake, a garrulous captain of the nineteenth century, wrote that on the first ship on which he served, about 1805, Captain Fraley of Bristol usually conducted his trade by barter, “but he also organised hunting expeditions on his own account . . . on the small rivers which emptied into the Gambia. . . . It was customary for parties of sailors and coast blacks to lie in wait near the streams and little villages, and seize the stragglers by twos and threes when they were fishing or cultivating their patches of corn.”25 General Rooke, in command at Gorée when it was in British hands after the Seven Years’ War, told the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1790 that, when about 150 Africans came to greet him as governor, three English slave captains suggested that they should carry them all off to the West Indies, asserting that every previous governor would have accepted the idea straightaway.
Still, there was always a sense, let us say, of priorities among slave traders. Francis Moore explained that, besides the slaves whom the merchants brought down from the interior, many were bought along the river Gambia: “These are either taken in war, as the former are, or else men condemned for crimes, or else people stolen, which is very frequent. . . . The Company’s servants never buy any of the last if they suspect it, without sending for the alcalde or chief man of the place, and consulting with them about the matter.” In 1765, Captain Charles Thomas, who had taken the Black Prince directly from Virginia to Guinea, was furious at the suggestion that he “clandestinely carried off by force several free men from the coast of Africa. . . . It gives me much concern that I should be accused of an action which I should condemn in another.”26
• • •
Fairs where slaves could be bought and sold, and which were available to the coastal peoples, thrived long before the coming of the Europeans to the coast of Africa. The large markets of Senegambia, for instance, included Bambuhu, Khasso, Segú, and Bambarena. In the late eighteenth century, near the last-named, the local ruler maintained and guarded something like a slave village, where captives could be held until they were able to be sold. Sometimes, naturally, slaves were born in these villages; and Mungo Park, the redoubtable botanist and son of a farmer on the duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Fowleshiels near Selkirk who traveled in the region in the 1790s, thought that the African merchants preferred those who had been brought up in such circumstances since, never having known freedom, they did not think of running away.
In this so-called western Sudan, most slave traders in the eighteenth century were Muslims. Islam, of course, still prohibited the enslavement of its own devotees, but blessed that of pagans by Muslims. By about 1780, most of the Muslim states in the interior depended on slave labor. There were slaves in households, in workshops, in the fields, in the harems (as eunuchs and as concubines), in the civil services, and in the armies. Some slaves rose to high positions, as they had done under Rome or in Muslim Spain, though even privileged slaves always risked injustice at the whim of their masters. Kings and noblemen lived by slave raiding and slave trading. If there had been no slaves, women would have had to work, and so would not have been kept in seclusion. That would have been a serious crime according to the Koran and would, indeed, risk hell-fire for the criminal.II
Slaves in the Muslim world had some undoubted advantages. They alone were socially mobile in the society concerned. Transport in a slave coffle was a terrible experience but, once settled, slaves could make a life for themselves better than they generally could in the Americas. Household slaves were always, not just occasionally, treated as members of the family. Slaves in slave villages would usually have their own plots on which they could grow plants. Though there was always a legal distinction between a freeman and a slave, there was little economic or social difference. Slaves could even own slaves, and some slaves also participated in slaving expeditions. None of this affected the Atlantic slave trade directly, but the presence in the African interior of a vast slave society encouraged coastal monarchies, whether or not they were Muslims, in their own slaving activities.
Thus, in the far interior of what is now Nigeria, there were many markets (including some full-scale fairs) where slaves were sold and bought. For example, just below the confluence of the rivers Niger and Benue, near Igala, the capital of Idah, there was an important island market at which eleven thousand slaves were sold a year—three hundred a session. These markets might serve the Atlantic slave trade, or the trade to the Muslim north, or both.
Of markets such as these, Mungo Park would write: “There are indeed regular markets, where . . . the value of a slave in the eye of an African purchaser, increases in proportion to his distance from his native kingdom. . . .” For that purpose, the slave was frequently transferred from one dealer to another, until he lost all hopes of returning to his native kingdom.
The slaves purchased by the Europeans on the coasts were, Park thought, usually of this description: “When a free man is taken prisoner, his friends will sometimes ransom him by giving two slaves in exchange; but, when a slave is taken, he has no hopes of redemption. . . . The slaves which Karfa [an African trader who befriended Park] brought with him were all of them prisoners of war. . . . Eleven of them confessed that they had been slaves from their infancy; but the other two refused to give any account of their former condition.” They were all very inquisitive; and they viewed Park with looks of horror, and repeatedly asked if his countrymen were cannibals. “They were very desirous to know what became of the slav
es after they had crossed the salt water. I told them that they were employed in cultivating the land; but they would not believe me; and one of them, putting his hand on the ground, said to me . . . ‘have you really got such ground as this to set your feet upon?’ ”27
From these internal markets, the slaves would be marched under guard, in coffles, of about a hundred people, to the ports. The slaves would often be chained together in twos or threes, and sometimes they were forced to carry goods (water, sorghum, ivory, wax, hides) or even stones on their heads in order to discourage them from trying to escape.
Slaves were, of course, harshly treated in Africa before they were bought by Europeans. Barbot reported how most of them were “severely and barbarously treated by their masters, who subsist them poorly, and beat them inhumanely, as may be seen by the scabs and wounds on the bodies of many of them when sold to us. They scarcely allow them the least rag to cover their nakedness, which they take off them when sold to Europeans; and they always go bare-headed. . . . When dead, they never bury them, but cast out their bodies into some place, to be devoured by birds, or beasts of prey.”28
Both the RAC and Barbot, like all Europeans, were, admittedly, at the mercy of wild stories: and Africans who sold the captives would give out that, in the interior of the continent, “there were cruel, and ferocious, irreconcilable enemies who drank human blood and ate their prisoners . . .” Such exaggerations were put about by merchants who transported their slaves by means of the yoke of a so-called bois mayombé, by which, if the slave pulled, the supervisor could tug and choke, even strangle, the slave. They did not want European inquiries into any of their activities.
