by Hugh Thomas
Many of the slaves on the coast near the estuary of the Gambia, Willem Bosman wrote, were Brumbrongs and Petcharias, people who each have a different language, “and are brought from a great way inland. Their way of bringing them is, tying from each other, thirty or forty in a string, having generally a bundle of corn or an elephants tooth upon their heads. In their way from the mountains, they travel thro’ very great woods, where they cannot for some days get water, so they carry in skin-bags enough to support them for that time. . . . They use asses as well as slaves in carrying their goods, but no camels or horses.”29
A French officer, Meinhard Xavier Golbéry, traveled in Sénégal in the 1780s. Visiting twenty African peoples in the hope of extending French influence there, he described seeing “whole chains of captives arrived from all parts, at the market of the trade, and we were astonished to learn that many of these caravans of slaves did not arrive at Galam in the Sénégal . . . and at the factories of the rivers Sherbro, Gabon, Volta, Benin, and Zaire [Congo], before they had performed marches of sixty, seventy, and eighty days; and by calculating these routes, it was evident that they must have come from the most central regions of Africa. We may, therefore, be convinced,” he added, “that the interior of this continent is not so desert a place as has been long imagined. . . .”30
The costs of a slave on the coast would have to be shared by a multitude of people who would have to pay tolls, taxes, and so on en route, so that, quite possibly, the original enslaver, the kidnapper, or the original captor in a half-forgotten skirmish, might receive only 5 percent or so of the price obtained on the coast.
Wadström noted in Senegambia: “The unhappy captives, many of whom are people of distinction, such as princes, priests, and persons high in office, are conducted by the Mandingoes in drives of twenty, thirty, and forty, chained together either to Fort St Joseph on the river Sénégal or . . . to places near the river Gambia. . . . These Mandingoes perform the whole journey, except at certain seasons of the year when they are met by the traders belonging to the coast, who receive the slaves from them, and give them the usual articles of merchandise in exchange. . . . I was curious enough to wish to see some of those that had just arrived, [and] I applied to the director of the Company who conducted me to the slave prisons. I saw there the unfortunate captives, chained two and two together, by the foot. The mangled bodies of several of them, whose wounds were still bleeding, exhibited a most shocking spectacle. . . .”31
Portuguese pombeiros (usually mulattoes) entered the tropical forests to the east of Luanda and Benguela innumerable times, but none of them left an account. The only European to accompany an African slave caravan for any length of time, and to write of it, was Mungo Park. His heroic journey, to Segú, the capital of the Bambara, the great slave market, where he saw, on July 20, 1796, “with infinite pleasure . . . the long sought for, majestic, Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing eastward,” thereby correcting the geographical errors of centuries, needs no commemoration.III, 32
Park reported in 1799 (on behalf of the African Association, an initially scientific, latterly commercial body founded in 1788), that a typical slave coffle in the upper valley of the river Sénégal would spend about seven to eight hours on the road every day, and would start at daybreak, continuing till the early afternoon—before, that is, the worst heat of the day. An average march would be twenty miles a day in good circumstances. Some caravans would comprise a thousand slaves, which would necessitate several hundred porters and guards. The leader of the koffle, the saatigi, would be chosen by discussion.
Park wrote that the slaves whom he saw were usually secured by placing the right leg of one and the left leg of another into the same pair of fetters. If the fetters were connected by a string, these men could walk, though slowly. Every four slaves might also be fastened together by the necks, with a strong rope of twisted thongs and, at night additional fetters would be put on their hands. Sometimes, a chain would be passed round their necks. Those slaves who protested were imprisoned in a thick billet of wood about three feet long and, a smooth notch being made upon one side of it, the ankle of the slave was bolted to the smooth part by means of a strong staple, one ring of which was passed on each side of the ankle. All these fetters and bolts were made from African iron.
In some respects, the treatment of slaves was, Park thought, far from being harsh or cruel. They were led out in their fetters every morning to the shade of the tamarind tree, where they were encouraged to play games of chance, and asked to sing, to keep up their spirits. (Among the freemen accompanying the caravan were six singing men, whose musical talents were used both to divert the slaves and to obtain a welcome from strangers.) In the evening, the irons were examined and hand fetters put on; after which they were conducted to two large huts, where they were guarded during the night by domestic slaves of the coffle’s leader.
When Park and the coffle left the town of Kamalia, they were followed for about half a mile by most of the inhabitants of the town, some of them crying, and others shaking hands with relations who were about to leave them forever; and, when they had gained a piece of rising ground from which they had a view of the town, all the slaves were ordered to sit in one place, with their faces towards the west, and the townspeople were asked to sit down in another place, with their faces towards Kamalia. The schoolmaster pronounced a prayer. When this ceremony was ended, all the people belonging to the coffle sprang up and, without taking formal farewell of their friends, set off. Since many of the slaves had remained for years in irons, the sudden exertion of walking quickly, with heavy loads upon their legs, occasioned spasmodic contractions of those limbs, and the procession of slaves had not journeyed a mile before it was found necessary to detach two of them from the rope and allow them to walk more slowly.
Bala was the first town beyond the limits of the Mandingo kingdom. The slaves marched towards the town in a procession. In front walked the singing men, and they were followed by other free people. Then came the slaves, fastened, in the usual way, by a rope round their necks, four of them to a rope, and a man with a spear between each two groups of four. After them came the domestic slaves and, in the rear, the free women. In this way, they walked until they came within a hundred yards of the gate of the town. Here the singing men began to chant loudly, intending to flatter the vanity of the inhabitants by extolling their well-known hospitality to strangers and their particular friendship for the Mandingos. When they entered the town, the procession went to the center of the place, where the people gathered round the coffle to hear its history. This was related by two of the singing men. They related every circumstance which had befallen the coffle. When that account was ended, the chief of the town gave the leaders a small present, and all the people of the coffle, both free and enslaved, were invited home by some person or other and accommodated for the night.
The next town which they approached was Koba. Before they entered it, the names of the people belonging to the coffle were called over, and one freeman and three slaves were found to be missing. All presumed that the slaves had murdered the freeman and escaped. It was, therefore, agreed that six people would go back to the last village, both to find the body and to collect news of the slaves. The remaining slaves waited, lying down in a cotton field, all forbidden to speak except in a whisper.
Towards morning, the six men returned, having heard nothing of the missing man or the slaves. Since no one had eaten for the last twenty-four hours, it was agreed that the expedition should continue to Koba and seek provisions. They accordingly entered the town before daylight, and the leader bought food, in the form of groundnuts, which they roasted and ate for breakfast. About eleven o’clock, the freeman and slaves who seemed to have deserted the coffle entered the town. One of the slaves, it appeared, had hurt his foot. . . .
The expedition was later joined by some Serawoolli traders. A slave dropped a load from his head, for which he was whipped. The load was rep
laced; but the slave had not gone more than a mile before he let it fall a second time, for which he received the same punishment. After this, he traveled in great pain. The day being remarkably hot, he became exhausted, so that his master was obliged to release him from the rope, for he lay motionless upon the ground. A Serawoolli, therefore, undertook to remain with him and try to bring him to town during the cool of the night. About eight o’clock the same evening, the Serawoolli returned and said that the slave was dead. The general opinion was that the Serawoolli had killed him, or left him to perish on the road: the Serawoollis were known to be more cruel to slaves than the Mandingo were.
At about ten o’clock the next morning, the coffle met another one of some twenty-six people and seven loaded donkeys; the people explained that they were returning from the valley of the river Gambia, which was not far away. Most of the men in the new coffle were armed with muskets, and several wore broad belts of scarlet cloth, no doubt from Manchester, over their shoulders, with European hats on their heads. These men explained that there was little demand for slaves on the coast, for no trading vessel had arrived for some months past. On hearing this, the Serawoollis separated themselves and their slaves from the coffle. They could not, they said, maintain their slaves in the estuary of the Gambia until a vessel arrived, and were unwilling to sell their captives at a loss. They therefore left for the north towards the Sénégal. . . . Park with his group continued on his way through the wilderness, and traveled through a rugged country covered with extensive thickets of bamboo.
One of the slaves belonging to the coffle who had traveled with great difficulty for the previous three days was found unable to continue. His master, a singing man, proposed to exchange him for a young slave girl belonging to one of the townspeople at the next village. The girl concerned was ignorant of her fate until all the bundles carried by the slaves were tied up in the morning and the expedition was ready to depart. Then, coming with some other girls to see the coffle set out, her master took her by the hand and delivered her to the singing man. “Never,” said Park, “was a face of serenity more suddenly changed into one of the deepest distress. The terror which she manifested on having the load put upon her head and the rope fastened round her neck, and the sorrow with which she bade adieu to her companions, were truly affecting.”
Park wrote that he parted for the last time with “my unfortunate fellow travellers, doomed as I knew most of them to be to a life of captivity and slavery in a foreign land,” with great emotion. “During a wearisome peregrination of more than five hundred British miles, exposed to the burning rays of a tropical sun, these poor slaves, amidst their own infinitely greater sufferings, would commiserate mine; and frequently, of their own accord, bring water to quench my thirst and, at night, collect branches and leaves to prepare me a bed in the wilderness.”33
When slaves came from the far interior, as they so often did, the long journey to the coast weakened the captives terribly; many died from shortage of food, exhaustion, exposure, as well as dysentery or other diseases. Raymond Jalamá, a merchant of Luanda, estimated, in the late eighteenth century, that nearly half of the captives might be lost through either flight or death between the moment of capture and arrival at the sea.34 Whatever the truth of the matter, as a modern historian points out with respect to Angola, where either warfare or kidnapping caused the initial capture, “the victims would have begun their odysseys [across the Atlantic] in exhausted, shaken, and perhaps wounded physical condition.”
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ISee page 47.
IIOne specialty remained a characteristic of the Muslim slave trade, which did not occur in its sister commerce of the Atlantic: a continuing interest in eunuchs, to guard the harems of the monarchies of Africa and the Ottoman empire. Some eunuchs became civil servants. The gelding of fully grown young men was a normal practice in the western Sudan, even though, unless the surgeon was a member of the reputedly skilled Mossi tribe (who inhabited what is now Upper Volta and northern Ghana), the loss in life was considerable.
IIIIt was not commemorated at all on July 20, 1996, at a time when many far less important discoveries were amply recalled.
20
The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair
“[Slaves] of the blackest sort with short curled hair and none of the tawny sort with straight hair.”
Instruction to English captains trading with Madagascar as to what the Spanish buyers wanted
THE PATTERN of European trading in Africa was early set by the Portuguese, before the end of the fifteenth century. Captains sailing down the coast of West Africa would expect to stop at numerous ports, where they would go ashore with their interpreter (perhaps brought from Lisbon or the Cape Verde Islands) and, observed by a notary, bargain with the local ruler for the slaves whom he would be offering. From early on, the Portuguese would often have the benefit of being able to use the services of the lançados (or tangos-mãos), expatriates who would often gather slaves together before the ships arrived. This was done on a regular basis at Arguin and in São Tomé and, afterwards, on a far larger scale, in Angola.
Still, there were many variations to this classic pattern of negotiations. West Africa was not a single nation, and the idea of it even as a continent seems inadequate.
Also from early on, different Europeans had set up their regular establishments in Africa. The Dutch, the English, and then the French had their trading places, especially in the region of the rivers Sénégal and Gambia and on the Gold Coast. Those forward-looking peoples were, as we have seen, followed by the Danes, the Swedes, and the Brandenburgers. Yet the purchase of many slaves, perhaps most, continued to be negotiated between a captain on a ship and an African trader in an estuary.
Most of the slaves bought by Europeans over the centuries were sold by kings, nobles, or their agents; but there were always small traders, selling slaves in twos or threes. The negotiation would often be conducted on the monarch’s behalf by a special official—for example, the mafouk, as he was known in Loango. Many African kings required a tax of, say, 120 iron bars before giving permission for the ship to start slaving. In the 1730s, the king of Barra, “a truculent monarch of the Mandingo people,” demanded a salute from all who entered and left his river; the same was required by the maloango in Loango. The king of Allada would insist that the first slaves bought were slaves he himself owned; thereafter his colleagues would expect to have priority. The ceremony of entering negotiations for purchase was always, and everywhere, complex, even if the captain of the slave ship had been to the same place before, and had previously experienced, say, the dropping of a little salt water into his eye, or the taking of it into his mouth and spitting it out—which gesture had, in Sierra Leone, to be answered in the same way, or else no trade would follow. In Angola the style of purchase was different from that in “Guinea.” In the former, the mafouk and some “courtiers” would usually come on board the slaver to arrange matters, drink a little eau de vie, receive a present—a dache,I in the form of a cloak, some silk, a barrel of eau de vie, or perhaps some handkerchiefs and sheets. James Barbot, buying 648 slaves in the river Calabar in 1699 as part-owner and supercargo of the Sun of Africa, recalled giving the king a hat, a firelock, and nine strings of beads. To other courtiers he gave hats, fishhooks, and textiles.
There were many other variations in the details of the traffic. Thus, in the early days of the trade in Loango, business was conducted in two stages. First, the Portuguese would exchange their goods, their cloths or their brandy, their trinkets or their beads, for palm cloth—sometimes the best “painted cloths,” either dyed or with colored strands woven into it, sometimes second-quality songa, or even cheap cloth, obtained from the peoples of the forested north of the Congo. The exchanges would be effected by pombeiros. These cloths, used as clothing as well as currency, would then be exchanged for slaves.
Each of the European peoples had their eccentricities, too: Willem Bosman reported, of his fellow countrymen the Dutch, that s
ome of their traders seemed “utterly ignorant of the manners of the people [and] don’t know how to treat them with that decency which they require.” Yet he also wrote: “The first business of one of our factors [of the Dutch East India Company] when he comes to Fida [Whydah] is to satisfy the customs of the King and the great men, which amounts to about 100 pounds in Guinea value. . . . After which, we have free license to trade, which is published throughout the land by the crier. But yet before we can deal with any person, we are obliged to buy the King’s whole stock of slaves at a set price . . . commonly one third, or one fourth higher than ordinary. After which, we have free license to deal with all his subjects of what rank soever.”1
Thomas Phillips, commander of the Hannibal, of London, described how, having traded all along the Gold Coast, he was eventually received in 1693 at Whydah: “As soon as the King understood of our landing, he sent two of his . . . noblemen to compliment us at our factory where we designed to continue that night and pay our devoirs to His Majesty next day . . . whereupon, he sent two more of his grandees to invite us there that night, saying that he waited for us and that all former captains used to attend him the first night . . . whereupon we took our hammocks, and Mr Pierson [the factor], myself, Captain Clay [commander of the vessel East-India Merchant], our surgeons, pursers, and about twelve men, armed, for our guard, were carried to the King’s town which contains about fifty houses. . . .”2
Phillips assured the king of Whydah that the Royal Africa Company of England had much respect for him, for his civility, and his fair and just dealings with their captains; and that, notwithstanding there were many other places that begged their custom, they had rejected all of them out of good will to him, and therefore sent him and Captain Clay to trade with him and to supply his country with what he needed. The king replied “that the African Company was [obviously] a very good brave man, that he loved him, that we should be fairly dealt with and not imposed on. . . . After examining us about our cargo, what sort of goods we had, and what quantity of slaves we wanted etc., we took our leaves and return’d to the factory, having promised to come in the morning to make our palavera [agreement] . . . about prices.”
