by Hugh Thomas
The truth is that, though a drop in population may have been caused by the sustained trade in slaves, a fertile population would have added as many as, or more than, it lost in the slave trade as a result of normal reproduction. Most statistics suggest that females, after all, constituted only a third of the slaves transported, even if most of them probably were of childbearing age. A fast-growing population might even have found relief from the inevitable pressure on resources through the export of some of its members. If, as seems possible, the population of West Africa in the early eighteenth century was about twenty-five million, enjoying a rate of growth of, say, seventeen per thousand, the effect of the export slave trade (say, 0.2 percent of the population a year) would merely have been to check the growth in population, since the rate of slave exports and that of natural increase would have been more or less the same. The introduction of those two wonderful crops, maize and manioc, also did something to compensate Africa for whatever loss it suffered in population by being implicated in the Atlantic slave trade.
There were some obvious political effects. One was to strengthen those monarchies or other entities which collaborated with the Europeans, above all, naturally, the coastal kings; and the riches obtained from the sale of slaves enabled some rulers to extend their political, as well as their commercial, activities into the interior. The growth of the slave trade clearly helped some states, such as Dahomey, to expand and consolidate themselves. But Benin avoided the trade and also matured as a state. The slave trade must have encouraged African monarchies not just to go to war (they had always done that) but to capture more prisoners than before, and to substitute capture for killing in battle. Dispersed coastal communities often experienced, as a result of the slave trade, territorial growth, political centralization, and commercial specialization. That may have been a consequence of European traders’ desire to gather an entire cargo from a single port. Thus the city of New Calabar vigorously developed its own version of monarchy. By 1750, the Efik had excluded all other Africans from contacts with the Europeans, and their political leader (Duke Ephraim, of Duke Town, in the nineteenth century) had political control over all the local slave trade, dominating his city without being formally a ruler, much as the Medici had done in Florence. But Calabar was a tiny city-state considered against the powerful internal empires, even if it was important in the coastal slave trade; and those empires, from the Songhai to the Oyo, not forgetting the Vili in Loango or the Congo and the various monarchies in what is now Angola, seem to have risen and declined without being decisively affected by the Atlantic commerce.
The effects on the African economy, apart from the matter of population, were also diverse. One was to stimulate the idea of a currency: thus cowries became a general trading currency in the Niger Delta, displacing old iron currencies there, while European-made iron bars, copper rods, and brass manillas also played a part. Yet cowries were increasing in circulation in “Guinea” before the doom-laden Portuguese caravels first drew inshore.
One effect on coastal African agriculture was to stimulate the growth of rice, yams, and later manioc and maize, and even the development of cattle, to provide the slave ships or the slave prisons—the “captiveries,” as the French customarily described them—with at least a modicum of food while the captives were awaiting embarkment. The success of slaving as a commercial proposition also implied that many older business—such as the trade in palm oil, gum, cattle, kola nuts, even ivory—diminished. Only gold remained an effective competitor to the slave trade. But all those other things survived, especially the first, to be revived in the nineteenth century.
The entrepreneurial spirit of Africa must have been stimulated by the Atlantic slave trade. Most European captains came to realize that their negotiating partners knew as much about European practices as the Europeans knew of them. The era of the trade also saw a great expansion of fairs, and an expansion too of the overall level of trade, in which the traffic in slaves formed only a part. Africans involved in the trade, however, benefited greatly. Some of that wealth was creatively used locally. The prosperity of the entrepôts stimulated employment; and the trade necessitated large numbers of porters, canoemen, and guards at every port along the West African coast.
It is also interesting to speculate on the effects of the imports deriving from the sale of slaves. The slave-trading peoples chose carefully the goods which they exchanged for slaves, and so slave ships had often to be floating general stores, for a European trader would look foolish if he arrived off Loango, say, with a supply of brandy when a previous ship had sold all that the ruler or the merchants concerned needed at that time.
As has been repeatedly noticed, the item most commonly exchanged for slaves was cloth. The import of woolens and cottons did not inspire a tailoring industry, because most Africans liked to wear those European goods untailored, wrapping the cloths round them. But local spinning, weaving, and dyeing did not as a rule suffer. The production of African woolen cloth even appears to have expanded in many places. Despite the apparent abundance of imports, foreign cloth remained rare enough in the hinterland of, say, southeastern Nigeria not to compete with traditional local products either in price or quality.
The most interesting aspect of the slave trade is that, during the five hundred years of constant contact between the Africans and the Europeans, the former did not develop further in imitation of the latter. The reluctance of Africans to Europeanize themselves can be presented as a weakness. But it is more likely to be explained by some innate strength of the African personality which, however close the political or commercial relation with the foreigner, remains impervious to external influence.
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Some priests or monks from the sixteenth century onwards were always critical of the revival of slavery in Europe and there was also some unease among Protestants. The saintly conduct of Fray Pedro Claver on the quays of Cartagena de Indias deserves more extended recognition. But his and other denunciations were voices crying in the wilderness and, once countries such as England had begun to trade Africans, there was little effective opposition until the late eighteenth century. The abolition movement which arose then was the consequence, first, of the diffusion of ideas made possible by the pamphlet and the book operating in conditions free of censorship, as was possible in Britain and North America, and to a lesser extent in France; and second, the conversion to abolition of one Protestant sect, the Quakers, who had participated in the trade, and so knew exactly what it was they were against. It must be doubtful whether abolition would have carried the day when it did had it not been for the Quaker movement’s capacity for organizing first their members and then others.
The determined efforts of philanthropists, in France, North America, and Britain, and later in Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere, working through the press, parliaments, and diplomacy, at all events eventually achieved the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery in the Americas, so paving the way for the beginning at least of the abolition of slavery and the traffic in Africa. Experience of what occurred between 1808 and 1860 suggests that the end of the slave trade came not because, as the French historian Claude Meillassoux put it, “slavery as a means of production hindered agrarian and industrial growth,” but because of the work of individuals, with writers such as Montesquieu playing an essential part. Thomas Clarkson and Wilberforce in England, Benezet and Moses Brown in the United States, and Benjamin Constant and other friends and relations of Madame de Staël in France, were the heroes. The effectiveness of Louis Philippe’s first government, in particular of the Minister of the Navy, Count Argout, showed that a determined leader could do much. Antillón, who first spoke against the slave trade in Spain in 1802 and who may have been murdered for repeating his views in Cádiz in 1811, should not be forgotten. Other Spanish abolitionists such as Labra and Vizcarrando should have their places in the Pantheon. Nelson Mandela, during his visit to the British Parliament in 1995, recalled the name of Wilberforce. He might hav
e mentioned others, not to speak of the British West Africa Squadron. In Brazil, Dom Pedro’s opposition to the slave trade was continuous and the role of several statesmen there (culminating in Soares de Souza) should be remembered in Angola.
No French, North American, or Spanish abolitionist would have accepted the famous judgment of the nineteenth-century Irish historian Lecky when he remarked: “The unweary, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.” British arrogance and aggressive pleasure in intervening in the commerce of other countries made the British navy’s conduct hard to forgive, as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and even Gladstone pointed out. All the same, the British led the way to abolition, in a way which surely compensates for the high-handedness.
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Any historian of the slave trade is conscious of a large gap in his information. The slave himself is a silent participant in the account. One may pick the slave out of a seventeenth-century engraving of Benin, let us say, in one of the many handsome illustrations to the famous travelogue of Jean Barbot. One learns a little of a few slaves in the reports of Eustache de Fosse in the fifteenth century or de Marees in the sixteenth; the sieur de la Courbe Barbot, or Bosman in the seventeenth, or, let us say, Alexander Falconbridge or Captain Landolphe, among innumerable memoirs, in the eighteenth. Pío Baroja, a great Spanish writer, has vividly depicted the life of nineteenth-century slave captains in fiction. In the nineteenth century, there are the splendid designs of Rugendas, some of them reproduced in the book. He may find a few direct testimonies of slaves from the late eighteenth or the nineteenth century. Some of these are mentioned in appendix 1. The best of these is probably the memorable work of Equiano, several times cited. But how pitifully small is the material! Nor has the historian any means of knowing whether those few spokesmen speak for the captives whose fate he has followed as best he can over five centuries. For the slave remains an unknown warrior invoked by moralists on both sides of the Atlantic, recalled now in museums in onetime slave ports from Liverpool to Elmina, but all the same unspeaking, and therefore remote and elusive. Like slaves in antiquity, African slaves suffered but the character of their distress may be more easily conveyed by novelists such as Mérimée than chronicled by a historian. Perhaps, though, the dignity, patience, and gaiety of the African in the New World is the best of all memorials.
* * *
II The brotherhood seems now to be entirely white, but it was black until the eighteenth century.
III See page 113.
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX ONE
Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale
A TINY MINORITY of the captives consigned to the slave ships can be identified, and most of those who can were slaves of the late eighteenth or the nineteenth century: men (there seem to have been no women) who gave evidence in inquiries in London, or who were talked to by missionaries, or proto-anthropologists, in Sierra Leone. There were men who, like the hero of Mérimée’s Tamoango, or the resolute Tambo, directed rebellions severe or successful enough to remain in the mind of the négriers. There were African kings or queens whose adaptation to life as a slave in Jamaica has been chronicled or, at least, as in the case of the mother of King Gezo of Dahomey, not forgotten. With respect to the vast slave market of Brazil, there are few accounts, and nearly all from the nineteenth century: for example, that of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, sold in Pernambuco and taken to Rio, who, after numerous attempts to escape in Brazil, found freedom by jumping ship in New York.
Few slave journeys had happy endings. But there were some. The extraordinary case of Equiano has been mentioned several times in this book. But there was also the curious instance of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a Fulbe, known to Europeans as Job Ben Solomon, son of a mullah of Bondu, a town high up a tributary of the river Sénégal. In 1730, he set out to sell some slaves on the river Gambia. He was robbed, captured, and himself sold by non-Muslims at Joar, a city lower down that waterway, to Captain Pike of the Arabella, an English slave ship, which carried him to Maryland. There he lived as a slave for a year with Vachell Denton of Annapolis, an amiable master, who sold him to a Mr. Tolsey, who had a tobacco plantation on Kent Island, in the Potomac River. Ben Solomon eventually sent a letter in Arabic to his father in Africa via London, where James Oglethorpe, then a director of the Royal African Company, and about to embark on the establishment of Georgia as a penal colony, sent that letter to Oxford to be translated. He also sent to Maryland for Job. Once in England, Job was employed by Sir Hans Sloane, the benign botanist and cofounder of the British Museum, who had spent his youth in Jamaica (hence his Catalogue of Jamaica Plants) and who was, at that time, president of the Royal Society. (He was also, like Oglethorpe, a promoter of Georgia.) Sloane found not only that Job was a master of Arabic but that he knew much of the Koran by heart. Either Sir Hans or the duke of Montagu, a noted Afrophile and practical joker, introduced him at Court. After living in London fourteen months, Job returned to Africa, taking with him presents from Queen Caroline and the duke of Cumberland. In a subsequent letter to Mr. Smith, writing master at Saint Paul’s School, Job described how he returned to Bondu and “how elevated and amazed they [his old friends] were at my arrival, I must leave you to guess at, as being inexpressible, as is likewise the raptures and pleasures I enjoyed. Floods of tears burst their way and some little time afterwards, we recovered so as to have some discourse and in time I acquainted them and all the country how I had been redeemed and conducted by the Company from such distant parts as are beyond their capacity to conceive, from Maryland to England and from thence to Gambia first. . . . The favours done to me by the queen, the duke of Montagu and other generous persons I likewise acquainted them of.”
One day, some years after his homecoming, Job was sitting under a tree at Damasensa, not far from Elephants Island, on the river Gambia, with the English slave captain Francis Moore (whose acute memories have been quoted several times), when he saw several of the men who had captured him three years before. Moore persuaded him not to kill them, but instead to ask questions. They said that the king, their master, had killed himself by mistake by letting off one of the pistols which Captain Pike had given him in return for Job. Job then gave thanks (to Allah, of course), for causing that king to die by means of the very goods in return for which he had been sold into slavery. He later admitted, though, that, had the king lived, he would have forgiven him, “because, had I not been sold, I should neither have known . . . the English tongue, nor had any of the fine useful and valuable things I now carry over, nor have known that there is in the world such a place as England, nor such noble, generous people as Queen Caroline, Prince William [the duke of Cumberland], the duke of Montagu, the earl of Pembroke, Mr Holden, Mr Oglethorpe, and the Royal Africa Company.”
Job was not the only slave to return from captivity in the Americas. In 1695, for example, a Dutch interloper, Captain Frans van Goethem, captured a Sonyo prince. The African traders in the Sonyo region (Angola) thereafter made trade impossible until that captive was returned. The Dutch West India Company found the slave, and sent him back from Surinam, via Holland.
Then Jean Barbot described how a certain Emanuel, governor of a large town, explained that his king had once sold him “for a slave to a Dutch captain who, finding me a good servant in his passage to the West Indies, . . . carried me with him into Holland, where I soon learnt to speak good Dutch and, after some years, he set me free. I went from Holland into France, where I soon got as much of that language as you hear by me. Thence I proceeded to Portugal, which language I made myself master of with more ease than either the French or Dutch. Having spent several years in travelling through Europe, I resolved to return to my native country, and laid hold of the first opportunity which offered. When I arrived here, I immediately waited on the King . . . and, having related my travels . . . , added I was come back to him, to put himself into his hands, as
his slave again, if he thought fit. The King was so far from reducing me to that low condition that he gave me one of his own sisters in marriage and constituted me Alcaide or governor of this town. . . .”
“Jack Rodney,” a cousin of King Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, should also be remembered. He was asked by an English slave captain to pilot a slave ship down the river Sierra Leone from Bence Island. He agreed, on condition that he be put on shore at the small port of Robanna. But the captain said that he would land him further down river at its mouth. Instead, however, he took him to Jamaica. Rodney talked to the governor there and succeeded eventually in returning. Mungo Park encountered an African servant, Johnson, who had been taken to Jamaica as a slave, had been freed, and then found his way home.
Perhaps the most curious story of all was that of Thomas Joiner, who began life as a minstrel slave, on the Gambia. He was sold in Jamaica as a slave, gained his freedom, learned to read and write English, and made enough money to return to Africa, where he set up as a trader at Gorée (not in slaves) about 1810. He then moved back to the river Gambia where, by 1830, he was the most important shipowner. His brigantine, the General Turner, sixty-seven tons, was then the biggest ship on the upper river.
In the nineteenth century, there were several accounts of slaves returning to Africa from Brazil. In 1832, four freed women of Benguela came back; and sometimes in Rio slaves were punished by being deported to Africa. In 1830, thirty-five prominent citizens of Cabinda were sent home from Rio because they had been criminally seized in Africa by slave traders who had asked them to dinner on a ship. Nearly sixty Africans from “Mina” bought their passage back from Rio to the Gold Coast in 1835. In 1852, about sixty “Muslims” from the same part of Africa were returned to Africa on an English ship (the Robert, George Duck master) for £800, having first assured themselves that the coast whence they had originally come was then free of slave dealers. In the 1850s and 1860s, there were numerous saving societies in Brazil designed to collect enough money to return their members to Africa. All along the West African coast, from Dahomey to Angola, little settlements of returned slaves from the Americas were soon to be found, sometimes giving such names as Pernambuco, Puerto Rico, or Martinique to their new African homes.
