The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  On his journeys across the mountains, Alvares witnessed regions of considerable prosperity. He travelled through fields of millet thick and tall as a man; visited areas where cereal crops were sown and harvested all year round; saw ‘beautiful fields, all irrigated by channels of water descending from the highest peaks’; and passed herds of cattle so numerous that ‘the multitude there is cannot be believed.’ But calamity from drought or locusts was never far away.

  In these parts and in all the dominions of the Prester John there is a very great plague of locusts . . . Their multitude which covers the earth and fills the air, is not to be believed; they darken the light of the sun. They are not in general in all the kingdom each year, for if it were so, the country would be a desert . . . but one year they are in one part, and another year in another . . . Sometimes they are in two or three of these provinces. Wherever they come the earth is left as though it had been set on fire . . .

  He described how whole populations were forced to flee as locusts devoured everything that lay in their path.

  The people were going away from this country, and we found the roads full of men, women and children on foot, and some in their arms, with their little bundles on their heads, removing to a country where they might find provisions.

  Among his other observations, Alvares noted that although Lebna Dengel could muster a sizeable army, it was poorly equipped, with little more than spears, bows and arrows. When the king finally agreed to let the Portuguese go, six years after their arrival, he furnished them with a letter requesting military and technical assistance, proposing an alliance that would ‘tear out and cast forth the evil Moors, Jews and heathens from [our] countries’.

  Lord brother . . . I want you to send me men, artificers, to make images and printed books, and swords and arms for all sorts of fighting; and also masons and carpenters, and men who make medicines, and physicians, and surgeons to cure illnesses; also artificers to beat out gold and set it, and goldsmiths and silversmiths, and men who know how to extract gold and silver and also copper from the veins, and men who can make sheet lead and earthenware; and craftsmen of any trades which are necessary in kingdoms, also gunsmiths.

  As the mission prepared to leave, Covilhã expressed ‘a passionate desire’ to join his countrymen. Accompanied by Alvares and others, he went to Lebna Dengel pleading and begging to be allowed to go. But it was to no avail.

  Soon after the Portuguese had left, Lebna Dengel’s army was put to the test. In 1527, Muslim forces under the command of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, a warrior imam from Adal, a sultanate based on Harar, invaded the highlands of Shoa, in a religious war – a jihad – to destroy the Christian state. Their cause was supported by Ottoman Turks who had taken control of Egypt in 1517 and the Yemen in 1525. Armed with Ottoman muskets and cannon, Ahmad – known to the Abyssinians as Gragn, the left-handed – made rapid advances, inflicting a heavy defeat on Lebna Dengel’s army at Shimbra-Kure, fifty miles south-east of present-day Addis Ababa. Gragn’s forces proceeded to rampage through the highlands, destroying churches and monasteries, burning books and massacring Christians or forcibly converting them. Thousands of slaves were taken across the Red Sea. Becoming a fugitive, Lebna Dengel died almost alone in the mountain-top monastery at Debre Damo.

  No word of this cataclysm reached the outside world until 1535 when João Bermudes, the barber-surgeon who had been one of Alvares’s companions but who had chosen to stay on in Abyssinia when they left, managed to reach Lisbon. And it was not until 1541 that a Portuguese expeditionary force of 400 men armed with cannon, muskets and large supplies of powder and shot, arrived to help defend what was left of the Christian state.

  In their battles with Gragn’s forces, the Portuguese forces suffered heavy casualties. Their commander, Christofe da Gama, a son of Vasco da Gama, was badly wounded, taken prisoner and beheaded. But when Gragn himself was shot dead by a Portuguese musketeer in 1543, morale in the Muslim camp collapsed and their forces retreated in disarray to the lowlands. Portugal’s intervention had thus helped to stave off the Muslim conquest of the land of Prester John.

  12

  THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

  The Portuguese continued to dominate maritime trade with the west coast of Africa until the end of the sixteenth century. Only a few ‘interlopers’ from other European states ventured there. In 1530, William Hawkins, the first English privateer to land in west Africa, picked up a cargo of ivory from the Guinea coast. In 1540, John Landye, a captain in Hawkins’s service, made a second voyage there. In the 1550s, three English captains – Thomas Wyndham, John Lok and William Towerson – sailed to Guinea and Benin, bringing back highly profitable cargoes of gold, ivory and pepper. French privateers were similarly active on the Senegal River and the Gambia River. Neither English traders nor the French showed any interest in acquiring slaves. For neither England nor France, unlike Portugal and Spain, had a market in slaves.

  The dynamics of European trade with west Africa, however, changed profoundly during the sixteenth century. Following Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean in 1492, Spain established a colony on the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and developed mines and sugar plantations there, initially using enslaved labourers from the indigenous population. When their numbers were depleted by overwork and European diseases, the Spanish began to import slave workers from Europe. The first cargo of African slaves to arrive in the Americas came from Spain on a Spanish ship in 1510. As demand for labour in the Caribbean grew, the Spanish turned to Africa directly as a source for more supplies. Royal authority was granted for the transport of 4,000 slaves from Guinea. The first cargo of slaves imported directly from Africa reached the Caribbean in 1518.

  A similar pattern occurred in South America. Following the voyage made to the coast of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500, the Portuguese developed sugar plantations in coastal areas using indigenous labour. As the demand for labour in Brazil grew, the Portuguese began to import slaves directly from Africa. The first batches were sent there during the 1510s.

  As the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves burgeoned, other European privateers competed for a share of the business. In the 1560s, John Hawkins, the son of William Hawkins, made three journeys to the African coast, sponsored by a group of London merchants, to purchase slaves. According to a brief account of his first voyage in 1562, Hawkins sailed to Sierra Leone on the Guinea coast ‘where he stayed some time and got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means, to the number of three hundred Negroes, besides other merchandises . . .’

  With this prey, he sailed over the Ocean sea to the island of Hispaniola [where he] made vent of the whole number of his Negroes; for which he received . . . by way of exchange such quantity of merchandise, that he did not only load his own three ships with hides, gingers, sugars, and some quantities of pearls, but he freighted also two other [vessels] with hides and like commodities . . .

  According to the Portuguese, however, Hawkins acquired slaves by raiding their own slave ships. He seized one Portuguese ship on the Guinea coast carrying 200 slaves and five other ships in Sierra Leone with several hundred more.

  Buoyed up by the profits he made, Hawkins set sail for Sierra Leone again in 1564 with four ships carrying provisions for the 500 slaves he expected to pick up. These included one and a half tons of beans and peas for their food and shirts and shoes with which they were to be outfitted for sale. ‘We stayed certain days,’ the account continues, ‘going every day on shore to take the inhabitants, with burning and spoiling their towns.’

  He encountered some resistance, but nevertheless left Sierra Leone for the Caribbean with a cargo of about 400 slaves, returning home to England ‘with great profit to the venturers’.

  On his third voyage in 1567, Hawkins was about to depart Sierra Leone with a cargo of 150 slaves when he was approached by two envoys from ‘the king of Sierra Leone’ and ‘the king of the Castros’ asking him to join forces in a war against two neighbourin
g kingdoms. His reward was to be able to take ‘as many Negroes as by these warres might be obtained’. Hawkins duly obliged, setting out with 200 Englishmen to storm a town of some 8,000 inhabitants. He subsequently left for the Caribbean with 470 captives.

  Year by year, the Atlantic slave trade gathered momentum. In the second half of the fifteenth century, according to modern researchers, the traffic in slaves taken by sea merchants from the west coast of Africa amounted to about 80,000. In the first half of the sixteenth century, when other European merchants became involved and the trans-Atlantic trade began, the number rose to about 120,000. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves reached about 210,000 – an average of about 4,000 a year.

  In the seventeenth century, new factors drove the trade. The Dutch emerged as a maritime power in the Atlantic and broke the Spanish monopoly on Caribbean trade and Portuguese dominance in west Africa and Brazil. They spread new plantation technology from Brazil to the Caribbean, supplying slaves from Africa at low prices to expanding sugar estates there. As Europe’s demands for sugar soared, more land and more labour was needed to fulfil it. Attracted by the scale of profits the Dutch were making, the British and French joined the fray. New plantations that the British established in Barbados and Jamaica and the French established in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue (Haiti) propelled the demand for slaves ever higher.

  In west Africa, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from the Gold Coast, capturing the Portuguese forts at Elmina in 1637 and Axim in 1642. Other European traders – the English, Danes, Swedes and Brandenburgers – followed, building their own forts along the Gold Coast. The French established themselves in 1639 on an island at the mouth of the Senegal River, building a fort and a town there, naming it St Louis. They also extended their foothold in the region by capturing the island fortress of Gorée (opposite modern Dakar), a strategic location controlling much of the sea trade of Upper Guinea, established originally by the Portuguese, then bought by the Dutch. The Portuguese managed to retain control of the Cape Verde Islands and a trading post on the Cacheu River on the Guinea coast. But otherwise their presence on the west coast of Africa was reduced to slaving ports at Mpinda and Boma in the Congo estuary and a new entrepôt at Luanda in the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo established in the late sixteenth century. For all European traders on the west coast, the aim was to gain as much profit as possible whether from trade in gold, ivory or slaves. But whereas previously gold had been the driving force behind their scramble, the focus now was on acquiring slaves.

  Whatever kind of trade with Africa was involved, European governments sought to benefit by granting national monopolies to commercial companies venturing there. In 1618, England’s James I gave a charter of monopoly to thirty London merchants who had formed the Company of Adventurers of London Trading into Parts of Africa, namely ‘Gynny and Bynny’ (Guinea and Benin) with the purpose of ‘discovering the golden trade of the Moors of Barbary’. The Dutch monopoly on trade between Africa and the Caribbean was run by the Dutch West India Company which, by the 1640s, was transporting about 3,000 slaves a year to the Americas. The French government gave a slaving monopoly to the French West Indian Company until the demand for slaves became so strong that it opened the slave trade to any Frenchman who wanted to engage in it. ‘There is nothing that does more to help the growth of those colonies [in the Caribbean] . . . than the labour of Negroes,’ declared a royal proclamation. In 1660, the Royal Adventurers into Africa, a London company whose investors included King Charles II and three other members of the royal family, was given a monopoly of England’s African trade for 1,000 years. Some of the gold it brought back from the Gold Coast was turned by the Royal Mint into coins with an elephant on one side; they were popularly called ‘guineas’, a unit of currency equivalent to twenty-one shillings which remained valid until 1967. In 1665, the company estimated that half of its returns came from gold, a quarter from slaves, and a quarter from ivory, pepper, wood wax and hides. When the Royal Adventurers encountered financial difficulties, its place was taken in 1672 by the Royal African Company of England which was given a licence to trade in ‘gold, silver, Negroes, Slaves, goods, wares and manufactures’ for 1,000 years and a monopoly of all African trade until 1688. Its main base in Africa became the Gold Coast and its headquarters there at Cape Coast included a garrison of fifty English soldiers, thirty slaves and a resident commander responsible for all English actions in west Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, as much as three-fifths of the income of the Royal African Company derived from the sale of slaves. As well as chartered companies, increasing numbers of privateers – ‘interlopers’ – competed for a share of the business.

  The triangular trade between Europe, the west coast of Africa and the Americas brought a triple round of profits to European merchants. On the outward journey to Africa, they brought linen, cloth, metalware, beads, brandy, wine and firearms; they then picked up slaves which they sold in the Caribbean or Brazil, taking back to Europe cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum.

  Yet the trade depended on the collaboration of African rulers and middlemen, all of whom made their own profits from it. European traders were confined for the most part to fortified posts on the coast or on river estuaries – ‘factories’, as they were known – built to protect them from European rivals. Rarely did they venture more than a few miles inland. They possessed no military power to force Africans to engage in any type of trade in which their leaders did not wish to participate. The business of selling slaves remained largely under African control.

  Early, first-hand European accounts of trading on the west coast of Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all stress the crucial role played by African rulers. ‘The trade in slaves,’ wrote one English slaver at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘is the business of kings, rich men, and prime merchants.’ In a letter published in 1705, Willem Bosman, chief factor of the Dutch West India Company at Elmina Castle, reported:

  The first business of one of our Factors when he comes to Fida [Whydah or Ouidah on the Dahomey coast] 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 licence to trade, which is published throughout the whole land by the Cryer.

  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; which is commonly one third or one fourth higher than ordinary. After which we obtain free leave to deal with all his subjects of what rank soever.

  African rulers commonly required gifts, taxes or other tribute to be agreed before granting permission for slaving. Protracted haggling took place. On a voyage to the Calabar River in the Niger Delta in 1699, James Barbot recorded:

  We went ashore . . . to compliment the king, and make him overtures of trade, but he gave us to understand he expected one bar of iron for each slave more than Edwards had paid for his; and also objected much against our basons, tankards, yellow beads, and some other merchandise, as of little or no demand there at the time.

  The next day, the haggling resumed, the king and his entourage insisting on thirteen bars of iron for a male and ten for a female. After several more days of ‘conferences’, the two sides reached a deal: thirteen bars for males and nine bars and two brass rings for females. The occasion was celebrated at a convivial reception on board Barbot’s ship, at which the king and his nobles were plied ‘with drams of brandy and bowls of punch till night’, and the king was presented with a hat, a firelock and nine strings of beads. Barbot’s haul from the deal was 648 slaves.

  The supply of slaves was at times random. ‘The Gold Coast, in times of war between the inland nations, and those nearer the seas, will furnish great numbers of slaves of all sexes and ages,’ wrote John Barbot, an agent of the French Royal African Company (and uncle of James Barbot). He recorded how, in 1681, ‘an English interloper at Commendo got three hundred good slaves, almost for nothing besides the troub
le of receiving them at the beach in his boats, as the Commendo men brought them from the field of battle, having obtained a victory over a neighbouring nation, and taken a great number of prisoners.’ The following year, he wrote, ‘I could get but eight from one end of the coast to the other.’

  Most slaves were war captives, but others were condemned criminals, kidnap victims, political prisoners or family members sold for debt or for food in time of famine. Enslavement became a common method for disposing of troublesome individuals of every kind. ‘Since the Slave-Trade has been us’d,’ wrote Francis Moore who traded in slaves on the Gambia River in the 1730s, ‘all Punishments are chang’d into Slavery; there being an Advantage on such Condemnations, they strain for Crimes very hard, in order to get the Benefit of selling the Criminal. Not only murder, Theft and Adultery, are punish’d by selling the Criminal for a Slave, but every trifling Crime is punish’d in the same manner.’

  Kidnapping was also prevalent in some areas of west Africa. Olaudah Equiano, the son of an Igbo farmer, described in his autobiography how children in his village had been taught, when their parents had gone to work in the fields, to be constantly vigilant about the threat from kidnappers: ‘ . . . they sometimes took these opportunities of our parents’ absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize.’ At the age of eleven, Equiano was kidnapped, along with his sister. He was first sold to an African chief, but escaped and returned home; he was then captured again and resold several times before ending up in the hands of English slavers.

  Once brought to the coast, slaves were held in specially built ‘booths’ or prison pens to await inspection by European agents. The demand for males outnumbered that for females by two to one. Women were deemed unsuited for the heavy labour required to plant and harvest sugar cane and fetched a lower price. ‘In slaving our ships,’ the Royal African Company told its agents, ‘always observe that the negroes be well-liking and healthy from the age of 15 years not exceeding 40; and at least two 3rds. men slaves.’ Those selected for purchase were branded with the mark of their European owners.