Slavery in Africa
I | INTRODUCTION |
Slavery in
Africa, the institution of slavery as it existed in Africa, and the
effects of world slave-trade systems on African people and societies. As in most
of the world, slavery, or involuntary human servitude, was practiced across
Africa from prehistoric times to the modern era. When people today think of
slavery, many envision the form in which it existed in the United States before
the American Civil War (1861-1865): one racially identifiable group owning and
exploiting another. However, in other parts of the world, slavery has taken many
different forms. In Africa, many societies recognized slaves merely as property,
but others saw them as dependents who eventually might be integrated into the
families of slave owners. Still other societies allowed slaves to attain
positions of military or administrative power. Most often, both slave owners and
slaves were black Africans, although they were frequently of different ethnic
groups. Traditionally, African slaves were bought to perform menial or domestic
labor, to serve as wives or concubines, or to enhance the status of the slave
owner.
Traditional African practices of slavery were
altered to some extent beginning in the 7th century by two non-African groups of
slave traders: Arab Muslims and Europeans. From the 7th to the 20th century,
Arab Muslims raided and traded for black African slaves in West, Central, and
East Africa, sending thousands of slaves each year to North Africa and parts of
Asia. From the 15th to the 19th century, Europeans bought millions of slaves in
West, Central, and East Africa and sent them to Europe; the Caribbean; and
North, Central, and South America. These two overlapping waves of
transcontinental slave trading made the slave trade central to the economies of
many African states and threatened many more Africans with enslavement.
II | TRADITIONS OF SLAVERY WITHIN AFRICA |
Slavery existed in some of Africa’s earliest
organized societies. More than 3,500 years ago, ancient Egyptians raided
neighboring societies for slaves, and the buying and selling of slaves were
regular activities in cities along the Nile River. However, whereas the
Egyptians left behind written records of their activities, most other early
African states and societies did not. Therefore, our understanding of most early
African practices of slavery is based on much more recent observations of
African traditions regarding slavery and kinship and on oral histories.
A | Origins |
In Africa, as in many places around the
world, early slavery likely resulted from warring groups taking captives. Such
captives were of little use, and often some bother, when kept close to their
homes because of the ease of escape. Therefore, they were often sold and
transported to more distant places.
Warfare was not the only reason for the
practice of slavery in Africa, however. In many African societies, slavery
represented one of the few methods of producing wealth available to common
people. Throughout the African continent there was little recognition of rights
to private landholding until colonial officials began imposing European law in
the 19th century. Land was typically held communally by villages or large clans
and was allotted to families according to their need. The amount of land a
family needed was determined by the number of laborers that family could marshal
to work the land. To increase production, a family had to invest in more
laborers and thus increase their share of land. The simplest and quickest way to
do this was to invest in slaves. To help service this demand, many early African
societies conducted slave raids on distant villages.
B | Slaves’ Roles |
Women constituted the majority of early
African slaves. In addition to agricultural work, female slaves carried out
other economic functions, such as trading and cotton spinning and dyeing. They
also performed domestic chores, such as preparing food, washing clothes, and
cleaning. Powerful African men kept female slaves as wives or concubines, and in
many societies these women stood as symbols of male wealth. Male slaves
typically farmed and herded animals. Those who belonged to wealthy families and
especially of ruling lineages of states also worked as porters and rowers, and
learned crafts such as weaving, construction, and metalwork. New slaves were
sometimes given menial tasks while experienced slaves did the more difficult and
dangerous work, such as mining and quarrying.
Some male, and fewer female, slaves held
positions of high status and trust within their societies. In precolonial states
in the interior of West and Central Africa, slaves often served as soldiers and
confidants of high officials. With their necessarily limited ambitions and
dependence on their masters, slaves were considered the ideal persons to be
close to men in power. In a few cases, female slaves assumed power and influence
as well. For example, in the 19th century in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey
(now southern Benin), women served in the royal palace and formed the kingdom’s
soldier elite.
C | Slavery and Kinship |
Kinship (connection to a family by blood or
marriage) has always been extremely important in Africa as an essential
component of a person’s identity and ability to survive in society.
Traditionally, those without kin were essentially lost—not considered real
persons by society. Slaves, taken in battle or in slave raids, were cut off from
their kin. In some societies, however, slaves were viewed as dependents, and
could, over time, become identified as members of their owners’ extended
families. Many African societies decreed that children of slave owners by their
slaves could not be sold or killed. Also, after three or four generations,
descendants of slaves could often shed their slave status. Thus slavery, on one
hand, cut people off from their kin but, on the other hand, provided them with
the possibility of becoming attached to other families and, after several
generations, reintegrated into the web of kinship.
None of the above possibilities should
suggest that enslaved Africans liked what was happening to them, accepted
slavery willingly, or normally rose quickly in status. However, early African
traditions of slavery appear more benign when compared to the institutionalized
systems of slave trading that would develop later. As African states began
providing slaves for export by Arabs or Europeans, slavery became much more
central to the economies and politics of those states and more of a threat to
Africans in general.
III | EFFECTS OF SLAVE TRADES ON AFRICA |
Around the 15th century bc, Egypt’s New Kingdom enslaved
non-Africans, such as Jews from Palestine, through warfare and imported them to
the Nile Valley. As an African importer of non-African slaves, however, ancient
Egypt is a notable exception to the rule. Africa’s role in the history of
transcontinental slave trading has generally been as a provider or exporter of
slaves for use outside of Africa.
After the 5th century bc, Greeks and, later, Romans came to
dominate the Mediterranean Sea. Both of these slave-owning powers raided North
Africa extensively for slaves. This practice of using Africa as a source of
slaves would be adopted and expanded first by Arab Muslims and later by
Europeans.
A | The Trans-Saharan and East African Slave Trades |
The spread of Islam from Arabia into
Africa after the religion’s founding in the 7th century ad affected the practice of slavery and
slave trading in West, Central, and East Africa. Arabs had practiced slave
raiding and trading in Arabia for centuries prior to the founding of Islam, and
slavery became a component of Islamic traditions. Both the Qur'an (Koran) (the
sacred scripture of Islam) and Islamic religious law served to codify and
justify the existence of slavery. As Muslim Arabs conquered their way westward
across North Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries, their victorious leaders
rewarded themselves with Berber captives, most of whom were eventually enrolled
in Muslim armies. Over time, large segments of North Africa’s Berber population
converted to Islam. The religion spread to the camel herders of the Sahara
Desert, who were in contact with black Africans south of the Sahara and who
traded small numbers of black slaves. Muslim Arabs expanded this trans-Saharan
slave trade, buying or seizing increasing numbers of black Africans in West
Africa, leading them across the Sahara, and selling them in North Africa. From
there, most of these slaves were exported to far-off Asian destinations such as
the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia (in present-day Turkey), Arabia, Persia
(present-day Iran), and India.
The trans-Saharan slave trade grew
significantly from the 10th to the 15th century, as vast African empires such as
Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu developed south of the Sahara and
marshaled the trade. Arab slave raiders also penetrated south, up the Nile River
to present-day Ethiopia, capturing thousands of slaves and sending them down the
Nile to Egypt. Over the course of more than a thousand years, the trans-Saharan
slave trade saw the movement of at least 10 million enslaved men, women, and
children from West and East Africa to North Africa, the Middle East, and India.
The slaves and their descendants contributed to the harems, royal households,
and armies of the Arab, Turkish, and Persian rulers in those regions.
Also, by the 9th century, seafaring Muslims
from Arabia and Persia had made their way down the Indian Ocean coast of East
Africa, obtaining African slaves in ports from Mogadishu (in present-day
Somalia) to Sofala (in present-day Mozambique) and conveying them to western
Asian cities to work. The culture of the East African coastal regions was
strongly influenced by Arab and Persian traders, many of whom intermarried with
Africans, thus producing the Swahili people and culture. Between the 9th and the
13th centuries, this Arab-Persian-Swahili population established cities and
city-states along the East African coast. These cities and states captured or
purchased slaves from the East African interior for domestic and agricultural
tasks. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as plantation agriculture developed in
the region, the East African slave trade increased dramatically.
Scholars’ opinions differ on the issue of
the long-term effects of Islam on African slavery. Some believe that Islamic law
helped regulate slavery, thus limiting its abuses; these scholars often argue
that because Islam encouraged the freeing of slaves upon their master’s death,
it increased instances of emancipation. Other scholars believe that Islam led to
the expansion of slavery, arguing that at the time that slavery was growing in
the parts of Africa coming under Islamic influence, slavery was declining in
most of medieval Europe.
Between the 7th and the 15th century, the
trans-Saharan and East African slave trades spurred the gradual expansion of
slavery within Africa. The slave trades contributed to the development of
powerful African states on the southern fringes of the Sahara and in the East
African interior. The economies of these states were dependent on slave trading.
Neighboring states competed with one another for trade, leading to wars, which
in turn led to the capture of more slaves. Slave raiding in West, East, and
Central Africa became more common and wide-ranging. When European explorers and
traders arrived in West Africa beginning in the 15th century, they found and
began using well-established slave-trade networks. While the trans-Saharan and
East African slave trades continued until the early 20th century, they were
overshadowed by the Atlantic slave trade after the 15th century. The Atlantic
slave trade dwarfed the trans-Saharan and East African trades in terms of volume
of export, impact on African practices of slavery, and lasting effect on Africa
in general.
B | The Atlantic Slave Trade |
The Atlantic slave trade developed after
Europeans began exploring and establishing trading posts on the Atlantic (west)
coast of Africa in the mid-15th century. The first major group of European
traders in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the
French. In the 16th and 17th centuries, these European colonial powers began to
pursue plantation agriculture in their expanding possessions in the New World
(North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean islands), across the
Atlantic Ocean. As European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco,
rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more New World lands became available for
European use, the need for plantation labor increased.
West and west central African states,
already involved in slave trading, supplied the Europeans with African slaves
for export across the Atlantic. Africans tended to live longer on the tropical
plantations of the New World than did European laborers (who were susceptible to
tropical diseases) and Native Americans (who were extremely susceptible to “Old
World” diseases brought by the Europeans from Europe, Asia, and Africa). Also,
enslaved men and women from Africa were inexpensive by European standards.
Therefore, Africans became the major source, and eventually the only source, of
New World plantation labor.
The Africans who facilitated and benefited
from the Atlantic slave trade were political or commercial elites—generally
members of the ruling apparatus of African states or members of large trading
families or institutions. African sellers captured slaves and brought them to
markets on the coast. At these markets European and American buyers paid for the
slaves with commodities—including cloth, iron, firearms, liquor, and decorative
items—that were useful to the sellers. Slave sellers were mostly male, and they
used their increased wealth to enhance their prestige and connect themselves,
through marriage, to other wealthy families in their realms.
The Africans who were enslaved were
mostly prisoners of war or captives resulting from slave raids. As the demand
for slaves grew, so did the practice of systematic slave raiding, which
increased in scope and efficiency with the introduction of firearms to Africa in
the 17th century. By the 18th century, most African slaves were acquired through
slave raids, which penetrated farther and farther inland. Africans captured in
raids were marched down well-worn paths, sometimes for several hundred miles, to
markets on the coast.
From the mid-15th to the late-19th
century, European and American slave traders purchased approximately 12 million
slaves from West and west central Africa. A small percentage of these slaves,
particularly in the early years of the trade, were sent to Europe, especially to
Spain and Portugal. Most, however, were shipped across the Atlantic for sale in
Portuguese-administered Brazil; the British, French, Dutch, and Danish islands
of the Caribbean; Spanish-controlled South and Central America; and the British
North American mainland (later the United States and Canada). The Atlantic
crossing, known as the Middle Passage, was nightmarish for slaves, who were
poorly fed, subject to abuses at the hands of the crew, and confined to cramped
storage holds in which diseases spread easily. Historians estimate that between
1.5 and 2 million slaves died during the journey to the New World.
The Atlantic slave trade differed from
previous practices of slavery and slave trading in Africa in its huge scope and
its importance to the economies of world powers. While traditional African
slavery was practiced largely to help African communities produce food and goods
or for prestige, slave labor on European plantations in the New World was
crucial to the economies of the colonies and therefore to the economies of the
colonial powers. This global economic demand for African slaves altered African
practices of slavery. In much of Africa, slavery became a more central,
structural element of African life, as rulers and wealthy elites sought to
accumulate more and more slaves, for sale as well as for their own use. In
addition to the systematic and institutional practice of slave raiding, other
practices were introduced in African states to bring in even more slaves,
including enslavement as punishment for crimes and religious wrongdoing. As a
result, by the 19th century vast numbers of black Africans in West and Central
Africa faced the threat of being enslaved.
IV | THE END OF SLAVERY IN AFRICA |
As humanitarian sentiments grew in Western
Europe with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment and as European economic
interests shifted slowly from agriculture to industry, a movement to abolish the
slave trade and the practice of slavery came into being in the Western world. In
1807 the slave trade was outlawed in Britain and the United States. Britain
outlawed the practice of slavery in all British territory in 1833; France did
the same in its colonies in 1848. In 1865, following the American Civil War, the
U.S. government adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery
in the United States. The Atlantic slave trade continued, however, until 1888,
when Brazil abolished slavery (the last New World country to do so).
While the Atlantic slave trade was dying down
around 1850, the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades were at their
peaks. In the 1850s the Ottoman Empire nominally outlawed slavery in much of the
Islamic world, but this had only a minor effect on the slave trade. One of the
main justifications European powers gave for colonizing nearly the entire
African continent during the 1880s and 1890s was the desire to end slave trading
and slavery in Africa. By the dawn of the 20th century, European forces had
defeated most African slave trading states, and the trans-Saharan and East
African slave trades came to an end.
Although colonial authorities began outlawing
slavery in some African territories as early as the 1830s, the complete legal
abolition of slavery in Africa did not take place until the first quarter of the
20th century. By that time, however, slavery was deeply ingrained in most
African societies, and thus the practice continued illegally. Slaves who became
liberated often did so by escaping and going to the colonial authorities or by
simply leaving the areas in which they had been held to take up residence
elsewhere. In some places, enslaved persons held that status throughout their
lives, despite the legal prohibition. It was not until the 1930s that slavery in
Africa was almost totally eliminated.
The ending of the slave trade and slavery in
Africa had wide-ranging effects on the African continent. Many societies that
for centuries had participated in an economy based on slave labor and the
trading of slaves had difficulty finding new ways to organize labor and gain
wealth. Meanwhile, colonial governments in Africa that outwardly disapproved of
slavery still needed inexpensive laborers for agriculture, industry, and other
work projects. As a result, African leaders and former slave owners, as well as
colonial officials, often developed methods of coercing Africans to work without
pay or for minimal compensation. Moreover, the outlawing of slavery did not
erase the pain and stigma of having been a slave. Many descendants of slaves
were affected by this stigma for generations after slavery was abolished.
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