what factors led to the development of the african slave trade?

Causes and results of slavery

A chief crusade of the trade was the colonies that European countries were starting to develop. In America, for instance, which was a colony of England, there was a need for many labourers for the saccharide, tobacco and cotton plantations. Paid labourers were too expensive, and the indigenous people had largely been wiped out by disease and disharmonize, so the colonisers turned to Africa to provide cheap labour in the grade of slaves.

The showtime shipment of slaves from Due west Africa to the Americas, across the Atlantic Ocean, was in the early on 1500s. European, Arab and African merchants were at present selling humans likewise as gold, ivory and spices.

Slave Trade Routes 1650 - 1860 Prototype source

Merely responsibleness for the slave trade is non simple. On the one hand, information technology was indeed the Europeans who purchased large numbers of Africans, and sent them far away to piece of work in their colonies. On the other hand, Africans acquit some responsibleness themselves: some African societies had long had their own slaves, and they cooperated with the Europeans to sell other Africans into slavery. The Europeans relied on African merchants, soldiers and rulers to get slaves for them, which they and then bought, at user-friendly seaports.

Africans were not strangers to the slave trade, or to the keeping of slaves. In that location had been considerable trading of Africans as slaves by Islamic Arab merchants in North Africa since the yr 900. When Leo Africanus travelled to W Africa in the 1500s, he recorded in his The Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained that, "slaves are the next highest article in the market place. There is a place where they sell countless slaves on marketplace days." Criminals and prisoners of state of war, also every bit political prisoners were oftentimes sold in the marketplaces in Gao, Jenne and Timbuktu.

Peradventure considering slavery and slave trading had long existed in much of Africa (though perhaps in forms less brutal than the slavery practised in the Americas), Africans were untroubled by selling slaves to Europeans.

Case study: The kingdom of Kongo and the slave trade

At the same time equally Corking Zimbabwe was powerful, there was a large and powerful kingdom along the Congo River in Cardinal Africa, known as the Kongo. Kongo was ruled by a manikongo, or king, and was divided into six provinces, each administered by a governor.

Artists depiction of the Kingdom of Kongo. Picture source: The Abolition Projection, abolition.e2bn.org

The kingdom had an organised organization of labour, taxation and merchandise, especially in atomic number 26 and salt. It also had a currency, in the course of nzimbu shells from a nearby island. The Kongo Kingdom had been in place for around 200 years when the first Portuguese arrived on the coast.

In 1482, Diego Cão, a Portuguese explorer, visited the kingdom. The reigning manikongo, Nzinga Nkuwu, was impressed by the Portuguese and sent a delegation to visit Portugal. Equally a issue, Portuguese missionaries, soldiers and artisans were welcomed to Mbanza, the uppercase of the kingdom. The missionaries targeted the Kongo leaders, and managed to convert Nzinga Nkuwu to Christianity. This led to divisions between the new Christians and followers of the traditional religions.

The next manikongo, Alfonso I, was raised as a Christian. He expanded merchandise links with the Portuguese, which included becoming involved in the slave trade. His people would raid neighbouring villages and states, selling the prisoners to the Europeans for a adept price. This made the kingdom very wealthy for some years.

However, the slave merchandise eventually took its toll on the Kongo kingdom. Although the slave merchandise fabricated some chiefs enormously wealthy, it ultimately undermined local economies and political stability as villages' vital labour forces were shipped overseas and slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. To meet the huge demand for slaves, the Kongolese began raiding further afield, and several groups fought back, including the Téké and the Kuba. This constant disharmonize distracted them from trade and weakened their defences. They shortly became dependent on the Portuguese for aid, specially in the Jaga Wars of 1568. The Kongo Kingdom never regained its quondam ability. In the years that followed, the Kongo fought both for and against the Portuguese, eventually being colonised in 1885.

A breakaway group, the Ndongo, moved southwards. They called their kings angola. They were also later colonised by the Portuguese.

The Abolition project, Africa Before Transatlantic Slavery visit abolition.e2bn.org

Case written report: The life of Gustavus Vassa

A good manner of understanding the slave trade is to read the kickoff-hand or eyewitness accounts written by bodily slaves, after some were freed and taught to read and write in European languages. One of the most famous of these was written by Olaudah Equiano, who was captured every bit a young boy in southern Nigeria and sold into slavery in Europe. The Life of Gustavus Vassa (his slave name) was the first-always slave autobiography. Here is an excerpt from his autobiography, a main historical source:

Vassa'due south autobiography (above) was funded by abolitionists and helped to farther the anti-slavery crusade. Source: memory.loc.gov

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the declension, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was and then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to encounter if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing and so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard) united to ostend me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if 10 thousand worlds had been my own, I would accept freely parted with them all to accept exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own land. When I looked round the transport also, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every ane of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I vicious motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I plant some black people most me, who I believed were some of those who had brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in club to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if nosotros were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, ruby faces, and long pilus. They told me I was not: and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a vino glass, but, existence afraid of him, I would non take it out of his hand. One of the blacks, therefore, took it from him and gave information technology to me, and I took a trivial down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor earlier. Soon later on this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair.

[afterwards] We were conducted immediately to the merchant's yard, where we were all pent up together, like and so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age. As every object was new to me, every matter I saw filled me with surprise. What struck me first, was, that the houses were built with bricks and stones, and in every other respect different from those I had seen in Africa; merely I was still more than astonished on seeing people on horseback. I did not know what this could mean; and, indeed, I thought these people were full of nothing but magical arts. While I was in this astonishment, ane of my boyfriend-prisoners spoke to a countryman of his, about the horses, who said they were the same kind they had in their country. I understood them, though they were from a afar part of Africa; and I thought it odd I had not seen whatsoever horses at that place; only afterwards, when I came to antipodal with dissimilar Africans, I found they had many horses amongst them, and much larger than those I then saw.

We were non many days in the merchant's custody, earlier we were sold later their usual manner, which is this: On a signal given, (as the beat of a pulsate) the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that bundle they like best. The racket and clamor with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a petty to increase the apprehension of terrified Africans, who may well be supposed to consider them as the ministers of that devastation to which they think themselves devoted. In this style, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. I remember, in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men's flat, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion, to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! Learned you this from your God, who says unto y'all, Do unto all men as y'all would men should exercise unto you? Is it non enough that we are torn from our state and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of proceeds? Must every tender feeling exist also sacrificed to your forehandedness? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear past their separation from their kindred, yet to exist parted from each other, and thus prevented from auspicious the gloom of slavery, with the small-scale comfort of beingness together; and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, husbands their wives? Surely, this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress; and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.

- Source: The Life of Gustavus Vassa by Olaudah Equiana, London, 1789

Abolition of the slave trade

If yous become time try to lookout man the movie 'Amistad' in course. Moving-picture show source: history.sandiego.edu

There was a bang-up deal of resistance to slavery, even while information technology was notwithstanding thriving. Many slaves themselves resisted capture by escaping or by jumping overboard from slave ships.

Examples of resistance include:

• On the transport Amistad, a group of slaves rebelled and took command of the ship.
• Queen Nzingha of Angola and Male monarch Maremba of the Kongo fought against the slave traders
• Many Europeans plant the thought of ownership and selling human beings appalling.

The abolitionists and humanitarians in Europe and America were by and large Christian groups who saw the slave trade as a crime confronting God. They likewise believed that they could better spread the word of Christianity among gratuitous Africans.

Years of resistance and pressure, peculiarly under the umbrella of the Anti-Slavery Club, eventually led the European governments to abolish slavery and emancipate or free the slaves, although it took a long fourth dimension for this to happen in exercise.

Some historians argue that the abolition of slavery was an economical, non a humanitarian, act. Past the early on 1800s the new captains of industry in England favoured abolition of slavery because they believed it was an inefficient and costly form of labour. Rather than buying slaves outright, and so having to provide at to the lowest degree a minimum of food and lodging, whether the slaves were productive or non, the English capitalists preferred to purchase only the actual labour time of the then called free workers.

You tin read more about the Industrial Revolution in Topic 3

Either style, Britain passed its Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, freeing all slaves in the British Empire, including S Africa. In North America, yet, information technology was only after the American Civil War was fought in the 1860s that the slaves were freed.

guthriegothat.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/atlantic-slave-trade

Share this post