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The "Wonders of Africa" and the TransAtlantic Slave Trade
by Joseph Inikori
Normative debates are difficult to join. The purpose of this contribution is to provide some evidence and a broad context for the ongoing exchange. To start, it is important to note that two critical conditions are needed to sustain a trade in slaves:
The existence of a market for slaves and a developed transportation system capable of transporting slaves to that market relatively cheaply.
The existence of weakly organized communities whose members can be captured and sold at little cost to the captors.
For communities to avoid capture and enslavement, first, they must have governments strong enough to prevent the members from capturing and selling one another; in other words, governments strong enough to prevent internal breakdown of law and order in the face of large- scale demand for captives. Second, they must have governments strong enough to inflict considerable punishment on external aggressors who may be tempted to capture and sell their subjects to meet the market demand. For as long as there is market demand at price levels that justify supply efforts, somebody is going to do what it takes to meet the demand. We have seen this in the illegal drug business. For market demand for captives to exist without supply response, politico-military and economic conditions have to raise the cost of procuring captives for sale above the benefits from meeting the demand.
At some point, the conditions which sustained the transatlantic slave trade were similar to those which earlier sustained the slave trade from medieval Europe to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the west gave rise to political fragmentation at the same time that markets for slaves developed in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. With no central government strong enough to prevent internal capture and export, the weakly organized communities in the British Isles fell victim to capture by internal and external captors who sold their captives for export. It took the relatively strong Norman state, created after the Norman conquest of 1066, to end the slave trade from the British Isles. Because the Balkans were the last major regions of Europe to be brought under relatively strong centralized governments, the weakly organized communities in the region remained victims of the slave trade to the Mediterranean for centuries. Like the Norman state in the British Isles, it was the Ottoman government which ended the capture and export of the Slavs following the extension of the Ottoman Empire to that region. Similarly, the incorporation of the communities in the Black Sea region into the Russian Empire in the fifteenth century ended the capture and export of white captives from that region, thus ending the slave trade from Europe just before the rise of large-scale demand for slave labor in the Americas. It should be stressed that it was not Europeans who came together and collectively decided to stop exporting Europeans. It was individual governments in Europe that prevented the capture and export of their subjects. For these governments the issue was not morality; it was political expediency. Socio-economic and political instability engendered by rampant capture and export of subjects, whether by local or by external captors, is detrimental to the self-interest of rulers.
Coming now to Africa, it should be recalled that it was African products, such as gold, which initially attracted the Europeans to Africa. As the early Europeans asked for these products, they were supplied by Africans. When, following the rise of demand for slave labor in the Americas, the European traders switched their demand from products to captives, supply also responded. Then about 300 years later European demand switched once again to products, such as cocoa and coffee. Again, supply responded, even though several of these products had not been produced earlier for the domestic market.
The switch of demand from products to captives occurred at a time when the vast majority of African communities on the Atlantic coast and the hinterlands were politically fragmented. For example, in the small area of the Gold Coast (the coastal area of contemporary Ghana), with a population no more than a hundred thousand in the early 17th century, there were about 43 autonomous chiefdoms at this time. Given this political fragmentation, there were few governments strong enough to prevent internal breakdown of law and order in the face of large-scale European demand for captives, let alone prevent external aggressors from taking captives. States, such as the Kingdom of Kongo and the Benin Kingdom in Nigeria, which were in the process of formation when the Europeans arrived, did all they could to protect their subjects from capture. Benin was more successful than Kongo. Unlike the slave trade from medieval Europe, the European demand for the American markets was so massive that the conditions created made it impossible for peaceful conditions among neighbors and internal socio-political stability to prevail for a long period. States, such as Asante and Dahomey, which emerged under conditions created by the European demand for captives, struggled to prevent the capture and export of their subjects, but those conditions constantly provoked wars with neighbors. When the King of Asante told the British consul that he did not go to war to catch slaves in the bush like a thief and that his forefathers never did, he spoke the truth. What he failed to say is that massive European demand for captives created conditions that provoked frequent wars with neighbors, wars which generated captives that had to be exported, given the character of the export demand and the political economy associated with it. It is significant that it was efforts being made by Oyo and its vassal states to arrest the breakdown of law and order in areas of Yorubaland, following the movement of several European slave traders to Lagos as their headquarters, that provoked the early wars in Yorubaland which combined with related conditions to sustain a century-long civil war in the 19th century.
It is a mistake to talk of Africans exporting Africans or "African leaders" exporting Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. There were no "African Leaders" in the 18th century. There were Asante leaders, Dahomean leaders, Oyo leaders, Kongo leaders, Benin leaders, and so on. The concept of pan-Africanism is a twentieth-century phenomenon; people on the Continent and those transported abroad knew nothing of such in the 18th century.
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