9 The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Exchanging People for Trade Goods
Introduction
Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims and the Ottoman Empire who dominated Mediterranean trade. (2) ( See Figure 2-1 )
When the Portugese landed on the coasts of Africa they found societies engaged in a network of trade routes that carried a variety of goods back and forth across sub-Saharan Africa. Some of those goods included kola nuts, shea butter, salt, indigenous textiles, copper, iron and iron tools, and people for sale as slaves within West Africa. The arrival of European slave traders in Africa also followed Muslim traders by some eight centuries. As early as the seventh century, Muslims from North African and other areas of the Mediterranean world established trade routes into Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa and acquired gold, pepper, ivory, dried meat and hides, and slaves, which they transported to North Africa, the Middle East and beyond (Curtin 1990:40–41, Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2014), 202).
As a result of the early West African slave trade by the Portuguese, a sizeable number of Africans ended up in Portugal and Spain. By the middle of the 16th century, 10,000 black people made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon. Some had been freed while others purchased their freedom. Some were the offspring of African and Portuguese marriages and liaisons. Seville, Spain had an African population of 6,000. Some of these Africans accompanied Spanish explorers to the North American mainland. (Curtin 1990:40–11).
All of the sub-Saharan African societies discussed in Module 1 participated in the slave trade as the enslaved or as slavers or brokers. While Europeans created the demand side for slaves, African political and economic elites did the primary work of capturing, transporting and selling Africans to European slave traders on the African coast (Thornton 2002:36). Since European traders were vastly outnumbered by West Africans who controlled trade along the coast, they first had to negotiate with powerful African chiefs who often demanded tribute and fair trading terms. Only then could European traders acquire African slaves.
The reason why Africans participated in the slave trade, given its drain on the most productive adults from Africa’s populations, is complex.
The violence and war sown by the slave trade greatly disrupted African societies. One answer is that the institution of slavery already existed in African societies. Slavery in Africa, however, was different from the kind of slavery that evolved in the New World, particularly the English colonies, a topic discussed in Module 3. (Curtin 1990:40–41).
Most legal systems in Africa recognized slavery as a social condition. Slaves constituted a class of people, captives or their descendants, over whom private citizens exercised the rights