A range of smaller groups, such as the Baga, Bullom, and Kru, lived along the coast, while farther inland were the larger Susu, Temne, and Mende, as well as the increasingly Muslim Fulbe and Jallonke. Smaller groups in the interior included the Gola and Kissi (both said to be culturally like the Mende), and dozens of others such as the Ibau and Limba. In the Mane Wars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mande speakers enslaved portions of smaller groups but were then themselves overrun by the Susu and the Fulbe. Islam spread beyond Senegambia into Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast as the Muslim theocracy of Futa Jallon conducted raids against those who practiced indigenous religions and sold them to Islamic traders in the north or coastal traders in the south. In the eighteenth century, approximately 460,000 people were enslaved and shipped out of this broad region, about 6.5 percent of the century’s total. More than 80 percent of them made the transatlantic voyage in British and American slavers.14
Gold Coast
John Kabes came into Fort Komenda “bawling” at the African traders from the interior of the Gold Coast. They were fools, he bellowed. They wanted too much for the slaves they were selling. How dare they ask for six ounces of gold rather than the customary four? He drove a hard bargain in the year 1714, just as he had been doing since 1683, working as a middleman between the African state of Eguafo, or Grand Commany, and European slavers. The English, the Dutch, and the French alternately wooed and vilified him. Without Kabes “nothing will be done” said an English factor; he is a turncoat and an “arrant coward,” snarled a Dutch one; we promise “high rewards,” added a hopeful Frenchman. He worked mostly with the English, for many years as an employee of the Royal African Company but not, in the parlance of the day, as its servant. He was a shrewd operator on his own behalf. He got three company agents fired because they could not work with him. “If we lose him our interest here is lost,” wrote one official to company authorities at Cape Coast Castle, fifteen miles away. Indeed it was Kabes who mobilized the labor that built Fort Komenda, the men who quarried the stone and cut the wood for the hulking imperial edifice. The Dutch, ensconced nearby at Fort Vredenburg, opposed the construction of the fortress, so Kabes led several military expeditions against them to encourage their assent. He subsequently built up a sizable town around the fortress. But most important of all, he traded slaves. Through the gates of Fort Komenda passed thousands of captives to one slave ship after another. By the time he died in 1722, Kabes had become a sovereign power in his own right, a merchant-prince who possessed his own “stool,” the ultimate symbol of political power among the Akan.15
The people of the Gold Coast had long traded with Europeans, originally, as the name signified, for the gleaming precious metal that spawned greed and massive fortresses, the first of which, at El Mina, was built by the Portuguese in 1482 to protect their golden hoard against Dutch, French, and English rivals. Eventually other European maritime powers, assisted by men like Kabes, came to build or seize forts of their own, which resulted in a string of fortifications along the five-hundred-mile coastline, from the port of Assini in the west to the river Volta in the east, the eastern portion of present-day Ivory Coast and most all of Ghana.
The English operated forts and trading establishments at Dixcove, Sekondi, Komenda, Anomabu, Accra, and Tantum; the seat of their operations was Cape Coast Castle. From these outposts traders loaded
prisoners—black gold—into the lower decks of the ships. The building of the forts gave rise to ministates with abirempon, “big men” such as Kabes and John Konny. Many people who lived in the Gold Coast region in 1700 belonged to the broad cultural group the Akan (others were the Guan, the Etsi, and the Ga). The Akan were themselves divided into competitive, often antagonistic states, as Denkyira, Akwamu, and Akyem rose to prominence along the coast early in the century, with the assistance of European firearms. The new elite were called awurafam, “masters of firepower.” Political power grew out of the barrel of a gun.
The mightiest group in the region was the Asante, whose rise after 1680 resulted in one of the strongest stratified and centralized states of West Africa. Osei Tutu built a regional alliance of “big men,” slowly incorporating various cultural groups under his central authority as asantehene, or ultimate leader, symbolized by the golden stool, sika dwa. The new Asante lords had brought several of the coastal ministates to heel by 1717 (adding Accra and Adangme in 1742) and continued their expansion in the north conquering smaller groups there, sending slaves northward with Hausa merchants and southward to the coast and the waiting slave ships. The Asante were skilled at war, as their very name, derived from osa nit, “because of war,” implied. “Real” Asantes, it was said, would not be sold into slavery. The powerful Asante army consisted in 1780 of eighty thousand men, half of them musketeers. Their slave trading over the course of the eighteenth century was a consequence of their war making and state building rather than a primary cause. Nonetheless it soon grew more profitable to catch slaves than to mine gold, and the Asante, despite their independence, became reliable players and valuable partners to the Europeans in the slave trade.16
Another major player were the coastal Fante, whose confederation of nineteen independent polities developed as a reaction against the Asante. The Fante at times signed treaties with the British but continued to trade with slavers of several flags. They served the slave trade in myriad ways, selling people from inland regions and hiring out their own to work for wages on the slavers. Built from matrilineal clans, the Fante used their formidable military prowess to protect local autonomy, all within a highly commercialized orbit. They acted as middlemen, connecting the Asante in the interior to the English slavers on the coast. They would remain independent until conquered by the Asante in 1807, the year of abolition. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Gold Coast produced more than a million slaves, about 15 percent of the total shipped from West Africa as a whole. Roughly two-thirds of the total were carried by British and American ships.17
Bight of Benin
The fishing village at the mouth of the Formosa River usually bustled with activity, but on this day in 1763 it was eerily quiet. Three people in a small canoe had come from far away and did not know the danger they were in. They might have wondered at the big ship, a brigantine, that lay at anchor a distance out in the Gulf of Benin, surrounded by ten war canoes. The Briton had come from even farther away. It belonged to Messrs. John Welch (or Welsh) and Edward Parr, merchants of Liverpool, and was captained by William Bagshaw. The war canoes, some of them large enough to have mounted six to eight swivel guns (small cannon), had come from upriver and belonged to a man named Captain Lemma Lemma, “a kind of pirate admiral” who traded in slaves. The people who lived on the lower river considered Lemma Lemma to be “a robber or stealer of men”; everyone was “exceedingly afraid of venturing out whenever any of his war canoes were in sight.” He was an important supplier of slaves to European Guineamen, which is why Captain Bagshaw had been entertaining him for ten days with food, drink, hospitality, and dashee, gifts to encourage sales.
From the main deck of the slaver, Lemma Lemma spied the strangers paddling by and ordered a group of his canoemen to capture them. They deftly took to the water, seized the three—an old man, a young man, and a young woman—and brought them aboard, offering them
for sale to Captain Bagshaw, who bought the younger two but refused the older one. Lemma Lemma sent the old man back to one of his canoes and gave an order: “his head was laid on one of the thwarts of the boat, and chopped off,” head and body then thrown overboard. Captain Bagshaw carried his children to Rappahannock, Virginia.18
The Bight of Benin, which lay between the Volta River and the Benin River (today’s Togo, Benin, and southwest Nigeria), had a turbulent history as a slave-trading region in the eighteenth century. During the previous century, Benin had been one of the first kingdoms to get large shipments of European firearms. Unlike the Asante, however, the peoples of Benin did not have the org
anizational capacity to use them, and they soon went into decline. Once-thriving regions near the coast were depopulated, their lands left uncultivated. Benin would remain the nucleus of various tributary states and societies, which would be connected to the slave ships by the likes of Captain Lemma Lemma.
The main cultural groups of the region were the Ewe to the west, consisting of more than a hundred small, autonomous village societies, the Fon in the central region (originally inland), and the more powerful and numerous Yoruba to the eastern interior, where they commanded the great Oyo Empire. Early in the eighteenth century, the main slaving ports were Whydah and Jakin, the port of Allada. These polities were independent until conquered by the Fon in the 1720s and 1730s and incorporated into Dahomey. Now that Dahomey’s King Agaja had eliminated the middlemen, he and his heirs built a strong, centralized, and relatively efficient state, organizing systematic raids and bending judicial processes to deliver slaves directly to the slave ships, although from a circumscribed hinterland that would in the long term limit slaving capacity. Dahomey maintained a standing army, with a storied regiment of women warriors, but the Dahomeans nonetheless began to pay tribute in the 1730s (regularly after 1747) to the more powerful neighboring Oyo, whose military strength in the heart-land was based on horses, cavalry, and control of the savanna. Long connected to the north-south caravan routes of the trans-Sahara slave trade, the Yoruba had by 1770 gained control of the ports of Porto Novo, Badagry, and, later in the eighteenth century, Lagos, although supplies to all would diminish with their own decline beginning in the 1790s. Altogether the Bight of Benin exported almost 1.4 million slaves in the eighteenth century, nearly a fifth of the total trade, but only about 15 percent of the total from the region were shipped by British and American slave vessels, which called increasingly to ports farther east.19
Bight of Biafra
Antera Duke was a leading Efik trader at Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra during the late eighteenth century. He lived at Duke Town, about twenty miles from the Calabar River estuary. Over time he prospered and became a member of the local Ekpe (Leopard) Society, which wielded enormous power in the slave trade and the broader affairs of the town. He participated in what he called “plays,” communal occasions of music, singing, and dancing. He arranged funerals, which for men of standing like himself included the ritual sacrifice of slaves, who were decapitated to accompany the master into the spirit world. He settled “bobs” and “palavers,” small disputes and big debates. He even oversaw the burial of a slave-ship captain, Edward Aspinall, “with much ceremony.” He entertained an endless procession of captains in his home, sometimes five or six at a time, drinking mimbo (palm wine) and feasting into the late hours of the night. Captains in turn sent their carpenters and joiners to work on his big house.20
Antera Duke listened for the roar of cannon at Seven Fathoms Point, which meant that a slave ship, or its tender, was headed upriver to trade. One “fine morning,” he noted in his diary, “wee have 9 ship in River.” He and other Efik traders “dressed as white men” and routinely went aboard the vessels, drinking tea and conducting business; taking customs and dashee; negotiating credit or “trust”; leaving and ransoming pawns; trading for iron bars, coppers, and gunpowder; and selling yams as provisions for the Middle Passage. He sold slaves, and sometimes he caught them himself: “wee & Tom Aqua and John Aqua be join Catch men.” On another occasion he settled an old score with a
Bakassey merchant, seizing him and two of his slaves and personally carrying them aboard a slaver, he noted proudly in his diary. At other times he bought slaves from traders of outlying regions. During the three years he kept his diary (1785-88), he noted the departure of twenty vessels he had helped to “slave.” Every last one of them was from Liverpool. They carried almost seven thousand men, women, and children to New World plantations. He recorded a typical entry on June 27, 1785: “Captin Tatum go way with 395 slaves.”21
The Bight of Biafra stretched along a coastline of mangrove swamp from the Benin River through and across the Niger River delta to the Cross River and beyond in the west. Because of merchants like Antera Duke, it was a major source of slaves and indeed one of the most important to British and American traders by the end of the eighteenth century. The region, consisting of what is, by today’s map, eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon, had no major territorial states. The traffic in slaves was handled by three large, competitive, sometimes warring city-states, which were themselves made up of “canoe houses”: New Calabar (also called Elem Kalabari), Bonny, and Duke’s own Old Calabar. The first two were “monarchies” of sorts, the last more a republic, in which founding Efik families used the Ekpe Society to integrate strangers and slaves into a system of extended fictive kinship and commercial labor. (“Fathers” like Duke incorporated “sons” and “daughters.”) Leaders of the canoe houses grew rich and powerful by dealing with European traders. In so doing they were perhaps more affected by European ways, especially in dress and culture, than were people in any other area of West Africa. Traders like Duke boarded the slave ships dressed in gold-laced hats, waistcoats, and breeches, speaking English and cursing up a storm, and at the end of the day returned to European-style homes.22
The main cultural groups of the Bight of Biafra were the Ibibio, dominant around the port of Andoni, and the more populous and decentralized Igbo, the latter representing a broad geographic culture from which a large majority of the enslaved originated. Other significant groups were the Igala (in the northern interior), the Ijo (along the coast to the west), and the Ogoni (around the Cross River delta). The primary form of social organization of the peoples of the region was the autonomous village. Some class differentiation was known, but local notables were usually first among equals. Slavery was not unknown, but it was mild in nature and limited. Most commoners were yam cultivators. One of the best descriptions of the Igbo way of life has been summed up in the phrase “village democracy.”
The landmass along the Bight of Biafra was densely populated on the coast and for hundreds of miles inland. The Igbo in particular had experienced intensive population growth in the seventeenth century, partly because of productive yam cultivation. Coastal and riverine peoples tended to fish. Rivers broad and deep penetrated far into the interior, which made canoes central to travel, communication, and the movement of the enslaved. The regions surrounding the Niger, Benue, and Cross rivers represented the main catchment area for captives, although some were also brought westward from the Cameroon Highlands. Most of the enslaved were taken in small raids, as large-scale wars were uncommon in the region. By the middle of the eighteenth century, much of the slaving and internal shipment was handled by a relatively new cultural group, the Aro, who used their access to European firearms and other manufactures to build a trading network that linked the canoe houses to the interior. In the course of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1730s, the traders of the Bight of Biafra exported more than a million people, mostly Igbo, 86 percent of the total in British and American vessels. Many went to Virginia between 1730 and 1770, the majority to the British West Indies.23
West-Central Africa
According to their own origin story, the Bobangi began as fishermen, branching off from other groups along the Ubangi River in the Kongo region of West-Central Africa. Over time they occupied higher ground and expanded into agriculture (plantains and especially cassava) and limited manufacturing, and from there to local and regional waterborne trade. Yet they remained primarily fishermen until the eighteenth century, when they began to trade in slaves. They sent captives southwest by canoe to Malebo Pool, a major nexus for trade to the coast, where the slave ships lay at anchor like hungry beasts with empty bellies. The Bobangi made a distinction between two types of slaves they traded: A montamba was a person sold by his or her kin group, usually after conviction for a crime or in some cases because of famine or economic hardship. Second and perhaps more numerous as the eighteenth century progressed was the montange, a person m
ade a slave in one of three ways—by formal warfare, an informal raid, or kidnapping. As prices for slaves went up, Bobangi merchants gathered more and more captives and began to march them overland by several routes to the coast, to Loango, Boma, and Ambriz. These middleman traders rose to regional prominence and ended up supplying a substantial minority of the slaves traded out of Loango in the eighteenth century. Their language became the trading lingua franca up and down the Ubangi River and its numerous tributaries.24
West-Central Africa consisted of a vast expanse of coast with two main slaving regions, Kongo and Angola, and within them hundreds of cultural groups. It was one of the most important regions of trade as the eighteenth century wore on, and it became the single most significant in the 1790s. Slave ships called with increasing frequency along a coastline of some twelve hundred miles, beginning around the island of Fernando Po and extending southward to Benguela and Cape Negro. By today’s map the area begins in Cameroon and extends southward to include Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, a small coastal bit of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of Angola. West-Central Africa was historically a place of Portuguese colonization and influence, both on the coast and deep inland. In the seventeenth century, the influence included a mass conversion to Christianity in the kingdom of Kongo, one of the main client states in the slave trade. British and American traders began to make inroads, with lasting success, in the middle of the eighteenth century.
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