Bargains were struck in a variety of currencies, as well as trade goods. The main currency along the Guinea coast was the ‘bar’, a bar of iron about nine feet long, with notches subdividing it into smaller units. On the Gold Coast, it was the ‘trade ounce’, a measure of gold dust, or the ‘manila’, a horseshoe-shaped bracelet of brass or copper. On many parts of the west coast, cowrie shells were used as a standard of value, both for large transactions and small ones. Payments were also based on multiple exchange rates. In 1676, for example, the Royal African Company bought a cargo of exactly one hundred men, women and children, paying for them with various lengths of cloth, five muskets, twenty-one iron bars, seventy-two knives, half a barrel of powder and other miscellaneous items.
Duly paid for and branded, slaves were held in barracoons awaiting shipment across the infamous Middle Passage of the Atlantic. The fear and distress of the slaves were all the greater as tales abounded that Europeans were sea creatures, cannibals from the land of the dead; their black shoe-leather was said to be made of African skins; their red wine was African blood; their cheese was made from African brains; and their gunpowder was burnt and ground African bones. Taken on board, they were chained together in pairs and placed in tightly packed ranks. The space allocated to each slave was minimal. In 1713, the Royal African Company stipulated that it should be ‘five foot in length, eleven inches in breadth, and twenty-three inches in height’. The moment of departure was especially terrifying. ‘The slaves all night in a turmoil,’ a sailor’s diary recorded. ‘They felt the ship’s movement. A worse howling I never did hear . . .’
Olaudah Equiano’s account of the crossing provides a vivid description of the conditions they faced:
The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo was confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced constant perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died . . . This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now became insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable.
The numbers of slaves exported from the west coast rose inexorably during the seventeenth century. In the first half, the total amounted to about 670,000, an annual average of just under 14,000. In the second half, it reached about 1.2 million, an annual average of 24,000. In the last fifty years of the seventeenth century, more slaves were sold to Europeans on the Atlantic coast than in the previous 200 years combined. In the eighteenth century, the numbers soared ever higher: the annual average was 65,000, rising to more than 80,000 in the 1780s, amounting to a total of 6.5 million.
The slaving port dispatching the highest number of slaves across the Atlantic was Luanda. Founded in 1576, just north of the estuary of the Kwanza River, it was used by the Portuguese as a base for colonial expansion, precipitating a century of wars that kept the slave trade at full tilt. Soon after their arrival, the Portuguese advanced inland along the Kwanza Valley intending to conquer Ndongo territory where silver mines were said to abound. They found no silver, but the slave trade presented even better prospects. ‘Here one finds all the slaves which one might want,’ wrote a Jesuit priest in 1576, ‘and they cost practically nothing.’ In 1592, Portugal sent out a governor-general to Luanda with instructions to set up a colonial government there, naming their coastal enclave Angola after the ruler of Ndongo, the Ngola, whose kingdom they had invaded.
The slaving networks established by the Portuguese and the growing community of Afro-Portuguese pombeiros reached far inland, drawing in supplies from Mbundu states such as Kasanje and Matamba and from territories beyond the Kwango River such as Kazembe and Lunda. Imbangala warlords roamed over large areas, acting in effect as mercenaries for the Portuguese. Local wars were often started with the aim of obtaining prisoners for sale. A new Portuguese enclave was established at Benguela, south of Luanda, populated by renegades from the Kongo, exiles and convicts from Portugal and criminals from Brazil who set up their own slaving networks in the highlands beyond the coastal zone.
The main destination for slave ships leaving the ports of Angola and Kongo was Brazil. More than half the number of slaves exported by the Portuguese from west-central Africa went to Brazil, a journey lasting from five to eight weeks; the rest were taken to the Caribbean and the plantation states of North America. The casualty rate during the various stages of enslavement was high. One modern estimate is that for every hundred Africans enslaved for export from Angola in the last decades of the eighteenth century, ten may have died through capture, twenty-two on the way to the coast, ten in coastal towns, six at sea, and three in the Americas before starting work, leaving less than half to work as slaves. In all, during the three and a half centuries that the trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted, some 2.8 million slaves were dispatched from Luanda and 764,000 from Benguela, about a quarter of the entire total.
A stretch of coast along the Bight of Benin produced the second highest number of slaves. The supply of slaves was so prolific in the seventeenth century that European traders there named it the Slave Coast. Encouraged by local rulers, keen to trade, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English ships made regular calls at the lagoon ports of Popo, Ouidah [Whydah], Offra, Jakin, Porto Novo, Badagry and Lagos. Rising from 2,000 slaves in the mid-seventeenth century, export numbers from the Slave Coast reached 12,000 a year by 1700.
The lead was taken by the lagoon port of Ouidah, part of the kingdom of Hueda, whose ruler made frequent raids inland to satisfy European demand. ‘The King is an absolute Boar,’ wrote John Atkins, a naval surgeon, about Ouidah in 1721, ‘making sometimes fair agreements with his country neighbours . . . but if he cannot obtain a sufficient number of slaves that way, he marches an army, and depopulates. He, and the King of Ardra [Allada], adjoining, commit great depredations inland.’
In the 1720s, Ouidah and several other ports along the Slave Coast were taken over by the inland kingdom of Dahomey, an Aja state adjacent to the Yoruba Oyo empire. At their capital at Abomey, seventy miles inland from Ouidah, the kings of Dahomey were soon heavily involved in the slave trade on their own account. The annual income of King Tegbesu, a ruthless monarch who executed rival merchants to enforce a royal monopoly on the slave trade, was estimated to be £250,000. Dahomey’s kings also made regular sacrifices of war captives at gruesome ceremonies known as the Annual Customs which European visitors were invited to attend. The Dahomey kingdom, in turn, was invaded by Oyo armies in the eighteenth century. Business along the Slave Coast, however, continued to thrive. In the eighteenth century as a whole, some 1.2 million slaves were dispatched from the Bight of Benin, most of them through the port of Ouidah.
Eastwards from the Bight of Benin, the Niger Delta, a maze of rivers, creeks and mangrove swamps running for a hundred miles along the coast, became another major source of slaves during the seventeenth century. Adapting to the demands of the slave trade, fishing communities in the Delta and the Cross River estuary acted as middlemen, setting up entrepôts on the coast – Bonny, Brass, Calabar – and organising supplies of slaves from far inland. African merchants travelled into the interior in large river boats, manned by crews of up to fifty paddlers, stopping at riverside markets to pick up cargoes. Their network covered much of Igbo and Ibibio territory and stretched as far as the Benue River Valley. European traders extended credit for their trips upriver and waited on the coast for their return. Describing journeys he made there in the 1760s, William James recorded:
During the eighteenth century, some 904,000 slaves were exported from trading ports on the Niger Delta and Cross River.
A fourth region which started to deliver huge numbers of slaves for sale in the eighteenth century was the Gold Coast. Hitherto, the Gold Coast had been a market for slave imports. Between 1480 and 1550, Portuguese ships transported more than 30,000 slaves there, mainly from São Tomé and from the ‘slave rivers’ of the Bight of Benin. The slaves were put to work in the Akan goldfields or as agricultural labourers or sold on to northern slave markets. The Gold Coast’s trade in slaves as well as gold and ivory drew in a plethora of European merchants. By the eighteenth century, the coastline was dotted with twenty-five major stone forts, separated from one another by an average of ten miles, plus an assortment of other factories and outstations – in all about a hundred trading posts.
But inland during the seventeenth century, a series of wars erupted between rival Akan states vying for supremacy, producing a tidal wave of slaves for sale. A director of the Dutch West India Company reported in 1705 that the Gold Coast was ‘changing completely into a slave coast, and the natives no longer concentrate on the search for gold, but make war on each other to acquire slaves’. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, European traders bought 80,000 slaves. The trade in slaves soon outpaced the trade in gold and ivory. Adding to the mix was a soaring demand from rival Akan warlords for European firearms. ‘We sell them incredible quantities,’ wrote Willem Bosman, the chief factor at Elmina Castle.
The dominant power that emerged in the Gold Coast was the new kingdom of Asante. Its founder was Osei Tutu, the first ‘Asantehene’, who drew together neighbouring Akan groups in an act of union, symbolised by a single wooden stool partly covered in gold. The Golden Stool became a state cult. With the help of Dutch and English firearms, the Asante kingdom, based on the inland capital of Kumasi, expanded into an empire, adding one conquered territory after another to its collection. The volume of slaves grew ever larger. Asante’s rulers needed to sell slaves to finance the purchase of European firearms with which to maintain control of their empire. Thus the Gold Coast became renowned as much for its exports of slaves as for its exports of gold. In the eighteenth century, more than a million slaves were dispatched from the forts of European traders to the Americas.
With soaring demand, the price for slaves climbed ever higher, spreading the trade far and wide. Between 1680 and the 1840s, the real price of slaves rose steadily by about fivefold. For inland rulers, eager to get their hands on European merchandise, especially guns and gunpowder, slave raiding became an essential activity. Thus the coastal trade reached ever deeper into the interior, blighting communities hitherto untouched.
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SOUTHERN FRONTIERS
On their voyages around the southern tip of Africa, halfway along the trade route between Europe and Asia, European sea captains in the seventeenth century began making regular calls at Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope to take on fresh water, rest their scurvy-ridden crews and barter for livestock with local Khoikhoi pastoralists. English and Dutch ships were the main visitors, but others came from France and Scandinavia. After months of hard sailing, Table Bay provided a welcome respite. The surrounding area was well watered with a benign Mediterranean climate free of tropical diseases and came as a delight to mariners who ventured ashore. An agent of England’s East India Company reported in 1611:
I went two leagues inland with four or five others . . . I have never seen a better land in my life. Although it was mid-Winter the grass came up to our knees: it is full of woods and lovely rivers of fresh water, with much deer, fish and birds, and the abundance of cows and ewes is astonishing . . . The climate is very healthy, insomuch that, arriving there with many of our people sick, they all regained their health and strength within twenty days . . . And we found the natives of the country to be very courteous and tractable folk, and they did not give us the least annoyance during the time that we were there.
Despite the attractions of the Cape peninsula, no European company proposed establishing a settlement at Table Bay for several more decades. It was not until a shipwrecked Dutch crew were stranded at the Cape for a year and returned to Holland reporting enthusiastically about the potential benefits of a settlement that the directors of the Dutch United East India Company – the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) – decided to take up the idea. In 1652, they dispatched an expedition to Table Bay of about ninety men under the command of Jan van Riebeeck with instructions to build a fort and a hospital, to grow vegetables and wheat, and to breed sheep and cattle. The aim was limited to providing a victualling and refreshment station for weary crews at minimal cost.
Within a few years, the Cape station proved to be a useful stepping stone, supplying Dutch ships with fresh produce from the company gardens, milk from the company dairy and meat obtained from its own cattle herd as well as from Khoikhoi pastoralists.
But it was a loss-making enterprise, still dependent on food supplies. Hoping to save money, the VOC directors decided in 1657 to release thirty-nine of its employees from their contracts and place them on thirty-acre landholdings at Rondebosch six miles from the fort. Though designated as ‘free burghers’, they were required to sell their produce only to the company at fixed prices, to make over annually one-tenth of their stock, and to remain subject to company discipline. In following years, the company discharged more employees, mainly Dutch and German, to work as independent farmers on similar conditions.
The encroachment of white settlers on their traditional grazing grounds on the Cape peninsula provoked local Khoikhoi leaders to revolt. In 1659, the Khoikhoi attacked suddenly and in force, driving settlers from five farms on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain and seizing their livestock. After months of stalemate, van Riebeeck met Khoikhoi representatives to negotiate peace terms, recording in his journal an account of their grievances:
They spoke for a long time about our taking every day for our own use more of the land which had belonged to them from all ages, and on which they were accustomed to pasture their cattle. They also asked whether, if they were to come to Holland, they would be permitted to act in a similar manner, saying ‘it would not matter if you stayed at the Fort, but you come into the interior, selecting the best land for yourselves, and never once asking whether we like it, or whether it will put us to any inconvenience.’ They therefore insisted very strenuously that they should again be allowed free access to the pasture. They objected that there was not enough grass for both their cattle and ours. ‘Are we not right therefore to prevent you from getting any more cattle? For, if you get many cattle, you come and occupy our pasture with them, and then say the land is not wide enough for us both! Who then, with the greatest degree of justice, should give way, the natural owner, or the foreign invader?’ They insisted so much on this point that we told them they had now lost the land in war, and therefore could not expect to get it back. It was our intention to keep it.
Under the terms of a peace treaty in 1660, the Khoikhoi of the Cape peninsula kept the livestock they had seized and paid
no reparations for the damage they had inflicted, but, with ominous implications for their future, they gave way over their right to the land, recognising the sovereignty of the VOC over land where free burghers had settled. To prevent further incursions, van Riebeeck ordered the construction of a perimeter defence around the outskirts of the settlement, marked by fences, watch houses and a hedge of bitter almonds. When completed, it covered an area of about six miles by two.
But there were other difficulties. From the start, van Riebeeck was plagued by a shortage of labour. The Cape settlement in 1657 numbered no more than about 150 people: one hundred company employees, ten free burghers, six married women, twelve children, six convicts and ten personal slaves. A large labour force was needed to clear land, cut timber, make bricks, construct buildings, cultivate crops and herd cattle. Forbidden by the company from forcing Khoikhoi to work for him, van Riebeeck agitated for permission to import slaves. Slave labour was commonly used by the Dutch at most outposts of their empire in Asia.
Henceforth, the Cape settlement came to depend on slave labour. The first two substantial shipments of slaves arrived in Table Bay in 1658: one consisted of 228 slaves taken from Dahomey; the other was a shipload of 174 slaves from Angola, mainly children, captured by the Dutch from a Portuguese slaver bound for Brazil. Subsequent shipments came mainly from Madagascar, India and Indonesia. Most slaves were put to work for the company; by 1679, the company employed 310 slaves. Others were assigned to free burghers.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 14