Africa+and+the+Africans+in+the+Age+of+the+Slave+Trade

Pg. 435-440 Notes:

The Atlantic Slave Trade: MI: During the late 1400's through the early 1500's the Portugese were expanding their territory into African land. Though they were not forceful, there then tried to convert, capture, and would sell slaves for a profit, thus creating the Atlantic Slave Trade. Trend Towards Expansion: MI: Between the periods 1450-1850 more than 12 million Africans had been carried from Africa to both the Americas and Portugal. Men were typically being sold in the trade because they were to be used as heavy laborers, while the women and children were to be kept as domesticated servants to the household. Demographic Patterns: MI: Portugal was not the only one who was participating in the African Slave Trade. African rulers themselves would sell their own people for the benefit of the profit. Organizations of the Trade: MI: Due to the Royal Africa Company the importance of the slave trade was shown. However, the hardships were also shown, such as the high mortality rates of both the slaves and the crew members. Notes: Pgs. 440-448 African Socities, Slavery, and the Slave Trade: MI: During the slave trade, many African villages were completely enslaved by Europeans, Muslims, or even their own rulers. Men were to be used as heavy laborers and women were to be used as domestic servants. Slaving and African Politics: MI: New poltics during this period mainly involved the basis of the slave trade. Many slaves were captured from warring states, while others were enslaved by their own peope. This was a whole new system, because before all slaves would be from different countries, however, whenever there were now reasons to use their own people with the shrinking amount of slaves captured. Asante and Dahomey: MI: During this period two major cities, Asante and Dahomey, the slave trade increased. Many new ways of slavery were being developed. Firearms were now introduced into the slave trade in exchange for the human slaves. East Africa and the Sudan: MI: The trans-Atlantic slave trade most likely affected eastern Africa and the Sudan causing millions of slaves to be traded, bought and sold during this period. New items and products were beginning to be seen on the market of the trade. White Settlers and Africans in Southern Africa: MI: The peoples of Southern Africa the Bantu's, were beginning to rise to power during this time period. New advancements in technology were used to help make their civilization better. Also, a sense of social men to women inequality was beginning to seep through. The Mfecane and the Zulu Rise to Power: MI: During this period, the Zulu people under the reign of Shaka, became a force to be reckoned with. The reformations made by Shaka allowed the Zulu people to be feared by different tribes and as they hoped the Europeans. p.448-453 The American Diaspora: MI: Slave Lives: MI: Africans in the Americas: MI: American Slave Societies: MI: The People and Gods in Exile: MI:
 * Portugese ships finally made it to the Cape of Good Hope in 1487.
 * Established factories along the coast. (Factories: forts and trading posts with resident merchants.)
 * El Mina: (1482) resided in the major gold producing industry.
 * Forts allowed the Portugese to exercise some control with few personnel.
 * Most forts were established with the consent of local rulers who benefited from the access to European commodities and sometimes from the strong military support provided by the Portugese.
 * Africans acquired goods from the Portugese, who sometimes provided African rulers with slaves that were captured from other countries along the coast. In exchange, the Portugese received ivory, pepper, animal skins, and gold in exchange for the slaves and services.
 * Trade was the basis of Portugese relations with the Africans, as well as political, religious, and social relations.
 * Missionary efforts were made to convert the rulers of Benin, Kongo, and other African kingdoms. They made contact with the Kongo kingdom south of the Zaire Rivers in about 1484.
 * Ruler of Kongo, Nzinga Mvemba, (1507-1543) with the help of Portugese advisors and missionaries brought the whole kingdome to convert to Christianity.
 * Attempts were made to "Europeanize" the kingdoms.
 * Enslavement of his subjects led Nzinga Mvemba to try to end the slave trade and limit Portugese Activities in his kingdom.
 * He was only partially successful, because of Portugal's steady control over Kongo's ability to communicate and trade with the outside world.
 * The Portugese tended to look on Africans as savages and pagans but believed that they were able to be civilized and converted to Christianity.
 * Portugese exploration continued to expand into settlements in the 1570's with the foundation of Luanda on the coast.
 * The Portugese tried to dominate the existing trading ports in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
 * The Portugese main effort was primarily commercial and military, while also accomplishing a strong missionary effort.
 * Portugal's major interest was in the gold industry. However, pepper and other products produced by the slave trade also took their effects.
 * Portugese voyages now opened a direct channel to Sub- Saharan African to Portugal.
 * The first shipment of slaves to Portugal was in 1441.The Portugese began sending 50 or more slaves per year to Portugal before 1450, but by 1460 500 slaves were shipped each year.
 * The Plantation system of organization associated with sugar, in which managers were able to direct and control laborers over long periods of time with little to no restraint. This eventually led to the production of various crops as the slave trade grew significantly in volume.
 * Between 1450 and 1850 an estimated 12 million African slaves were transported across the Atlantic to bth Portugal and the Americas.
 * Mortality rate was 10-20% on the ships. About 10 or 11 million Africans actually made it to the Americas during the 16th century.
 * During the 1600's the numbers of the slave trade were small, but by the 1700's they had grown dramatically.
 * Slave mortality rate was high in the Caribbean and Latin America. Between1550 and 1850 Brazil received 3.5 to 5 million Africans or about 42% of all those who reached the New World.
 * Benin alone, was exporting more than 10,000 slaves per year.
 * Atlantic Slave trade focused on men. Planters and mine owners in the Americas were looking for workers who could participate in heavy labor. Many were not willing to buy children because of the high mortality rate.
 * African societies who sold captives into slavery also preferred to sell men, so that they could keep the women and children as domestic servants.
 * Trans-Atlantic-Slave-Trade carried more men than women and more women than children.
 * Those who remained in Africa swelled the numbers of enslaved people and skewed the proportion of women to men in African enslaving societies.
 * Royal African Company was chartered for the purpose of slave trade.
 * Each nation established merchant towns or trade.
 * Fewer than 10% of the employees of the Royal Africa Company who went to England came back alive. A majority of the people died on the first year out on the slave ships.
 * European agents for the companies often had to deal directly with local rulers, paying a tax, or offering gifts.
 * Various forms of currency, were iron bars, brass rings, and cowrie shells.
 * Spanish developed a complicated system in which a healthy man was known as an Indies piece and children and women were priced at fractions of the value.
 * Triangular trade. Existed in which slaves were carried to the Americas. Sugar, tobacco and other goods were carried from the Ameicas to Europe and European goods were then sent to the coasts of Africa.
 * During the slave trade, Europeans sometimes justified the enslavement of Africans by pointing out that slavery already occured on that continent.
 * However, forms of bondage were ancient in Africa and the Muslim trans Sahara and Red Sea trades were already established and the Atlantic trade interacted with and transformed those earlier aspects of slavery.
 * African societies had developed many forms of servitude which varied from a peasant status to something much more like chattel slavery in which people were considered things "property with a soul" as Aristotle quoted.
 * African states were usually nonegalitarian and because in many African societies all land was owned by the state or the ruler and the control of slaves was one of the few ways, if not the only way in which individuals or lineages could increase their wealth and not their status.
 * Slaves were used as servants, concubines, soldiers, administrators, and field workers.
 * In some cities such as Ghana and Kongo almost the whole villages were enslaved dependents who were required to pay tributes to their rulers.
 * Muslim traders of Africa were linked to the forest region to the savannahad slave porters as well as villages of slaves to supply their caravans. These forms of servitude were fairly benign and were an extension or lineage and kinship systems.
 * In other, however, they were expoitative economic and social relationsthat reinforced the heriarchies of various African societies and allowed the nobles, senior lineages, and rulers to exercise their power.
 * Despite great variation in African societies and the fact, that slaves sometimes attained positions of command and trust, and in most cases slaves were denied choice about their lives and actions.
 * They were placed in dependent or inferior positions and they were often considered aliens. It was important to remember that the enslavement of women was a central feature of African slavery. Although slaves were used in many ways domestic slavery and the extension of lineages through the addition of female members reamined a central feature in many places.
 * Some historians believe that the excess of women (having more than one woman at a time) and the creation of large harems by rulers and merchants whose power was increased by the process and the position of women was lowered in some societies.
 * In the sudanic states of the savanna, Islamic concepts of slavery had been introduced, Slavery was viewed as legitimate fate for nnbelievers but was illegal for Muslims.
 * Sepite the complaints of legal scholars such as the Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu (1556-1627) against the enslavement of Muslims many of the Sudanic states enslaved their captives both Muslim or pagans.
 * In the Niger valley slave communities produced agricultural surpluses for the rulers and nobles of Songhay, Gao, and other states. Slaves were used for gold mining, and salt production and as caravan workers in the Sahara.
 * The existence of slavery in Africa and the preexisting trade in people allowed Europeans to mobilize the commerce in slaves quickly by tapping existing routes and supplies. In this venture they were aided by some African rulers of certain African states who were anxious to aquire more slaves for themselves and to supply the Europeans with slaves in exchange for aid and commodities.
 * In the 16th century, Kongo Kingdom, the ruler had an army of some 20,000 slaves as oart of his household and this gave him greater power than any previous ruler had ever had. In general African rulers did not enslave their own people, except for crimes or in other unusual circumstances.
 * European merchants and royal officials were able to tap existing routes, markets, and institutions, but the new and constant demand also intensified enslavement in Africa.
 * In the period between 1500-1750 as the gunpowder empires and expanding international commerce of Europe penetrated Sub-Saharan Africa existing states and societies often were transformed.
 * The empire of Songhay controlled a vast region of the Western Savanna until it was defeated by a Moroccan invasion in 1591. Most small states were therefore left fragmented.
 * Led to a situation of instability caused by competition and warfare as states tried to expand at the expense of their neighbors or to conolidate power by incorporating subject provinces.
 * Warrior or soldier emerged in this situation as an important social type in states such as the Kongo kingdom and Dahomey as well as along the Zambezi River.
 * Endless wars promoted the importance of military and made the sale of captives into the slave trade. Extension of the politics of regions of Africa.
 * Some authors see the situation as a feature of African politics. others believe that it was the result of the European's new demand for slaves.
 * The main result was the capture and sale of millions of people.
 * Although increasing centralization and hierarchy could be seen in the enslaving African societies, a contrary trend of self-sufficiency and anti- authoritarian ideas developed among the peoples who bore the brunt of the slaving attacks.
 * One result of a presence of Europeans on the coast was a shift in the locus of power with Africa. Just as states such as Ghana and Songhay in the savanna took advantage of their position as intermediarias between the gold of the west African forests and the trans-Saharan trade routes.
 * Beyond the coast its was different than it was to the right of the coast. With access to European goods, especially firearms, iron, horses, cloth, tobacco, and other goods, western and central African kingdomes began to redirect trade towards the coast and to expand their influence.
 * Some historians have written of a gun and slave cycle which increased firepower allowed these states to expand over their neighbors, producing more slaves which they used to trade for more guns. Ther result was unending warfare and the disruption of societies as the search for slaves, was pushed even further into the interior.
 * Several large states developed in West Africa during the slave trade era. Each represented a response to the realities of the European presence and the process of state formation was long underway in west Africa. Rulers of these states grew in power and oftern surrounded themselves. with ritual authority and a luxurious court life as a way of reinforcing the position that their amies had won.
 * In the area also known as the Gold Coast by the Europeans, the empire of Asante rose to prominence in the period of the slave trade. The Asante were members of the Akan people, who had settled in and around Kumsai, a region of gold and kola nut production.
 * There were at least 20 small states. Under the vigorous Osei Tutu (d.1717) the title assantehene was created to designate the supreme civil and religious leader. His golden stool becam the symbol of the Asante union.
 * An all-Assante council advised the ruler and an ideology of unity was used to overcome the traditional clan divisions.
 * With control of the gold- producing zones and a constant suppy of prisoners to be sold as slaves for more firearms, Asante maintained its power until the 1820's as the dominant state of the Gold Coast.
 * The kingdom of Benin was at the height of its power, when the Europeans arrived. As early as 1516, the ruler or oba, limited the slave trade, from Benin and a long time, most trade from the Europeans. Trade with the Europeans was controlled directly by the king and was in pepper, textiles,and ivory rather than slaves.
 * The Kingdom of Dahomey which developed among the Fon peoples had a different response to the European presence. Its kings ruled with the advice of powerful councils, but by the 1720's access to firearms allowed the rulers to create an autocratic and sometimes brutal political regime based on the slave trade.
 * In the 1720's during the reign of King Agaja (1708-1740), the kingdom of Dahomey moved towards the coast which attracted many European traders.
 * The trade of firearms and slaves, were controlled by the royal court whose armies were used to raid for more captives.
 * Into the 19th century, Dahomey was a slaving state and dependence on the trade in human beings which had negative effects on the society as a whole. More than 1.8 million slaves were exported from the Bight of Benin between 1640 and 1890.
 * In many places, crafts such as bronze casting,woodcarving, and weaving flourished. Guilds of artisans developed in many societies and their specialization produced crafts which were then executed with great skill.
 * The best artisans laborered for the royal court, producing objects designed to honor the ruling family and reinforce the civil and religious authority of the king.
 * Much of the artistic production also had a religious function or contained religioius symbolism; African artists made the spiritual world visually apparent.
 * Europeans came to appreciate African arts and skills. In the 16th century, the Portugese began to employ African artists from Benin, Sierra, Leone, and Kongo to work local ivory into ladles, saltcellars (containers) and other decorative objects that combined African and European motifs in beautifully carved designs.
 * While works were commisioned by the Europeans, sometimes the African artisans were allowed to incorporate some of their traditional symbols and themes from motherhood to royal power.
 * West Africa was the region mostly affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. On the coast of east Africa the Swahili trading cities continued their commerce in the Indian Ocean, adjusting to the military presence of the Portugese and the Ottoman Turks.
 * Trade to the interior continued to bring ivory, gold, and a steady supply of slaves. Many of these slaves were destined for the harems and households of Arabia and the Middle East but a small number were carried away by the Europeans to work their plantation farms.
 * On Zanzibar and other offshore islands and later on the coast itself, Swahili, Indian, and Arabian merchants followed the European model and set up clove producing plantations using African slave laborers.By the 1860's Zanzibar had a slave population of about 100,000. The sultan of Zanzibar alone, owned more than 4000 slaves in 1870. Slavery became a prominent feature in eastern Africa.
 * Much less is known of the interior of eastern Africa. Large and small kingdoms were supported by the well watered and heavily populated region of the lakes of the interior.
 * Bantu speakers predomianted, but many of the people inhabited the region. Linguistic and archaelogical evidence suggests that pastoralist peoples from the upper Nile Valley with a distinctive late Iron Age technology moved southward into what is today western Kenya and Uganda, where they came into contact with Bantu speakers. Also came face to face with farmers and herders who spoke another language known as Cushitic.
 * Beginning in the 1770's Muslim reform movements began to sweep the western Sudan, Religious brotherhoods advocating a purifying Sufi variant of Islam throughout the Muslim networks.
 * In 1804 Usuman Dan Fodio, a studious and charistmatic Muslim Fulani Scholar, began to preach the reformast ideaology in the Hausa kingdoms. His movement came to become a revolution when in 1804, seeing himself as God's instrument he preached a jihad against the Hausa kings who he felt were not following the teachings of Muhammad.
 * By the 1840's the effects of Islamization and the Fulani expansion were felt across much of the interior of West Africa. New political units were created, a new reformist Islam that tried to eliminate pagan practices spread and new centers of trade. Literacy became more widely dispersed and new centers of trade were established in this period.
 * Later jihads established other states along similar lines. These processes fed into the ongoing process of the external slave trade and the development of slavery within African societies. Large numbers of captives resulting from the wars were exported down to the coast for sale to the Europeans, while another stream of slaves crossed the Sahara to North Africa.
 * In the western and central Sudan the level of slave labor rose, especially in some of the larger towns and along the trade routes. Slave villages, supplying royal courts, and merchant activities, such as the plantation system were developed to produce peanuts and other crops.
 * Slave women spun cotton and wove cloth for sale, slave artisans worked in the towns, and slaves served in the caravan traders.
 * By the late 19th century regions of the savanna contained large slave populations in some places as much as 30-50% of the whole population.
 * One area of Africa that was barely affected by the slave trade was the southern tip of the continent.
 * Peoples practicing farming and using iron toolds were living south of the Limpopo River by the 3rd century C.E
 * By the 16th century, Bantu- speaking people occupied much of the eastern regions of southern Africa. They practiced agriculture and herding; worked iron and copper into tools, weapons, and adornments and traded with their neighbors.
 * Men worked as artisans and herders; women did the farming and housework and sometimes organized their labor communally.
 * Politically chiefdoms of various sizes characterized the southern Bantu peoples. Chiefs held power with the help of their relatives and with the acceptance of the people.
 * The Bantu speaking peoples' pattern of political organizationand the splitting off of junior lineages to form new villages created a new form of expansion that led to competition for land.
 * In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope to serve as a provisioning post for ships sailing to Asia. Large farms developed on the base of the colony.
 * The Cape Colony depended on slave labor brought form Indonesia and Asia, but they soon found themselves enslaving the native Africans.
 * By the 1760's the Boer farmers had croseed the Orange River in search of new lands. They saw the fertile plains and hills as theirs and they saw the Africans as intruders and a possible source of labor. Competition and warfare was a result.
 * By 1800 the Cape Colony had about 17,000 settlers, 26,000 slaves, and 14,000 Khoikhoi.
 * As the Boers pushed northwards, the southern Bantu were extending their movement to the south. Great Britain seized the Cape Colony in 1765 and then took it under formal British control in 1815.
 * After 1834, when Britain aboulished slavery and imposed restrictions on landholding groups of Boers staged their Great Trek far to the north to be free of government interference.
 * Among the Nguni peoples major changes had taken place. A unification process had begun in some of the northern chiefdoms and a new military organization had emerged.
 * In 1818 leadership fell to Shaka, a brilliant military tactician who reformed the loose forms into regiments organized between lineages and age.
 * Iron discipline and new tactics were introduced including the use of a short stabbing spear to be used at close range.
 * They army was made a perminant institution and the regiments were housed together in seperate villages. Fighting men were allowed to marry only after they had completed their service.
 * Shaka's own Zulu chiefdom became the center of this new military and political organization, which began to absorb or destroy its neigbors. Shaka ruled with an iron hand, destroying his enemies conquering their cattle, and crushing any opposition. The cruel behavior gained him many enemies. He was assasinated in 1828, but his reformations still remained in use.
 * Slave trade was the means by which the history of the Americas and Africa became linked and a principal way in which African societies were drawn into the world economy.
 * Import into Africa of European firearms, Indian textiles, Indonesian cowrie shells, and American tobacco in return for African ivory, gold, and especially slaves.
 * Prices of slaves increased in the 18th century.
 * For the slaves themselves, slavery meant the destruction of their villages or their capture in war. seperation from friends and family, and then forced to march to an interior trading town or to the slave pens at the coast.
 * Conditions were deadly. Many to 1/3 of the population of captives died along the way. Eventually the slaves were loaded onto the ships. Cargo sizes varied and could go as high as 700 slaves crowded into the dank unsanitaty conditions of the slave ships, but most cargoes were smaller.
 * The Middle Passage or slave voyages to the Americas were traumatic. Taken from their homes, branded, confined, and shackled. Africans faced not only the dangers of poor hygiene, dysentry, disease, and bad treatment, but also the constant fear of being beaten or the worse, by Europeans.
 * Their situation sometimes led to suicide or resistence or sometimes even ship mutiny.
 * Middle Passage did not strip Africans of their culture. When arriving in America they retained their languages, beliefs, artistic traditions, and memories of their past.
 * Slaves carried across the Atlantic were brought mainly to the plantations and mines of the Americas.
 * Landed estates using large amounts of labor often coerced became characteristic of American agriculture, at first in sugar production, and later for tobacco, rice, and cotton.
 * Plantation system of farming with adependent or enslaved workforce characterized the production of many tropical and semitropical crops that were in demand in Europe.
 * Slaves did many other jobs besides working on plantations. Some worked as miners, tourban occupations, such as artisans, street vendors, and household servants.
 * Different types of slaves. African-born slaves were almost all black (by European standards) and their American born descendants. Creole slaves were mulattos as a result of the sexual explotiation of slave women or other forms of miscengenation.
 * Hierarchy status. The free whites were on top, slaves were at the bottom, and free people of color were in the middle. Color and race did play into the American slavery as it had not been in African slavery..
 * Slaveholders also created a hierarchy based on origin and color. Creole and mulatto slaves were given more oppurtunities to aquire skilled jobs or to work as house servants rather than in the fields or the mines. They were also most likely to win their freedom by manumission (the voluntary freeing of slaves)
 * Hierarchy which was created by the slaveholders did not reflect the perceptions of the slaves.
 * Creole and African slaves intended to divide the community as did the distinctions between different African groups. In Jamaica there were several Akan-led rebellions in the 18th century. In the 18th century African slaves and their descendants formed a majority of the Caribbeans population.
 * Jamaica and St. Domingue slaves made up more than 80% of the population. African slaves made up only 35% of Brazil's total population.
 * Free people of color, the descendants of former slaves made up about another 1/3 so together slaves and free colored people made up a total of 2/3's of Brazil's population. Slaves developed in such states such as Charleston and New Orleans in North America. A large free slave and slave population was developed.
 * Working conditions for slaves brought to America were exhausting and life for most slavers were difficult and short. Family formation was made difficult because of the general shortage of female slaves. the ratio of men to women was 3:1 in some places. Family members might be seperated by sale or by a masters whim.
 * Most slaves lived in family units even though they're marriages were not always sanctioned by the religions of their masters.
 * Amount of continuity depended on the intensity and the volume of the slave trade.
 * Some slaveholders tried to mix up the slaves on their plantations so that African identities would be lost, but colonial dependence on slaves who consistantly dealt with the same region tended to undercut such policies.
 * African slaves had to adapt and to incorporate other African people's ideas and customs into their own lives.
 * Religion was an obvious example of continuity and adaptation slaves were converted to Catholicism by the Spaniards and Portugese. African religious ideas did not die out. In English islands obeah was the name given to African religious and the men and women konwledgeable in them were held in high regard within the community.
 * Reality of the Middle Passage meant that religious ideas were easier to transfer that the institutional aspects of religion.
 * Recalcitrance, running away, and direct confrontation were present wherever slaves were held.
 * In 1527, a plot to rebel was uncovered in Mexico city. Throughout America communities of runaway slaves were formed. Palmares enormous slave kingdom with many villages and a population of 8,000 to 10,000 people.
 * Resisted Portugese and Dutch attempts to destroy it. Most remarkable story of African American resistence was in the forests of Suriname, a former Dutch plantation colony. Large numbers of slaves ran off in the 18th century and mounted an almost perpetual war in the rainforest against the various expeditions that were sent to hunt them down.