WEST AFRICA AND THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

DAVID L. IMBUA

Introduction
The convention of the League of Nations in 1926 defined slave trade as including all acts
involved in the capture, acquisition or disposal of a person with an intent to reduce him/her to
slavery. Simply put, slave trade embraces the totality of activities involved in obtaining,
transporting and exchanging a human being for money or other goods. Once the exchange is
made, the person literally ceases to be a human being and he/she is treated as the property of
another, bound to serve him/her without the choice of what to do, where to do it, how to do it,
or when to do it. It may be difficult today for people to understand how a man can be bought
and sold as a property by another person but there was a time that the slave trade dominated all
economic and political relations between African states and peoples on the one hand, them and
Europe on the other. The trans-Atlantic slavery emerged as a cruel, unjust, exploitative and
oppressive system which rested on the “principle of property-in-man,” that is, one man’s
appropriation of another person as well as the fruits of his labour. From its establishment in the
sixteenth century to the formal colonization of Africa in the dying years of the nineteenth
century, the slave trade brought about the largest involuntary migrations of peoples from West
Africa to the Americas. In this infamous trade, Europe was the carrier and user of slaves while
Africa was the producer of slaves, who were transported into slavery in the Americas.
American slavery, to borrow the words of Orlando Patterson was “a relation of domination, a
brutal system of exploitation and human degradation; and a special form of human parasitism.”
Any discussion of West Africa and the Europeans since the fifteenth century that excludes the
Atlantic slave trade is therefore incomplete and questionable. Thus, this chapters examines the
origin, abolition and impacts of the Atlantic slave trade on West Africa.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

In any discussion of slave trade and slavery, the transatlantic slave trade looms large. The
transatlantic slave trade was unique and unlike any other in its magnitude and scale. Due to its
enormity and centrality in the economic and commercial relations between Africa and the
Europeans, Walter Rodney avers that: “to discuss trade between Africans and Europeans in the
four centuries before colonial rule is virtually to discuss slave trade.”1 On its importance, David
Northrup avers that:
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 First, it brought many millions of Africans to the Americas (four times the
number of European immigrants who settled there down to about 1820), leaving
a permanent cultural and genetic imprint on many parts of the New World.
Second, the creation of slave labour systems in the New World was associated
with the first phase of European expansion and the rise of capitalism. Third, the
end of the slave trade was the subject of a massive abolitionist campaign that
scholars widely have seen as one of the great turning points in Western moral
consciousness. Finally, the Atlantic slave trade has been seen not only as
affecting Africa during the four centuries of its existence but also as leading to
the later European takeover of the continent and causing its present-day
underdevelopment.2
The starting point is why Africans were recruited and packed in the way horses or dogs would
not be allowed to be packed today and transported in the most horrific condition through the
Middle Passage to the Americas. Developments in Europe and the Americas, empowered
Europeans in ways that devastated Africans, with the Atlantic slave trade as one major
outcome. Soon after the West Coast of intertropical Africa was unveiled, Europe began to make
a prey of its people. As early as 1503, a few Africans were exported from the Portuguese
settlements to America, and under Ferdinand V sanction was given to this traffic. Alexander
III, who then occupied the papal throne, in the plenitude of his power as Lord of the world in
virtue of his office, gave the Spaniards full right to the possession of the people, and the
territories of all the discoveries they made in the West. This power was so cruelly exercised,
that the inhabitants of the West Indies Islands, and of those regions of the continent acquired
by Spain, speedily became extinct.
The cruelties inflicted on the weak Amerindians scathed the indignation of many of the
agents of the Romish Church sent to convert them, and strenuous efforts were made, especially
by the Dominican order, for their protection. The leader of that humane endeavour,
Bartholomew de Las Casas, accompanied Christopher Columbus in his second voyage, and
witnessed in St. Domingo the gradual disappearance of its inhabitants, under the ruthless
oppression of those who had got possession of them in their division of their spoil by the
conquerors. Returning to Spain, he exposed the conduct of his countrymen, and so effectually
pled the cause of the wretched Indians with Charles V and his ministries, that he was sent back
with the title of Protector of the Indians, to promulgate laws for their protection and defence.
Unfortunately, he found all his courageous and persistent efforts on their behalf, though backed
by royal authority, unavailing in these distant countries against the drive for stupendous wealth;
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and to save them from utter extinction, he looked to Africa for the needed labour. Cardinal
Ximenes opposed the scheme pursued by Las Casas. He saw the iniquity of reducing one race
of men to slavery while seeking the means of restoring liberty to another. When the matter was
brought before Leo X, he declared that “not only the Christian religion, but nature herself cried
out against a state of slavery.” Against this opinion, Charles, carrying out the biding of Las
Cases, granted a license to import four thousand Africans into America to one of his favourites,
who sold it to Genoese merchants.3 The emperor seems to have acted without due
consideration, for he subsequently endeavoured to undo the consequences of his action by
proclaiming emancipation to all slaves in his American islands. On his resignation of the
crown, the importation of Africans was recommenced.
The critical need to mobilize adequate and steady amount of labour needed to get work
done on American plantations and mines was the primary reason for the development of the
Atlantic slave trade. In all societies of the New World, the importation of enslaved Africans
became the cheapest and often the only way to find the needed labour. We can therefore say
that the access to a limitless pool of land after the ‘discovery’ of the Americas and the
availability of African labour established the foundation of an Atlantic system that lasted for
centuries. From its beginning to the very end, virtually all aspects of the trade were brutal,
exploitative and dehumanizing. Captured by acts of violence, human beings were turned into
commodities by slave dealers, whom Thomas Clarkson believed were bestial and brutish. In
Clarkson’s own words: “the hearts of those, who were concerned in this traffic, became
unusually hardened, and I might readily believe any atrocities, however great, which might be
related of them.”4 The magnitude of the atrocities, depravity and insecurity occasioned by the
slave trade led Hugh Goldie to the valid conclusion that “this commerce… turned a great part
of Africa into a wilderness.”5
There were several chartered companies formed in the seventeenth century to carry on
the slave trade. In 1662 for instance, a company was formed, chartered by Charles II, and
headed by the Duke of York, to supply the British West Indies with 30,000 enslaved Africans
annually. Britain’s share in the traffic gradually increased, until after securing what was called
“The Assiento Contract,” which made over to her the privilege of supplying the Spanish West
Indies with slaves. Because of this, 192 ships at the minimum left British shores annually for
Africa.6 This monopoly to supply the Spanish West Indies with slaves was formerly possessed
by France, but was secured to Britain by the treaty of Utrecht, as its gain from the victories of
the great Marlborough.7 Apart from chartered companies, individuals were also involved in the
slave trade and in some cases, shipped many more slaves than the companies. The collapse of
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the Royal African Company’s monopoly was important to the expansion of the British slave
trade. William A. Pettigrew argues that: “The separate traders benefitted from undoubted
economic advantages over the company… They traded faster, beat the company’s ships across
the Atlantic, and received higher prices for their slaves.”8 For both the chartered companies
and individual traders, until circumstances began to change during the first half of the
nineteenth century, their trade with West Africa was essentially based on the exportation of
one commodity –the African slave, for service on American plantations growing tropical
produce for Europeans.
African slave labour was crucial for the exploitation of the enormous natural resources
of the Americas which made the European colonization enterprises in those Amerindian lands
attractive and profitable. In the plantations of sugar cane, tobacco and cotton; in the mines and
in the cities, the enslaved African was the hand and feet of the European ruling class which
would not degrade itself with manual work. To maximally exploit the slave, he was treated as
a tool, a chattel, a thing, the possession of another, a legally and socially dead person with no
entitlement to the fruits of his labour. As one historian argues, American slavery was “a relation
of domination, a brutal system of exploitation and human degradation; a special form of human
parasitism.”9 American slavery meant hard work from dawn to dusk under damning conditions
with a grudgingly given diet of poor nutritional value. Enslaved Africans were the only
elements who could be reduced to the total discipline the planters considered essential to the
prosperity of their investments in the New World. The tragedy of blacks was that if they resisted
and were brutally punished, there was nowhere for them to seek redress.
Long standing prejudice made blacks easy victims, especially by the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when slavery came to be justified and rationalized on racial grounds.
European publicists, ethnographers, scientists, missionaries and scholars seemed to agree with
the view expressed by Rev. G. C. H. Hasskarl in his The Missing Link: Has the Negro a Soul?
(1898) that “the Negro is a separate and distinct species of the genus homo from Adam and
Eve…. He is inevitably a beast and as a beast entered the ark.” Similarly, Charles Carroll
identified the Negro in his The Negro a Beast; or, In the Image of God (1900), as a “beast,
created with articulate speech, that he may be of service to the white man.” The beast motif
had become popular among Europeans. Even the most ardent advocates of the egalitarian
principles of the American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson, a prominent slave owner,
defended slavery as “the best kind of school for the benighted, culturally backward and
spiritually bankrupt Africans.” Indeed, as the Rev. Hugh Goldie noted, slavery was regarded
as “a benevolent institution for the negro,” who would have become victim of human sacrifice
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if left in their homes in Africa. The apologists of the slave trade stopped at nothing to justify it
in an attempt to discourage its abolition. Indeed, the apologists argued that:
… because Africa was a savage and backward place, a kind of ‘living hell,’ the
slave trade was a form of blessed release, taking Africans from their cursed
environments and landing them in the Americas, a new beginning. Moreover,
they argued, Africa produced slaves in any case, through endemic warfare: there
was nothing to be done to stop this.10
The way some scholars who are eager to apportion blame pursue the issue of
African complicity in the slave trade has been criticized. To start with, the slave trade defied
all ethics of normal business and many Africans had no choice in the circumstance they found
themselves. The creation of a world economy by European capitalists and the reconstruction
of economic and political relations in all parts of the world was done without any input from
Africans. In constructing a complex global economy, Europe had capital and entrepreneurial
skills but lacked land and labour. They found abundant fertile land to produce sugar cane,
cotton and tobacco in the Americas. The only factor of production which was lacking was
labour, which Africa was compelled to supply. It is important to point out that African chiefs
and middlemen neither created nor had good understanding of the global economy which
reduced their kith and kin to slaves. Treating the slave trade as business between Europe and
Africa is to downgrade its human costs and horrors.11
Again, there are scholars who hold the view that African sons and daughters were not
just exported for nothing. They claim that it was an exchange and Africans got what was due
them. There is no doubt that the slave trade was not simply a matter of trade. It was exploitation
inspired by greed for wealth and inordinate grabbing. In real sense, the slave trade was nothing
less than robbery. The trade, which armed your neighbours and compelled you to be perpetually
at war with them, could not be profitable. Through the slave trade, Europeans and Americans
made huge profits, produced the direly needed raw materials, stimulated their various industries
and created the needed capital, all of which contributed to the industrial revolution. In return
for all this Africans received trinkets, guns and gun-powder and hot drinks which enabled them
to constantly engage themselves in wars that provided the Europeans with more slaves.
Whatever benefits that accrued to the tiny political class who collaborated with the Europeans
should not be used to trivialize the magnitude of the injustice suffered by millions upon millions
of Africans who were unjustly and inhumanly commodified.

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Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
The two decades spanning the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries are a major watershed in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, especially its abolition.
Much of the debate about the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery started with the
controversy surrounding the call for abolition and emancipation. The abolitionists charged that
the Atlantic slave trade had caused, and was causing, considerable socio-economic and political
disruption in Africa and was inflicting great suffering on the enslaved.12 In defense of their
atrocious business, the slave traders claimed that the wars in Africa were not caused by
European demand for slaves. They argued that those wars occurred independently of European
intervention and that the captives sold to the Europeans would have otherwise been
slaughtered.13 They therefore claimed that they were performing a rather humanitarian service
in transporting the captives to the Americas. Some members of the Western public did not find
this argument convincing and were determined to ensure that the trade was abolished. As a
result, the late eighteenth century saw several forces in Europe gaining momentum for the
abolition of the slave trade. Through their effort, the opening years of the nineteenth century
witnessed one nation after the other declaring the slave trade illegal. Denmark and Britain, two
of the biggest slave carriers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among the first
to prohibit their citizens from participating in the trade in 1803 and 1807 respectively. 14 They
were followed by the United States (1808), Holland (1814), and France (1817). At the Congress
of Vienna in 1815, there was a general agreement among most European nations that the slave
trade should be abolished. By the mid – 1830s, most European states had outlawed the trade.15
Despite these attempts, the slave trade died hard and continued through much of the nineteenth
century with the landing of enslaved African in Latin America. The Atlantic slave trade did,
however, gradually decline in the course of the nineteenth century, and had largely disappeared
by the 1870s and 1880s.
The abolitionist movement and the ultimate abolition of the slave trade has been
differently accounted for. It is a matter of some debate how potent particular factors are
considered to be. Between the 1770s and 1800s, some persons campaigned for abolition on
humanitarian grounds, with a curious alliance of enlightenment humanism and evangelical
outrage serving to publicize the unacceptable brutality of the slave trade.16 European
intellectuals and church societies united in the belief in universal brotherhood and the
fatherhood of God to all men irrespective of race as well as the universal right of all human
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beings to freedom, equality and dignity of life pulled their energies and resources together in
the fight against the slave trade and slavery. The role of Christian churches in the campaign for
abolition explains why in the 1930s, the Sir Reginald Coupland’s school of thought at Oxford
celebrated the abolition of the slave trade as the triumph of Christian moral values over material
greed, a kind of “a noble sacrifice of national economic self-interest in the service of global
humanitarianism.” to borrow the words of Joseph Miller.17
The basic argument of scholars who subscribe to humanitarianism as the force behind
the abolition of the slave trade is that morality, not profits, was a significant, if not the
controlling consideration behind British abolition and Britain’s subsequent efforts to suppress
the slaving of others. Christian morality created and sustained a sense of transnational
commitment to humanism, at least among Christian nations. As far as the Christian Church
itself was concerned, this was the beginning of an evangelical revival which would see the
rapid growth of missionary activity in the Americas and Africa. The evangelicals argued that
the slave trade contravened several laws of God, according to which all men are not just
brothers but which also admonishes the strong to have compassion for, as well as, bear the
infirmities of the weak rather than pleasing themselves at his expense; the slave trade also
violated the Golden Rule and inhibited the spread of divine love and Christian Fellowship.
Humanitarians of all shades, identified a conflict between the slave trade and the fundamental
principles of morality and righteousness.
In France, the humanitarian argument was forcefully expounded by Jacque Pierre
Brissot who founded the Société des Amis Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks) to work
for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. In Britain, the leading campaigners included
Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce. Some other important figures were: Tom Paine
(author of “African Slavery in America,” 1776), Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, 1852); John Jay, William Lloyd Garrison, Lord Mansfield, James Ramsay, Olaudah
Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Thomas Clarkson, and Josiah Wedgwood who produced the
memorable anti-slavery medallion depicting a slave in irons above the slogan, “Am I not a Man
and a Brother?” Later recognizing the role of women in the humanitarian campaign, the
inscription “Am I not a Woman and a Sister?” was engraved on abolitionist tokens that were
popularly circulated in America and Britain in the 1830s. As the slave trade debate gathered
momentum in the 1780s, the African Association was founded in London. One of its major
aims was to wean Africa off the slave trade, diversity commerce and bring about a mutually
beneficial, progressive, civilizing, missionary relationship which would improve Africa.

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 Some scholars expressed skepticism with long-standing humanitarian explanations for
abolition and wondered why the same philosophical and religious traditions that had tolerated
the slave trade for several millennia suddenly became sources of massive public opposition to
it. These scholars attribute the abolition of the slave trade to the declining profitability of slave-
grown sugar. Economics then became the focus of intense scrutiny by economic historians.
This view was first argued clearly by Eric Williams (a West Indian Historian and later Prime
Minister of Trinidad and Tobago) in his 1944 magnificent book, Capitalism and Slavery.
Williams argued that the anti-slave trade agitation succeeded when it did because by the end
of the eighteenth century the basis of the slave regime had been undermined by a number of
developments that were primarily economic in character. Based on a study of such
developments, Adiele Afigbo concludes that Atlantic abolition was designed to protect Europe
from a trade that no longer served its interests, not to advance anybody else.18
The strength of the British sugar islands before 1783 lay in the fact that British West
Indian plantations worked by enslaved Africans produced sugar for all of Europe and America,
and was, therefore, Britain’s most valuable possession at the time. This monopoly was broken
by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when French West Indies had started to produce
cheaper sugar and France took over the control of the European sugar market. French sugar
cost one-fifth less than that of Britain and this indicated that the age of the British sugar
monopoly was over. It is argued on the basis of this thinking that the then British Prime
Minister, William Pitt supported abolition legislation as a means of blunting French advantage
in the sugar trade. Gaston-Martin, the famous French historian of the slave trade and the
Caribbean colonies accused Pitt of aiming by propaganda to free the slaves, “in the name no
doubt of humanity, but also to ruin French commerce.”19 The Paris press read British –
sponsored right-to-search treaties as pretexts to intercept French ships engaged in legitimate
trade. Similar opinion prevailed among critics and doubters across Europe and America who
regarded British self-congratulatory narrative of humanitarianism as nothing more than the
boosting of a self-righteous bully. Britain was seen by critics as a Machiavellian government
intended to achieve world supremacy under the cover of universal philanthropy.20
Matters were worsened by developments in Britain itself. By the middle of the
eighteenth-century surplus capital, the bulk of which came from the slave trade, had helped to
bring about the industrial revolution in Britain. Similar changes were about to take place in
other parts of Europe. The industrial revolution made it easier and quicker to turn raw materials
into manufactured goods. Industrialization brought about an important shift in economic
thinking about Africa, which came to be regarded more as a veritable source of raw materials
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and a huge market for industrial manufactured goods, than simply a source of slave labour. The
evidence indicates that the industrialization in the northern hemisphere was fuelled by the
vegetable oil and rubber of “the tropics,” and European manufacturers – many of whose
companies had originally made their money in the slave trade – searched for overseas markets
to sell their cheaply-made commodities.21 The point cannot be over-emphasized that
industrialization brought with it dwindling demand for slaves and the expansion of commodity
trade. These were important factors that undermined the slave trade.
Because of the new realities in the global economy, there arose a group of economic
thinkers and philosophers who forcefully propagated the idea that free trade, free competition
and free labour were more profitable and less wasteful than forced labour. Universal experience
suggested that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in
the end quite expensive and unsatisfactory. Economic thinkers insisted that slave labour is
given grudgingly and it is emblematic of the unwise principles guiding Atlantic enterprise.
Adam Smith, the intellectual giant of the industrial middle-class with its new found freedom
argued in his seminal book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) that empire was an economic burden
to the nation rather than a boon as was widely supposed. Adam Smith had massive support
from many Western European economists who were convinced that slave labour was no longer
profitable. Future economic growth, it was argued, lay in industrialized systems making use of
free, waged labour. Fortunately for these scholars, the revolutionary and Napoleonic war which
had engulfed Europe between the early 1790s and 1815 had repercussions for international
trade. Global shipping lanes were severely disrupted including those linking Africa and the
Americas and the slave trade never fully recovered.
For a long time, scholars have engaged themselves with the debate on which of the
foregoing factors really made the abolition of the slave trade possible. Followers of Coupland
and those of Williams continue to disagree rather sharply on the factors that conduced to the
abolition of the slave trade. Rather than taking side with any of the camps it is reasonable to
support Miller’s position, viz:
The dialectic of economic opportunism and moral principle pervaded Atlantic
abolition. Though Eric Williams and Reginald Coupland described these
motivations as opposing, in fact sincere humanitarian ideals coexisted easily
with economic success; in fact, the latter made the former affordable. The
pairing is not a paradoxically old coupling of principle and practicality but
rather the dynamic engagement that energized the historical processes…
Someone had to pay for saving African bodies and souls from the limitations
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 misattributed to them, yet the power of this idealization of the virtues of
Christianity and commerce repeatedly led its European proponents to undertake
initiatives far beyond their grasp.22
What remains to be highlighted before we end this section is the critical role played by
the enslaved in the antislavery movement. Tales of abolition and emancipation are usually
presented as if they were merely a metropolitan struggle; with focus on white abolitionists as
if Blacks were indolent, docile and passive in the struggle to end the enterprise in which they
occupy the central stage. On this, Brown argues that:
The antislavery movement, we now know, involved far more than the small
circle of propagandists and elite politicians whom the first chronicles tended
to lionize. Resistance by the enslaved, themselves, helped put the legality of
slaveholding in Britain on trial in the English and Scottish courts in the 1760s
and 1770s and helped diminish sympathy for Caribbean slave-owners.23
Irrespective of what has been said to the contrary, the subject of slave resistance and dread of
insurrection is fundamental to the broader history of slavery, abolition, and emancipation. Slave
resistance and mutinies in Africa, on board ships and in the Americas were common and
dangerously uneasy. The self-liberating efforts of the enslaved (through subversive poisonings,
open revolt, and escape) created in the West Indies focused British politicians’ attention on
their broader concerns with security in a period of unsettling changes. The most successful
slave revolt was that on the island of Haiti in 1791, under Toussaint L’Ouverture; who has been
described by Eric Williams as “one of the most remarkable men of a period rich in remarkable
men.” The financial and human costs of slave revolts were alarming and this was a major
concern to Pitt and Britain as a whole. Even Wilberforce was critical of revolutionary
emancipation and agreed with Charles Ellis that the continued importation of enslaved Africans
into the Americas would be a disaster for the colonies, which will culminate in a period “when
rivers of blood would flow.” The specter of bloodbaths was a theme drummed repeatedly by
the abolitionists during the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.
From the foregoing analysis, it is safe to conclude that it was a constellation of
humanitarian, economic, ideological forces and the determined resistance of the enslaved that
combined to break the yoke of slavery. In Thomas Clarkson’s graphic depiction, antislavery
opinion flows in one direction, without eddies or crosscurrents, without a diversity in aim,
agenda, or interest. The opponents of slavery all wanted the same thing, and for the same
reasons. The strategy was clear. The attack on the slave trade would come first. In time, when
the time was ripe, the challenge to slavery would follow.
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Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade and its Abolition on West Africa
Despite the controversy surrounding a host of issues relating to the Atlantic slave trade,
scholars are quite agreed that the trade impaired Africa’s potential to develop economically
and maintain its social and political stability. The demand for slaves and the struggle to meet
that demand impacted all economic, political, social, and religious activities, especially in the
coastal and forest regions of Africa, and shaped the character and nature of relations between
African coastal communities and their hinterlands. The ubiquity and enormity of this impact
led Adiele Afigbo to the conclusion that: “no theme, not even that of the evolution of states,
big and small, in early African history, can rival the significance of the slave trade and its
abolition in the history of any region of Africa or the continent as a whole.”24
Studies of the history of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa have focused on demography
and within it on the number of enslaved persons exported from the continent. Despite the huge
literature on this, there is no consensus on the number of enslaved Africans taken to the
Americas. Seen from the perspective of African history, the question of the number exported
is only a small part of the larger question of the impact of the trade on West Africa. Despite the
controversy surrounding the number game, the Atlantic slave trade was undoubtedly one of the
greatest population movements in history, and certainly the largest migration by sea. It is hard
to deny that this monstrous rape of African manpower, life and productivity affected sub-
Saharan African societies irreversibly. Demographic historians of the slave trade especially
those with ‘low estimates’ have been criticized for deliberately using numbers to downplay the
impact of the slave trade and by so doing dismiss any connection between the slave trade and
the underdevelopment of Africa.
The enslavement of the virile young men and women, “the flower of their society,”
negatively altered the population structure in many areas. It is virtually impossible to make an
assessment of how the monstrous rape of African manpower affected the population of sub-
Saharan Africa as a whole, given that one of Africa’s core themes has been the attempt to build
up its population.25 One cannot over-emphasize the point that the massive loss of the African
labour force was made more critical because it was composed of able-bodied young men and
young women. Slave buyers preferred their victims between the ages of 15 and 35, and
preferably in the early twenties.26 Europeans shipped the healthiest wherever possible and this
was a serious loss to Africa’s productive potential. The most devastated areas were Angola,
areas north of the Congo River and the Gulf of Guinea, and large areas in their hinterlands.

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 Depopulation as a result of the systematic export of people stunted economic growth
and development of commodity production which in turn delayed or frustrated the development
of market institutions and general commercialization of economic activities in Africa. A more
important impact was food insecurity. The slave trade era was a period of endemic famine for
Africa. During bad years people often sold their children or themselves, and slavers had
difficulty feeding the slaves they bought. During the famine of 1757-58, a French Commander
turned about 500 slaves out of the fort to fend for themselves because he could no longer feed
them. Eyo Honesty II witnessed famine in a neighbouring Calabar community, where people
sold themselves and children for a few yams or few coppers.27 While in some areas these
famines were caused by drought and locusts, the slave trade eroded traditional mechanisms for
dealing with natural disasters. Slave-raiding warriors pillage and burned granaries; people
moved to safer, though less productive areas.
Some scholars hold the view that the slave trade was a blessing to Africa and claim that
Africans grossed some economic and social benefits from their collaboration with European
slavers. They dismiss the claim that the native auxiliaries of the slave trade were helpless
victims, with no choice but to play the role assigned to them in the infamous trade. They insist
that whatever African agents did was influenced by their vision of improved economic, social
and political fortunes. It is generally agreed that those who raided and took captives, and the
African traders who bought and sold the captives, all made good on the trade.28 It is agreeable
on the basis of human rationality that the raiders and traders would not have sustained the
captives’ business for centuries if there had been no private gains. It is generally accepted that
the export centers on the African coast benefited economically and demographically from the
trade. Where they succeeded in insulating themselves from the socio-political upheavals
provoked by the trade in their hinterlands, these port towns (or city-states) realized short-term
benefits that have been equated with private gains.29
Market production of agricultural commodities to meet the limited needs of the slave
ships for foodstuffs was stimulated, their population expanded as the coastal traders retained
some of the captives for their needs and for the production of their subsistence products, and
so on. These port towns or city-states grew as enclave economies. In some city – states like
those of Old Calabar, local merchants of the slave trade displayed their economic and socio-
political positions by replacing their ‘mud-plastered, palm thatched and poorly ventilated
houses’ with ‘prefabricated wood and iron houses’ and “brick and cement structures.”
Prefabricated houses ‘were ordered through the British trading ships and paid for in slaves or

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palm oil.’30 At the same time that merchants were recruiting people from other families for
sale, some of them sent their children abroad for education.31
The slave trade connected Africa to the world economy and by so doing transferred to
the New World part of Africa’s relative advantage in the production of commodities for the
evolving global market, and this retarded the growth and development of commodity
production for international trade in Africa.32 In turn, this delayed the development of market
institutions and the general commercialization of economic activities in Africa. The slave trade
made Africa an integral part of the Atlantic world and played a crucial role in the history of
early modernity, the industrialization of Europe, and the plantation economies in the
Americas.33 In return for their role in creating the capital that made industrialization possible,
Africans received trinkets, guns and powder which enabled them to constantly engaged
themselves in wars that feed the trade. In many ways, the slave trade helped to structure African
societies in ways that were inimical to capitalist development.
Africans were linked to the Atlantic world in their greater role as slaves, for exploitation
and domination. Abolition did nothing to redress the world capitalist system to be free, fair and
just to all its members. It rather worsened the situation by hitching Africa and its resources
more securely for the West through colonization. The industrialization of Europe created
consumer and not producer societies in Africa and such societies are positioned to supply raw
materials while the West transform the raw materials into finished goods which they sell at
exploitative prices in African markets. European colonies in Africa were more or less markets
for the nationals of those countries to sell all kinds of goods, including the ones that none of
their citizens will buy locally. Africa’s ties with the West are still characterized by exploitation
and domination. There is no end in sight to this unequal relationship since the world is still
being policed and controlled by the descendants of slavers, who like their benefactors are
driven by greed for large wealth and inordinate grabbing. Because of the slave trade and the
post-abolitionist developments, Africa has lost the ability to compete with Europe and much
of the Americas.
The root of black poverty is very much connected with the past history of slavery, slave
trade and colonization. Thus, Africa’s underdevelopment has been linked to its location in the
world economy, its role in the Atlantic world, its domination by Europe, and to the
contemporary declining economies that forced thousands of people out of the continent. The
uncertainty that defined the days of the slave trade affected all branches of economic activity,
and agriculture in particular. By removing vibrant young people who constitute the engine of
change and development, the slave trade hampered development and prosperity in Africa.
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Because people could easily obtain cheap European goods in exchange for slaves, local crafts
gradually died out and this retarded economic development. Walter Rodney referred to what
happened to Africa’s local industries in the face of European cannibalism as “technological
arrest or stagnation and regression which made people forget even the simple technique of their
forefathers.”34 Economic development and technological advancement require the judicious
use of the country’s human capital and natural resources under peaceful atmosphere. The slave
trade denied Africa of all this.
The slave trade and its abolition brought about the objectification of Africa as an
imagined entity lying at the feet of the debaters with little (individuals such as Olaudah Equiano
excepted) to say for itself.35 Richard Reid writes that Africa had become an “object,” an issue
or a question to exercise the great philanthropic and political minds of the day, and not a few
lesser ones, too: and herein do we see a process by which “Africa” was being invented
according to the concerns and agenda of outsiders.36 Apart from the objectification motif, the
slave trade made Africans to look down on themselves. Whereas Europeans valued land as the
most important possession, a concept that was introduced to Africa, Africans valued people
above land and often measured wealth in terms of the family and kinship size. Africans had to
accept new ideas from the West in the guise of modernization. As a result, some Africans came
to have the power of life and death over other people, the so-called slaves. For instance, Da
Souza, a notorious slave trader at Whydah or Badagry, cruelly slaughtered a hundred of slaves
that he was unable to sell.37 In Calabar, Eyo Honesty told Hope Waddell that “oh, you know
that slaves be nothing here” and they could either be buried with the dead or killed as a
substitute for a free man.38 This was not the case in the pre-Atlantic slave trade era.
One of the fundamental misjudgments made by European politicians, humanitarians,
intellectuals, and philanthropists alike was the notion that slavery and “legitimate” commerce
were mutually exclusive. It dawned on them sooner than later that: “It took the labour of
African slaves to sustain not only the Atlantic slave trade but also the so-called ‘legitimate
trade’ in cash crops which were desperately needed in Europe and the Americas for the
industrial growth that began to be recorded from the eighteenth century first in Britain and later
to other parts of Europe and the New World.”39 As has been established by some scholars, the
struggle to suppress the slave trade and to spread the gospel of ‘legitimate’ production led to
the institutionalization of indigenous slavery in many parts of Africa. Indeed, the production
of ‘legitimate goods’ had the opposite effect of expanding slave use especially in the plantation
set up to produce the new articles of trade. Clearly, the transition from the slave trade to the so-
called ‘legitimate’ trade did not represent any major break in the patterns established in the
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slave trade period. The production and processing of commodities like palm oil and kernel led
to the expansion in the use of slaves in plantations. Afigbo captures the picture succinctly:
“legitimate trade emerged in the interior as the twin brother of the ‘illegitimate trade’ in slaves;
indeed, the two developed sort of as Siamese twins. They were carried on along the same
routes, and their wares were displayed and sold in the same markets.”40
In the early days of the colonial era, the need to sustain an economy based on cash crops
gave impetus to indigenous slavery. Many colonial governments used labour in ways not
different from slavery, such as forced labour, poorly remunerated labour, and semi slave
workers. Pawnship consolidated itself in many areas, in ways not too different from slavery,
largely to create cheap labour for cash crops.41 In his From Slavery to Neoslavery, Ibrahim
Sundiata asserts that “the triumph of British imposed abolition and emancipation coincided
with the increasing exploitation of the worker and the tying of the laborer to the plantation.”42
In his own study Fomin found out that slavery did not exist in most non-centralised societies
in Africa until after the abolition of the external trade and thus concluded that “slavery was
externally introduced from the ‘trans’-systems.”43 He stresses that the homogeneity of the non-
centralized societies, their kinship ties, absence of class among them, the democracy they
practiced, the egalitarianism in their social life and their simple political structures did not make
for indigenous servitude. He concludes that the people of these societies “seemed to have taken
up slavery when they got involved in the sale of slaves they obtained from the hinterland states
to European traders.”44 We cannot over emphasize the role of the Atlantic slave trade and its
abolition in the rise of slavery in several communities of West and Central Africa. It could
hardly be doubted that the promotion and expansion of ‘legitimate’ trade would not have been
achieved with the exclusive use of free labour.
In the post-abolition period, Europeans looked at Africans as lawless, and uncivilized
people who needed European intervention to come out of darkness and heathenism. To this
end, missionaries were empowered to control the moral agenda in Africa. In pursuit of this aim,
some former slaveholders and plantation owners who had become opposed to slavery urged
the missionaries to fight against all forms of slavery in Africa. But as later events will prove,
the missionaries lacked the power to abolish slavery. They tolerated and admitted slave owing
converts to their churches. The Rev. Henry Townsend, the pioneer missionary at Abeokuta,
argued that a head-on confrontation with slavery would affect the work of evangelization,
hence: “I cannot admit the principle that everyone holding a slave is an idol worshipper, an
adulterer etc. for possessing a slave is not among the works of the flesh enumerated by St.
Paul.”45 In Old Calabar, the pioneer missionaries admitted slaveholders as communicants on
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the claim that St. Paul and his associates worked in countries where slavery prevailed.46 Rev.
Hope Waddell who led the Calabar missions condoned slavery and argued that “were it
suddenly abolished anarchy would reign.”47 Waddell and his colleagues did not see any
justification in excluding slave holders from the church if they “were willing to obey the laws
of the Lord Jesus Christ.”48 For the missionaries, slavery in Africa was therefore a necessary
evil.
Modern historians are quite agreed that the European demand for captives caused
political upheaval and wars in Africa. Whether fought primarily for the purpose of obtaining
slaves or for other reasons, warfare was responsible for a substantial number of people enslaved
in Africa. Some Africanists claim that anarchy and inter-tribal wars in Africa were by-products
of the slave trade which defied every normal trade ethics. Slaves were most captured whenever
there was warfare, strife and instability. Available records indicate that captains of slave ships
provided weapons and goods that encouraged inter-tribal wars among African communities.
Across swathes of western and central Africa between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries,
militarized state arose, while imported firearms often facilitated the rise of small, well-armed
minorities capable of dominating larger populations. In broad terms, the slave trade contributed
to the creation of more arbitrary and centralized warrior state, that it magnified Angola, for
example, where Ndongo and Lunda empire became deeply involved in slave-raiding violence
across swathes of central Africa, violence which continued well into the nineteenth century.49
Such African groups like Kaabu, Asanteman, Dahomey, the Aro Confederacy and the
Imbangala had war bands that sent out steady streams of captives to the New World. Walter
Rodney avers that:
The process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade
at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry and kidnapping. When one
tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African
continent, it is very essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of
social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word.50
Till date, the deep wounds sustained during the slave trade era are yet to be healed and have
continued to breed unhealthy relations among states in the slave trade corridor. This has been
intensified by the recent calls on coastal states, like the Efik of Old Calabar and the Aro of
Southeastern Nigeria to pay reparations for their roles in the slave trade.51
Apart from the fact that Africa’s human and material resources were carted away,
abolition widened the gulf between the rich western nations and their poor African
counterparts. After the abolition, the freed African had no help in his struggle to support himself
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and his dependents. A black nation like Haiti was impoverished paying ransom to the slave
owners whereas it was the liberated slaves that needed compensation, not just for the wrongs
they had suffered, but as capital to enable them to repair the damage done and level the ground
so as to enable them to compete with former slave owners trading in the same market, at no
undue disadvantage. But the slaves waited in vain for any reparation. In Britain, the
emancipated slaves received no compensation while the former slave owners in the West Indies
shared a Parliamentary grant of £23 million, now worth more than £23 billion.52
Similarly, the emancipated slaves in the US were each promised 40 acres and a mule,
but nothing was forthcoming to ensure a smooth transition from slavery to freedom. The
situation on the continent was not different. As already noted instead of Reparations to Africans
to repair the damage already suffered, abolitionists and missionaries who promoted the sale of
palm oil, groundnut, ivory, sheabutter, cotton, etc. as “legitimate trade” to discourage the export
of slaves began a new period of expanded internal “domestic slavery” to produce the palm oil
and carry it by head or canoes to the markets. Till date, the issue of Reparation for the slave
trade has not been given the attention it deserves. The enormity of the crime involved in the
transatlantic slave trade remains insufficiently appreciated in the world. The French parliament
in July 2001 passed a law recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity.
The promise by that law, to get other nations to recognize the enormity of the crime, is yet to
be fulfilled.
A significant impact of the slave trade is its role in the process of globalization. Africans
were forced to migrate to various parts of the world, mostly to the New World in the Americas
and the Caribbean, but also to India, Indonesia, Philippines, and the Far East generally. They
were also taken to Europe in appreciable numbers. In the process, Africans faced new
challenges and new opportunities. Wherever they were taken, Africans created vibrant living
communities whose culture and social institutions were discernibly African, varying in scale
and intensity depending on such factors as geography, demography, the nature of the economic
enterprise in which the slaves were involved, the ideological disposition and commitment of
the enslaving white society, and the nature of their contact with Africa. Today, all attest to the
value of African contributions to music, sport and entertainment in the world at large. The
world’s fastest runners, the latest being Usain Bolt, have come from the islands of the
Caribbean, where most African slaves were landed. This has been attributed to genetic
transformation in the crossing from Africa to the islands.53

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 Sadly, black slavery played an inglorious role in the emergence, consolidation and
ideological validation of Euro-American racism, a powerful force in world history since the
eighteenth century. On this, Reid asserts:
There can be little doubt that the growth of the Atlantic slave trade was
accompanied by the rise of European racism toward Africa. Between the
fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Africans came to be seen as ‘natural’
slaves, the products of underdeveloped societies and cultures, and ‘blackness’
thus became associated in the ‘Western’ mind with servitude and savagery.54
The campaign to eradicate the slave trade and slavery from the late eighteenth through the
nineteenth centuries did nothing to change the European perception of Africans and the
character of race-relations between blacks and whites. Even after abolition and emancipation,
legal and other forms of oppression still blocked black access to power and resources. Both in
slavery and after it, the Blackman was the object of degradation and pity the world over.
The migrations instigated by slavery and the racist attacks on black people around the
world led to the creation of a global black identity that became a political movement in the
twentieth century. Black politics in Europe and the Americas began to connect in many ways
to those of Africa. The African diaspora produced consequences that served as agents for ties
across and within the Atlantic.55 The actions of men like W. E. B. Du Bois and Kwame
Nkrumah were based on the notion that Africans were one large family, and that Africans on
the continent and those in the Diaspora have so much in common and neither of them can
maximize its place in our race - conscious world without the cooperation of the other.

Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to discuss the origin, development and impact of the Atlantic slave
trade and its abolition on West Africa. We noted that though slavery occurred in all ancient
civilizations, the enslavement of Black people during the formation of post-Columbian
American societies marked a significant turning point in the historical development of Africa
and peoples of African descent living either outside of the African continent or in parts of the
continent. From its establishment in the sixteenth century to the formal colonization of Africa
in the dying years of the nineteenth century, the slave trade dominated all activities in Africa,
internally and externally. After more than four hundred years of its existence, a constellation
of humanitarian, economic, ideological forces and the determined resistance of the slaves
combined to break the yoke of slavery and made it illegal for citizens of many nations to
participate in it. Since the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, conflicting arguments have
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been presented on a host of issues relating to slavery and the slave trade. These often centre on
questions of why Africans were enslaved? Who were gainers and who were losers in the
infamous trade? Why was an enterprise so economically important to the whole world severely
criticized and ultimately abolished in the first decade of the 19th century? What was the major
force behind abolition? How did the trade affect Africa and Africans in the short and long
terms? These issues have been addressed in this chapter. It is clear from the analysis here that
though some individuals and export centres on the African coast realized some short-term
benefits from serving as local collaborators and facilitators of the trade, Africans were by and
large losers in the Atlantic slave trade.

Notes
1
Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1990), 103.
2
David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), xiii.
3
Hugh Goldie. Calabar and Its Mission (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1901),
53 -54.
4
Thomas Clarkson. The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the
Africa Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 10.

5
Goldie. Calabar and Its Mission, 57.

6
Goldie. Calabar and Its Mission, 57
7
Ibid.
8
William A. Pettigrew. “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave
Trade, 1688-1714.” William and Mary Quarterly. Vol. LXIV. No. 1 (2007): 6.

9
Okon E. Uya, Contemporary Issues on Slavery and the Black World (Calabar: Clear Lines, 2003), 5.
10
Richard J. Reid. A History of Modern Africa 1800 to the Present (West Sussex: John Wiley and Son
Limited, 2012), 7.
11
Toyin Falola. The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization (Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2013). 55.
12
Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman. “Introduction: Gainers and Losers in the Atlantic Slave
Trade.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the
Americas, and Europe, edited by Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1992), 12 – 13.

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13
Ibid.
14
Joseph A. Ushie and David Imbua, Essays on the History, Language and Culture of Bendi (Ibadan:
Kraft Books, 2011), 55.
15
Reid. A History of Modern Africa, 31.

16
Ibid., 28.
17
Joseph C. Miller. “Introduction: Atlantic Ambiguities of British and American Abolition.” William
and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LXVI, No. 4 (2009): 677.

18
Adiele E. Afigbo. “Africa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly. Vol.
LXVI. No. 4 (2009): 709.
19
Qtd in Eric Williams. Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 147.
20
Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006), 11 -12.
21
Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 30.
22
Miller, “Introduction: Atlantic Ambiguities,” 686
23
Brown, Moral Capital, 21-22
24
Afigbo. “Africa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 706.
25
Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 26.
26
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 105.
27
David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Developments in South-Eastern
Nigeria (London: Clarendon, 1978), 74.
28
Inikori and Engerman. “Introduction: Gainers and Losers,” 2.
29
Joseph E. Inikori, ed. “Introduction.” In Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on
African Societies (London and New York: Hutchinson University, 1982), 51.

30
Braide and Ekpo, 144
31
David L. Imbua. Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World: Calabar-British Experience,
17th – 20th Centuries (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2012), 48.

32
Inikori and Engerman, “Introduction: Gainers and Losers,” 3.
33
Falola, The African Diaspora, 5
34
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 114.
35
Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 30.

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36
Ibid.
37
Hope M. Waddell. Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary
Work and Adventure, 1829 – 1858 (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1963; reprinted as 2nd edition
with Introduction by G. I. Jones. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1970), 207.
38
Waddell, Twenty Nines, 405 & 427.
39
Chukwuemeka Agbo, “Between Slaves and Slave Owners: The Abolition and Resource Wars in
Colonial Eastern Nigeria,” in Nigeria’s Resource Wars, edited by Egodi Uchedu
(Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2020), 35.
40
Afigbo. “Africa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 709.
41
Falola, The African Diaspora, 41.
42
Ibrahim K. Sundiata. From Slaving to Neoslaving: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era
of Abolition, 1827-1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 8.
43
E. S. D. Fomin, A Comparative Study of Societal Influence on Indigenous Slavery in Two Types of
Societies in Africa (New York: The Edwin Mullen Press, 2002), 2.
44
Ibid, 111.
45
Falola, The African Diasporay,172
46
Goldie, Calabar and Its Mission, 178.
47
Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 557.
48
Ibid, 558.
49
Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 26.
50
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 104.
51
Okon E. Uya, “Indigenous Slavery and Slave Trade in the Cross River Region,” in Slavery and Slave
Trade in Nigeria from Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century, edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi and
Okon Uya (Ibadan: Safari Books Ltd, 2010), 124.
52
Ade J. F. Ajayi. “Remembering the Slave Trade.” In The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks,
Legacies, Expectations, edited by James Kwesi Anquandah, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang and
Michel R. Doortmont (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007), 369.
53
Okon E. Uya, Diasporas and Homelands: An Emerging Central Theme in African Cultural and
Historical Studies (Lagos: CBAAC, 2013), 5.
54
Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 7.
55
Falola, The African Diaspora, 106.

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23

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