The Origins of the African Slave Trade

| by Piero Scaruffi
In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ash
anti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore,
since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims and the Muslims were continuin
g the trade like before.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief th
at the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white
people were to blame for it. This is a simplistic scenario that hardly reflects
the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvar
d University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the
origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Black
burn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slav
e trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early m
iddle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western Afric
an kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be th
at Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms w
ere paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary t
o obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the
white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact thei
r tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the k
ings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own subjects. (Of course
, this neither condones the white traders who bought the slaves nor deny that ma
ny white traders still committed atrocities to maximize their business).
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman
empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Empero
rs and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of c
ourse, Western powers retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citiz
ens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued i
n their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how t
he stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ance
stral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the on
ly ones selling slaves, and they were selling people of their own race. (To be p
recise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war, and Muslims
were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the Christians of Eur
ope nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were selling their own people)
.
Then the Muslim trade of African slaves declined rapidly when Arab domination wa
s reduced by the emerging European powers. (Note: Arabs continued to capture and
sell slaves, but mostly in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates t
hat 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of no
rthern Africa. As late as 1801 the USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripol
i precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality o
f those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortal
ity rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though. The first ones were the Portuguese
, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities,
and often using Italian venture capital, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves i
n the 1440s to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their ow
n African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America,
but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South
and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because
the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S
. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary
to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was
just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any for
ce to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (bl
ack) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Afric
ans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born) and 17
,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free
people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly
stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the norm
. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply pur
chased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of b
lack Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like
they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to differen
t tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of r
ace.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, milli
ons of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the
economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the
United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one o
f the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exporte
d to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe
. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves i
n the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditio
ns in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities
(which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps). It is not a coinciden
ce that slavery was abolished at a time when millions of European and Chinese im
migrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites pract
iced slavery: in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or about
1.4% of the white population (there were 27 million whites in the USA). That pe
rcentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of th
e 27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery). Incidentally, in 1830
about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more sl
aves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white
slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only
whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery became widespread even before Lincoln, and throughou
t Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong
in Africa itself, where slavery is slowly being eradicated only in our times. O
ne can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms
until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all those African kingdo
ms became colonies of western European countries that (for one reason or another
) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s, those African coloni
es regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery resurfaced. And countl
ess African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner look like a sain
t. Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans b
efore it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites an
d not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the moment they could,
why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say, Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave tra
de with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was
invented by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europe
ans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The U
SA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: for a long time no such criticism
was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for s
laves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started sel
ling their own people (and, even today, slavery is a taboo subject in the Arab w
orld).
Today it is politically correct to blame some European empires and the USA for s
lavery (forgetting that it was practiced by everybody since prehistoric times).
But I rarely read the other side of the story: that the nations who were the fir
st to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precis
ely those countries (especially Britain and the USA). In 1787 the Society for Ef
fecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in England: it was the firs
t society anywhere in the world opposed to slavery. In 1792 English prime minist
er William Pitt called publicly for the end of the slave trade: it was the first
time in history (anywhere in the world) that the ruler of a country had called
for the abolition of slavery. No African king and emperor had ever done so. As D
inesh D'Souza wrote, "What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement t
o abolish slavery".
Of course, what was also (horribly) unique about the Western slave trade is the
scale (the millions shipped to another continent in a relatively short period of
time), and, of course, that it eventually became a racist affair, discriminatin
g blacks, whereas previous slave trades had not discriminated based on the color
of the skin. What is unique about the USA, in particular, is the unfair treatme
nt that blacks received AFTER emancipation (which is, after all, the real source
of the whole controversy, because, otherwise, just about everybody on this plan
et can claim to be the descendant of an ancient slave).
That does not mean that western slave traders were justified in what they did, b
ut placing all the blame on them is a way to absolve all the others.
Also, it is worth noting that the death rate among the white crews of the slave
ships (20-25%) was higher than the rate among black slaves (15%) because slaves
were more valuable than sailors but nobody has written books and filmed epics ab
out those sailors (often unwillingly enrolled or even kidnapped in ports around
Europe when they were drunk).
To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African sla
ve trade was an aberration of the USA, not their own invention.
By the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slav
es in Africa (black slaves of black owners) than in the Americas.