The Effects of the Slave Trade

African Societies

Aim:

• Consider the main effects that slavery had on African societies.

Success Criteria:• On a map of Africa you can label the kingdoms of

Ashanti and Dahomey.• You can give an example of how slavery affected

farmers, tradesmen, tribes and families.

Introduction

• The slave trade had effects on all the areas it touched.

• The main effect was on the continent of Africa – some people did gain out of the trade but many more suffered.

• It is important to remember that there had been slavery for many years in West Africa.

• However the work that slaves did and the way they were treated varied immensely.

Olaudah Equiano 1745-1797• Born in 1745 in modern day Nigeria.• At the age of 11 he was taken into slavery

and sent to Barbados and then Virginia in America.

• He was bought by a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy and trained to be a sailor – he was expected to fight in battles his master was involved in.

• He was sent to Britain to attend school and learned how to read and write.

• Olaudah was sold two more times – his final master, Robert King said he could buy his freedom for £40.

Olaudah Equiano 1745-1797• After he returned to Britain he became

heavily involved in the Abolitionist movement.

• He was encouraged to write his life story or autobiography ‘ The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’

• His personal account of slavery was a sensation at the time and provides historians with valuable evidence about slavery.

• He married a British woman – Susan Cullen and had two daughters.

In Source A Olaudah Equiano describes the lives of slaves among his own Ibo people of West Africa. The extract is taken from his 1789 autobiography.

We kept as slaves the prisoners of war that were not bought back or sold off. But their conditions was so much better than the slaves in the West Indies. With us they did no more work than anyone else. Their food, clothing and lodging were nearly the same. Some slaves even held important positions and had slaves of their own.

• Ashanti is in modern day Ghana – the Europeans called the coastline near Ashanti – the ‘Gold Coast’.

• Ashanti was an inland kingdom, so it was too difficult for white Europeans to attack.

Ashanti

‘The Gold Coast’

Ashanti – The Gold Coast

• Ashanti used slaves for many years but they used even more once the slave trade developed.

• Ashanti traded some of its slaves for white men’s goods, such as cloth, alcohol and especially guns.

• It used the guns to make itself more powerful and start wars against its neighbours to gain more slaves.

• It also had gold mines were slaves worked.

In Source B, a Danish visitor to Ashanti in the eighteenth century described the Ashanti gold mines

They are pits dug into the ground in a slanting manner. The pits are like a staircase with each step measuring about one metre high. On each step stands a slave who passes up soil on trays and hands down the empty ones to men working at the face, who pick out the earth and extract the ore. The pits vary in length from four to ten metres. Slaves in Ashanti are also put to death in religious rituals, as human sacrifices.

• Dahomey, in modern day Benin, was another inland kingdom that became rich and powerful by exploiting the slave trade.

• The Kings of Dahomey organised raids into neighbouring lands, to capture slaves to sell on to the whites.

Dahomey

‘The Slave Coast’

In Source C, Olaudah Equiano describes how, at the age of eleven, he became a slave.

When the grown up people were gone into the fields to work, the children gathered together to play. Usually some of us climbed into a tree to look out for any kidnapper, for they often took the opportunity of our parents’ absences to attack and carry off as many as they could seize. Three people, two men and a woman, climbed silently over a wall. Before we could cry out they seized my sister and me and gagged us. Then they carried us off into the woods. For two days they hurried us through the woods. On the third day some new people took my sister off. I never saw her again.

Mungo Park was a Scottish traveller who made a 500-mile journey through West Africa. In Source D, he describes one of the many slave caravans he met in the interior.

The slaves which Karfa had brought with him were all prisoners of war. They looked at me first with horror, for many of them believe the whites buy Africans for the purpose of eating them. This is one reason the slave merchants keep them constantly in irons, and watch them very closely lest they escape. They are usually secured by putting the left leg of one and the right leg of another in the same pair of fetters (chains).

Every four slaves are likewise fastened together by the necks, with a strong rope. At night another pair of fetters is put round their wrists.

Effects of Slavery on West Africa

Effects of Slavery on African Societies

Farming

Tribes Trade

Families and Communities

In Source E, John Newton a slave trader in West Africa comments on the trading methods used between Africans and Europeans.

Europeans try to cheat Africans at every turn. Any article of trade that can be cheapened is so. Spirits are diluted with water, kegs of gunpowder have false bottoms, pieces are cut out of rolls of cloth. The natives are cheated in every way, and become more and more jealous, revengeful and cheating the more they trade with Europeans, and especially, I am sorry to say, with the English.

Source F is from the ‘The Shameful Trade’ by F.G. Kay published in 1967. It describe the effects of the slave trade on Africa.

From Cape Verde to the Cuanza river, a coast of over 1000 miles, more than 150 European forts dominated Africa. African farming changed to grow the crops used to provision the slave ships. Native crafts died out, unable to compete with cheap European goods. Chiefs and Kings stopped ruling by law and custom, and became greedy cunning tradesmen, surrounded by corrupt African officials and advised by unprincipled European agents.

Tribal wars went on and one, caused invariably by the profits from the slave trade. Law and justice were being corrupted, more and more crimes no matter how small were punished by being made a slave. Husbands sold wives, parents sold children, neighbours tried to blame each other for crimes punishable by slavery. Thousands of villages were ruined or deserted as a result of wars or raids to get slaves. Towns that had once flourished as trading centres became derelict. Only one trade flourished – in slaves.