The Slave Trade in Africa
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The slave trade would carry Africans far from their homeland, but the problem of slavery begins in Africa as warring tribes would capture members of other tribes and sell them into slavery. The slave trade in West Africa served the labor requirements of the New World and other areas for more than three centuries. The slave trade in West Africa began with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and increased until it was a major trade linking Africa with Europe and North and South America. Slave ships headed for the New World would stop at sites along the West African coast to pick up their human cargo, often purchasing members of one tribe from another. The Spanish and English would also become involved in the slave trade over the next two centuries, and slavery in the New World in particular would be a matter of economic need because of an agricultural system that needed a large labor force for as little economic outlay as possible. When the Native American population did not prove viable as a labor force, the various European settlers turned to Africa and the slave trade to solve their labor problems. Africa was a point of interest in Europe long before any European powers invaded that territory, for beginning in the eleventh century, Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula were aware of Africa and of two Muslim dynasties, the Almoravids and Almohades, which came from Africa. Trade was carried on with the Muslim world, and into the fi
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r and Spielvogel 249).
Africa had long had its own slave trade, a trade which reached "enormous proportions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when European slave ships transported millions of unfortunate victims to new homes in Europe or the Americas" (Duiker and Spielvogel 252).
The slave trade in Africa was a function of war as the empires of the region fought one another and gained control over other tribes:
The superstate was built with military and monetary support furnished by the conquered tribes. Slave tributes were exacted by the powerful from the weak . . . The Africans like other peoples throughout the world, had practiced slavery since prehistoric times. They took prisoners in war and forced them into domestic service, as they did to their criminals (Meltzer 17).
There was thus a historical difference in the way slavery developed and was maintained in Africa and the way it was developed and maintained by Muslims and Europeans. For one thing, slaves in the African context were war profits, and while this may have been true of initial forays by Muslims, in the long run, slaves for Muslims and Europeans were an economic matter based more on need at home than an accumulation of power over neighboring
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3176
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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