The slave trade of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries is known, in popular imagination, primarily for those parts of it in which Europeans or people of European descent participated directly. We can draw on vivid images of slave ships making the Middle Passage, or of slaves being sold on the block or working in the fields in the New World. But, though the kidnapping of Kunte Kinte figured in Roots, the African end of the slave trade is far less familiar.
Yet the slave trade was the principal export trade of sub-Saharan Africa through much of the slave-trading era. By the same token, the trade goods which European slavers brought in order to purchase slaves was the principal sub-Saharan import trade. Throughout the slave era, the interior of Africa remained largely unknown to Europeans; thus, it was African merchants and other entrepreneurs who organized the trade within Africa.
Our concern here is with the internal slave trade in those parts of West Africa that eventually became influenced by the European slave trade. Separate slave trades existed in East Africa, supplying Middle Eastern markets, but these trades lie outside our area of concern. For simplicity, we will henceforth say simply "Africa," with the understanding that only certain portions of sub-Saharan West Africa are actually meant.
Slavery of various sorts was a long-established social institution in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Indigenous slavery in Africa could take many forms, and be characterized by greater or lesser degrees of oppressiveness. A slave could look forward to anything from human sacrifice to becoming eventually a member of his or her buyer's household, and perhaps even an heir (Reynolds, 1985, pp. 5ff). In some areas, slavery was long-established; in others, there was no slavery until the development of the European slave trade.
For the most part, however, there was not a large-scale slave trade as such, because...