Slavery refers to the commodification of human beings and can be viewed as a complete disregard fo r their dignity (Klein 2010) . Just like in most parts of the world, slavery or involuntary human servitude was practiced throughout Africa and other parts of the world from the prehistoric times to the modern era. However, w hen people think of slavery today, they are likely to view it from the perspective of its existe nce in the United States (U.S) before the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865) . During this period, a racially identifiable group own ed and exploit ed another. Other parts of the world exhibited different forms of slavery (Hawthorne, 2010). In some societies , slaves were allowed to rise in the society, often reach ing positions of military or administrative power. Very often, both slavers and slaves were Africans , although they belonged to different ethnic groups. Traditionally, African slaves were procured to aid in perform ing commercial or domestic labor, to serve as wives or concubines, or to improve the status of the slave owner. Slavery existed in some of the first organized societies in Africa. For instance, m ore than 3,500 years ago, the ancient Egyptians looted and pillaged villages and settlements of tribes that bordered them in search of slaves . Likewise, the trading of slaves was a common and widely practiced activity in cities along the Nile River. However, while the Egyptians left written records of their activities, most of the other early African states and societies did not (Klein 2010). Therefore, the current understanding of the early African slavery practices is based on much more recent observations of African traditions regarding slavery , kinship and oral histories.
Why Slavery?
In Africa, as in many parts of the world, early slavery was probably the result of warring groups that took captives (Pettigrew, 2013). However, war was not the only driving force of slavery in Africa. In many African societies, slavery represented one of the few methods of making wealth available to ordinary people. Across the African continent , there was little recognition of the rights to private ownership of land until colonial officials began to enforce European law in the 19th century. G eneral ly , villages or large clans held land as a community and assigned portions to families according to their needs (Green, 2011). To increase production, a family had to invest in more workers and at the same time increase the amount of land under production . The quickest and fastest approach was to acquire slaves since it was a cheap source of labor. Many of the first African societies carried out slave raids in distant villages to help meet this demand.
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The Trans-Saharan and East African Slave Trade
The Arabs had practiced slave assault and trade in Arabia for centuries before the founding of Islam . Subsequently, slavery became a crucial component of Islamic traditions. Both the Koran (the sacred script of Islam) and the Islamic religious law served to codify and justify the existence of slavery. For instance, w hen Muslim Arabs conquered their way west through North Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries, their victorious leaders received rewards in the form of Berber captives . M ost of these captives eventually enrolled in Muslim armies (Hawthorne, 2010). Over time, large segments of the Berber population of North Africa converted to Islam. The religion grew to be accepted even by the camel herders of the Sahara desert . These herders w ere in contact with black Africans south of the Sahara an d traded with a small number of black slaves.
Muslim Arabs expanded th e trade in trans-Saharan slaves . They did this by buying or capturing an increasing number of black Africans in West Africa, transporting them through the Sahara desert and into North Africa. It is from there that they were shipped across the world to places in Asia such as the E astern Mediterranean, Anatolia (now Turkey), Arabia, Persia (now Iran) and India . The trans-Saharan slave trade grew significantly from the 10th to the 15th century. This was particularly the case when vast African empires such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai developed S outh of the Sahara and organized the trade. The Arab invaders also penetrated to the S outh, moving up the Nile River to what is now Ethiopia . In the process, they captured thousands of slaves and sent them across the Nile to Egypt. Within four decades, 10 million Africans were forcefully transported to Asia , the Middle East and to such places as India (Green, 2011) .
Around the 9 th C entury, Arab and Asian traders began to trade with communities and settlements along the East African coast. Subsequently, t he culture of the coastal regions of East Africa was strongly influenced by Arab and Persian merchants . M any of these merchants also married Africans, resulting in the Swahili culture and people. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, this Arab-Persian-Swahili population established cities and city-states along the East African coast (Klein, 2010). These cities and states captured or bought slaves from the interior of East Africa for domestic and agricultural tasks. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as plantation agriculture developed in the region, the slave trade in East Africa increased drastically. The opinions of various scholars regarding the issue of Islam's long-term effects on African slavery differ. Some believe that Islamic law helped regulate slavery, thus limiting the abuses . These scholars argue that Islam increased the cases of emancipation because it encouraged the liberation of slaves after the death of their master s . In contrast, o ther scholars believe that Islam led to the expansion of slavery . This group reckons that at the time when slavery was increasing in parts of Africa under Islamic influence, slavery was declining in most of medieval Europe. Between the seventh century and the fifteenth century, trans-Saharan and East African slave traders encouraged the gradual expansion of slavery within Africa. S lave trade contributed to the development of powerful African states in the southern fringes of the Sahara and the interior of eastern Africa. The economies of these states depended primarily on the slave trade. For instance, neighboring states would compete with each other in a bid to control the trade. This led to wars, which in turn resulted in the capture of more slave s.
The Slave Trade In The Atlantic
The slave trade in the Atlantic developed after Europeans began to explore and establish trading posts on the Atlantic (west) coast of Africa in the mid-fifteenth century. The first major group of European merchants in West Africa was Portuguese . This was followed by the British and the n the French. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, powerful European powers began to expand their economies through large-scale plantation agriculture . In this pursuit, these economies realized that they lacked the human resour ces needed to make this a reality . Two key factors further fueled the need for slaves. On the one hand, the demand for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton in European grew. On the other hand , there was increased availability of land to the Europeans in the New World . Thus , owing to the two factors, the need for plantation labor increased (Pettigrew, 2013). This led to increased demand for slaves from Africa.
T he Africans who facilitated and benefited from the slave trade in the Atlantic were the political or commercial elites . These were either members of the governing apparatus of African states or members of large families or commercial institutions. The African vendors captured slaves and took them to markets on the coast. In these markets, European and American buyers paid for the slaves with basic products such as cloth, iron, firearms, liquor and decorative items . These items w ere found to be useful to the slave sellers. Th ese slave rs were mostly men and used the wealth acquired to improve their prestige and connect, through marriage, with other wealthy families in their kingdoms. The Africans who were enslaved were mostly prisoners of war or captives as a result of slave incursions. In the 18th C entury, most African slaves were acquired through slave raids which penetrated more and more inland. The A fricans caught in raids were taken on busy trails, sometimes for several hundred miles, to markets on the coast (Klein, 2010).
Beginning from the mid-fifteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century, European and American slave traders bought approximately 12 million slaves from W est and C entral Africa ( Angeles, 2013 ). A tiny proportion of these slaves was sent to southern Europe. Most, instead , were shipped across the Atlantic for sale in Brazil . This transit was administered by the Portug uese, British, French, Dutch and the Danish islands of the Caribbean . It was also c ontrolled by the Spaniards in South and Central America and the North American British continent (now presently known as the U.S and Canada) (Klein, 2010). The journey across the Atlantic Ocean, then and now referred to as the Middle Passage was a hellish reality for slaves . Often the slaves were underfed, subjected to abuse by the crew and confined to tight storage warehouses where diseases spread quickly. It is approximated that 2 million slaves lost their lives during their transportation to the N ew W orld (Klein, 2010).
Effects of Slave Trade in Africa
Around the 15th century BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt enslaved non-Africans like the Jews of Palestine through war and took them into the Nile valle y . However, as an African importer of non-African slaves, ancient Egypt is a notable exception to the rule. Africa's role in the history of the transcontinental slave trade has generally been as a supplier or exporter of slaves for use outside of Africa (Klein 2010). After the 5th century BC, the Greeks and, later, the Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean Sea. Both slaveholding powers raided North Africa extensively in search of slaves. This practice of using Africa as a source of slaves would be adopted and expanded first by the Muslim Arabs and later by the Europeans (Klein 2010).
The effects of the slave trade are being felt to date in Africa. One of the main indicators of this is the underdevelopment of most African nations, particularly in the rural areas. This is because Africa lost millions of its strongest men and women to the slave trade. This loss implies that most parts of Africa did not have a proper agrarian revolution as well as the subsequent industrial revolution as was the case in many parts of the world (Nunn, 2008). The fact that most African nations did not achieve stable agricultural production also meant that they could not successfully benefit from the industrial revolution. Slavery also reduced Africa’s population significantly. This resulted in a shortage in the workforce needed to advance African communities and societies. For instance, the removal of the able-bodied and young Africans from the continent meant that the African societies could not reproduce socially, economically as well as culturally (Nunn, 2008). The demand for slaves also fuelled conflicts between communities as the slavers searched for slaves. Some of these conflicts exist to date. The colonization of Africa that took place after the slave trade was also made possible by the latter. This is because, with the extraction of all the able-bodied people, Africa could not defend itself. Lastly, slavery significantly compromised the cultural grounding of Africans, and this continues to affect the continent.
Conclusion
The untold suffering that human beings went through during the slave trade is one of the worst tragedies the world has ever seen. Whether practiced by Africans, Arabs, Europeans or Americans, among others, the practice resulted in a permanent stain on the human race and its collective conscience . Interestingly, t he effects of African slavery are still being felt today. In areas such as America, racial tensions between the whites and African-Americans that have their roots in the slave trade are being felt to date. What make s this tragedy even worse is the refusal of the human race to learn from the p ast. Recent cases of slavery such as those unearthed recently in Libya point towards lack of Africans to learn from the tragedy that befell their forefathers.
References
Angeles, L. (2013). On the causes of the African Slave Trade. Kyklos , 66 (1), 1-26.
Green, T. (2011). The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Vol. 118). Cambridge University Press.
Hawthorne, W. (2010). From Africa to Brazil: Culture, identity, and an Atlantic slave trade, 1600–1830 (Vol. 113). Cambridge University Press.
Klein, H. S. (2010). The Atlantic slave trade . Cambridge University Press.
Nunn, N. (2008). The long-term effects of Africa's slave trades. The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 123 (1), 139-176.
Pettigrew, W. A. (2013). Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 . UNC Press Books.
