Slavery in Africa at the time that Europeans arrived south of the Sahara Desert
When white people first came to West Africa, they found a flourishing trade in slaves, to which they simply tapped in.
To hear modern people talk, it would be easy enough to believe that before those terrible white Europeans started their cruel activities in sub-Saharan Africa, the concept of slavery was wholly unknown to the indigenous inhabitants. This is a pleasing conceit, one which has no basis at all in fact. Indeed, before the arrival of ships from Europe, slavery was simply a way of life in Africa and had been so for thousands of years.
Since there are no written records relating to the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa before the arrival of Arab explorers crossing the Sahara Desert in caravans of camels and the first voyages to that part of the world by sea, undertaken by Portuguese traders, reconstructing the customs and way of life in Africa before the fifteenth century AD might seem a hopeless enterprise. There are though two methods by which we might build a picture of life there at that time. These may be broadly described as negative and positive evidence. Put together, they allow us to draw at least some conclusions about one or two features of the pre-literate societies of West Africa.
What might be described as the negative evidence for the existence of slavery in Africa before the practice was actually recorded there is that we know that slavery existed across Europe, Asia, North Africa and North America from the earliest times. Whenever a structured society existed in ancient times, one with chiefs or kings and a social hierarchy, slavery in one form or another was present. In the Balkans and Peloponnesian Peninsula, to give one example, only one nation did not hold with slavery. This was Macedonia and their rejection of this universal custom is so unusual that it is invariably the object of remark when the history of Macedonia is being discussed (Cotterell, 1980). From this perspective, it would have been remarkable if there had been no tradition of slavery in at least some parts of Africa before we find written references to it. There is though more definite evidence than this.
In 1938 a man called Isaiah Anozie was digging a cistern on his property in that part of Nigeria in which members of the Igbo tribe live. He unearthed some very fine bronze artefacts, which had been made using the cere perdu or ‘lost wax’ method of casting. He took these finds to the British administrative officer in the area and they were later sent to the Nigerian Museum. Although similar pieces had been found at Benin and Ife, this was the first time anything like them had turned up in that part of Nigeria. It was clear that something very interesting lay buried beneath the ground in that district.
Twenty years later, archaeologist Thurstan Shaw was invited to carry out excavations where the bronzes had been found, which he did between 1959 and 1960, This archaeological expedition uncovered some more bronze items and also the tomb of an important individual who had been buried with great ceremony (Bahn, 1996). According to Shaw, his work was hampered by the somewhat backward and unsophisticated nature of the community in which he was working. He later wrote that;
The Igbo-Ukwe excavation was far and away the most nerve-wracking
excavation I have ever undertaken. This was partly because I very soon realised
that I was onto something unique and important…in the night after the first
bronze was discovered an attempt was made to steal it from under my bed.
(Shaw, 1970)
Perhaps the most extraordinary discovery, and one which is relevant to the subject at which we are looking, was a burial chamber unearthed on the land of Richard Anozie. One man had been interred in a room built of wooden planks and then completely covered in earth. He wore a copper crown and was seated on a stool. In his hands had been placed a fly whisk and fan holder, perhaps symbols of office. Whoever he was, he must have been immensely rich and powerful, for the quantity of grave goods accompanying his burial was very great. In addition to many beautifully made pieces of ceremonial bronzeware there were over 100,000 glass and carnelian beads. Carnelian is a semi-precious stone, much valued today by devotees of crystal healing. These beads had their origin in India and showed that there must have been extensive trading between those who lived in this part of West Africa and the ports on the Indian Ocean; thousands of miles away on the other side of Africa.
On the planks laid above the tomb of the person who was presumably a leader of the tribe, or perhaps the head of a religion, were found the remains of five people who had probably been sacrificed as part of the funerary rites. In many cultures across the world, it was the custom to kill slaves and bury them at the same time as a ruler, so that they could serve the dead man in the next life. The natural assumption is that these five individuals were part of this type of ceremony and this, by extension, suggests the existence of slavery at the time of the burial. Carbon dating has given the nineth century as the time when these five victims died, which predates European contact with that part of Africa by some five hundred years. It has also been speculated that the presence of those many thousands of glass and carnelian beads, which were not made locally, indicates that they were obtained, ‘through trade for slaves, ivory, or spices’ (Apley, 2001).
The fact that one man was given such a spectacular tomb indicates very strongly that the society to which he belonged was socially stratified to a high degree. In other words, there were very important men at the top of the social order and then various grades below him. Once a society of this kind emerges from the loosely knit and largely egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers in early social structures, the existence of slavery may be more or less taken for granted. It was so in Europe and Asia and also both North and South America. This goes some way towards confirming that the bodies buried with the king or priest were those of slaves.
The tomb in Nigeria is not the only reason to suppose that slavery was customary in West Africa before Europeans became involved in the slave trade in that part of the world. There is also mention by Muslim writers of what was seen in sub-Saharan Africa in the fourteenth century. In 1351 a Berber scholar and explorer from Tangier set off across the Sahara from the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Ibn Battuta had already travelled extensively in Asia and the Middle East and now he wished to see what lay south of his own homeland in the largely uncharted country of West Africa.
After crossing the Sahara in a camel caravan, Ibn Battuta arrived at Taghaza. This is now in the north of the modern-day country of Mali. Slabs of rock salt were mined here at the time that Ibn Battuta visited the town and the heavy work was undertaken by slaves from the Masufa tribe (Levtzion & Hopkins, 2000). After spending some time in Taghaza, the caravan moved south again, eventually reaching the capital of the empire of Mali, which lay on the banks of the River Niger. This was a Muslim realm, ruled by a black African sultan. Slaves were so common that Ibn Battuta was even given one as a present! After looking at other districts of West Africa, Ibn Battuta returned to Morocco, travelling with a caravan which was transporting 600 female slaves north across the Sahara (Defrémery & Sanguinetti, 1858).
To the east of Mali lay another black realm, which was so extensive at one time that it might not inaptly be called an empire. This was known as Kanem and our information about it comes principally from Arab geographers.
In the seventh century, a leader of the Arab armies which conquered North Africa established a base in the middle of dense forest which at that time covered part of the Tunisian coast. This grew into a city called Qairwan. Mosques and a university were founded and the city traded with a power which had grown up in Central Africa, not far from Lake Chad. Some of the nomadic tribes which roamed the savannah south of the Sahara Desert had banded together and put down roots, building walled towns. By the ninth century AD Kanem was one end of a busy routed running south from Qairwan and ending in their own territory. Al-Yaqubi, a geographer writing at that time, said that, ‘I have been informed that the kings of the blacks sell their own people without justification or in consequence of war’ (Smith, 1972).
Kanem’s prosperity was based upon exporting goods north to the Arab world of North Africa. Camel caravans travelled across the desert, carrying two principal cargos. One was salt; there were mines where this was dug out by slave labour. The other thing which was sold to the Arabs was people. Those who ran Kanem used to make regular raids into areas where the Bantu tribesmen were less well organised and then take them as prisoners to be sold to Arab merchants. In the early years of Kanem, about a thousand slaves a year were sold in this way, but by the fifteenth century, this had increased to 5,000 a year (Meredith, 2014). Both the internal economy of Kanem and its external mercantile activities, were based upon slavery. Slaves worked the salt mines and also undertook much of the heavy and unpleasant physical labour in the cities and farms.
The centre of political power in Kanem shifted over the years and by the middle of the sixteenth century the realm was governed from Bornu, which lay on the banks of Lake Chad. Slavery was now very big business and it has been estimated that something int the region of two million slaves passed north over the centuries. All this great trade had nothing at all to do with Europe, it was centred around Tripoli, the capital of the modern state of Libya. Writing of the situation on the route taken by the slave caravans across the Sahara, Martin Meredith, an expert in the history of this culture, had the following to say,
Wells along the way were surrounded by the skeletons of thousands of slaves,
mostly young women and girls, making a last desperate effort to reach water
before dying of exhaustion once there.
(Meredith, 2014)
By this time, after the fifteenth century, the realms of Kanem and then Bornu were Muslim, the people there having embraced Islam as a result of coming into so much contact with Arabs in the course of the slave trade. This meant of course that they were compelled to go further afield than their own lands in search of slaves to sell. Mindful of the prohibition laid down in the Haddith about enslaving Muslims, they began raiding ever deeper into the forests of central Africa and bringing back prisoners of war who could be sold to the Arabs or forced to work in the salt mines. The slave-based economy of Bornu lasted, almost incredibly, until the nineteenth century.
Enough has perhaps been said to show that slavery existed in sub-Saharan Africa at least as early as the ninth century and almost certainly earlier. It is necessary though to qualify this statement a little, because the word ‘slavery’ as it is commonly used today in the Western World allows little shade of meaning. It invariably refers to chattel slavery, that is to say the treating of humans like cattle; buying and selling them as though they were merely the property of their owner. Without doubt, some of the slaves in Africa were subjected to chattel slavery, but by no means all. Some slaves were genuinely seen as being members of the family. In at least one African culture, a slave could own slaves of his own. Elsewhere, slavery had more in common with the old European idea of serfdom, in which men and women were bound to a landlord’s land, but could not be sold away from their homes. These various traditional ways of life continued into the colonial era and made the abolition of slavery a very complex proposition.
Nobody would deny that the interest of Europeans from the fifteenth century onward in buying slaves acted to encourage the slave trade in Africa, but they did not create it. Obviously, when new buyers appear on the scene of any commercial activity, especially those who are willing to buy as much of any given commodity as can be supplied, this is bound to stimulate the market. Demand has ever had the effect of increasing supply. Human nature being what it is, when it became known that the white visitors were desperate to acquire slaves, there were plenty of merchants only too ready to satisfy the demand. It has also been alleged that the European interest in the trade had the effect of altering the nature of slavery in Africa, but this is a complicated topic which will be discussed later.
It is perhaps possible to make the case that the demand for slaves in the Americas and also the insatiable appetite for them in the Middle East caused an unprecedented increase in the African slave trade, but one aspect of slavery can hardly be connected in any way with outsiders. This was the use of slaves across much of sub-Saharan Africa as victims of human sacrifice.
In many parts of the world, taking the lives of people for religious reasons or to ensure good fortune was simply an unremarkable part of the way of life. One very early record of human sacrifice undertaken as a way of securing a successful result in a chancy and uncertain enterprise is related in the Bible. We read in the Old Testament of Jephthah and the oath he swore. Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges tells how an Israelite leader called Jephthah was fighting against the Ammonite tribe and when things were looking uncertain, he sought to strike a bargain with God.
And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, if thou shalt without fail
deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands.
Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house
To meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely
be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.
(Judges 11:30, 31)
Unfortunately, it was Jephthah’s daughter who emerged from his house as he returned from winning the battle and in due course, he sacrificed her as part of his bargain with the Lord.
In Europe, the remains of both animals and humans have been found buried in the foundations of buildings. This practice is known as ‘foundation sacrifice’ and it was widespread across Europe and Asia, as far east as Japan. It was particularly common in Celtic tradition (Ó Súilleabháin, 1945). This superstitious belief, that putting a human sacrifice in the foundations of a building will protect it from harm, is also found in the Bible. It is related in the Old Testament Book of Kings that when he was rebuilding Jericho, a local chieftain did this very thing;
In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the foundations thereof
in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub
(1 Kings, 16:34)
The gates of a city were popular places for such sacrifices, as were bridges and even ordinary homes. This practice was every bit as popular in Africa as it was in the rest of the ancient world and there are references to it in the writings of the first Europeans to visit Africa and record the customs which were observed there. The preferred victims of such sacrifices in Africa were usually slaves; some of whom had been acquired for this very purpose (Brewster, 1971).
The Kingdom of Benin was in the south of what is now Nigeria and it was one of the places where European traders went when they wanted to buy slaves. Benin itself though, which included the kingdom of Dahomey, was already very familiar with slavery centuries before the first Europeans anchored off the coast. The trade in, and exploitation of, slaves had flourished in Benin long before the coming of white people to West Africa. Archaeological excavations have revealed, for instance, the sacrifice of slaves which was customary throughout most of the ancient world on the death of a king. We see this in so many cultures that it can hardly be expected that Africa would prove any exception. Archaeologist Graham Connah unearthed a total of 41 female skeletons all buried in one pit. These dated from the thirteenth century and are assumed to be victims of human sacrifice; most likely slaves (Trigger, 2002).
Nobody could deny that European interest stimulated the slave trade in West Africa, but this was only possible because the institution of slavery was already so firmly entrenched there. It is hardly fair to blame white people exclusively for what happened in the area between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Some years ago I read a book called White Gold by Giles Milton on the trade in European slaves in North Africa - I also read Robinson Crusoe last year and was surprised to find he was caught up in this trade himself, but managed to escape - I realize this latter book is fiction - but it highlights the existence of this trade none-the-less - which appeared to be well known and understood by Europeans of the time. Strange how this part of our history has been and is still very much hidden.
"Since there are no written records relating to the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa before the arrival of Arab explorers crossing the Sahara Desert in caravans of camels and the first voyages to that part of the world by sea, undertaken by Portuguese traders, reconstructing the customs and way of life in Africa before the fifteenth century AD might seem a hopeless enterprise."
Sailer, not wanting to be included among the ranks of the crude racialists, points out that Ethiopia had a written language within the first few centuries AD/CE and they adopted Christianity at about the same time. They are also racially diverse, and were in contact with the ancient Classical civilizations of the Med long ago. But not doing too well right now,