African involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade

There is an idea of only Europeans having enslaved people from Sub-Saharan Africa.  They are claimed to have raided and kidnapped the locals.  The trouble is the slave trade went on for several centuries.  People were not as stupid or ignorant as you like.  If the next village along the coast had been destroyed they would have discovered it.  Small children were not enslaved and neither were elderly people.  It can be imagined some able-bodied escaped too.  These and elderly could reveal what had happened.  To protect from slave raiders the villages would have been fortified.  Could they not build in stone they would at least have gotten palisades.  We would have heard about wars instead of mass kidnappings.

I want to point out the interior of Africa being long unreachable to Europeans.  We don’t naturally resist the area’s indigenous diseases.  Trading stations at the coast could cope for a while.  The stationed there could be replaced without too much trouble.  Individuals managing to survive for longer could moreover have children with indigenous women.  Such children had greater chance of surviving these diseases.  Visible minorities in Angola I think are descended from such.  Not until the late 19th century was it discovered how the diseases were prevented.  Then the Transatlantic slave trade had largely ceased.

It follows that the very most were enslaved by other Africans.  Of cause pure kidnapping victims occurred.  However, it seems like most were either prisoners of war or convicted criminals.  Politically unwanted individuals could be enslaved too.  It happened the highly educated were discovered among the slaves.  My best explanation of this is rulers had disliked these individuals.  Otherwise the proportions are unknown between the different groups.  This is poorly documented because few could write.

The slave trade was really a trade also for involved Africans.  It even happened that Africans were part of the crew of slave ships.  But they rarely belonged to the same culture as the enslaved did.  Enslavement of prisoners of war already existed in large parts of Africa.  Now it became more and more common to sentence people to slavery.  Large numbers were sold in exchange of goods made in Europe.  It could be rifles, rum or to them exotic fabric.  The trade continued on from the 16th century and all the way into the 19th century.  What eventually stopped it was the abolishment of slavery in the Americas.  Thereby the market for enslaved Africans disappeared.

It happened Europeans manipulated different peoples to wage war on each other.  Then their allies for the occasion got more prisoners of war to enslave.  However, the largest effect on Africa was social changes for slave export.  People were sentenced to slavery for any and all crimes.  Wars were started with the main aim of acquiring prisoners of war to enslave.  When the slave trade across the Atlantic was banned some had hard to stop.  Their elites had made such wars into their bad habit.

More than 10 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic.  1/6 of the enslaved died on the way to the coast.  1/8 of the rest died during the journey across the sea.  Either from hardship or from diseases in the crowding.  Some packed their slaves so densely people risked suffocation at calm.  The illustrations typically used show how it was at best.  1/3 of those which survived died during training for slave labour.  The most then died from diseases worsened by poor nutrition.  A considerable part committed suicide.  Some were killed by slave-owners because they were considered unusable or could not be sold.  All those deaths were by-effects of ruthless economic activity.  There was no plan to kill people only based on group affliction.

Taken together only 47% survived long enough to be useful as manpower.  Their treatment was usually determined by what was economically profitable.  Few slave-owners cared at all about how their slaves felt.  As a rule they were only seen as something that should be used.  The result was a wide spectrum of different degrees of exploitation.  But there is always a limit to which cruelty is profitable.  Something some people apparently are unaware of.  Slavery is believed to have meant loads of risky physical punishment.  Which would not have worked.

Naturally there were people in Africa resisting the slave trade.  Some peoples did not have slavery as we would define it today.  Others resisted hereditary slavery on religious grounds.  According to Islam one could not be born a slave which was largely followed.  The rulers of Dahomey found out that people were worked to death in the Caribbean.  For this reason they resisted enslavement of their own country’s inhabitants.  Some peoples formed alliances for armed resistance to slave raids committed by other peoples.  Which did not work in the long run since slavers could bye rifles.

There are people denying that Africans were involved.  They can’t have any grasp of the demographics in this context.  Neither are they aware of all the cruelties Africans have committed against each other after decolonization.  Some are probably myths.  However, the well-documented cases I consider bad enough.  African involvement in the slave trade should be understood in terms of abuse of power.  This in contrast to denial in what looks like wishful thinking.

 

Uploaded on the 24th of August 2025.