On the role of the European slave trade in consolidating the backwardness of African peoples

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

To discuss the trade between Africans and Europeans that took place during the four centuries prior to colonial rule is in fact to discuss the slave trade. Although, strictly speaking, an African became a slave only when he got into a society where he worked as a slave.

Before that, he was first a free man, and then a prisoner. Nevertheless, it is fair to talk about the slave trade, implying the transportation of African captives to different parts of the world, where they lived and worked on the property of Europeans. The heading of this section is deliberately chosen to draw attention to the fact that all transportation was carried out by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and that this was in the interests of European capitalism and nothing else. In East Africa and Sudan, many local residents were captured by the Arabs and sold to Arab buyers. In European books, this is called the "Arab slave trade". Therefore, it should be said unequivocally: when the Europeans ferried Africans to European buyers, it was the "European slave trade".

Without doubt, with a few exceptions - such as Hawkins [1] - European buyers acquired prisoners on the African coast, and the exchange between them and the Africans took the form of trade. It is also obvious that the slave was often sold and resold as he moved from the hinterland to the port of departure - and this also took the form of trade. However, in general, the process during which prisoners were taken on African soil, in fact, was not a trade. This happened through hostilities, deception, robberies and kidnappings. When trying to assess the impact of the European slave trade on the African continent, it is very important to realize that what is being evaluated is the result of social violence, not trade in any conventional sense of the word.

Much remains unclear about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the overall picture of its destructiveness is clear. It can be demonstrated that this destructiveness is a logical consequence of the way in which captives are taken in Africa. One of the unclear points is the answer to the key question about the number of Africans exported. For a long time, this problem has been the subject of speculation. Estimates ranged from a few million to over a hundred million. A recent study has suggested a figure of 10 million Africans who landed alive in America, the Atlantic islands and Europe. Since this figure is an underestimate, it was immediately taken up by European scholars who advocate capitalism and its long history of atrocities in Europe and beyond. The maximum underestimation of the corresponding figures seems to them to be a good starting point for the whitewashing of the European slave trade. The truth is that any estimate of the number of Africans imported into America based solely on the written sources that have come down to us is inevitably a lower bound, since there were a huge number of people with a personal interest in the secret trade of slaves (and with the data withheld). Be that as it may, even if the lower limit of 10 million is taken as the basis in assessing the impact of slavery on Africa, the reasonable conclusions from it should still amaze those who try to play down the violence perpetrated against Africans from 1445 to 1870.

Any estimate of the total number of Africans who disembarked in America would need to be supplemented, starting with a calculation of the death rate during transport. The Transatlantic, or “Middle Way,” as it was called by European slave traders, was notorious for its mortality rate of anywhere from 15 to 20%. Numerous deaths in Africa occurred between capture and embarkation, especially when prisoners had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. But the most important thing (taking into account the fact that the war was the main source of replenishment of prisoners) is to estimate the number of people who were killed and maimed during the capture of millions taken prisoner alive and unharmed. The total number can be estimated many times greater than those millions who came ashore outside Africa, and this figure will show the number of Africans directly removed from the population and productive forces of the continent as a result of the establishment of the European slave trade.

The huge loss of African productive forces was all the more catastrophic since healthy young men and women were being exported in the first place. Slave traders preferred victims between the ages of 15 and 25, and best of all 20; in a sex ratio of two men to one woman. Europeans often took very young children, but very rarely old people. They took away to different parts of the healthiest, especially those who had been ill with smallpox and acquired immunity to one of the deadliest diseases in the world.

The lack of data on the size of the population of Africa in the 15th century complicates any scientific attempt to assess the results of its outflow. However, it is clear that on the continent, during the centuries-old slave trade, there was no noticeable increase in population that was observed in the rest of the world. Obviously, due to the export of millions of people of childbearing age, fewer children were born than they could have. In addition, it is important to understand that the transatlantic route was not the only channel for the European trade in African slaves. The slave trade across the Indian Ocean has been called "East African" and "Arab" for so long that the scope with which the Europeans took part has been forgotten. When the slave trade from East Africa flourished in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most of the captives were sent to European plantations in Mauritius, Reunion and Seychelles, as well as to America via the Cape of Good Hope. African slave labor in some Arab countries in the 18th and 19th centuries served exclusively the European capitalist system, which generated demand for the products of this labor, such as cloves, which were grown in Zanzibar under the supervision of Arab masters.

No one has been able to establish figures showing the total loss of the African population as a result of the export of slave power from all regions in various directions over the centuries of the existence of the slave trade. However, on all other continents, since the 15th century, the population has shown a constant, and sometimes even sharp, natural increase. It is extremely significant that the same cannot be said about Africa. One European scientist gave the following estimates of the world population (in millions) by continent.

None of these figures are accurate, but they point to a common conclusion for researchers of population problems: on the huge African continent, an extraordinary stagnation was observed, and nothing but the slave trade could cause it. Therefore, it requires special attention.

The emphasis on population decline plays a large role in addressing issues of socio-economic development … Population growth has played a central role in Europe's development, providing an expanding workforce, expanding markets and increased demand activity that have propelled them forward. Japan's population growth has had similar positive effects. In other parts of Asia, which remained at a pre-capitalist level, large populations led to a much more intensive use of land resources, which was hardly ever possible in Africa, which remains sparsely populated.

While population density was low, people as working units were much more important than other factors of production such as land. In different parts of the continent, it is easy to find examples of Africans realizing that in their conditions the population is the most important factor of production. Among the Bemba [2], for example, the number of people has always been considered more important than the land. Among Shambala [3] in Tanzania, the same idea was expressed by the phrase "the king is the people." In the balant [4] in Guinea-Bissau, the strength of the family is estimated by the number of hands ready to cultivate the land. Of course, many African rulers embraced the European slave trade, as they believed, for their own interests, but from any reasonable point of view, the outflow of population could not be judged otherwise than a disaster for African societies.

The outflow affected African economic activity both directly and indirectly. For example, if the population of any region where the tsetse fly dwindled to a certain number, the remaining people were forced to leave their habitat. In essence, enslavement led to the loss of the battle for the conquest of nature., - and it serves as a guarantee of development. Violence also creates vulnerability. The opportunities provided by European slave traders have been the main (but not the only) incentive for frequent violence between and within various African communities. It took the form of raids and kidnappings more often than regular hostilities, a fact that heightened fear and uncertainty.

All European political centers in the 19th century, both directly and indirectly, expressed concern about the fact that activities associated with the capture of prisoners interfere with other economic pursuits. There was a time when Britain was not in dire need of slaves, but local workers to collect palm products and rubber, and to grow crops for export. It is clear that in West, East and Central Africa, these intentions came into serious conflict with the practice of capturing slaves. Europeans recognized this problem much earlier than the 19th century, as soon as it touched their own interests. For example, in the 17th century, the Portuguese and Dutch themselves obstructed the slave trade on the Gold Coast [5], because they realized that it could interfere with the gold trade. However, by the end of the century, gold was found in Brazil and the importance of supplying gold from Africa diminished. In the Atlantic model, African slaves became more important than gold, and Brazilian gold was offered for African captives in Vida (Dahomey) and Accra. From that moment on, slavery began to cripple the Gold Coast economy and disrupt the gold trade. Raids to capture slaves made mining and transporting gold unsafe, and capturing campaigns consistently generated more revenue than gold mining. A European eyewitness remarked that "since a single successful robbery makes a local resident rich in just one day, they are more likely to become sophisticated in war, robbery and robbery than to go about their previous business - mining and accumulating gold."

The aforementioned turn from gold mining to the slave trade happened in just a few years between 1700 and 1710, during which the Gold Coast began supplying 5,000 to 6,000 captives each year. By the end of the 18th century, far fewer slaves were exported from there, but the damage had already been done. It is worth noting that Europeans at various times viewed various areas of West and Central Africa as the largest supplier of slaves to the Americans. This meant that virtually every stretch of the long western coastline between the Senegal and Cunene rivers [6] had at least several years of experience of an intense slave trade - with all the ensuing consequences. Moreover, the history of eastern Nigeria, the Congo, northern Angola and Dahomey includes entire decades, when the annual export of slaves amounted to many thousands. For the most part, those areas were fairly well developed in comparison to the rest of Africa. They constituted the leading force of the continent, whose power could be directed both to their own progress and to the progress of the entire continent.

War engagement and abductions could not but affect all spheres of economic activity, especially agriculture. At times in some localities, food production increased to provide food for slave ships, but the overall impact of the slave trade on agricultural activities in West, East and Central Africa was negative. Labor was siphoned out of agriculture, creating precarious conditions. Dahomey, which in the 16th century was well known as a supplier of food to the area of modern Togo, suffered from hunger in the 19th century. The modern generation of Africans remembers well that when, during the colonial period, able-bodied men became migrant workers and fled their homes, this led to the decline of agriculture in their homeland and often served as a cause of hunger. And the slave trade, of course, meant a hundred times more brutal and destructive movement of labor.

One of the prerequisites for dynamic economic development is the maximum use of the country's labor force and its natural resources. It usually takes place in peaceful conditions, but there have been periods in history when social groups became stronger by stealing women, livestock, property from their neighbors, using the loot for the benefit of their own society. Slavery in Africa has never even had such a redemptive value. The captives were taken out of the country instead of being used within any African community for the production of benefits from natural resources. When in some areas Africans recruiting slaves for Europeans realized that it was better to save some for themselves, there was only a sudden side effect. In any case, slavery hindered the effective agrarian and industrial development of the remaining population and provided jobs for professional slave hunters and warriors who could destroy rather than build. Even disregarding the moral aspect and the immeasurable suffering caused, the European slave trade was economically absolutely irrational from the point of view of African development.

For our purposes, we need more specificity and consideration of the slave trade, not only on a continental scale, but also taking into account its uneven influence on different regions. The comparative intensity of invasion raids in different areas is well known. Some South African peoples were enslaved by the Boers, and some North African Muslims by European Christians, but these are only minor episodes. The most involved in the export of live goods were, firstly, West Africa from Senegal to Angola, along a belt stretching 200 miles [7] inland and, secondly, the regions of East and Central Africa, where Tanzania and Mozambique are now located, Malawi, Northern Zambia and Eastern Congo. However, regional differences can also be noted within each of these broad areas.

It may seem that the slave trade has not negatively affected some areas of Africa - simply due to the lack of exports or their low levels there. However, the assertion that the European slave trade is a factor contributing to the backwardness of the continent as a whole should not be in doubt, since the fact that an African region did not trade with Europe does not imply its complete independence from any European influence. European goods penetrated into the most remote areas and, more significantly, due to the orientation of vast areas towards the export of human resources, beneficial interactions within the continent became impossible.

The above will be made even clearer by a few comparisons. In any economy, some components reflect the level of well-being of others. This means that when there is a decline in one of the spheres, it will, to a certain extent, necessarily spread to others. Likewise, when there is an uplift in one area, others also benefit. Using an analogy from the biological sciences, we can remind you that biologists know that a single change, such as the disappearance of a small species, can lead to negative or positive reactions in areas that, at first glance, have nothing to do with it. The areas of Africa that remained “free” from slave exports no doubt must have suffered from the shifts as well, and it is difficult to determine exactly how they were affected, since it is not clear how things could have turned out differently.

Hypothetical questions like "what could have happened if …?" sometimes lead to absurd speculation. But it is entirely justified and necessary to ask the question: "what could have happened in Barotseland (South Zambia) if there was no single slave trade network in the entire Central African belt, which borders on Barotseland in the north?" Or "what could have happened in Buganda [8] if Katanga [9] had focused on selling copper to Buganda rather than selling slaves to Europeans?"

During the colonial era, the British made Africans sing:

The British themselves began humming this song at the beginning of the 18th century, at the height of the conversion of Africans into slaves. "What would be the level of development of the British if over four centuries millions of them were taken out of their homeland as a slave force?" … Even assuming that these wonderful guys would never, never, never become slaves, one can assume with what force the enslavement of continental Europe would have influenced them. In this situation, Britain's closest neighbors would fall out of the sphere of flourishing trade with her. After all, it is trade between the British Isles and regions such as the Baltic and the Mediterranean that is recognized by all scholars as the stimulus that influenced the development of the English economy in the late feudal and early capitalist times, long before the era of overseas expansion.

Today, some European (and American) scholars are of the opinion that although the slave trade was an undeniable moral evil, it was also an economic boon for Africa. Here we will only briefly take a look at some of the arguments in favor of this position to show how ludicrous they can be. Considerable emphasis is placed on what African rulers and the rest of the population received from Europe in exchange for captives consumer goods, thereby ensuring their "welfare." Such a setting does not take into account the fact that a part of European imports suppressed the circulation of African products with their competition, does not take into account that not a single product from the long list of European imports was related to the production process, since these were mainly goods that were quickly consumed or accumulated without receiving useful use. And it is completely not taken into account that most of the imported goods, including food, were of the worst quality even by the standards of mass demand - cheap gin, cheap gunpowder, leaky pots and cauldrons, beads and other various rubbish.

From the above setting, it is concluded that some African kingdoms have become economically and politically stronger as a result of trade with Europeans. The most powerful West African kingdoms such as Oyo [11], Benin [12], Dahomey and Ashanti [13] are cited as examples. Oyo and Benin were indeed powerful, but only until they entered into conflict with the Europeans, and Dahomey and Ashanti, although they became stronger during the European slave trade, the roots of their achievements go back to the previous era. In general - and this is the weakest point in the argumentation of the apologists for the slave trade - if any African state acquired greater political power during its participation in it, this does not mean that the sale of people was the reason. A cholera epidemic could take thousands of lives, but the country's population will continue to grow. Population growth is evidently in spite of, not due to, cholera. This simple logic is neglected by those who say that Africa has benefited from the slave trade with Europe. Its pernicious influence is beyond doubt, and even if it seemed that the state was developing at that time, a simple conclusion can be drawn: it developed in spite of the adverse effects of this process, which did more harm than cholera. Such a picture emerges from a careful study of, for example, Dahomey. This country did everything possible to develop politically and militarily, although it was bound by the bonds of the slave trade, but in the end, the latter still undermined the economic basis of society and led it to decline.

Some arguments about the economic benefits of slave trade with Europeans boil down to the idea that taking out millions of captives was a way to prevent famine in Africa! Trying to answer that would be a tedious and waste of time. But there is probably a slightly less straightforward version of the same argument that needs an answer. It says: Africa has benefited from the introduction of new food crops from the American continent through the slave trade, which have become staple foods. These crops, maize and cassava, are indeed staple foods from the late 19th century and into the present century. But the spread of agricultural plants is one of the most common occurrences in human history. Many cultures initially grew on only one continent, and then social contacts led to their appearance in other parts of the world. The slave trade has no particular meaning in this sense; ordinary forms of trade would provide the same result. Today for Italians, durum wheat products such as spaghetti and maccheroni are the staple foods, while most Europeans consume potatoes. At the same time, the Italians adopted the idea of spaghetti from Chinese noodles after the return of Marco Polo from China, and the Europeans borrowed potatoes from the American Indians. In none of these cases were Europeans enslaved in order to receive the benefits that are the property of all mankind. But Africans are told that the European slave trade, by bringing in maize and cassava, contributed to our development.

All the ideas discussed above are taken from books and articles published recently, and these are the results of research from major British and American universities. These are probably not the most common ideas even among European bourgeois scholars, but they show a growing trend that could become the new mainstream of view in the leading capitalist countries, which fits perfectly with their resistance to further economic and intellectual decolonization of Africa. In a sense, it is better to ignore such delirium and protect our youth from its influence, but, unfortunately, one of the aspects of modern African backwardness is that capitalist publishers and bourgeois scientists rule the ball and contribute to the formation of opinions around the world. For this reason, works that justify the slave trade must be denounced as racist bourgeois propaganda that has nothing to do with reality or logic. This is not so much a question of history as it is of the modern liberation struggle in Africa.

Walter Rodney

The book was published in 1972 in Tanzania.

- zinc

- book in English

It is not difficult to see that many of the issues raised by the author at that time are in the current political discourse today, and in the last few weeks, they are completely over-topical.

Another question is that most of these issues are channeled by manipulators in the direction of primitive vandalism or the struggle of American parties, although by and large the economic exploitation of African countries by European countries continues today in the form of economic neo-colonialism.