European Encounters with West Africa

In the 1440s, Portuguese ships began to trade along the West African (or Guinea) coast. The Portuguese established bases in port cities like Benin to collect trade goods, including slaves, for sale in Europe. The slave trade expanded with the building of Elmina Castle and by the early sixteenth century had increased significantly. Initially, Africans were viewed as “exotic” objects and were often put on display at courts or for popular entertainment. Increasingly, however, African slaves were put to work in households and shops or on large estates.

Still, Europeans were most familiar with North Africa, a region deeply influenced by Islam and characterized by large kingdoms, well-developed cities, and an extensive network of trading centers. In northeast Africa, including Egypt, city-states flourished, with ties to India, the Middle East, and China. In northwest Africa, Timbuktu linked North Africa to empires south of the Great Desert as well as to Europe. Here African slaves labored for wealthier Africans in a system of bound labor long familiar to Europeans.

As trade with western Africa increased, however, Europeans learned more about communities that lived by hunting and subsistence agriculture. By the mid-sixteenth century, European nations established competing forts along the African coast from the Gold Coast and Senegambia in the north to the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa farther south. The men and women shipped from these forts to Europe generally came from communities that had been raided or conquered by more powerful groups. They arrived at the coast exhausted, hungry, dirty, and with few clothes. They worshipped gods unfamiliar to Europeans, and their cultural customs and social practices seemed strange and often frightening. Over time, it was the image of the captured West African slave that came to dominate European visions of the entire continent.

As traders from Portugal, Spain, Holland, and England brought back more stories and more African slaves, these negative portraits took deeper hold. Woodcuts and prints circulated in Europe that showed half-naked Africans who looked more like apes than humans. These images resonated with biblical stories like that of Ham, who sinned against his father, Noah. Noah then cursed Ham’s son Canaan to a life of slavery. Increasingly, European Christians considered Africans the “sons of Ham,” infidels rightly assigned by God to a life of bondage. This self-serving idea then justified the enslavement of black men, women, and children.

Of course, these images of West Africa failed to capture the diverse peoples who lived in the area’s tropical rain forests, plains, and savannas. By the fourteenth century, agricultural productivity in the region fueled population growth and the rise of both city-states and trade networks. The Yoruba people developed walled towns ruled by obas, many of whom were women, who served as religious and political leaders. To the south lay the highly centralized kingdom of Benin. Its warrior king, Euware, had conquered some two hundred villages to create his kingdom and then used his power and wealth to promote trade and patronize the arts. Nearby the Igbo people rejected kingships in favor of title societies composed of wealthy men, women’s associations tied to kinship, and hereditary organizations that created cohesion among competing groups. Despite their political and social differences, the Yoruba, Beni, and Igbo traded with one another and with more distant African kingdoms.

In addition to these powerful kingdoms, smaller societies based on farming or herding existed across western and central Africa. These communities were sometimes conquered by expanding kingdoms and their members sold as slaves within Africa. But once trade developed with Portugal, Spain, and other nations, these communities were increasingly raided to provide slaves for European markets. As the slave trade expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it destabilized large areas of western and central Africa, with smaller societies decimated by raids and even larger kingdoms damaged by the extensive commerce in human beings. As early as 1526, Afonso, the king of the Kongo people and a convert to Christianity, begged the Portuguese to end the slave trade: “Merchants are taking everyday our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives.”

Still, rulers of the most powerful African societies helped shape the slave trade. For instance, because women were more highly valued by Muslim traders in North Africa and Asia, African traders steered women to these profitable markets. At the same time, African societies organized along matrilineal lines—where goods and political power passed through the mother’s line—often tried to protect women against enslavement. Other groups sought to limit the sale of men.

Ultimately, men, women, and children were captured by African as well as Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English traders. Still, Europeans did not institute a system of perpetual slavery, in which enslavement was inherited from one generation to the next. Instead, Africans formed another class of bound labor, alongside peasants, indentured servants, criminals, and apprentices. Slavic-speaking workers imported from areas around the Black Sea were especially prominent on sugar plantations in the Mediterranean region. Indeed, the term Slav became the basis for the word slave. When the Ottoman Turks cut off access to Slavic laborers, Europeans increased their slave trade with Africa.

Distinctions among bound laborers on the basis of race had not yet fully developed. Thus affluent Europeans condemned pagan rituals, sexual licentiousness, and ignorance among both Slavic and African laborers. They also considered such traits common among their own peasants. When the English entered the African slave trade in the 1560s, via the privateer John Hawkins, they quickly put their own spin on such comparisons. In the sixteenth century, they viewed both Africans and the conquered Irish as “rude, beastly, ignorant, cruel, and unruly infidels.”