Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
It has come to be widely accepted that slavery prevailed on the African continent before the arrival of the Europeans, and this indigenous slavery is said to have facilitated the rise and progress of the Atlantic slave-trade. According to P. D. Rinchon, ‘from the earliest days of the trade, the majority of the Negroes were living in a state of servitude, and the native chiefs did not have far to seek for the human merchandise’. Daniel Mannix, in one of the most recent accounts of the Atlantic slave-trade, contends that ‘many of the Negroes transported to America had been slaves in Africa, born to captivity. Slavery in Africa was an ancient and widespread institution, but it was especially prevalent in the Sudan.’ In the opinion of J. D. Fage, ‘the presence of a slave class among the coastal peoples meant that there was already a class of human beings who could be sold to Europeans if there was an incentive to do so… So the coastal merchants began by selling the domestic slaves in their own tribes.’ The main purpose of this brief study is to test these generalizations with evidence taken from the Upper Guinea Coast—the region between the Gambia and Cape Mount.
1 Rinchon, D., La traite et l'esclavage des Congolais par les Européens (Brussels, 1929), 169.Google Scholar
2 Mannix, D. in collaboration with Cowley, M., Black Cargoes, a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London, 1963), 43 (44, 45 are also relevant).Google Scholar
3 Fage, J. D., Introduction to the History of West Africa (London, 1959), 78.Google Scholar
4 See below, p. 436.Google Scholar
5 McCulloch, M., Peoples of Sierra Leone, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, ed. Forde, D. (London, 1964), z8, 29, 68.Google Scholar
6 Rattray, R. S., Ashanti (London, 1923), 40–43, 222, 230.Google Scholar
7 E.g. Elkins, Stanley, Slavery, a Problem in American Institutional and Social Life (New York, 1963), 96Google Scholar and Davidson, Basil, Black Mother (London, 1961), 40. (For a discussion of African ‘slavery’ and ‘serfdom’, see the section on pp. 33–40.)Google Scholar
8 Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962): see index under ‘slave trade, internal’.Google Scholar
9 de Sanderval, Alonso, Natureleza… de Todos Etiopes (Seville, 1623).Google Scholar
10 Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid)– ‘Papeles de Jesuitas’, tomo 185, no. 1346, report of Barreira, P. Baltezar, Sierra Leone, 1606.Google Scholar
11 Monod, Th., Mota, A.Texeira da and Mauny, R. (eds.), Description de la côte occidentale d'Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte, Archipels) par Valentim Fernandes (1506–1510) (Bissau 1951), 82. (To be cited subsequently as ‘Valentim Fernandes’.)Google Scholar
12 Fernandes, Valentim, op. cit. 88;Google Scholarde Almada, Alvares, ‘Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné’ (1594), in Brasio, P. Antonio, Monumenta missionaria africana, Africa ocidental (1570–1600), and series, vol. III (Lisbon, 1964), 323, 324, 333;Google Scholar and Alvares, Manual, ‘Ethiopia Menor, o descripçao geografica da Provincia de Serra Leoa’ (1616), MS. of the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa.Google Scholar
13 Fernandes, Valentim, op. cit. 10.Google Scholar
14 de Almada, Alvares, ‘Rios de Guiné’, 234, 235.Google Scholar
15 Ibid. 344, 345, 347; and Peres, Damiao (ed), Duas descriçoes seiscentistas da Guiné de Francisco de Lemos Coelho (Lisbon, 1953), 59–61, from the description written ifl 1669. (To be cited subsequently as ‘Lemos Coelho’.)Google Scholar
16 Park, Mungo, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in the Years 1795, 1796 and 1797 (London, 1799), 297, 298.Google Scholar
17 de Anguiano, P. Mateo, Misiones capuchinas en Africa, ed. de Carrocera, P. Buenaventura, II (Madrid, 1950), 136–missionary report of 1686 on the Atlantic slave-trade as pursued on the Upper Guinea Coast. Cabo or Gabu was a Mandinga province extending between the Gambia and the Corubal. The ruler was called Farim or ‘governor’, because he was ostensibly a representative of the emperor of Mali.Google Scholar
18 de Almada, Alvares, ‘Rios de Guiné’, 275.Google Scholar
19 Wadstrom, C. B., An Essay on Colonisation (London, 1795), part 2, pp. 113–117. A ‘bar’ originally signified an iron bar about 9 inches long. It came to be a unit of currency in the trade of the Upper Guinea Coast with a very imprecise and fluctuating value. Wadstrom estimated it at about 3S. (p. 56).Google Scholar
20 Wadstrom, C. B., op. cit. part 2, p. 117.Google Scholar
21 Cultru, P., Premier voyage de Sieur de la Courbe, fait à la Coste d'Afrique en 1685 (Paris, 1913), 252.Google Scholar
22 Mathews, John, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone (London, 1788).Google Scholar
23 Laing, A. G., Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko and Soolima Countries (London, 1825), 221.Google Scholar
24 Marty, P., ‘Islam in French Guinea’ (trans.) in Sierra Leone Studies no. XIX (old series, 1936), 49–129.Google Scholar
25 Tauxier, L., Moeurs et histoire des Peuhls (Paris, 1937), 9. He renders the word rimaibe as ‘agricultural serfs’. The singular is dimadio.Google Scholar
26 Canot, Captain, The Adventures of an African Slaver (London, 1928), 128, 129. (This account was actually written in 1854 by one Brantz Meyer to whom Canot related his experiences.)Google Scholar
27 Public Record Office, London (to be cited below as P.R.O.), T 70/1465: diary of agent Charles, Walter, 1728. This mentions ‘Cayoba, a castle slave who had been made such from a sale slave’.Google Scholar
28 P.R.O. T 70/51: instructions to agent Freeman, 4 August 1702.Google Scholar
29 P.R.O. T 70/51: instructions to agent Freeman, I December 1702.Google Scholar
30 P.R.O. T 70/60: instructions from the directors, 5 October 1723.Google Scholar
31 P.R.O. T 70/1465: diary of agent Walter Charles.Google Scholar
32 Arquivo historico ultramarino, Lisbon (to be cited below as A.H. U.), Guiné, caixa II, no. 230, minute of the Conselho Ultramarino, 30 October 1694.Google Scholar
33 de Almada, Alvares, ‘Rios de Giné’, 326,Google Scholar and de Santiago, Fr. Francisco, ‘Chronica da Provincia Franciscana de Nossa Senhora da Soledade’ (MS.)Google Scholar, extracts in Dias, A. J., ‘Cren’, Portugal em Africa, II, no. 9 (1945), 159–69.Google Scholar
34 Fyfe, Christopher, op. cit. 270.Google Scholar
35 P.R.O. T 70/53: instructions to agent Plunkett, 9 February 1721. (He was sent a new branding iron.)Google Scholar
36 P.R.O. T 70/16: letter from agent Edmund Pierce, February 1682.Google Scholar
37 P.R.O. T 70/361: Bence Island accounts, 1682.Google Scholar
38 A.H. U., Cabo Verde, caixa VI: Bishop of Cape Verde to the Conselho Ultramarino, 27 July 1694.Google Scholar
39 Wadstrom, C.B., op. cit. part 2, pp. 84, 85, 87.Google Scholar
40 Ibid. part 2, p. 117.
41 British Museum, Add, MS. 12131: papers relating to Sierra Leone, 1792–96, journals by Mr Gray and Mr Watt, 1795.Google Scholar
42 Canot, Captain, op. cit. 168, 169.Google Scholar
43 Crooks, J. J., in his A History of the Colony of Sierra Leone (Dublin, 1903), holds to the view of African slavery being ancient, but he makes no connexion with the Atlantic slave-trade.Google Scholar
44 See, for example, McKitrick, Eric (ed.), Slavery Defended: the Views of the Old South (New Jersey, 1963).Google Scholar
45 Obviously, the early records of the Portuguese in Benin and the Congo could be of vital importance here. Basil Davidson cited Pacheco Pereira to the effect that there were wars in Benin providing captives for the Europeans, and added that ‘these wars provided slaves for domestic use, much as in medieval Europe’. This is a reasonable presumption, but it is nevertheless an interpolation and not the evidence of Pacheco Pereira (Old Africa Rediscovered, 124, and Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, ed. Mauny, 134). For the Congo (121, 122) Davidson cites a secondary work: Ihle, A., Das alte Kōnigreich Kongo (1929).Google Scholar
46 Besides, Mungo Park was heavily influenced by the West Indian slave-owner Bryan Edwards; and it was one of the pro-slavery arguments that, if the majority of Africans were already slaves in Africa, then it would be no improvement in their lot to end the Atlantic slave-trade and American slavery. For a discussion of the extent to which Park was influenced by Edwards, see the introduction by Murray, John to the publication of Park's second Niger journey, The Journal of a Mission to Africa in the Year 1805.Google Scholar
47 Fernandes, Valentim, op. cit. 92, 96.Google Scholar
48 See, for example, the report of three Spanish Capuchin missionaries on the conduct of the Atlantic slave-trade on the Upper Guinea Coast in the latter part of the seventeenth century in Mateo de Anguiano, P., Misiones capuchinas en Africa, II, 132–46 (written in 1686).Google Scholar
49 McCulloch, M., op. cit. 24, 25.Google Scholar
50 Mauny, Raymond (ed.), Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, par Duarte Pacheco Pereira (vers 1506–1508) (Bissau, 1956), 134, 126.Google Scholar
51 de Almada, Alvares, op. cit. 301.Google Scholar
52 Jobson, Richard, The Golden Trade (London, 1933), 108, 109. The ‘slaves’ in the Gambia were owned by the Muslim imams.Google Scholar
53 See above, p. 434.Google Scholar
54 Oliver, R. and Fage, J. D., A Short History of Africa (London, 1962), 172.Google Scholar
55 Udo, R. K., ‘The migrant tenant farmer of eastern Nigeria’, in Africa, XXXIV, no. 4 (10, 1964), 333. There is a reference to the regime of household service in southern Nigeria in Black Mother, 39.Google Scholar
56 Duffy, James, Portugal in Africa (London, 1962), 61, 62, 69.Google Scholar