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  • 44 - Slave Wills along the Swahili Coast

  • from Part Eight - Documents from Muslim Africa
  • Edited by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, Cornell University, New York, Martin A. Klein, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 511-518

  • Summary

    The killing of innocent individuals so they could serve their social superiors in the afterlife is a topic that has attracted for centuries the attention of Europeans writing about western Africa. In the eighteenth century, English apologists for the slave trade claimed that the purchase of West African war captives for enslavement in the Americas should be seen as a humanitarian act because these same individuals would have otherwise become the victims of human sacrifice in Africa. Slaves were not the only individuals who could potentially suffer such a fate. Convicted criminals and war prisoners were held by the Asante state in specific villages until needed for execution at annual religious rituals. Thus fear of being the victim of a ritual sacrifice was hardly unique to the enslaved, nor was this the only source of dread in their lives.