The Social and Historical Context of Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa

Kojo Dei
Department of Anthropology
John Jay College

Question: Why is it necessary that we begin this course with a discussion of the social and historical context of slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The main reason is that you cannot understand properly the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) without some knowledge of slavery within the African Continent as well as knowledge of the nature of traditional African societies. Prior to the beginning of the TST in the fifteenth century, which linked Africa to Europe and the Americas, slaves had been exported by Africans from the African continent to Middle Eastern or Muslim countries. Also, anthropological research provides insights into the nature of traditional African societies or cultures before the tremendous and sustained influence of the western world on the African continent. Surprisingly, however, this knowledge is seldom utilized to shed light on Africa’s involvement in the slave trade. Few historians or students of African studies, as well as social scientists in general seldom make reference to that continent’s socio-historical context for fear of being misconstrued to be arguing that slavery is organic to Africa. But the fact of the matter is that slavery is a universal socioeconomic phenomenon. That is , slavery is found in all human societies (see, for instance, Orlando Patterson’s Freedom in the Making of Western Culture [1991]). In short, it would have been surprising if African societies had NOT practiced slavery before Europeans arrived on the continent. Also, we shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that the Transatlantic Trade which began in earnest in the sixteenth century ended in the nineteenth century (almost four centuries!). It is therefore reasonable to argue that slavery was indeed a major institution in African societies, as the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux (1986) has done.

I would like to quickly add that the fifteenth century did not, however, initiate the trade in human beings between Africa and Europe. As we now know from early Islamic Chronicles (that is, Arabic speaking historians working for various Muslim leaders before the fifteenth century) Africans had been sold as slaves in Islamic Spain (really, Spain and Portugal) as far back as the eighth century (Meillassoux 1986). Another interesting point is that a fairly robust trade in which Europeans from the Balkan were sold as slaves in West Africa thrived both before and during the early stages of the TST. Thus, it seems that the slave trade between Africa and Europe was not simply a one directional exchange, even if eventually most slaves in that exchange were Africans. This is important because it points to the complexity of the slave trade in Africa that is frequently overlooked.

The purpose of this essay is to set the stage for a meaningful discussion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, later. I guess most of you would like us to discuss the Middle Passage or what happened to the slaves after the reached the Americas. However, we must begin with the lesser known subject of slavery on the African continent before the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Many students want answers to questions like: Did Black Africans voluntarily engage in selling their congeners (i.e., individuals they grew-up with or individuals of "their own kind," but not necessarily their consanguine relatives) to strangers from Europe who transported them to faraway places like the West Indies and the Americas? What was the situation like at the height of wars that led to the capture of slaves exported to foreign lands? I will attempt to shed light on basic questions like these and provide you with a social historical context which contributed to the emergence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the sixteenth century.
But first allow me to introduce one of the few scholars who utilize anthropological knowledge of traditional African societies in discussing the slave trade in Africa. He is the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, the author of The Anthropology of Slavery: The womb of Iron and Gold (1986). This book is an important resource for any course on African slavery. However, the book is not easy to read and digest. That is why Prof. Umbach and I decided that I should write this essay as a substitute for chapter I in Meillassoux’s book.

Definition of the Slave

Who is a slave, or to whom should the concept "slave" be adequately applied? Claude Meillassoux (1986: 23-40) discusses this issue and points out the difficulties one encounters when this concept is used in a cross-cultural fashion. Because the characteristics that we in the West ordinarily associate with a slave can also be found to be associated with a vast category of persons in Africa who are not slaves at all, Claude Meillassoux provides a useful discussion of this concept and suggests a limited but prudent way in which to apply this concept in Africa. For example, should wives and children who are dependents of a patriarch in a household be considered as slaves? After all like slaves either of these social persons (a wife or a child) can be pawned or even sold under certain circumstances in many West African societies. Yet, as he correctly he points out, from the point of view of their neighbors these persons and their descendants aren’t slaves at all. He argues that the term "slave" in Western societies is given a legalistic (or personal) meaning that makes it totally inapplicable for the African context where the social supercedes the personal or individual idiosyncrasies. He criticizes attempts to argue that the slave is an extension of the elaborate African system of kinship, and rejects the kinship argument completely because the slave in the African context is an alien or "a contrario who did not grow up in the interstices of the social and economic networks which situate a man [sic] with respect to others" (Meillassoux 1986:23). He maintains that the two terms slave and freeborn (congener) were conceptually different and reflected in the treatment that Africans traditionally accorded the freeborn who happened to be captured or sold into slavery. According to Meillassoux (1986:23), Africans conceived freemen as "those who were born and have developed together."

In The Anthropology of Slavery Claude Meillassoux attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the discussion of slavery in West Africa. He points out that slavery was a social institution in the fabric of West African societies. He characterizes traditional African societies as "domestic societies." What does he means by this? Domestic societies are village-based societies which function like a communal or egalitarian community because of the nature of their economies in contrast to societies dominated by the market economy (economies where goods are sold and bought on a market for cash or its equivalent). In other words, market economies produce hierarchical (class) societies but domestic societies do not. To read Meillassoux correctly one must presume that the entire region of West Africa, which he refers to as "the Sahelo-Sudanese Region," served as an entrepot for the slave trade.

Sahelo-Sudanese Region

The geographical focus of this essay is the area that Claude Meillassoux calls "The Sahelo-Sudanese Region." The significance of this region to slavery in Africa was recently underscored by President G. W. Bush’s maiden trip to Africa in June, 2003. The President’s only comments on slavery and America’s role were made on Goree Island in Senegal, which is located on the Western flank of the Sahelo-Sudanese region.

The Sahelo-Sudanese region approximates the contemporary region of West Africa, which has the unenviable distinction as the center of slave trade in Africa. The region encompasses all the geographical territories of the 15 or so members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and more. (MAP) Its western frontier extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern border of the Sudan by the Red Sea and from the Cameroon in the south to the Sahara Desert in the north, bordering Libya and other Arabic nations in North Africa.

Slaves were brought on foot from all parts of the Sahelo-Sudanese region to places on the coast like Goree Island in Senegal, dubbed "the point of no return" because it was on this island that Africans were put on slave ships from Europe and sent to the Americas. It is appropriate that we focus on this region because the Sahelo-Sudanese region indeed functioned as the entrepot of Africa’s slave trade not just to the Americas but to Europe and the Islamic countries in the Middle East as well. Slave trade between the Middle East and Africa is another important subject that needs to be explored in order to gain a more complete understanding of the Slave Trade. Prof. Umbach will talk about that because of his knowledge of the subject boosted by his fluency of the Arabic language as well as personal familiarity of some of the areas.

A word or two has to be said about the geographical terrain of the Sahelo-Sudanese region which perhaps made its role as the entrepot of slavery in Africa possible. The area is covered by three types of vegetation: savannah which stretches roughly 25 Kilometers inland from the Atlantic coast, then you encounters dense tropical rainforest (or jungle) with humid conditions. The rainforest stretches for about 250 kilometers. The vegetation and climate change into arid and desert conditions. Beyond this area, sometimes referred to as savannah, lies the vast sparsely populated Sahel region—where desert conditions of the Sahara prevail. However this did not stop African slave traders from marching the human cargo they had either acquired through capture or sale to the Mediterranean coast to be shipped
to the West Indies.

The Sahel part of this region, in particular, contained some of the biggest slave markets like Awdaghust, Jenne, Gao, Timbuktu ever to flourish in Africa. As early as the tenth century A.D. slaves were sent on foot from this region to the shores of the Mediterranean on way to slave markets in Spain and Portugal. Most of the slave markets as well as Africa’s ancient empires like Songhai, Mali, and Ghana were established in the Sahel area.

Meillassoux’s Thesis

Claude Meillassoux (1986:10-22) maintains that slavery played a major role in the economic and political development of the Sahelo-Sudanese region long before the arrival of the first European. Because many of the societies Meillassoux examines left us few records, he relies up outside travelers accounts for evidence. Indeed, much that we know about these societies emerges from such accounts. In particular, Meillassoux relies up the famous Muslim travelers Ibn Battuta. Click here to read more about Ibn Battuta and read the full text of his writings on Africa. Meillassoux thesis is based on the assumption that the phenomenon of slavery in Africa arose from "an economy of theft" in which people were either captured or stolen through acts of violence and then converted into commodities. Accordingly, he thinks that the two institutions, namely, trade and war, were absolutely necessary for the emergence and sustainability of slavery. Thus, for him, it was no surprise from the ninth or tenth century that slavery aided the establishment of an aristocracy of warrior princes (the Naba). Meillassoux points out that the military aristocracy was not directly engaged in holy wars, for they were never Muslims to begin with. He maintains that they were first and foremost leaders determined to protect rural populations in the southern portion of the Sahelo-Sudanese region against incursions from the Sahel section in the north (Meillassoux 1986: 50). The political structures they established seemed to have inadvertently paved the way for merchant trade to flourish. So the three factors—slavery, war, and trade--seemed to have influenced each other.

Merchants who carried on this trade were at first Berbers from North Africa but later the so-called Muslim marabouts came from Arabic societies in the Middle East and at first settled in a few towns in the south. They began to set up networks of trading partners -- local Africans -- in villages who supplied them with kidnapped people to be sold into slavery in towns of the traders who came from the north. Goods had always been traded locally within what calls "domestic societies," but increasingly the networks established by merchants significantly increased both the distance which goods were traded and the number of goods traded. The expansion of trade within Africa encouraged the growth of urban centers. Such cities, in turn, had to be supplied with food and other necessities; in particular, the growing use of clothing increased local demand for goods. And so slavery, once the exclusive practice of sovereigns, slavery spread to the larger population. The emergence of a merchant class in the Sahelo-Sudanese region, according to Meillassoux, helped sustain and maintain slavery as a major institution in African societies. By the time Europeans appeared on the scene, this new merchant economy (and its dependence upon slavery) had already taken shape. Thus the beginnings of the trans-Sahara trade that Berbers in North Africa initiated set up a process would over time grow and develop into a fundamental social process that engulfed the entire Sahelo-Sudanese region.

The rise of the merchant class in the region also transformed its political organization. Centralized powers controlling large sweeps of territory were replaced by much smaller units: loosely allied fortified village under the authority of families (kinship groups) who were responsible for organizing the defense. In some areas, there emerged fiefdoms dominated by a local dynasty ruling over a few towns which, to protect themselves, organized a military force or hired mercenary clans.

Many students want to know if this merchant slavery that flourished in Africa before Europeans arrived was "softer" or "kinder" than the slavery in the United States before 1865. Here, it might be appropriate to quote at length Ibrahim Sundiata, Chair of the Department of History at Howard University, one of America’s most prestigious historically black colleges and universities:

Given the geographical size of Africa and the number and complexity of societies found there, any broad generalization is bound to be false. One could argue that there is no benign slavery. Some time ago, in comparing slavery in the Americas, the anthropologist Marvin Harris, comparing slavery in the United States and Latin America, discounted the "Myth of the Kindly Master," in which "Latin" slavery was envisioned as somehow innately less harsh and burdensome than the Anglo-Saxon variety. In the Harris thesis, if some African societies seemed to offer slaves more leeway than others, it is because their intensity of economic production was less. It would be very hard to argue that the slave salt miners of Taodeni or the laborers in the Asante gold mines participated in any form of "familial" slavery. Even when the kinship idiom is used, we must realize that folks can be awfully hard on their kin (for example, Roman fathers had the legal right to kill or sell their spouses and children). Also, gender cannot be overlooked. The majority of slaves in Africa were women and in many places the major agriculturalists. Their status put them at a complex juncture; under patriarchy all women are subordinate, but some are more subordinate than others. (see the entire article here)

Claude Meillassoux discusses this evolutionary process and changes under three sub-headings: (1) From Empires to Merchants (that took place from the seventh to fifteenth century); (2) From Merchant Cities to Muslim Aristocracies (that occurred from the sixteenth to nineteenth century; and (3) The Decline of slavery and European colonization (which occurred from about the 1890’s to 1960’s).

I would like to stress that the three periods overlap so that some of the histories in the period "From Empires to Merchants" for instance, continued to impact the subsequent period "From Merchant Cities to Muslim Aristocracies." For instance, the first period "From Empires to Merchants" incorporates the three ancient West African empires mentioned above: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and it began from about the seventh century but its impact shaped events in the region well into the fifteenth century; while the second period "From Merchant Cities to Muslim Aristocracies" witnessed the emergence of merchants whose livelihood depended solely on trade. They constituted the contemporary nouveau riche and functioned as an elite group, the most powerful and innovative political leaders during that time.
Notice that I did not say that the third period saw the end of slavery. Why do you think that I purposefully avoided saying the end of slavery? I did that because even as late as the end of the twentieth century slavery in the Sahelo-Sudanese region was again in the news. Check out media stories about slavery in Mauritania, (located on the northwest coast of the Sahelo-Sudanese region and south of Morocco), the Ivory Coast, and modern Ghana. The article on "The New Slavery" that Prof. Umbach asked you to read for next week is evidence that slavery has not been completely eradicated in the world after the British abolished the slave trade way back in the early nineteenth century. For me, the slow pace of eradicating slavery, is further evidence to supports Meillassoux’s point that slavery is a major social institution in not just African societies but the entire world.

(much of the following two paragraphs is taken directly from Meillassoux, pp 62 – 63)

As Meillassoux points out, after Europeans ended the TST (1808), major slave supplying wars broke out over West Africa with a ferocity that Sahelo-Sudanese region had never seen. Why? During the years of the TST there were outlets for all of the captives, because there were two distinct slave markets. The first, the European market, absorbed adult men whatever their social condition (whether freemen or recapture slaves), but the demand for women and children from this market was low. The other, the market within Africa for African slaves, provided an outlet mostly for women and children and had little use for adult men. In this way all the captives could be sold.

When the Europeans ended the TST, there was no longer any outlet for male captives of free-born origin; from this time onwards they were generally massacred on the battlefield. Only recaptured male slaves and women and children were held. But profits from war fell as a result, since the costs remained the same whether all or only part of the spoils (booty captured in war) were sold. For war to remain profitable, it had to be intensified: bigger populations had to be attacked, military operations had to be more frequent.

Let’s summarize some irrefutable facts of the historical records at the outset. The first is that Africans for purposes of greed and other reasons collaborated with foreign merchants who came into their territories to trade in goods as well as in human beings. The second is that even though the earliest merchants were Muslims religious conversion was not their primary motive; for all intent and purposes it was plain and simple greed. Religious conversion was later adopted a cover in waging the so-called holy wars (jihad) to capture infidels en mass and sold as "raw material" for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The fact of the matter is that the foreign merchants always acquired African partners who helped them navigate the communities they were domiciled in. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any student of human societies with a keen sense of observing human behavior. People are seldom monolithic even though they may subscribe to or share the same cultural ideology. From all accounts it seems that the lack of political stability in the region aided merchants in persuading native Africans to take arms up to defend and protect their rural populations. The military aristocracy that emerged as political leaders of the various communities in that Sahelo-Sudanese region allowed specialization of occupation to take place and with that, as Meillassoux points out, the foundations of class societies were laid and they in turn helped entrench slavery in the region. The coming of European colonial powers set in motion laws that outlawed slavery in the region but by no means did legal sanctions completely uproot the practice of slavery in this region of Africa.