Beginnings
Explorers and Colonists
When Africans first came to the New World, they came of their
own free will, and they arrived at virtually the same moment
as the first Europeans. During the 16th century, African adventurers
joined into the spirit of the Age of Exploration and crisscrossed
the globe. In the early 1500s, Africans trekked across Mexico,
Peru, and Ecuador, conquered New Mexico with Coronado, and
gazed upon the shores of the mysterious Pacific Ocean alongside
Ferdinand de Balboa. The African explorer Estevanico helped
the De Vaca and Coronado expeditions open up what is now the
Southwestern United States for Spain, and Africans accompanied
the French Jesuit missionaries as they charted the northern
reaches of North America.
In the early 17th century, as the Age of Colonization
began in earnest, Africans had begun to come to North America
to stay. In 1619, a year before English pilgrims arrived at Plymouth,
Massachusetts, a group of Africans were brought to the Jamestown
colony in Virginia as indentured servants.
Within 50 years, however, this colony of free
people was no more, and most of the African immigrants in Virginia
had been enslaved. Like practically all other Africans in North
America, they had been caught up in the transatlantic slave trade-a
web of international commerce and human suffering that was entangling
Europe, the Americas, and Africa. This new institution would
bring about profound changes in society, politics, and everyday
life on all four continents, and would shape the African experience
in America for centuries to come.
West Africa before the Slave Trade
At the dawn of the era of transatlantic slavery, Africa was a
vast and diverse land, the home of many ancient cultures and
more than 800 languages. The region that would be most powerfully
affected by the slave trade was in West Africa, along a strip
of coast between the Senegal and Congo rivers. This vast expanse
of land was marked by a rich and varied culture, having long
absorbed influences from Arab North Africa, from European trading
posts, and from the cosmopolitan cities of the interior. The
inland city of Timbuktu was a major center for scholarship,
and the work of its astronomers, mathematicians, and theologians
spread throughout West Africa. Several large kingdoms, such
as Mali, Songhay, and Benin, held sway over significant stretches
of territory, and in the 16th century the capital of Benin
was one of the largest cities in the world. In much of the
region, though, people lived in small clusters of villages,
ruled by tribal kings or chieftains, and worked the fields
and forests for food, pooling their labor and resources as
a community.
Olaudah
Equiano was the son of a chief of the Igbo people in West
Africa, but was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a small
boy. In his autobiography of 1789, he looked back on life in
his homeland, remembering it as "a charming fruitful vale."
Agriculture is our chief employment; and
every one, even the children and women, are engaged in it.
Thus we are all habituated to labour from our earliest years.
Every one contributes something to the common stock; and as
we are unacquainted with idleness, we have no beggars. The
benefits of such a mode of living are obvious.
A Global Network of Suffering
The rise of the transatlantic slave trade disrupted the traditional
way of life in West Africa, and over the centuries would extract
an immeasurable human toll. Europeans had first made contact
with West Africans centuries before, and had long maintained
trading posts on the coasts. As European colonies in the Americas
expanded, though, their governments looked to West Africa for
a source of cheap labor to power their growing farms, mines,
and plantations.
Beginning in the 16th century with the Spanish,
then the Portuguese, French, and Dutch, Europeans began systematically
kidnapping and enslaving large numbers of West Africans, and transporting
them to the American colonies for sale. In 1702, by the Treaty
of Utrecht, the British became increasingly involved in the slave
trade and were accorded a 30-year contract to send nearly 5,000
African slaves a year to the Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere.
Soon, countless cargo ships were crossing the Atlantic, carrying
shiploads of shackled Africans to the Americas, then bringing
raw materials home to Europe. By 1750, an average of 10,000 Africans
were involuntarily transported across the Atlantic every year.
By the time the slave trade reached its peak in the 18th century,
the number was up to 60,000 per year.
It is estimated that during the 300 years of
the transatlantic slave trade, between 15 million and 20 million
Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves. Of these,
more than 400,000 were sent to the 13 British colonies and, later,
the United States. We may never know a precise number, but current
estimates hold that more than 1 million Africans died on the
journey.
The trade in slave labor fueled an unprecedented
era of expansion, innovation, and prosperity across the European
world, from London to Amsterdam to Philadelphia. But it ruined
the kingdoms and villages of West Africa. Slavery had never been
unknown in the region, but the large-scale abduction and transportation
of slaves, as well as the treatment of those slaves as permanent
property, were unheard of. Wars broke out as local tribes sought
to protect their people from roving bands of slave traders, and
villagers retreated behind barricades. But the greatest blow
was the loss of its people, and the youngest and strongest men,
women, and children-West Africa's future-were taken across the
ocean to a harsh life in another land. |