The African Slave Trade

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sponsible for the slave trade? The Europeans alone, or the Africans themselves? Did the slave trade do real damage to Africa, or was it a marginal phenomenon affecting only a few coastal societies?
Trade or go under
We need to take a fresh look at the origins of the Atlantic slave trade. They shed light on the enduring mechanisms that established and maintained the vicious spiral. It is not certain that the European slave trade originally derived from the Arab trade. For a long time the Arab slave trade appears to have been a supplement to a much more profitable commerce in Sudanese gold and the precious, rare or exotic products of the African countries. Whereas, despite some exports of gold, ivory and hardwoods, it was the trade in human beings that galvanised the energy of the Europeans along the coast of Africa. Again, the Arab slave trade was geared mainly to the satisfaction of domestic needs. In contrast, following the successful establishment of slave plantations on the islands off the coast of Africa (Sao Tomé, Principe, Cap Verde), the export of Africans to the New World supplied the workforce for the colonial plantations and mines whose produce (gold, silver and, above all, sugar, cocoa, cotton, tobacco and coffee) was the prime material of international trade.
The enslavement of Africans for production was tried in Iraq but proved a disaster. It provoked widespread revolts, the largest of which lasted from 869 to 883 and put paid to the mass exploitation of black labour in the Arab world (2). Not until the nineteenth century did slavery for production re-emerge in a Muslim country, when black slaves were used on the plantations of Zanzibar to produce goods such as cloves and coconuts that in any case were partly exported to Western markets (3). The two slavery systems nevertheless shared the same justification of the unjustifiable: a more or less explicit racism with a strong religious colouring. In both cases, we find ...