A Complex Trade Shaped by Both Sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Captive Africans were submitted to harrowing journeys before boarding slave ships. Their rare surviving accounts provide details of how they were sold multiple times along the path between their homelands and the Atlantic coast.
Their narratives highlight the horrible time they spent confined in forts and barracoons while waiting to be sold. Although most of these stories are based on childhood recollections, the information they provide coincides with existing written records that show the organization of the trade as based on preexisting routes. A variety of African representatives dominated these inland networks and the trade on the coast. Moreover, except for the ports of Luanda and Benguela, controlled by the Portuguese during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, other ports in Atlantic Africa were not controlled by Europeans but remained under the control of local African rulers and agents. Hence, European merchants not only needed to obtain their permission to establish forts and conduct the trade but also had to pay customs fees and provide gratuities in the form of gifts to get preferred treatment from African traders. These transactions were shaped by these human exchanges and by the goods traded by these agents. Depending on periods and regions, African rulers and traders demanded specific commodities as well as manufactured and luxury goods. These items responded to their own specific needs and tastes as well as those of the populations living inland who also developed preferences over the many decades of the Atlantic slave trade.Exchanges between both sides of the Atlantic Ocean favored the creation of connections between regions producing specific goods in the Americas and African consumers in specific zones of the Atlantic coast. As a result, enslaved people from these regions were exported to the same areas of the Americas where the goods sent to these African regions originated.
This is the case of Bahian tobacco, greatly appreciated by African rulers in the Bight of Benin, that led to the transportation of great numbers of African captives from the Bight of Benin to Bahia. As enslaved Africans reported in their own accounts, African traders transported far into the interior of West Africa and West Central Africa gunpowder, firearms, and other manufactured products introduced in the region by European merchants, fueling the cycle of violence introduced with the Atlantic slave trade. In most African regions, European merchants remained restricted to the coast. African rulers and their representatives relied on wide networks of traders and caravans that went far into the interior to acquire captives with a large array of products to be sold on Atlantic Africa seaports. Many of these traders were African-born men and women. But among them there were also the descendants of European men and African women, who nurtured alliances that persisted since the arrival of the first Europeans in the continent. Competition often marked the interactions among European merchants in Atlantic Africa. The exchanges between these same merchants with African men and women also oriented the development of the slave trade to the Americas.
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