European and American Players
The establishment of commercial, cultural, and religious exchanges between Portugal and Africa coincided with European expansion in the Americas. West Central African and West African rulers purchased firearms and gunpowder from the Portuguese.
Through their growing contact with African markets, the Portuguese became central actors in the development of the slave trade. As the Atlantic slave trade expanded in the seventeenth century, Portugal was joined by other European competitors such as England, the Dutch Republic, France, Spain, and Denmark. In 1612 the Dutch had already established a fort in Mouri (also spelled Moree or Moure), between Cape Coast and Anomabu. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch attempted to take control of the Elmina castle on the Gold Coast, but it was not until 1637 that they succeeded in defeating the Portuguese and seizing the imponent trading post. Likewise, in the seventeenth century, other European powers began competing to gain access to the gold trade in the region. Brandenburg, Denmark, England, France, and Sweden built fortresses along the Gold Coast, leading the Portuguese to lose their grip on the region. In this period, this new cosmopolitan context increased local elites’ growing dependency on European commodities, ultimately negatively altering the balance of power in the region.Slave merchants from Europe and the Americas also joined the lucrative venture as the slave trade reached a peak in the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, West Central African and West African societies were marked by increasing insecurity, as more and more locally born men, women, and children feared being captured. As in Kongo, existing customary law and legal mechanisms in other parts of West Central Africa protected certain individuals from enslavement, but starting in the eighteenth century, what often prevailed for the Portuguese and local agents was the opportunity to make profits.11 In this context, local rulers were often unable to protect their own subjects.
Outsiders, women, and children were especially vulnerable to enslavement, but they were not the only ones, since male and female slave traders could also be captured and sold themselves. In other words, on the coast and in the hinterland, virtually anybody could be captured and sold into slavery, including fully integrated members of local societies, such as members of the royal elites, mixed-race individuals who spoke European languages, and even caravan workers who worked transporting enslaved persons from the hinterland to the coast.12During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese explored and waged war against the states and populations located south of the Kingdom of Kongo. They conquered and claimed the Kingdom of Ndongo, north of the Kwanza River, by renaming it the Kingdom of Angola and founding the island of Luanda in 1575. In the first two decades of the seventeenth century the Portuguese claimed the region south of the Kwanza River, named it the Kingdom of Benguela, and found the coastal town of Benguela in 1617. As the Portuguese established these colonies, they imposed treaties of vassalage with existing states in this West Central African region.13 In general, vassal states agreed to provide the Portuguese administration with soldiers to fight nonvassal African polities, porters for the internal trade, and free passage for itinerant traders crossing their territories. In theory, holding a vassal status protected the state’s subjects from being raided. But these agreements were constantly infringed upon. In 1725, as shown by historian Mariana P. Candido, the ruler (soba) of Kiambela, a polity located near the Portuguese fortress of Caconda (on the highlands southwest of Benguela, near the source of the Catumbela River) refused to pay taxes to the Portuguese crown, with whom three years earlier he had signed a vassalage treaty. In retaliation, the Portuguese officer in charge led the raid of Kiambela. The operation captured nearly 600 individuals, including the soba and members of the royal family.
Yet, he sent only 130 prisoners as payment of royal duties to the port of Benguela, which means that most of these captives were for his personal benefit.14 Local sovereigns whose subjects were seized complained to Portuguese governors, and sometimes they were successful in their demands to release men, women, and children captured in these incursions. Nonetheless, the Atlantic slave trade established an endless cycle of violence. Eventually, in their own turn, the same rulers raided by the Portuguese attacked other polities in order to pay royal duties to obtain commodities such as alcohol and weapons.15Likewise, as examined by historian Roquinaldo Ferreira, a white former slave ship captain named Francisco Roque Souto (who served in Brazil but who may have been Portuguese) led an expedition to conduct free trade with the inland Kingdom of Holo in 1739. But the neighboring Mbundo kingdoms of Kasanje and Matamba (two past Portuguese allies) violently reacted against such interference, which would eliminate their roles as intermediaries in the commerce between Holo and Luanda, by killing traders and seizing enslaved people and goods. In retaliation for this attack, Luanda sent against Matamba an armed expedition composed of thousands of soldiers, including African men, who occupied its capital for more than two weeks and enslaved 1,500 individuals. This military attack increased the flux of enslaved captives to Luanda and forced the queen of Matamba to sign an agreement allowing the Portuguese free access to her territory.16 Events such as these debunk the notion that Europeans had no participation in the enslavement of individuals sold in the coastal areas.17
In the West African coastal area of today’s Guinea-Bissau, where decentralized societies prevailed, European traders acquired enslaved Africans from local communities who waged wars or raided each other along the littoral areas of the ports of Cacheu and Bissau.
As already discussed, local traders sold captives captured during these operations in exchange for a variety of goods (or rather currencies), such as cloth, gunpowder, and alcohol. But the most coveted commodity in the region of Guinea-Bissau was iron, usually obtained from Mandinka traders. Starting in the sixteenth century, the development of contacts with European traders altered this context. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the external trade in the region gave rise to an economic cycle of selling enslaved captives in exchange for iron bars used to fabricate agricultural tools as well as hunting and warfare weapons.18By 1680, the coastal polities of the Gold Coast, Eguafo, Fetu, Asebu, Fantyn, and Agona sought to acquire control of the gold trade routes and markets, and therefore waged wars against each other. Again here, European traders were not mere spectators of these developments. They provoked some of these conflicts by offering particular states money and commodities such as firearms and gunpowder. They also occasionally hired African mercenaries to attack coastal polities and rival European powers.19 Consequently, between 1690 and 1730, the largest number of captives placed on ships on the Gold Coast to be sold into slavery in the Americas originated from these armed conflicts. But this context changed at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The gold trade, and then the trade in enslaved Africans, created competition and therefore wealth inequalities among local states and also among individuals and groups within communities.20 Such rivalries fueled warfare and raids among Gold Coast societies, generating more captives for the Atlantic trade.
Starting in the seventeenth century, centralized Akan states emerged on inland Gold Coast’s south and central regions. The Kingdom of Akwamu covered part of modern-day eastern Ghana, from today’s Akwapim and the region stretching between the Volta River (modern-day Lake Volta) and today’s border of Ghana and Togo.
The Kingdom of Denkyira developed on the western region of today’s Ghana, expanding north toward the modern-day border of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and also along the region’s western coastline. But their expansion stopped in the eighteenth century. Akan speakers created the Asante Kingdom, a centralized state whose capital Kumasi was nearly 125 miles from the coast. The Asante conquered Denkyira in 1701 and Akwamu in 1742, thereby becoming the strongest empire on the Gold Coast. The Fante was another heterogenous group of Akan speakers established along the coast during the fifteenth century.21 This group encompassed migrants from inland and other parts of West Africa who gradually adopted a common identity.22 As cosmopolitan agents, accustomed to contact with European outsiders, they became the most prominent group in the coastal area of the Gold Coast during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, until the early nineteenth century.