Harrowing Journeys to the Coast
For the men, women, and children taken captive in the hinterland of West Africa and West Central Africa, the ordeal was just starting. Kidnappers, raiders, and soldiers immediately started transporting these captives through land and water pathways of preexisting trading routes, traversing many regions until they reached the coast.
Once captured, enslaved people could stay confined in permanent structures such as coastal forts or barracoons between six and twelve months, with an average waiting period of three months, before being boarded on slave ships.3 During this long process, these men, women, and children were gradually transformed into living commodities. Unfortunately, up until the late eighteenth century, only a handful of firsthand accounts about these harrowing journeys from the interior to the coast have survived.The two individuals who captured Olaudah Equiano and his sister in the interior of the Bight of Biafra in approximately 1753 knew in detail the path they needed to take to get to the coast.4 For several days, the two young captives and their West African kidnappers walked all day and stopped only during the night to eat and sleep. Despite his scattered memories, Equiano explains how during his journey to the coast, they crossed through many villages and towns, and they saw other people but only from a distance.5 Such journeys, however, were not totally unknown to him, as in his own narrative he mentions neighboring traders who traded European items such as firearms, gunpowder, hats, and beads in exchange for “odoriferous woods and earth” as well as “salt of wood-ashes.”6 According to him, these traders
always carry slaves through our land.... Sometimes indeed we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other crimes which we esteemed to be heinous.
This practice of kidnapping induces me to think, that, notwithstanding all our strictness, their principal business among us was to trepan [trick] our people. I remember too they carried great sacks along with them, which, not long after, I had an opportunity of fatally seeing applied to that infamous purpose.7The slave trade on the coast and in the region of present-day Angola in West Central Africa operated in similar ways. Yet, unlike West African ports of the Bight of Biafra, the Bight of Benin, and the Gold Coast that were controlled by African polities, starting in the late sixteenth century the Portuguese founded Luanda and Benguela, whose harbors became the two largest West Central African ports. In these areas, there was a web of decentralized networks of itinerant traders who traveled between the coast and the hinterland. Agents based in the ports of Luanda and Benguela, and sometimes also in Portugal and Brazil, provided these traders with imported items such as Indian and European textiles, firearms, and gunpowder, as well as cachaça or aguardente (a Brazilian distilled spirit made of sugarcane, locally known as gerebita or jeribita). Sometimes these itinerant traders were based in markets controlled by the Portuguese administration in Luanda. But very often they entered the backlands, where they sold these commodities on credit.8 And from these same communities, caravan traders obtained captives, enslaved through various means, as discussed in chapter 2. Yet, as the caravans moved from inland to the coast, captured Africans resisted enslavement by attempting to escape, fighting, and even killing their abductors.9
Equiano was separated twice from his sister during the long journey to the coast. He passed through the hands of various traders as well. Aware he was moving west, he gradually understood how far he was from his hometown. During this voyage toward the coast, he remained several days with a family of Igbo speakers like himself.
At one of these multiple stops, he was sold again for 172 “little white shells.”10 These cowrie shells (originated in the Maldives Islands in South Asia) were introduced on the African continent by Muslim traders through the Near East or the Indian Ocean via caravan trades that crossed the Sahara as early as the eleventh century. First recorded in Arabic sources in the fourteenth century, in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese started transporting cowries by sea around the Cape of Good Hope.11 Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, cowries became the major form of currency used in West Africa and West Central Africa (where they were known as nzimbu). During the eighteenth century, observers who visited Ouidah reported the use of cowries as currency.12 Likewise, French slave ships that sailed to Ouidah in the eighteenth century purchased captives using cowrie shells.13 Cowries were imported in Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and Angola, even though in some of these regions cowrie shells were not domestically used as currency but rather transported to the interior, where traders used them to purchase enslaved people and other commodities.14Captured on the Gold Coast in 1770, Cugoano was led to the coast along with other children. As they did with Equiano, the kidnappers stopped at many places during the long walking journey. As days passed and Cugoano gradually lost hope of being able to ever return home, the traces of the eighteenth-century trade with Europeans appeared as they approached the coastal area: “When next morning came, I asked for the men that brought me there, and for the rest of my companions; and I was told that they were gone to the sea side to bring home some rum, guns and powder.”15 Like in Equiano’s experience, as Cugoano approached the coast, he reports the presence of white individuals: “Next day we travelled on, and in the evening came to a town, where I saw several white people, which made me afraid that they would eat me, according to our notion as children in the inland parts of this country.”16 His fear of being eaten reveals how the Atlantic slave trade gave rise to the circulation of legends about cannibal white men.17 In these stories, slave merchants who took away African people metaphorically ate them.
The blood of their bodies was transformed into wine, their brains converted into cheese, the ashes of their burned bones transmuted into gunpowder. In this allegory, white men would purchase newly enslaved Africans with the very commodities extracted from enslaved bodies.18 Cugoano’s account of his reaction to the presence of these outsiders also confirms that on the Gold Coast, West African agents controlled the inland slave-trading routes and slave-trading posts. As discussed in chapter 1, Europeans were restricted to the coastal areas in this region of West Africa, where they had been established since the second half of the fifteenth century.In the Gambia River region, Europeans had to regularly negotiate permission with local rulers to build fortresses to conduct their affairs on their land.19 On the Gold Coast, European powers were allowed to construct permanent trading posts, including castles and fortresses, as the Portuguese did when they built the Elmina castle in 1481 and then a wooden trading station in Cape Coast in 1555. Gold continued to dominate in the Gold Coast external trade during the entire seventeenth century. In 1652, the Swedish African Company built in Osu (today’s Accra), the Fort Christiansborg, which the Danish purchased one decade later. In 1653, the Swedes also built a timber fort in Cape Coast. Reconstructed by the English in 1663, this building became known as the Cape Coast Castle, one of the most important European trading posts on the Gold Coast during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. (The castle still stands today and has been visited by tourists and many international authorities such as the former US president Barack Obama.) As the trade in enslaved Africans to the Americas became the dominant commercial activity in the region, these castles (originally conceived for the gold trade) became the European headquarters of the Atlantic slave trade. Upon his arrival on the coast, Cugoano was first kept in an unidentified fort and then was imprisoned at the Cape Coast Castle, where he described his experience of confinement with other captives in one of the dungeons: “I was soon conducted to a prison, for three days, where I heard the groans and cries of many, and saw some of my fellow-captives.”20 Like him, many other West Africans transported by the British, the Dutch, and the Danish to the West Indies were imprisoned in the castle’s dungeons during the eighteenth century.