In his sixteenth-century bestseller The Cosmography and Geography of Africa,
North African diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, known as Johannes Leo Africanus, described Jenne, a town in present-day Mali, as being a rich land, “lush with wheat, barley, livestock and cotton, and its inhabitants are very wealthy because they do a good trade in cotton fabrics.” He also mentioned that North African merchants sold “many wares in this kingdom, especially European textiles, copper, brass and weapons such as swords and lances.
They pay with gold that has not been struck into coin, though for small things they pay in iron pieces.”1 As this scholar explained, West African and West Central African societies have been part of economic and cultural exchanges with other parts of the globe for centuries, long before the Portuguese began exploring the coastal regions of West and West Central Africa in the fifteenth century.2Purchasing and transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean from these two regions became more affordable in comparison with purchasing the increasingly expensive slaves from the Ottoman Empire and the Moroccan state, regions that previously provided captives to European markets through the Saharan routes. To better understand the complex mechanisms of the Atlantic slave trade, the best place to start is the history of the contact between the inhabitants of the African and the European continents that started centuries before, reaching back to antiquity.
It is undeniable that the first Portuguese expeditions to West Africa had economic and religious motivations. The Portuguese waged “just war” against non-Christians, especially against the Muslims and other non-Christian populations, and this religious excuse at least initially justified their enslavement. I emphasize here the extreme violence that characterized the first incursions of Portuguese explorers in the coastal areas of West Africa and West Central Africa, which were modeled on their early experiences fighting Muslim invaders in the Iberian Peninsula. I especially stress that the first exchanges between the Portuguese and West African societies during the first century of the Atlantic slave trade did not truly rely, as others have claimed, on the willingness of local rulers to sell prisoners or outliers into slavery. Though Portuguese and African authorities established trade agreements in the late fifteenth century, earlier raids set the tone for future exchanges. In these initial contacts as well as in later ones, rulers and commoners of African polities were not forced to enter the business of selling human beings to European traders, but they also did not do so entirely voluntarily. The reality is that, very often, they were left with few (if any) alternatives.