How People Were Enslaved

Slavery existed before the arrival of the Europeans in West Central Africa and Africa, even though it is hard to determine how widespread the institution was because of the scarcity of information, which is often not available for all regions of the continent.

Painting the complex panorama of enslavement in West Africa and West Central Africa during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade is a difficult task. Most of the nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans who boarded slave ships on the shores of the African continent from the fifteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century were captured through warfare. Africans recounted how these wars affected their home countries in correspondence, oral and written slave narratives, and visual records. These accounts, as with any source, carry biases. Because in some cases they drew from childhood recollections and were shaped by the context of the abolitionist movement, they frequently provided an idealized image of Africa. Also, most narratives by African-born individuals were neither written by the narrator nor produced in an African language.⁵ None of the published narratives of enslaved persons born in Africa were written by women. Also rare are the published accounts by prisoners of war who were subsequently sold into slavery, even though their testimonies survived through archival sources, especially in the nineteenth century, offering a wealth of information to help us understand the processes of enslavement in West Africa.

During the period of the Atlantic slave trade, through the rise of European rule in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, until African independences were achieved in the middle of the twentieth century, the current borders of African states did not exist yet. Therefore, like today, African societies and peoples were diverse. In this context, most of the time, persons eligible to be captured, kept locally enslaved, or sold away into slavery were foreign individuals. However, there were exceptions to this rule. Enslaved people taken to the Americas all came from the regions of West Africa, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa. But on a regional level, men, women, and children captured and sold to European and American merchants were aliens in the societies that traded them into slavery.

In various regions, African populations could be organized in chiefdoms whose structures were based on kinship. Until the nineteenth century, most West African and West Central African populations lived in decentralized societies. But some states were bigger, more complex, and clearly centralized. For example, in regions surrounding the port of Benguela in West Central Africa, this diversity explains why groups that carried distinct cultural affiliations and spoke varied languages raided each other during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶ Hence, until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, men and women living on the African continent built their identities along the ethnic lines that shaped their lineages and clans, which is why it would be inaccurate to refer to the existence of a common African identity, an idea that only emerged later in the Americas, as one of the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade, and in Africa, as a response to European colonial rule.

As the Atlantic slave trade evolved, the fate of war prisoners gradually changed. During the sixteenth century, thanks to the support of Portuguese allies, most bondspeople in the Kingdom of Kongo were prisoners captured during wars waged against the Kingdom of Ndongo (a state inhabited by the Kimbundu-speaking Mbundu people, also identified as Ambundu, plural of Mbundu). Kongo also made captives north of its territory, across the Congo River in the Tio Kingdom (also known as the Kingdom of Anziku), a polity that covered the area surrounding the Malebo Pool, in the lower Congo River, which marks the border between today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo (south) and the Republic of Congo (north). As shown by one historian, these external sources initially satisfied Kongo’s demand for slaves, while protecting freeborn individuals from enslavement.⁷ Nevertheless, starting in the last decade of the sixteenth century, freeborn Kongo subjects could also be sold to the Atlantic slave trade for a variety of reasons, including participation in rebellious activities.

Most persons captured in West Central Africa and West Africa who were sent to Europe and the Americas between the fifteenth century and the late nineteenth century were originally outsiders. But the intensification of the commerce in human beings led also to the enslavement of locally born individuals. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese agents obtained slaves from Kongo by participating in local wars as mercenaries.⁸ Kongo rulers blamed Portuguese subjects who enslaved freeborn people (including nobles) and sent them to Portugal, São Tomé, and Brazil. As evidence shows, occasionally, the king of Kongo tried, with some success, to ransom these illegally enslaved individuals and bring them back to the kingdom.⁹ In 1575, the Portuguese founded Luanda, south of the Congo River, which gradually became a colonial settlement and the largest slave-trading port in West Central Africa. In 1617, the Portuguese established the colony of Benguela. South of Luanda, the colony later became the second busiest slave-trading port in West Central Africa. By the time, the Portuguese engaged in practices like those they had already utilized in Senegambia (as explored in chapter 1), first raiding villages, then kidnapping and enslaving their inhabitants.¹⁰