Kidnapped and Sold into Slavery
Although most Africans were enslaved through warfare, other men, women, and children were kidnapped and sold into slavery. As early as the sixteenth century, European agents described the growing insecurity associated with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade in the Gambia region.
In the Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo-Verde, the Cape Verdean merchant André Alvares d’Almada narrated the intensive slave trade activity in the Gambia River and how the local population took protective measures against slave raids.47 In this early period, the populations established along the coast often complied with Portuguese enslavers to avoid their own enslavement.48Descriptions of the general atmosphere of insecurity persisted and even increased in the following centuries. Europeans who sailed along the coasts of West Africa during the eighteenth century witnessed how local chiefs and ruling men experienced the vulnerability associated with the Atlantic slave trade. According to British naval surgeon John Atkins, who sailed from Sierra Leone to Cape Lopez (a headland marking the westernmost point of present-day Gabon), robbery and kidnapping were widespread in the region, forcing local chiefs to carry firearms on a regular basis. As in the Upper Guinea, engaging in slave-trading activities was a means to prevent being enslaved: “Each knows it is their Villanies and Robberies upon one another that enables them to carry on a Slave-trade with Europeans; and as Strength fluctuates, it is not unfrequent for him who sells you Slaves today, to be a few days hence sold himself at some neighbouring Town.”49
Oftentimes, kidnapping, raids, and warfare were intertwined. In their accounts published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved Africans explained how they were abducted by outsiders when they were children, and therefore more exposed to enslavement.
For example, Broteer Furro (later Venture Smith) was victim of a slave raid in 1739, when he was about twelve years old, then was sold into slavery and sent to Rhode Island in colonial North America.50 In an account published in the late eighteenth century, he described how captors “came to us in the reeds, and the very first salute I had from them was a violent blow on the head with the fore part of a gun, and at the same time a grasp round the neck. I then had a rope put about my neck, as had all the women in the thicket with me.... In this condition we were all led to the camp.”51 Although Smith can hardly be identified as a prisoner of war, his enslavement in the hinterland of the Gold Coast has been connected to several disputes, including a Fante assault on Elmina in 1738, an invasion of Little Popo and Ketu by the Kingdom of Dahomey around the same period, and, more likely, a series of conflicts involving the Fante and the Akyem, who ended up occupying the coast of Accra.52 Like many captive Africans, he was brought to the Gold Coast, but when the coffle (a line of enslaved persons tied together) arrived at the port of Anomabu, the captives were attacked and seized, an episode that evokes the practice described as “panyarring,” which “involved the seizure of goods that were considered to be legitimate compensation for a debt.”53Likewise, African-born Olaudah Equiano wrote the most famous narrative authored by a formerly enslaved man, describing the social unrest caused by warfare in his homeland of Igboland, in contemporary southeastern Nigeria.54 Equiano explained the growing insecurity that predominated in his homeland. When adults were absent and children remained outside to play, one child was typically assigned “to get up a tree to look out for any assailant, or kidnapper.”55 Equiano reported in detail his abduction, which took place despite constant surveillance by the members of his community.
According to him, he was captured in 1753, when he was still a young boy of possibly seven or eight years old: “One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, tied our hands, and ran off with us into the nearest wood.”56Another abolitionist, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, was also kidnapped during his childhood. Born by 1757 in Agimaque (today’s Ajumako), a Fante village of the Gold Coast, Cugoano was captured in 1770, when he was about thirteen years old. In his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, published in 1787, he explained that despite being aware of the dangers of being captured, he was abducted in the woods, in what seems to have been a raid, as he reported that nearly twenty other children were also taken: “We went into the woods as usual; but we had not been above two hours before our troubles began, when several great ruffians came upon us suddenly.... Some of us attempted in vain to run away, but pistols and cutlasses were soon introduced, threatening, that if we offered to stir we should lie dead on the spot.”57 Like others, Cugoano was transported to the coast and sold into slavery in the British West Indies.
Osifekunde was a native of Makun in the Yoruba Kingdom of Ijebu, south of Ile-Ife, in a region encompassed by present-day Nigeria, northeast of Lagos. Born into a family of merchants of royal lineage, Osifekunde used to travel by water, buying and selling European goods. In 1820, when he was in his early twenties, the young man was returning in his boat from Lagos, where he had been purchasing European merchandise. A group of Ijaw (a people established in the mangrove swamps of the delta of the Niger River) pirates stopped his boat and abducted him.58 Transported to multiple locations along the coast eastern of Lagos, he was eventually sold into slavery and sent to Brazil, where he was purchased by a French merchant. Renamed Joaquim, Osifekunde lived seventeen years in Rio de Janeiro before going with his owner to Paris, where he benefited from the free soil legislation that made him a freedman.59 Although this case suggests kidnapping as a form of enslavement, the enslavement of Osifekunde is closely associated with the context of the Owu War that disrupted the Yorubaland during the second decade of the nineteenth century, creating opportunities for raids and boosting the slave trade in the region.60