Left Behind
Dahomean soldiers killed on the spot captives considered unfit to be sold. But the crowded coastal barracoons with horrible hygiene conditions also exposed the weak and poorly fed men, women, and children to diseases.
Many died prior to embarkation. This is why the inspection of captive Africans, as Kossola’s description shows us, was a crucial stage of the various operations performed before their sale to European and American merchants. African traders attempted to conceal any illnesses and physical problems by carefully preparing enslaved Africans for sale. They shaved the heads of male captives to conceal gray hair, anointed their bodies with palm oil to disguise any wounds, and dressed enslaved women with several layers of cloth to make them attractive. In Ouidah, surgeons of slave ships violated the bodies of captive Africans by scrutinizing their external genital organs in search of signs of sexually transmitted disease. In Anomabu, on the Gold Coast, African captives were also inspected in detail. Ultimately, ship captains decided which captives were loaded onto the ship and which captives were left behind.38British slave ship captain John Newton, the author of the popular hymn Amazing Grace who in his later years became an important voice in the abolitionist movement, wrote a detailed journal of his voyages as a ship captain to the Windward Coast (namely, the western coast of Africa stretching from Cape Mount in modern-day Liberia’s northern corner to Assinie on present-day Côte d’Ivoire’s eastern border). During his first voyage (1750–51), aboard the vessel Duke of Argyle, he was offered an enslaved woman while anchored in Sierra Leone by Portuguese traders stationed there. But because she was “long breasted,” he refused to purchase her as well as several other enslaved women who were later offered to him, showing how “attractiveness” was an important criterion in the selection of enslaved women to be sold to the Americas.39 Still, the fate of captives who were rejected for sale remains unclear. In Ouidah, like in Cape Coast, unsold Africans may have been killed or locally traded.40
Although Kossola refers to men and women in his late account of enslavement and transportation to the coast, the proportion of enslaved men and women who boarded slave ships on African shores and those who disembarked in the Americas to toil on plantations and in urban areas varied according to regions and during specific periods.
But despite these variations, an average of two enslaved men to one enslaved woman forcibly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the hold of slave ships during the era of the inhumane trade. This imbalance was caused by two main factors. Although it is true that slave merchants from Europe and the Americas procured men because they believed they were better fit to perform agricultural labor, African agents valued women, who tended to be kept locally to perform agricultural activities or sold in the trans-Saharan slave trade that prized women to serve as enslaved concubines.41 Nonetheless, existing data suggest that in the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, 50 percent of the enslaved Africans who were forced to board slave ships in West Central Africa were women. After 1807, when the British slave trade was abolished, children younger than fourteen years old corresponded to nearly 40 percent of the enslaved Africans transported to the Americas.42