New Africans
Markets were places of despair. Like the depots on African coasts and slave vessels, slave markets were sites of violence, dehumanization, and commodification where enslaved people were chastised, disciplined, and sexually violated.
Markets were also places of transition. At least for African-born individuals, these spaces were where they had the first contacts with enslaved people who, unlike them, were born in the Americas. As a microcosm of slave societies, the slave market provides a glimpse of the conditions of life under slavery in the Western Hemisphere.Newly arrived Africans left few testimonies of the period they spent in slave pens and slave market buildings waiting to be sold. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, more than three hundred years after the sale of African captives in Lagos, and during the summit of the Atlantic slave trade, similar scenes of despair continued to occur in the Americas. Take the example of Olaudah Equiano. After a long Atlantic crossing, Equiano and his fellow captives finally arrived in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1754. Planters and merchants, probably accompanied by a health professional, came on board to inspect the human cargo. Still terrified after the dreadful journey on the sea, men, women, and children feared they would be eaten by the white men. But after this scary first contact with future buyers, other enslaved workers in the port area came on board to calm them down by reassuring them that they were not going to be eaten but were instead there to “work, and were soon to go on land” to meet other Africans.2
Sadness and fear marked the landing of enslaved Africans in the Americas, even though for some enslaved persons, coming ashore may also have been a short-lived moment of relief, albeit as a result of false pretenses. Equiano reports that as soon as they landed, they were led to the merchant’s yard, the market where recently arrived slaves were sold.3 On their way, Africans speaking all languages came to him and his shipmates.
These were precious moments, as during these first contacts, enslaved Africans working in the port area could ask newly arrived captives, who spoke their native languages, if they had news from their villages and towns and if they had any word from their relatives left behind on the African continent. In these first interactions, local enslaved men and women certainly provided newly arrived enslaved Africans with information about the new land.4Equiano did not spend many days in the slave market waiting to be sold, but he briefly described the slave auction, in which one could observe how starkly the attitude of buyers who selected human commodities contrasted with the horror of the Africans on sale: “On a signal given, (as the beat of a drum) the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans.”5 Whereas to merchants and buyers, purchasing and selling human flesh was a common activity, to enslaved Africans the auction meant separation from relatives, countrymen, and shipmates. Equiano remembered enslaved men who shared the same men’s compartment in the slave ship and who were separated during the sale: “It was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting.”6
Equiano knew that this tragedy was just beginning. Repeated separations from kinfolk and comrades haunted enslaved men, women, and children during the entire period they remained enslaved in the Americas. Like Equiano, but more than one century later, Oluale Kossola (alias Cudjo Kazoola Lewis) also remembered his landing in the United States in similar ways. In 1860, when the international slave trade had been illegal in the country for more than five decades, the slave ship Clotilda entered the Mobile River in Alabama.
Crew members discreetly disembarked African captives on Twelvemile Island, where they were given clothes for the first time. Kossola clearly recalled when the shipowner Timothy Meaher took thirty-two captives to sell them separately. This new separation led him to relive the trauma experienced on the African continent when he was torn apart from his family and community: “We were very sorry to be parted from one ’nother. We cry from home from our people. We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry.”7Similar scenes of despair occurred in other parts of the Americas as well. Portuguese and British chartered companies such as the Cacheu and Cape Verde Company (Companhia de Cacheu e Cabo Verde) and the South Sea Company (created respectively in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) were represented by a variety of slave merchants in the port of Cartagena, in present-day Colombia. Larger traders could purchase groups of dozens more enslaved persons to be distributed in the interior, whereas smaller-scale merchants could purchase a few slaves to resell along with various goods. Upon anchoring in the bay of Cartagena, the slave ships were inspected by port authorities, and as in other ports, slave merchants came on board. After examining the human cargo in search of any signs of illnesses, slave traders paid the duties for each enslaved person according to calculations that varied over time but considered age, sex, and physical condition. Sometimes, slave traders branded the bodies of African captives while yet on the coasts of Africa. In the port of Cartagena, during the colonial period, slave traders employed a hot iron or silver device to first brand newly arrived captives with a Spanish crown emblem, in order to avoid illegal imports of enslaved persons. A second mark was then added to identify the holder of the asiento, an agreement established between the Spanish crown and an individual or company representative who engaged to provide the Spanish colonies with enslaved Africans.
Finally, a third brand identified the owner of the enslaved persons purchased in the markets of Cartagena. The repetition of this excruciating procedure that left permanent scars on the bodies of enslaved people was not only designed to distinguish them as human property but was also intended to extend the broader process of managing and controlling African bodies.As early as the sixteenth century, enslaved Africans who disembarked in Cartagena were confined in several warehouses located close to the harbor and the city walls. Enslaved Africans were sold in plain sight near Cartagena’s elite family residences and churches.8 Slave merchants also gathered new Africans in yards and buildings adjacent to their residences. Many others were lodged in barracoons spread around the city or in surrounding neighborhoods. Enslaved Africans came ashore ill and weak with scurvy, yaws, and dysentery, and often infected with diseases such as typhus, smallpox, typhoid fever, measles, and yellow fever.9
Spanish Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval, who was a missionary in Cartagena in the early seventeenth century, described the dreadful conditions he witnessed at these slave depots in his De instauranda Aethiopum salute, published in 1627. According to him, on one occasion he saw “two slaves already dead, naked on the floor, as if they were beasts, facing upward with their mouths open and full of flies.” In another house, he discovered a recently arrived enslaved man who had died “in the middle of a patio where many people were living. He was naked, face down with his mouth open to the floor, covered in flies that seemed to want to eat him. There he was left as if he were less important than a dog.”10 In these new spaces of confinement, other slaves were in charge of overseeing, cooking, and feeding the newly arrived slaves, who remained naked and poorly fed, a context that barely differed from African coastal barracoons or the holds of slave ships.11
Captive Africans could remain in these insalubrious slave pens for more than one year waiting to be sold.
In Cartagena, slaves who were not consigned to specific owners and traders were brought to be auctioned at the public square, a site that attracted dozens of buyers from various regions, who were invited to make their bids. A similar context was also visible in Jamaica’s slave-trading port of Kingston, which imported nearly one million enslaved Africans in the era of the Atlantic slave trade and was also the entry port for captives who would be transported to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean region. In the eighteenth century, Kingston was one the five largest British cities in the Americas, along with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. During this period, most enslaved Africans who disembarked in Kingston were acquired by traders on consignment from British merchants and their agents based in Britain, or other representatives based in Kingston. In this system, the human property was loaned to the merchants. If the captives were sold, the traders received a percentage of the selling price. Still, other slaves were sold wholesale. In other words, local merchants directly purchased the captives at a reduced price, placed them in urban yards and pens, and only then made profits by reselling them retail in the local market to local buyers. Even though they rarely spent a long time in these yards, as in Cartagena and Rio de Janeiro, many Africans who came ashore in Kingston spent their first days in the Americas confined in slave pens.12 Starting in the early eighteenth century, in Kingston, British colonists, including women, also purchased enslaved persons directly from slave ships, especially enslaved African boys and girls to serve as companions for their own children.13European travelers who visited Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described the slave markets of Brazil’s main slave-trading ports, such as Salvador, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. In the nineteenth century, British traveler Thomas Lindley, who sojourned in Bahia in 1802, described the slave market of Salvador similarly, again emphasizing the large numbers of recently arrived enslaved Africans: “The streets and squares of the city are thronged with groups of human beings, exposed for sale at the doors of the different merchants to whom they belong; five slave ships having arrived within the last three days.”14 Although acknowledging that the large numbers of enslaved Africans could increase the risk of slave rebellions, as had happened in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, Lindley expressed the view that enslaved Africans in Brazil were joyful and satisfied, “indulged to licentiousness, not over-worked, and enjoying their native vegetable food.”15 Emphasizing what he perceived to be the Portuguese’s humanity toward their slaves, his take on the living conditions of enslaved people was probably derived from hearsay, and it was certainly not based on a close scrutiny of Salvador’s slave markets.
Other European travelers who witnessed the disembarkation of Africans in the Americas reported scenes of deep sadness. On November 22, 1821, British traveler Martha Graham described in her journal the arrival of Africans in Salvador, Bahia: “This very moment, there is a slave ship discharging her cargo, and the slaves are singing as they go ashore. They have left the ship, and they see they will be on the dry land; and so, at the command of their keeper, they are singing one of their country songs, in a strange land.”16 In her visit to the port area of Salvador’s lower city, Graham explained that the slave market was located in this part of the city: “Passing the arsenal gate, we went along the low street, and found it widen considerably at three quarters of a mile beyond: there are the markets, which seem to be admirably supplied, especially with fish. There also is the slave market, a sight I have not yet learned to see without shame and indignation.”17
During her stay in Brazil, Graham also visited the slave market in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian province of Pernambuco and the third-largest Brazilian slave-trading port. This time, she also described the horrible conditions of men, women, and children on sale: “About fifty young creatures, boys and girls, with all the appearance of disease and famine consequent upon scanty food and long confinement in unwholesome places, were sitting and lying about among the filthiest animals in the streets.”18 Her description of emaciated enslaved Africans, which was also reproduced in an engraving illustrating her travel account, indicates that these men, women, and children had quite likely recently arrived from Africa and were still so weak as to be unfit to be sold to local slave owners. Although not detailed, Graham’s descriptions clearly indicate the size and significance of these markets, in which thousands of enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean were sold every year.
Slave markets were not only the places where economic transactions took place; they also were sites of pain and sorrow. AmĂ©dĂ©e-François FrĂ©zier, an engineer working for the French Army Intelligence Corps, who had visited Chile, Peru, and Brazil between 1712 and 1714, seemed shocked by the presence of large numbers of enslaved people who were put on sale in horrible conditions in the slave market of Salvador: “There are shops full of these poor unfortunates, who are exposed all naked, and where they buy them like beasts and upon whom they acquire the same power, so that on minor discontent, they can kill them almost with impunity, or at least mistreat them as cruelly as they want.”19 Nude and debilitated, the conditions to which these enslaved Africans were submitted after landing in Brazil, differed little from what they experienced in the slave ships.