No One Was Safe
Most enslaved Africans brought to the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade were captured through warfare. Although mechanisms of enslavement varied from region to region and evolved over the four centuries during which the Atlantic slave trade remained active on the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa, existing published and unpublished narratives reveal several similarities.
Enslavement always involved violence. With the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade and as African societies increasingly depended on selling enslaved persons, warfare also intensified and pushed the growth of other forms of acquisition of slaves, such as raids, kidnappings, pawnship, and panyarring. Stories of enslavement in slave narratives, accounts recovered from archival documents, interviews, and oral traditions are often embellished and recurrently omit detailed descriptions of violence. But whether in the Upper Gambia, the Bight of Benin, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, or West Central Africa, these stories carry many elements in common. They show how insecurity became widespread and how men, women, and children of diverse social positions and ages could become the target of African and European enslavers seeking to harvest the profits of the lucrative slave trade.