Paths to Colonization in Africa

The trade relations developed during the era of the Atlantic slave trade had opened the path for European conquest of Africa. At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain, France, Portugal, and other European states gradually imposed their presence on the African continent, fueling a process that became known as the “scramble for Africa.” The new rule by European colonial powers led to the gradual legal prohibition of slavery on African soil.

Slavery had existed in Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans. Likewise, Muslim slave trade (mainly to North Africa and the Middle East) and the African internal slave trade, which provided captives to the continent’s internal market, emerged before the Atlantic slave trade and persisted throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Although bondage in Africa differed from the racialized chattel slavery that prevailed in the Americas, the development of the transatlantic slave trade altered the nature of slavery in Africa. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the end of the Atlantic slave trade led many African societies to develop an export-oriented agricultural economy that largely relied on slavery as a mode of production.⁴¹ But in regions such as West Central Africa, slavery continued to expand over the course of the nineteenth century.⁴²

Measures to legally prohibit the slave trade and slavery on African soil justified European conquest and colonization. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain signed several treaties with African states, including Egypt, Zanzibar, and Madagascar, to legally ban the slave trade.⁴³ Despite these agreements, during this first phase, Britain tolerated the existence of what many British officials defined as “domestic” slavery, perceived as a more benign and acceptable kind of bondage.⁴⁴ In some West African regions such as the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now Nigeria, not only did a plantation economy expand, but the institution of slavery continued to develop under new contours that carried many similarities to chattel slavery in the Americas.⁴⁵ In regions controlled by the Portuguese, such as Angola, slavery was abolished in 1869. But in the three years that followed, Portugal imposed an apprenticeship system on former slaves.

The consolidation of colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to the legal end of slavery in Africa. In 1900, Britain legally abolished slavery in its occupied zones in Nigeria. In 1905, France legally prohibited slavery in its West African colonies.⁴⁹ Despite these transformations, European colonial rule in zones controlled by France, Portugal, and Belgium imposed on populations atrocious coercive labor regimes, which in practice were similar to slavery. In most African regions, slavery had disappeared by the time of the Second World War (1939–45). Although illegal, depending on the period and region, slave labor resurfaced several times. A striking example is Mauritania, where slavery was first legally banned during French colonial rule in 1905, yet an actual law abolishing slavery in the country was not enacted until 1981.⁵⁰ Even today, the populations of various African countries, such as Angola remember the slavery-like working conditions of forced labor systems imposed by Europeans.⁵¹ Therefore, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the legacy of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade lives on.