The loud noise of Dahomean soldiers breaking the gate of his town woke up Oluale Kossola.
He could hear the attackers yelling and running fast to invade his compound. In a matter of minutes, they killed the king and captured the men, women, and children who were not able to reach the forest and escape.
Banté, the town where he spent his childhood, was destroyed. Taken by Dahomean soldiers, nineteen-year-old Kossola was lined up and bound into a coffle with other townspeople.1 As the sun rose that morning, the new captives marched southward tied together under the hot sun of the dry season. After a harrowing journey on foot that lasted nearly three weeks, Kossola was brought to the port of Ouidah, where, along with 109 other captives, he was put on the slave ship Clotilda that sailed to Alabama in the United States on May 11, 1860.2 When Kossola (alias Cudjo Kazoola Lewis) was captured, transported to the coast, and eventually sold into slavery to the United States, the Atlantic trade in captive Africans to the Americas had been in motion for more than three centuries.We only know Kossola’s story because he survived this ordeal. In 1927, when he was eighty-six years old, he provided an account of his enslavement to African American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Kossola is among the last men enslaved in West Africa and brought to the United States. His enslavement occurred late in the nineteenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas had already been made illegal by most nations. Nevertheless, his late experience has certainly much in common with that of thousands of Africans, making it a useful point of departure to understand how African agents controlled the slave trade in ports such as Anomabu on the Gold Coast, Ouidah in the Bight of Benin, and Cabinda, Loango, and Malembo in West Central Africa. In all these coastal regions, European merchants often competed to obtain a monopoly on the trade.
By contrast, in West Central Africa, the Portuguese alone dominated Luanda and Benguela, the first and the third busiest African ports, respectively, during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on travelogues by European officers, journals of ship captains (or shipmasters), correspondences, and slave narratives, this chapter explores the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of the interactions between African rulers, middlemen, and local women, and a variety of European and American agents who visited or were permanently established in trading posts, forts, and castles along the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa.Drawing on examples from these two broad regions, in this chapter I explore the human dimension of the long journey endured by the captives transported from the hinterland to the coast. While men, women, and children waited to be loaded onto slave ships traveling to ports in the Americas, they were kept for several months in a variety of temporary and permanent coastal structures such as forts, barracoons, and other provisional constructions used to detain enslaved individuals. In some regions, as caravans transporting enslaved people reached the coast, ship captains gradually purchased men, women, and children and transferred these captive Africans to the holds of slave ships, where once again they could wait for several weeks.
I also highlight that the economic engines of the trade in human beings extended from the coast to the hinterlands. Currencies such as iron bars, textiles, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and gunpowder, as well as luxury products such as some European and Asian cloth, hats, and a variety of objects, shaped the commercial transactions between European, American, and African traders and local agents. These exchanges oriented the dynamics of the Atlantic slave trade between the various ports of Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, the Loango coast, the vast region labeled as Angola in West Central Africa, and the various parts of the Americas (see map 1 at the beginning of the book).