This chapter will explore ritual violence in the form of close combat in precolonial western Africa (and the African diaspora) during the period of European contact from the mid fifteenth century until the late nineteenth century, a period which saw an end to the slave trade and the start of European colonisation.
African ritual close combat took place across a range of overlapping social contexts including recreational sport, religious rituals, rites of passage, duels and battlefield combat.
Ritual combat employed various degrees of violence in order to gain dominance over a rival, but the violence was often contained by strict rules of procedure, at times even on the battlefield. Throughout this period, particularly in the realm of battlefield combat, pre-existing African notions of ritual violence came into conflict with military and ideological systems from outside the region. The first major battleground in this clash of combat traditions was the Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa, where the native Guanches were trained through combat games such as ritual stone throwing and stick fighting. Even in the late fifteenth century, after more than a century of struggle, the Spanish were still routinely defeated by Guanches who literally fought with sticks and stones.Europeans quickly learned that they lacked the military capability to colonise the African mainland. Nonetheless, they did have a profound impact through their sale of firearms and purchase of war captives. When Europeans arrived on the coast there was no pre-existing supply of slaves nor a slave trade in the areas untouched by Islam. In many areas of Africa, escalating purchases of European firearms in the seventeenth century drove a proliferating slave trade.1 This was [861] especially true in areas such as the Gold Coast where the relatively rapid adoption of firearms transformed the nature of battlefield combat, crowding out the former role of ritualised close combat, at least from the battlefield. However, other areas of western Africa experienced a slower transition to firearms.[862] As will be explored, ritualised close combat retained a prominent place in the combative culture of the savannahs of western Sudan and Angola throughout the period, and elements of these combat systems even extended into the Americas.