Violence in Africa

Stanfield's poem dwelt at length on his time in West Africa, mainly to show that Europe was a destroyer of simple African happiness. He noted that ‘av'rice, bursting ev'ry tender band / sweeps, like a deluge thro' the hapless land'.

Slavery was nothing new in Africa and thus African merchants and rulers were not reluctant to facilitate European efforts in getting slaves, experienced as they were by extensive internal slave trading in Islamic areas of northern and western Africa. The nature of political authority in much of West Africa, moreover, encouraged slavery: political fragmentation led to frequent inter­necine warfare that often generated captives who could be just as easily got rid of for profit to Europeans as to other Africans. Most captives in the Atlantic slave trade were the unintended by-products of war. Atlantic slavery thus became a highly lucrative trade in some parts of West Africa by the eighteenth century. It is estimated that in the 1780s slaves comprised over 90 per cent of all African exports. By 1800, African traders were getting three or four times the value of goods that they had received in 1700, increasing considerably the price which planters on the other side of the Atlantic had to pay for their slaves.^[37]

Given the increasing lucrativeness of the trade to African rulers, it seems logical to assume that there was an incentive to increase the supply of slaves available to be sold to Europeans.

The link between powerful, warring states and the Atlantic slave trade was clear. The rulers of Dahomey and the lords of the Asante, another highly stratified, centralised and war-loving state in the region that Europeans called the Gold Coast, traded captives for guns which they used to strengthen social hierarchies in their area and to subdue their neighbours in order to produce the next coffle of slaves to be traded for new muskets. Those people involved in slave trading became rich, with wealthy merchants controlling customs, taxes and the flow of captives. The advent of the Atlantic slave trade enhanced the power of the groups most inclined to advance their power by acting violently and aggressively towards their neighbours.

Contrary to Rodney's argument, the slave trade was not an indepen­dent force that shaped West Africa and Africans but a manifestation of local politics and the solution to problems raised by war (and at times an encouragement to more war). For many ordinary Africans, the increasing frequency of internal wars, only some of which were related to the slave trade, showed them that people in authority were deter­mined to exploit them. They tended to blame local merchants and rulers more than Europeans, and to place these evildoers within an ideological construct of witchcraft and even cannibalism. Despotic African rulers and nefarious local traders were often denounced as either witches or cannibals. If we are to understand how the violence of the slave trade worked within West African slaving societies, we need to appreciate that the transatlantic slave trade was connected to internal class structures and class anatagonisms. Those Africans shipped to the Americas as slaves were caught up in local politics and patterns of violence exhibited by the rich to the poor that marked life in early modern West Africa as much as in Europe.^[39]