Tippu Tip (1832-1905), one of the largest slave traders in East Africa. Often neglected in discussions on the evil African slave trade is that of the original slave capturers & sellers, being mostly indigenous Africans themselves. A thread on such. (Sources cited at the end.)
We rightly remember & discuss the barbarous evil that Euro-Americans and Arabs facilitated, encouraged & took part in: the abhorrent slave trades of the Atlantic & Eastern African. Such crimes against humanity must never be forgotten. But what of the start of that supply chain?
Slave trading nations, like Portugal & United States, generally lacked the resources to go into the African continent to get slaves. Instead slaves were already captured and taken to the coast for trade - allowing some African nations, kingdoms & warlords to reap gross profits.
This thread focuses on the African continent from 1500s onwards. (Though remember, the institution of slavery has existed for many millennia across all races & continents.) African traders enslaved their fellow man ultimately to better themselves/entities there were part of.
Slavery itself was an important part of many African economies, ranging from the Aro-Niger Delta Confederacy to Zanzibar. Traders often captured innocents through brute force, be it village raids or wars. Many times force used through cooperation with other slavers,
As Unomah and Webster state, "Nyamwezi traders, even porters, travelled to Ujiji and to Buganda to buy slaves. Some of them co-operated with the coastal traders to raid the fragmented Manyema communities in eastern Congo."
Another example of 'slave raids' is that of the slave hunting in societies by Lake Tanganyika which became more heightened from invading coastal traders and Ngoni warriors from southern Africa.
Another method was that of punishment. For example, tradesmen failing to pay up loans, so they were enslaved by their debtors (A key example is believed to be that of Sewa Haji Paroo in Bagamoyo.) with slaves sometimes treated as a commodity of exchange within the continent.
Capturing and selling their own citizens allowed certain states to grow in power. For example, the firearm-slave exchange. Ivory and slaves were exchanged for ammunition in Unyamwezi. For Bemba chiefs, 1860ish onwards, these same trades vastly contributed to their power.
The increase in firearms for the Bemba establishment allowed their control over the populous to grow. This further control then encouraged enslaving more of the population for more firearms, especially as the supply of ivory decreased.
Of course, many traders and slave trading nations kept slaves for their own enrichment via slave labour, instead of selling their slaves. Plantations were fundamental parts of the economies of that around Kankan, Sinsani and more. One of the problems in looking at the evil of
the African slave trade is that they did not keep as rigid data in their transportation and capturing of slaves. The purchasing and transportation of slaves out of Africa is more known as it was more likely to be documented by the evil Euro-Americans, for example.
Nevertheless, what I've cited below (and mentioned above) shows that internally there was a thriving slave market within the African continent. Furthermore, though many Africans courageously supported abolition, some remained resistant. For example, that of...
the sultan of Zanzibar. Despite Great Britain's abolitionist quests and presence in the East African ocean, capturing slave ships, he maintained efforts to keep the trade as it powered the economy. Laura Fair, who is quoted the sources, in 2001, wrote that,
"Slaves, and the profit derived from both their sale and their labor, were at the very heart of Zanzibar’s transformation from a small and relatively unimportant Swahili town to the centre of a vast trading empire stretching from central Africa to halfway around the world”
We must never forget the great evil of slavery, that of the past and that which continues to this day. But in our teaching of this hell, we must look at all those who took part in it. This means the Euro-Americans, but also the original slave capturers who sold them slaves.
Of course, this thread simply focused on the internal mechanics of the African slave trade. Slavery operated outside, and still does, of the continent - and these evils should also be highlighted.
