2. Introduction
2.14 Summary and Conclusion
The transatlantic slave trade principally followed the Middle Passage vis-à-vis the triangular routes, which took place between the continents of Europe, Africa and America from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The reason this trade was called the triangular trade was because it was made up of three different voyages, which formed a triangular trade pattern.
However, some slave trading voyages were made directly between the continents of Africa and America. The first part of the triangular trade was the voyage from Europe to Africa.
On arrival in Africa, the European slave traders bought and enslaved Africans in exchange for goods shipped from Europe. The second part of the triangular slave trade was the voyage from Africa to the Americas. This is the so-called Middle Passage.
This was the part of the triangle where they captured Africans, which were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. On arrival in the Americas, the Africans who had survived the terrible journey were sold as slaves to work on plantations. The third and final part of the triangular slave trade included the return voyage from the Americas to Europe. Slave ships returned to Europe loaded with goods produced on plantations using African slave labour. The journey could take ships up to one year to complete the entire triangular voyage. The triangular trade contributed to the accelerated macro-economic but also micro-economic growth of the slave owners and the economies. The money accruing from selling the slave labour in Europe was invested in further slave trading voyages. This then supplied plantations with more slave labour with which to produce more crops such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and later cotton.352
The Atlantic Slave Trade was in 1840 within site of its end, the end of slavery itself in America took longer than had been imagined. Britain had already abolished slavery;
France did so in eight years and the United States in twenty-five years. The possession of slaves was punishable in British India in 1882. In both Cuba and Brazil, slavery survived until nearly the end of the 19th century.353 Advertisements were still seen in Brazil in the 1870s for the sale of slaves. The wording was ambiguous, whether it was a human or an animal that could be bought: cobra might be a goat but could also mean a female quadroon.354
352 Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Gates, jr., Henry Louis (eds), Africana, The Encyclopaedia of the African and African American Experience, 1999, pp. 1872-1875; Thomas, Hugh, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870, 1997, pp.153-157.
353 Thomas, Hugh, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, 1997, pp. 786-787; ibid. Appiah et al., p. 1875.
354 ibid. Thomas, Hugh, p. 786.
The Ten Years War in Cuba in 1868-1878 propelled emancipation. However, the revolutionaries did not commit themselves to immediate abolition, and they proclaim freedom only, as Bolivar had done, to slaves who fought for them. A new law of 1870 in Madrid of Segismundo Moret accounted for the liberty of children born to slave families;
and it also conceded freedom to all slaves over the age of sixty-five (later amended to sixty). The slaves who fought for Spain in the war against Cuban nationalists were also proclaimed free, still there were about 200,000 Cuban slaves at the end of the War.355 The speech of the great liberal orator Emilo Castelar deserves a space here:
“I will say that we have had 19th centuries of Christianity and there are still slaves.356 They only exist in the catholic countries of Brazil and Spain… We have experienced barely a century of revolution and the revolutionary people, France, England and the United States have abolished slavery. Nineteen centuries of Christianity and there were still slaves among the Catholic people. One century of revolution and there are no slaves among the revolutionary people… Arise, Spanish legislator make this 19th century the century of the complete and total redemption of slaves! 357
Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, in Cuba only in 1886, and in 1869, the mother of slavery, Portugal, abolished slavery. However, between 1876 and 1900, she like France in Senegal, liberated the slaves, but put them to work for fixed periods, so that they were slaves in all but name.358 Portugal formally abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1875. In 1870, about one and half million slaves were recorded in Brazil many more than there had been in 1800. Only during the late 1880s did Brazilian slavery collapse. Three quarter of a million slaves were still left in March 1887, but by then, many were fleeing their farms, in acts of mass desertion. The unpunished escapes invoked again the sordid feeling of the flight from servitude, which occurred at the beginning of the eleventh century in Europe and which signalled the end of the institution of slavery there.359 Panthers began to free slaves on the condition that they sign labour contracts up to four years. The Church, for the first time, overtly backed abolition, because of fear that revolutionary blacks would sweep the country in an onda negra, in the style of Haiti. 360
355 Thomas, Hugh, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, 1997, p. 787.
356 ibid. pp. 489, 786-787.
357 ibid.
358 ibid. p. 787.
359 ibid. pp. 787-788.
360 ibid. pp. 489, 786-788.
Paradoxically, the trade in Africa continued. Eunuchs were still in demand for northern harems; and late as the 1880s, slaves were still being exchanged for horses, as they had been by the Arabs and the Portuguese in the 1450s.361 David Livingstone told audiences in London 1857 that while the European slave trade was declining, that of the Arabs in East Africa was growing. In the 1880s, in Senegambia, slaves accounted for two-third of the goods trade at markets. In 1883, Commandant Joseph-Simon Gillieni, the future pro-consul of Madagascar, described how nothing equals the harrow of the scenes of carnage and desolation 362 to which the incessant war gives rise in region renowned for their fertility and wealth of minerals.363 The villages were burnt; the old of both sexes put to death, while the young are carried into captivity and shared among the conquerors. Though slavery was abolished in British Gold Coast in 1874, still a generation later, slaves were used in the palm oil industry, including by the mulatto descendants of Danes who had experimented with cotton in Akuapem. About 750,000 slaves were carried into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the 19th century. Newspaper reports indicated that despite abolition of slavery, slavery in Mauritania persisted.364
Slavery and slave trade existed in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade, but neither the continent nor the people of African origin were distinguished personalities in commercialised slavery. During the Atlantic slavery, the African rulers played a prominent role in procuring slaves for the Arabs and European buyers. Portugal and Spain served as an abattoir of African slaves and their GNP during and after Atlantic slavery derived in most cases from the sale and usage of African slaves. Thereafter slavery was internationalised.
The European academic community also played a notable role in slavery and slave trade.
While some were advocating abolition because of the dehumanisation of slaves, others who were benefiting either directly or indirectly from the trade supported it. The role of the Catholic Church in most cases was ambiguous. Their part did not quite depict their biblical calling.
361 Thomas, Hugh, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, 1997, p. 789.
362 ibid.
363 ibid.
364 ibid., p. 790.