A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

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      Gang of female slaves, central Africa, nineteenth-century engraving (Getty images).

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       A Terrible Crying: Women and the Africa Trade

       There were many women who filled the air with heart-rending cries which could hardly be drowned by the drums.

      Ship’s surgeon, 1693

      There is no way to tell this horror story in a palatable way. Perhaps, if the descendants of those who benefited most had made recompense for this dark chapter in our shared history, it would be easier to talk about. But the legacies of those centuries of genocide and abuse are still with us, in relative levels of poverty and education, infant mortality and prison occupancy rates, wars, human suffering and a plethora of other glaring North-South inequalities, both social and economic, that cry out for reparation.

      For all of this, it was never a straightforward black-white issue, and who owes what to whom is an ongoing debate. The trade in captured Africans was a complex transaction and Europeans were responsible for every aspect of its execution, yet the unpalatable truth is that it could never have survived or prospered without significant African involvement. But if some Africans colluded in the theft and sale of their own people, the evidence shows that there were also countless others who found the courage and the means to fight back, despite every effort to quash their human spirit.

      This is the thought that preoccupies me as I step down into the dungeons of Elmina Castle in Ghana, Portugal’s first African trading fort. Built in 1482, it is an enduring monument to one of history’s most shameful epochs. In the holding cells, more than two centuries after Britain officially abolished the Atlantic slave trade, the stench of hundreds of thousands of captives still clings to the walls.

      In the sun-scorched courtyard, a solitary cannonball too heavy to lift marks the start of our guided tour. Our guide describes how women who declined to ‘entertain’ their captors during the long months awaiting embarkation would be chained to the cannonball at the ankle or forced to hold it aloft in the blistering heat for hours at a time – a tantalising hint of the defiant mindset of those recently captured women. Inside the death cell, where mutinous soldiers and rebellious captives alike were left to rot, the atmosphere remains oppressive. Its door, marked with a skull and crossbones, acts like the lid of a coffin, blocking out light and air. Yet even this tomb-like cell speaks of dissent and rebellion – why else would it have existed?

      A narrow, well-worn staircase leads us from the courtyard to the officers’ quarters above. The windows offer a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean, evoking a distant memory of slave ships of every nation anchored offshore, plying their ignominious trade. The governor’s breezy rooms contrast starkly with the suffocating gloom of the slave holes below, where the claw marks of the desperate and the dying are still visible above a dark, indelible tidemark of human waste. The horrors endured by hundreds of tightly packed captives receive graphic illustration when our guide points to the former site of huge ‘necessary tubs’ that would have been filled to the brim with excrement. A vile death by drowning awaited those unfortunate souls who, too exhausted to perch on the edge, slipped and fell in.

      We stoop low to enter the cramped corridor that led countless men, women and children to step, bound and shackled, through the ‘door of no return’. The architecture tells its own story – a narrow, single-file opening, designed to frustrate all thoughts of escape as the captives were bundled into longboats that would ferry them to the waiting ships. Yet thoughts of escape there must have been, for a whole industry was developed to equip the traders with the heavy iron chains and shackles they needed in order to prevent it.

      Back in the courtyard, we are almost blinded by the brilliant sunshine reflecting from a brass plaque in honour of the millions who perished. It reads: ‘In Everlasting Memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to uphold this’.

      Fine words indeed.

      Conditions such as those in Elmina would become commonplace as local chieftains became more and more complicit in the capture and sale of their own people. During the seventeenth century, their efforts to consolidate local or regional power came to depend increasingly on the exchange of prisoners of war and other hapless victims, both male and female, in return for guns and sought-after European commodities. The result was a highly lucrative partnership – one that has survived to this day in the corrupt dealings between the power brokers of Africa and Europe.

      As people-trade entrenched itself along the West African coast as far south as the Congo and Angola, those intrepid Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, French and English traders, many of whom built their own forts and trading posts, could rely on a steady supply of captives from the interior to fill the waiting barracoons – the end result of a complex process of barter and exchange of ‘equivalent’ goods in return for captured humans. Increasingly, African lives came to be valued in beads, cloth, gunpowder, rum and iron bars.

      Not all chiefs took so readily to the sale of their own people. Particularly in the early years of the trade, when the slavers’ success relied heavily on the patronage of local rulers, some chiefs bucked the trend and resisted all involvement. Africa, like Europe, was no more than a vague geographical concept at the time. In reality, Europe’s slave traders encountered a complex array of kingdoms and tribes, some more sophisticated than others, with competing interests, language barriers, social and cultural differences, rivalries and territorial ambitions, as well as widely differing attitudes to slavery. Inevitably they met with powerful Africans who wanted a piece of СКАЧАТЬ