A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

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      Bogus treaties with local chiefs may have given Europe’s traders an initial foot in the door, but their success – and, on some occasions, their very survival – came to rely on the services of local people: boatmen, domestic servants, messengers, traders, brokers, interpreters and so-called ‘wenches’. For them and their descendants, this trade in fellow humans would ultimately become a way of life. Treacherous currents and diseases that could devastate an entire crew encouraged European ships to anchor far offshore for their own safety. The trade would have died an early death but for the expertise of local boatmen, who were handsomely rewarded for ferrying people and goods to and from the waiting ships. If they were fortunate enough to escape capture themselves, it was only because their skills in handling the canoes, sometimes as long as eighty feet and able to carry over 100 people, were vital to the endless traffic between ship and shore.

      Within 200 years, what began as a Portuguese monopoly in 1490 had become a free-for-all. As the British, French, Danish, Dutch, Prussians, Spanish and Swedish jostled with the Portuguese for strategic dominance of the coastal forts and supply routes, competition was fierce, often deadly. Elmina Castle, seized by the Dutch in 1642, changed hands several times until finally, over two centuries later, it fell under British control. A similar fate befell Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu and many other forts and trading posts, 100 of which had been built on the Gold Coast alone. Meanwhile, in the Americas, the establishment of plantations for growing sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, coffee and other produce led to a declining interest in Africa’s gold reserves and an ever-growing demand for ‘black ivory’. This steady drain of men and women, paupers and princesses alike, would deplete the continent’s most precious resource for centuries to come. Africa is, as we know, still in recovery.

      To begin with, back in Europe, the traffic in human lives provoked few moral qualms. Initially characterised by mutual curiosity and respect, relationships between Africans and Europeans only began to change once the trade became established. Slavery was a lot easier to defend if its victims could be vilified, and the justifications, however crude, were easily swallowed by Europe’s illiterate masses. Africans, it was argued, were ‘slaves by nature’, little more than apes or talking parrots, a savage, godless race whose ‘impudent nakedness’ was proof of their inherent immorality. To enslave them, therefore, was seen as an act of salvation, for it saved them from themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, an entire racist mythology had been devised to justify African enslavement, couched in lofty, pseudo-scientific language and sanctioned by both church and state.

      The extent to which Africans were dehumanised is apparent from the earliest Portuguese references to the shipment of slaves by the tonne and records of their transportation across the Atlantic like so many heads of cattle. It can be no coincidence that in Portuguese, ‘to explore’ and ‘to exploit’ are one and the same word (explorar). The Royal African Company was quick to follow suit. Bankrolled by wealthy patrons, it supplied nearly 50,000 slaves to the British West Indies between 1680 and 1688 alone.¹¹ It would be another 120 years before Britain publicly condemned the tyranny of the transatlantic trade and the ‘great enormities … practised in Africa and upon the persons of its inhabitants, by the subjects of different European Powers’.¹²

      The enormities were great indeed, regardless of gender. African women are prominent in the accounts of contemporary eyewitnesses and in their detailed, hand-drawn sketches of the coffle line. Secured by wooden yokes fashioned from forked tree branches that could weigh as much as seven kilos, they can be seen leading children by the hand and carrying goods or supplies. Francis Moore, factor to the Royal African Company between 1730 and 1735, recorded seeing caravans of up to 2,000 slaves tied by the neck with leather thongs in batches of thirty or forty, ‘having generally a Bundle of Corn, or an Elephant’s Tooth upon each of their heads’.¹³

      For those seized inland, the trek from the forested interior could mean walking several hundred miles in the pitiless heat. How many Africans perished before reaching the coast can never be quantified but it is thought that close to half of them – as many as 12 million people – may have perished before they even reached the coast, either from escape attempts, wounds sustained during capture, summary execution or sheer exhaustion. In such desperate circumstances, suicide was probably one of the few available acts of resistance. Many a captive is said to have chosen death by their own hand over the trauma of being driven like cattle toward an uncertain fate.

      Flogging was common practice on the coffle line, with no exception made for young children or pregnant women. Babies, the elderly or the infirm, viewed as an unnecessary encumbrance, were often abandoned en route or casually murdered. In fact, the Royal African Company tacitly encouraged such practices. In an early missive to the King of Whydah in 1701, it insisted that the company was not interested in anyone ‘above 30 years of age nor lower than four and a half feet high … nor none Sickly deformed or defective in Body or Limb … And ye Diseased and ye Aged’. A year later, a letter to their newly appointed agent, Dalby Thomas, included written instructions to procure ‘as many Boys and Girls as possible’, ideally in their early teens, and to avoid sending ‘old Negroes’.¹⁴

      Rumours of these atrocities must have spread like wildfire. Deep in the interior, talking drums, which could convey news over hundreds of miles in the space of a few hours, and the tales of itinerant traders ensured that the slavers’ terrifying reputation preceded them. Explorer Vernon Cameron, who witnessed a passing slave caravan while travelling in central Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, described how, at its approach, the local people ‘immediately bolted into the village and closed the entrances’. Camped close to the path, he watched as ‘the whole caravan passed on in front, the mournful procession lasting more than two hours. Women and children, foot-sore and overburdened, were urged on unremittingly by their barbarous masters; and even when they reached their camp it was no haven of rest for the poor creatures. They were compelled to fetch water, cook, build huts and collect firewood for those who owned them’.¹⁵ Whether these captives were headed for Portuguese traders off the coast of Angola or the Arab slave markets to the north is not known, since both continued to operate long after the Atlantic trade was outlawed by the British. Either way, on the arduous journey still ahead of them, women were clearly expected to bear the brunt of the hardship.¹⁶

      Mungo Park, who accompanied a slave coffle in Senegal toward the end of the eighteenth century, witnessed the miseries of the Atlantic-bound coffle first-hand, including the substitution of an enslaved man who was too sick to travel with a young village girl encountered en route. His description of her anguish on learning her fate suggests that however ignorant of their eventual destination, the captives were only too aware of the horrors that lay ahead:

      Never was a face of serenity more suddenly changed into one of the deepest distress. The terror which she manifested on having the load put upon her head and the rope fastened around her neck, and the sorrow with which she bade adieu to her companions were truly affecting.¹⁷

      As demand for slaves increased, the King of Whydah and other local chiefs tried securing supplies to order, mostly by means of armed raids. Not all captives were prisoners of war, however. People could be sold into slavery for a variety of reasons: debt, witchcraft, theft, adultery, non-payment of a tribute, incurring their chief’s displeasure or simply having no means to support themselves. Others, like Olaudah Equiano and his ‘dear sister’ were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and found themselves kidnapped.

      Women and girls were especially vulnerable, it seems. The female relatives of male felons, mothers who gave birth to twins, family servants, even young girls who menstruated earlier than normal risked being despatched into slavery to meet the ever-growing demand. In 1694, Captain Thomas Phillips reported that, when slaves were in short supply, the king would ‘often … sell 300 or 400 of his wives to complete their number’. On the Ivory Coast, perhaps in the hope of taking the pressure off themselves, the Avikam people stole or purchased large numbers of female slaves with a view to breeding and selling the СКАЧАТЬ