Transatlantic Slave Trade: Impact on Africa and Diaspora

Before the advent of the Europeans, the ocean played an insignificant role in the life of the African people. Several harbors existed in the Indian Ocean, but connections with the Mediterranean were maintained via the trans-Sahara caravan route and limited to African littoral trade. Along the West African coast, littoral fishermen were active and salt was gained from the sea. However, the great rivers and lagoons made shipping on the ocean superfluous. This state of affairs changed the late sixteenth century onward. In the following 300 years, approximately twelve million Africans were shipped as slaves over the Atlantic. Of those, about 1.5 million never reached America because they perished during the dangerous voyage referred to as the Middle Passage.

An infrastructure of thousands of translators, soldiers, sailors, and guards emerged that kept the slave trade system alive. Africans gained maritime knowledge as they traded with the European ships anchoring off the coast. Former fishing villages or places for trade and salt production, such as Luanda, Cabinda, and Benguela in Angola, developed into active slave trade ports. Furthermore, the Europeans maintained forts along the coasts, which should be best understood as “joint African-European ventures,” where the Europeans were the masters but the Africans dominated the personnel.

The trade fostered commercialization in Western Africa. Merchants and regions that specialized in this emerging exchange gained prominence. In the cases of Asante and Dahomey, new African dynasties emerged. Relationships of trust and credit were built between African traders and rulers and European merchants and ship captains, who regularly returned to the same African ports. Europeans satisfied African demands for textiles, metal wares, alcoholic spirits, tobacco, firearms, and money. In exchange, Africans sold gold, ivory, hides, malagueta pepper, beeswax, tropical gums, and, above all, slaves.

The direct result of the slave trade was the emergence of an African diaspora in the New World. African beliefs and practices spread as new hybrid cultures and identities arose, for example, in cities such as Havana in Cuba and Salvador in Brazil. A syncretic religion that combined West African belief systems with Roman Catholicism emerged in colonial Haiti. Vodou (more commonly known as voodoo) persists as a major religious practice in this Caribbean nation. Africans were more important for the Atlantic world than the Atlantic world was for Africans.

With the slave trade, Africans introduced African plants to America that they had taken on board and cultivated after their arrival. Furthermore, Asian plants, which had been adopted in Africa, also reached America. These included root crops and tubers, such as taro, the Asian yam, ginger, and banana. Captains of slave ships in African ports purchased not only rice, yams, and black-eyed peas but also already-introduced Amerindian crops, such as maize, manioc, peanuts, and sweet potato. Furthermore, African medicinals, such as the kola nut, were appreciated on the ship. Captains used the kola nuts in water casks to improve the taste of the drinking water during the transatlantic voyages. Although the majority of Africans crossed the Atlantic as slaves, others traveled back and forth as sailors on European and American ships.