So before the white Europeans came to Africa, how much slavery actually went on there? Was African slavery similar to Euro-American slavery?
Well there are the Hebrews, allegedly. And post Punic Wars N Africa was full of Roman slaves. And most of Carthage got sold into slavery. Egypt had lots of slaves as well as did Roman Africa.
In sub Saharan Africa, you had the Arab slave trade and furthermore many of the slaves sent to America had been captured by the Ghanian Empire in it’s expansion.
I couldn’t say how much of it was happening, but it was (and still is in some places) quite different than the chattel slavery in the Americas.
African slavery often resembled a caste system. Many African societies have a handful of hereditary professions. If you from a blacksmith family, you become a blacksmith. If you are from a noble family, you become a ruler. If you are from a musician family, you become a musician. And if you are from the family that works for Mr. Jones’ family, you work for Mr. Jones’ family. In practical terms, this often means that you hand over a portion of your crops to said family in exchange for working the land. You may need to ritually ask permission to marry or move, but in general your daily life would not be subject to outside influence and you could walk about and conduct life fairly normally. Slaves could usually earn their own money, and it wasn’t unusual to buy your freedom.
Of course, there are exceptions. Dahomey practices human sacrifice at times. Some area’s slaves were indentured servants. Other areas had other arrangements. It’s a big continent.
American chattel slavery was an industrial model. Slaves were valued as tools of mass production, and nothing else. When the slave trade thrived, slaves were seen as disposable tools, with a limited lifespan. They were not free to conduct business, could not usually buy their freedom, and often had no say as to their personal life. This arrangement, outside of perhaps slaves taken in war, is fairly unique in history. It couldn’t have existed without the industrial revolution era supply chains and economic instruments.
Isn’t this really a GQ topic?
Hmmm…a little light, I’d say, on criticism of what intra-Africa “slavery” was like.
Women in particular in many–perhaps most–african cultures were property. Chattel. Their job was to work, pleasure men, and reproduce. They were sold or traded as property; given as gifts. Gained in war as prizes. The usual, world-over lot of women at the time. It’s hard to quantitate but I’d say, worse in africa than many other cultures (except maybe the Islamic ones).
They were as much “chattel” in africa as anywhere else. The lack of an “industrial” model reflects a lack of “industry” and not a difference in using involuntary-constrained laborers to work their ass off involuntarily. Freedom of the individual woman is very much a modern–even western–idea.
I suggest a little more reading around typical practices of typical african groups.
Externally, sub-saharans have been on the short end of the stick for enslavement as well, of course, both for the Atlantic slave trade and the European/Arabic slave trade. The arabs have a pretty long, pretty extensive, and surprisingly recent history of swiping people from africa.
Of course, European slavery wasn’t much like American slavery either. Slavery barely existed in Europe itself by the time of the Age of Exploration. When you have a labor surplus slavery it doesn’t make much sense buy a slave when there are hundreds of hungry people willing to work for the same marginal cost.
Slavery in the Americas was reintroduced because of the labor shortage in the Americas. Wages are high, it would cost a lot to hire people to do this work, so it’s cheaper to kidnap them and force them to work at gunpoint.
On the other hand, the “arabs” enslaved about as many africans over the years as did the people in the americas.
A rather large number of Europeans (and also a few Americans) were captured by African slavers and sold into slavery in Africa never to be seen again. The slavers raided European lands as far north as Iceland. It doesn’t appear that their conditions were a whole lot better than later Africans sold into slavery in Arabia or America. Before that Muslim invaders from Africa had captured tens of thousand Europeans and sent them to African and Arab slave markets and Muslim Tartar and Turkish slave raiders also roamed Ukraine and Russia with a barbarity on par with transatlantic slave trade.
Sounds more like serfdom.
This Wiki page discusses slavery within Africa and breaks it down by region.
Tribes, in whatever continent, often raid each other and capture slaves. This was endemic in Sub-saharan Africa.
Certainly slavery already existed in Africa when the Europeans started slave-trading there, and mostly the Euros did not raid for slaves but bought them from the locals. However, the Euros did introduce a new, lucrative export-market, which incited kingdoms and tribes to make war on their neighbors to get POWs to sell, and bandit-gangs to roam the countryside kidnapping people, and it was all very destabilizing to West African societies.
Do you have something to contribute about slavery, or would you like to continue to stretch the definition to suit your agenda?
FWIW, Islam was (and is) actually fairly progressive in West Africa, at least compared to the previous gender roles. Islam affords women certain rights, including inheritance and the like, while in Animist areas women really are bought and sold and worked in the fields like animals.
I have no clue what you mean about “typical African groups.” My expertise is in West Africa, specifically with the Fulbe, who were major slave traders. I couldn’t say much about East or Southern Africa.
With the notable exception of the Mediterranean. Malta was a center of piracy just as Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were, only usually in the other direction ( Venice was actually a rather frequent victim of the Knights of St. John’s piracy as well, supposedly justified by their trade with Muslim states ). Both Malta and Livorno had thriving slave markets ( Malta until the French arrived in 1798 ).
Also not all that shockingly the one notable area where there was not a significant labor surplus was in the rather un-lucrative field of galley-rower ;). Galley slaves, whether dragooned from the “criminal” population, foreign nationals captured and impressed directly ( common in piratical Malta ), or purchased from the slave marts in Malta or Livorno, remained a feature of the Mediterranean Basin long after slavery had largely disappeared in northern Europe.