Reasons for Slavery

In modern times, with the knowledge that we have about the horrors of slavery, it doesn’t seem that it could in any way be reconciled with a Christian worldview. At the time of the slave trade, however, Europeans who bought, sold, and owned slaves found excuses for doing so in the Bible. The very Scriptures that would eventually be used in the cause of abolition were misconstrued in order to support human trafficking and violence to unknown people groups. The professed rationale and the true motives behind this terrible enterprise reveal a lot about the Europeans who developed the slave trade and the effect it had on African slaves in South America.

The Europeans looking for justification for slavery often claimed that, much as they were “civilizing” the natives that they encountered in the Americas by changing their culture and religion, they were helping the slaves by bringing them to a New World and teaching them about Christianity. This might have given some comfort to nobles who had concerns about the practice. However, the slave trade began as purely a financial venture, used to serve the needs of the Portuguese on their sugar plantations and other ventures that required more human labor than they could provide. Racial dynamics were not necessarily involved in the original capture of African slaves. In fact, African tribes helped the Portuguese by trading enemy prisoners for European products. While the Portuguese felt themselves superior to the Africans, it was as much due to their access to modern weapons and military power as it was to supremest ideas of religion and societal interactions. They merely understood that slaves taken out of their home to an unfamiliar world would be easier to subdue than those forced to work in their native environments.

While Africans brought to North and South America had similar experiences in their capture and transportation across the Atlantic, the cultures that they developed were surprisingly different. The number of slaves sold in Latin America was enormous compared to the number sold in the North, especially since the slave trade came to South America and the Caribbean about a century before the first slaves arrived in Jamestown. Due to the size of the African population in South America, the slaves retained more of their African culture, and relied perhaps even more heavily than before on the mystical, magical elements of their religions and societal interactions as a way of coping with the atrocities they faced. Even as generations were born in the Americas, this retention of African sensibilities affected the way the slaves interacted with the other people groups in Latin America and led to a unique subculture that has lasted into modern times