The African Slave Trade

 John Thornton makes some enlightening claims in his article on “Slavery and the African Social Structure.”  It is easy for me to view all forms of slavery as a racial issue, which makes it difficult to understand how Africans helped support the slave trade with the Portuguese. Despite the fact that they would sell slaves from other tribes, to subject another human being to such treatment and willingly help perpetuate the practice is difficult to fathom. Thornton claims that the European view of slavery and the African view of slavery differed a great deal. In Africa, much like in the native cultures of South and Latin America slaves were captured enemies, usually the result of war, but in Africa slaves were also the main source of wealth. Individuals could not buy land in the sense that we understand so “their only recourse was to purchase slaves, which as their personal property could be inherited and generate wealth for them.”  It was not a matter of the color of their skin and inferior intellectual or moral abilities but a means to gain wealth and subdue one’s enemies. Although the idea of owning another human being, whatever the reason is a disgusting and humiliating experience, the slave trade started by the Portuguese and practiced in the “New World” was something else entirely.

A white Portuguese doctor documented the treatment and suffering of slaves in Africa before they even reached Brazil. He wrote “only the imagination can give an idea of the treatment that the slaves suffer when they are put in those libambo,” which was a chain that bound the slaves. He writes of their horrible treatment, lack of proper nourishment and water, and the fact that their “human nature is entirely overlooked.” However among the slaves he notices “charitable and obliging qualities which are not seen among the backlanders or any other free people. Though ten to twelve thousand may reach the coast, only six to seven thousand are taken to Brazil.

Despite racists overtones the lack of humanity and appalling treatment of the Africans was noted by several prominent white members of the community once the slaves that survived reached Brazil.  One clergyman describes the scene at the slave market at Valongo in Rio de Janeiro. He likens the process to that of a “butcher feeling a calf,” with no other thought the physical capabilities and profit the slave can bring. The slaves were bought and sold with no regard to the fact that these men and women were human beings. Some went to work on plantations, others to be domestic slaves, or trained in some occupation in town, but there were some women who experienced a different fate. Slave prostitutes in Brazil were a common place commodity, even though technically attempts were made to impede the practice. Anything that could be done to demoralize or present the slave as subhuman was done. Slaves were renamed with Christian names upon arrival; women were hired out as wet nurses and subject to the every whim of their master, and human beings were treated as livestock. The wealth Spain gained from their new colonies was built on the backs of the people they conquered and the abhorrent practice of slavery.