The Slave Trade and its effects on African civilization

When reading about the "Triangular Slave Trade" a logical question is what did the slave trade do to the local cultures in Africa where the slaves came from? I have found little written about that, largely because Europeans did not want to admit that Africans had strong cultures of their own before Europeans colonized Africa.

However, I have found this very interesting video on UTube.



This is an interesting companion to the fourth of the TV series "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Jared Diamond makes the point that Africans had a strong culture, one that was well adapted to the tropical conditions of Central Africa. He pointed to the Bantu Civilization and to the South African Zulu Empire. the Bantu Civilization was built around native African crops such as millet, and the villages were small (which prevented rapid transmission of Malaria) and were set on high ground away from the rivers and lakes that teemed with mosquitoes (Malaria carriers.)

Nineteenth Century European industrial society demanded raw materials such as Gold, Copper and Diamonds, so European colonialists moved to the tropics of Africa and destroyed the villages of the native Africans, forcing them to move to urban centers near mines and water transportation.

Since writing is an urban phenomenon and native Africans had been forced by malaria to avoid building large cities (which are normally built next to water transport) the African societies did not have much native written history. The European colonialists were interested first in cheap slave labor to operate plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil and in the American South (to feed international trade) and later in African raw materials to feed the developing European industrial society, they had no interest at all in learning about native African cultures and societies. Labor was all they needed from the African peoples.

Today tropical Africa is a set of countries with borders drawn by European colonialists and racked with malaria and AIDS. The malaria results from the destruction of purposes of European trade of their earlier societies which had been designed to minimize malaria.

As soon as those two diseases are controlled Africa will become a prosperous continent.

The UTube movie above gives strong indications of how West Africa became what it is today.

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One thing the UTube movie points out is that the slave trade was not just a European thing. Muslim invaders from the Middle East also captured and exports slaves from Africa to the Middle East. Here is another UTube video that addresses the Muslim slaver trade.



One difference between the European and the Muslim slave trade was that the Islamic societies did not have the large scale international trade to be fed by factory-style plantations designed to produce cash crops (Sugar, Indigo and Cotton) to feed that trade, so the profit motive to degrade slave labor on a massive scale did not exist as it did in the Americas.

I've never understood the Islamic history of slave armies, but the Muslim use of slave women in harems is no different from the current sexual slave trade in the modern world.

In any case, though, slavery is always a case of the powerful preying on the less powerful, and it is nearly as destructive of the more powerful societies as it is the less powerful ones.

There are other UTube videos on the history of Black Slavery at This UTube location if you are interested. Unfortunately I have been unable to determine what organization is producing them, so I can't at this time vouch for their historical accuracy.

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The Andover University Library offers a list of books on the slave trade.