Concept

African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade

Intro

Did Africans sell other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade? Yes. Historians across the spectrum agree on it. Most of the people carried across the Atlantic were captured inside Africa, in wars and raids, by African armies, rulers, merchants and sometimes bandits. They were marched to the coast and sold to European ship captains, who paid in cloth, guns, gunpowder, liquor, iron, beads and shells. European traders mostly stayed at their forts and ships on the coast.

That is only half the story, and the other half matters just as much. The people who were sold never agreed to it. The sellers and the captives were usually from different kingdoms and peoples, so "Africans sold their own people" is not accurate in the way it sounds. And the whole trade existed because buyers in Europe and the Americas wanted enslaved workers and paid for them. The ships, the plantations and the slave laws were theirs.

So the honest answer is that guilt for the Atlantic trade crosses every race involved. Scripture says the same thing. It condemns the one who steals a person, the one who sells him, and the one found holding him, all three (Exodus 21:16).

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In full

The Atlantic slave trade (roughly 1500s to 1860s) was a commercial system with distinct links. Enslavement within Africa was carried out by African states, warlords, merchants and raiders, as John K. Thornton of Boston University summarizes: European merchants had little or no involvement in the first part of the captives' journey, which was generally the work of African rulers, merchants, and sometimes bandits; only in Angola did Europeans routinely command armies that captured people or preside at courts that condemned people to slavery (Thornton, Gale essay, 2009). Coastal sale was a negotiated barter in which African sellers chose the goods. Transport (the Middle Passage), the plantation economies, and the legal machinery of hereditary chattel slavery were European and American. The SlaveVoyages project estimates about 12.5 million captives embarked and 10.7 million disembarked.

Three overstatements distort this record. One erases African participation ("Europeans kidnapped everyone"). A second inflates it into exoneration ("Africans sold Africans, so the West bears no special blame"). A third, "Africans sold themselves," confuses sellers with victims. The historical record supports none of the three. The Christian position is not a tally of which race sinned more, but the biblical verdict on every link: manstealing, selling and holding are each condemned (Exodus 21:16; Deuteronomy 24:7; 1 Timothy 1:10), and nations that delivered whole peoples into captivity were judged by name (Amos 1:6, 1:9).

How the trade worked

Captives came mostly from war. Mark Christensen's essay for the Bill of Rights Institute states that the most common source of slavery was the taking of war captives by an enemy tribe or state, and that African merchants and rulers exchanged enslaved Africans for European commodities (Bill of Rights Institute). Thornton adds raiding by bandits and courts that condemned people to slavery as further sources (Gale essay).

African sellers set the terms of the goods. The University of Glasgow's course History of Slavery in the British Caribbean explains that African economies before 1900 ran on barter, not money (FutureLearn, "The Organisation of the Slave Trade on the African Coast"). The most popular item in every African region was colourful textiles, which slave traders mostly sourced from Asian manufacturers. Guns, gunpowder and liquor (rum, brandy, gin) were also in high demand, along with smaller goods such as knives, iron bars and cowrie shells. The cowries came exclusively from the Maldives. A captain who did not know what his African trading partners wanted risked heavy losses. In 1781 the Liverpool merchant William Davenport rejected a shipment of textiles because it did not match the patterns wanted at Old Calabar. Ottobah Cugoano, himself enslaved, described being sold for "a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead."

The same course notes that guns and gunpowder were generally symbols of power, though in some regions African rulers used European weapons in warfare and slave raiding, and that within Africa powerful traders and rulers used imported goods to acquire people. The Discovering Bristol history site lists the cargo of a ship bound for Africa as mixed goods such as cotton, brass pans and guns, along with gunpowder, glass beads, pottery, woollen cloth, iron, copper and brass "manillas" (Discovering Bristol). The Bill of Rights Institute essay adds rum, tobacco, axes and knives.

Shipping and sale in the Americas were European and American. Ships spent months on the coast buying captives before crossing. The Bill of Rights Institute essay gives an approximate figure of 10 to 15 percent of the captives dying on the voyage, more than one million people. The buyers who created and sustained the demand were planters and merchants in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.

The United States was a small share of the destinations. Thornton notes that only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic came to the present-day United States; most went to Brazil, Jamaica, Saint Domingue (Haiti) and other American colonies (Gale essay).

Scale

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by David Eltis, estimates that 12,520,000 captives departed Africa for the Americas and 10.7 million disembarked, mainly in the Americas (SlaveVoyages, "Methodology"). The methodology essay reports 34,948 voyages in the 2010 data set and about 36,000 in the current one. On coverage it says the database contains some trace of 85 percent of voyages that embarked captives and some record of almost 80 percent of vessels disembarking captives, and, measured against higher estimates of the trade's total volume, that it documents two-thirds of all slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866.

These are estimates, refined as records are added. The codex cites them as the best current figures, not as fixed counts.

What historians say

John K. Thornton. Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), expanded in a second edition as Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues that African states engaged the Atlantic economy as active participants, not as passive victims of European power. Summaries of his work describe the argument that African economic and military strength was enough to make Europeans deal with African polities on African terms (Wikipedia, "John K. Thornton"). In his own later essay for Gale he states the point plainly: the African side of the trade "was generally the work of African rulers, merchants, and sometimes lawless figures like bandits," while "Elsewhere Europeans were only at the receiving end of processes taking place before they came" (Gale essay, 2009). He adds the methodological caution that most African societies left few written records, so historians lean on European traders' testimony, which was "biased by their commercial interests and by racial prejudice."

Linda Heywood and John Thornton on Central Africa. Their Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) shows that many early captives came from Central Africa and already had Christian backgrounds, through the Christian kingdom of Kongo and its neighbors (Wikipedia, "John K. Thornton"). See Afonso I of Kongo and Christian Pre-Colonial African Heritage Argument.

Dahomey and Kongo. Henry Louis Gates Jr. names the slave-trading kingdoms as the Akan of Asante (modern Ghana), the Fon of Dahomey (modern Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo (modern Angola) and Kongo, and writes that slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo (Gates, New York Times, 2010). The Chicago Tribune describes Dahomey in the 17th century as a major supplier of slaves on the Slave Coast (Chicago Tribune, 1 May 2000). Thornton names Dahomey among the few African kingdoms whose own records survive (Gale essay).

Further reading. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1983; later editions 2000 and 2011) traces slavery within Africa itself, before and during the Atlantic era.

African leaders' own admissions

Mathieu Kérékou, President of Benin. Gates reports that in 1999 Kérékou "astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore" by kneeling and asking African-Americans' forgiveness for the "shameful" and "abominable" role Africans played in the trade (Gates, 2010). In 2000 a Beninese delegation toured Virginia and Washington, D.C. to publicize "President Mathieu Kerekou's recent apologies," and at a James River dock in Richmond the minister Luc Gnacadja said, "We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation," and "The slave trade is a shame, and we do repent for it" (Chicago Tribune, 2000).

John Kufuor, President of Ghana. On a 2007 visit to London, Kufuor rejected the idea that European nations bear all the responsibility, stating that "some local indigenous groups were also guilty," and adding that "whatever way you look at it, slavery and slave trade were certainly an iniquity and a disgraceful business even if considered in relation to the other brutalities of the time" (as reported in Bayo Holsey, "Owning Up to the Past?", Transition 105, 2011, cited in Wikipedia, "African apologies for the Atlantic slave trade"). The same article notes that Ghana's Joseph Project, a tourism and investment initiative directed at the diaspora, was named after the biblical Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his own brothers (Genesis 37:28).

These admissions came from heads of state speaking for their own countries' histories. They are not concessions extracted by Western critics.

Stating it precisely

"Africans sold themselves into slavery" is false. The captives were the victims, not the sellers. They were taken in war, raids, kidnappings and judicial condemnations. Nobody on the ships consented. To say they "sold themselves" puts the seller's act on the person sold.

"Africans sold their own people" is misleading. It assumes a single African people with a shared identity, which did not exist in the period. Africa was hundreds of separate kingdoms, city-states and peoples who fought each other, the way England and France did. Sellers and captives were usually from different polities. The University of Glasgow course observes that for African traders "there was a clear distinction between their own kin and people who could be legitimately enslaved." A ruler selling war captives taken from a rival state was, in his own terms, selling foreigners, not his own subjects. That does not excuse the sale; it corrects the description.

Demand, and the largest profits, lay outside Africa. The trade existed because American plantations needed labor and European and American merchants financed the voyages, insured the ships and sold the captives. African sellers were partners, and some grew rich, but the plantation economies and the racial law that made slavery hereditary were Western creations. Virginia's 1705 act, for example, declared that imported servants "who were not christians in their native country" were to be "accounted and be slaves," and that a master who killed a slave in "correction" was not guilty of felony (Encyclopedia Virginia, "An act concerning Servants and Slaves (1705)"). No African king wrote that law.

The Gates controversy. In "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game" (New York Times, op-ed published online 22 April 2010, in print 23 April), Henry Louis Gates Jr. argued that the African role "was a considerable one," that slavery "was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike," and that responsibility belongs "to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization." He quoted Frederick Douglass on "the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage." Gates wrote in the context of the reparations debate. The next day Boyce Watkins answered in theGrio that Gates let the United States "off the hook," arguing that the United States benefited from slavery "to the tune of several trillion dollars" and comparing Gates's reasoning to a pimp who says a girl's parents made a deal with him: "the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused" (theGrio, 23 April 2010). Both men accept the African role. They disagree about what follows from it. Gates's op-ed also gives a percentage estimate for African enslavement attributed to Thornton and Heywood; the codex does not repeat that figure because it could not be traced to their own published work.

What Scripture says about every link in the chain

The Bible does not stop at one link. It names the kidnapper, the seller and the holder.

• Stealing, selling and holding. "And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16, ASV). The raider who seized, the king or broker who sold, and the planter in whose hand the person was found all fall under the same sentence.
• Stealing a brother. "If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and he deal with him as a slave, or sell him; then that thief shall die" (Deuteronomy 24:7, ASV). Selling a fellow member of one's own people is singled out, which answers anyone who thinks a shared ethnicity makes the act lighter.
• Menstealers. Paul lists "menstealers" among those the law is for, beside liars and false swearers (1 Timothy 1:10, ASV). Abolitionists used this verse against the trade (see 1 Timothy 1.10).
• Nations that traded in whole peoples. "For three transgressions of Gaza, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they carried away captive the whole people, to deliver them up to Edom" (Amos 1:6, ASV). Tyre is judged "because they delivered up the whole people to Edom, and remembered not the brotherly covenant" (Amos 1:9, ASV). Gaza took captives; Tyre was a trading city that handed them on. God holds both the capturer and the middleman to account.
• Selling people far from home. Joel addresses "Tyre, and Sidon, and all the regions of Philistia" (Joel 3:4, ASV) and charges them: "and have sold the children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem unto the sons of the Grecians, that ye may remove them far from their border" (Joel 3:6, ASV). The prophet condemns exactly the long-distance export of captives.
• The buyer's market. Babylon's merchants trade in "slaves; and souls of men" (Revelation 18:13, ASV), listed as the climax of the cargo of a doomed commercial system.
• One humanity, one guilt. God "made of one every nation of men" (Acts 17:26, ASV), and "all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23, ASV). There is no race that sinned in this trade and no race that was incapable of it.

How the fact is used in apologetics, both ways

Against "Christianity is the white man's religion of enslavement." The objection pictures the trade as white Christians enslaving innocent black Africans, so that the faith is a tool of one race against another. The record is more complicated: the trade was a partnership of African sellers and European and American buyers, with sellers who were mostly not Christian and buyers who often were. The fair conclusion is shared guilt across peoples, not African guilt instead of European guilt. Christianity's own Scripture condemns every link in that partnership, and it was Christians, black and white, who used that Scripture to fight it. See Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater, Black People Shouldnt Be Christian, Christian Abolitionist Movement and Black Christian Agency.

Against "Africans sold Africans, so stop blaming the West." This move is used to deflect criticism of Western slavery. It fails on its own terms. African sellers do not reduce the buyer's guilt any more than a fence reduces a thief's. The demand, the ships, the plantations, and laws like Virginia's 1705 code were Western, and Western nations built hereditary racial slavery that lasted for generations after the captives arrived. Exodus 21:16 puts the man "found in his hand" under the same sentence as the man who stole and sold. Sin crosses races; so does accountability.

Concede what is true, on both sides. A Christian making either argument should grant the strongest point of the other side: yes, African rulers and merchants took part, willingly and profitably; and yes, the Western buyers created the demand, ran the system, and wrote it into law, often while professing Christianity. The gospel does not need either half of the record suppressed. It names all of it as sin and offers the same forgiveness to the descendants of every party.

Honest limits

• Figures are estimates. Embarkation and disembarkation totals come from a database that documents most but not all voyages and models the rest.
• Sources are lopsided. As Thornton notes, much of what is known about the African side comes from European traders with commercial and racial biases.
• "Voluntary" needs care. Historians who stress African agency mean that African rulers made their own decisions and were not compelled by European force outside Angola. That is a claim about the sellers. It says nothing about the captives, who had no choice at all.
• Some Africans resisted. Not every African ruler or people took part, and some opposed the trade, as Afonso I of Kongo protested Portuguese slave traders in letters to the Portuguese crown. "Africans" did not act as one bloc in either direction.
• The codex does not use the "90 percent" figure sometimes quoted from the Gates op-ed, because its basis could not be confirmed in Thornton's or Heywood's own published work.

See also

• Slavery, the search-landing page for the slavery objection cluster
• Four Pillars of Chattel Slavery, why the Atlantic system was chattel slavery in the full sense
• Chattel Slavery vs Biblical Servitude, how Mosaic law differs from the Atlantic system
• Where Was God During Slavery Objection Defeater, the problem-of-evil form of the objection
• Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater, the full defeater on biblical slavery
• Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater, the race-of-the-faith objection
• Deuteronomy 28-68 Slave Trade Prophecy Objection Defeater, the Hebrew Israelite reading of the trade
• Most of the World Was Colonized by Christians Objection Defeater, the colonialism charge
• Christianity Spread Only by the Sword Objection Defeater, the coercion charge
• Black People Shouldnt Be Christian, the cultural form of the objection
• Christianity in Africa and African Christianity Pre-Colonial, African Christianity before the trade
• Frederick Douglass, who knew the African role and still fought slavery from America
• Christian Abolitionist Movement, Christians who used Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:10 against the trade
• Islamic Sex Slavery Objection Defeater, the parallel trans-Saharan and Islamic trades