The Fortunes of Africa
Source: amren.com
A history of Africa before independence.
Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor, Public Affairs, 2014, 784 pp., $35.00.
It is not easy to fit 5,000 years of the history of anything between two covers, much less the history of an entire continent. Journalist and historian Martin Meredith has not only done it, he has done it very well. The Fortunes of Africa is a first-rate introduction to a part of the world about which most Americans know next to nothing, and is an excellent companion to Mr. Meredith's masterful account of black Africa since independence, The Fate of Africa.
Like the previous volume, this one is marvelously unsentimental. Mr. Meredith has no use for fantasies about mythical black sages and empires, nor does he make a fetish of the sins of the white man. He just tells the story and it is a fantastic tale of colorful characters and useful lessons.
Recurring patterns
Although the author does not always call attention to them, there are clear patterns that emerge from this history, one of which is the importance and persistence of slavery. Except among people such as the Pygmies and Hottentots who were so poor that they were all struggling to survive, slavery was practiced all across the continent for as long as we have records.
Foreign peoples who came into contact with black Africans appear to have found them deeply alien and fit candidates for slavery. Place names that persist to this day reflect what must have been the first reaction of all outsiders on first meeting blacks. “Sudan” by which was meant the entire south Saharan region, comes from the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “land of the blacks.” “Guinea,” which is in the names of three African countries as well as the gulf of that name, comes from a Moroccan word meaning “black.” “Ethiopia” comes from the Greek, meaning “burnt faced.” Zanj, which is the Arab name for the east coast of Africa and for its inhabitants, means “black.” Likewise, “Zanzibar” is from the Persian, and means “black coast.”
For centuries, black Africa had only three major exports: gold, ivory, and slaves. When trade caravans began crossing the Sahara in the 8th century, they brought slaves north. Mr. Meredith notes that the service life of early trans-Saharan slaves was about seven years, so there was steady demand. A good horse could be traded for 10 to 30 slaves, and eunuchs brought the highest prices. From 600 to 1500 AD, before the trans-Atlantic trade began, there were probably some 4 million slaves taken across the Sahara to markets in North Africa and the Middle East. Enslavement of blacks was so common that the Arab word abd, which means slave, (the name Abdullah means “slave of Allah) also meant any black person.
Muslim Arabs tried to conquer the black Christian kingdoms in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia (missionaries from Alexandria had converted them in the fourth century). The Christians fought the Muslims to a standstill and established a truce, under which there was to be an annual exchange. The Arabs would supply horses, wheat, etc., in return for 360 of the finest slaves of your country, both male and female. Mr. Meredith writes that this deal, known as the Baqt, was honored for six centuries.
For about 800 years, Muslims shipped slaves from the east coast of Africa. Zanzibar is only 20 miles off the coast of Africa, but sea-faring Arabs controlled the island, and Islam was firmly established by the 11th century. From bases in Zanzibar, Arabs controlled a vast, East African slave and ivory trade, with destinations throughout the Middle East. During the 1860s, after the trans-Atlantic trade had been essentially abolished, Zanzibar was still shipping out some 20,000 slaves and 250 tons of ivory every year.
Stone Town, on Zanzibar, was the world's last public slave market. The British shut it down in 1873, but could not root out the system, and Arab traders continued to hunt slaves in the interior to work on plantations on the coast. In 1875, the British Navy had to put down several local rebellions by slave traders on the coast who were furious that outsiders were meddling in their business. Mr. Meredith notes that British interference resulted in a sharp rise in the price of slaves.
It was the Portuguese who began the Atlantic slave trade in 1441, initially supplying markets in Portugal and Spain. Henry the Navigator initially promoted exploration of the African coast in the hope of finding a sea route to the gold mines in what is now Ghana, but slaves turned out to be a more accessible commodity. Since slavery was widely practiced in West Africa, the Portuguese had no trouble finding suppliers, and rarely had to go on slaving expeditions themselves. The Spanish church sent missionaries to the Congo delta, where profits were so high that even priests traded slaves.
In many African kingdoms, the punishment for crimes such as murder or theft was enslavement, and chiefs were happy to sell off their criminals to Europeans. A horse could be had for 9 to 14 slaves, but guns were also very popular. Africans who got their hands on them first attacked neighboring tribes in order to capture and sell yet more slaves. Chiefs policed their turf just as drug gangs do today, executing rivals.
The first shipments to Spanish territory in the New World came directly from Spain in 1510, and the first cargo directly from Africa arrived in 1518. Thus, slavery had been practiced in Latin America for a century before the first blacks arrived in Jamestown in 1619.
Most North American slaves came from West Africa, but Mr. Meredith notes that the port that shipped the largest number of slaves was Luanda in what is now Angola. The Portuguese controlled the area, and most of the 2.8 million slaves shipped from Luanda were bound for the Portuguese colony of Brazil, and for sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The next largest source of slaves was the coast of what is now Togo, Benin, and Nigeria known then as the Slave Coast.
The mouths of rivers were the best trading posts. African chiefs sent their men up river in huge canoes with 50 paddlers and filled them with captives to sell to Europeans.
Part of the Atlantic trade stayed in Africa. The Akan people managed to keep control of the gold mines until the British seized them in the late 19th century. Slaves worked the mines, and the Akan bought slaves from the Luanda area when local supplies were low.
The end of the 18th century was the high water mark of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with shipments reaching 80,000 a year. The British carried more than half of the trade, but Parliament, bowing to abolitionist pressure, passed a law in 1807 banning the slave trade in British ships. The British West Africa Squadron patrolled the area, and beginning in the 1840s, the navy began breaking up land-based slave operations as well. Africans were dumbfounded by this incomprehensible interference in age-old business practices.
The British founded the colony of Sierra Leone initially as a place to send blacks who were not wanted in England, but later they used it as a haven for slaves freed by the navy. Between 1810 and 1864, some 150,000 blacks were settled there.
In the interior of Africa, however, the trade went on undisturbed. Tippu Tip was a Zanzibar trader who stripped a vast part of the Eastern Congo of ivory and slaves. A missionary who was appalled by the sight of one of his caravans in 1882 wrote that Tippu Tip’s men made slaves carry the ivory. Anyone who complained that the ivory was too heavy was speared to death and left in the jungle. This discouraged slackers.
Tippu Tip knew David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, but could not understand what motivated explorers:
If you Wazungu [white men] are desirous of throwing away your life, there is no reason we Arabs should. We travel little by little to get ivory and slaves . . . . but you white men only look for rivers and lakes and mountains and you spend your lives for no reason, and to no purpose.
Of Livingstone he said, "He bought no ivory or slaves; yet he traveled further than any of us, and for what?";
David Livingstone
Mr. Meredith reports that the best estimates for the total number of slaves shipped from Africa in the long-haul trade between 800 to 1900 come to about 24 million. They took the following routes:
Trans-Sahara: 7.2 million.
Across the Red Sea: 2.4 million.
From the East African coast: 2.9 million.
Trans-Atlantic: 11.3 million.
These numbers do not include the countless millions trafficked within Africa. Some 800,000 are estimated to have been brought to British North America.
Slavery, of course, continues in Africa. In 1981, Mauritania was the last country officially to abolish it, but did not provide for criminal penalties. Today Arabs there own an estimated 150,000 to 600,000 blacks, which means that as much as 20 percent of the population could be slaves. Slave status is hereditary, and slaves can be bought, sold, rented out, or given as gifts.
Historically, Arabs enslaved whites as well as blacks. Mr. Meredith describes the Janissary and Mamluk systems in which Christian boys were captured and trained as soldiers. He also describes the Barbary Pirate raids, estimating that at least one million Europeans were enslaved between 1530 and 1780. Christians were worked to death as galley slaves, and white slaves helped build 18th-century Algiers into one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
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