The african Slave Trade

Along the west coast of Africa, from the Cameroons in the south to Senegal in the north, Europeans built some sixty forts that served as trading posts. European sailors seeking riches brought rum, cloth, guns, and other goods to these posts and traded them for human beings. This human cargo was transported across the Atlantic Ocean and sold to New World slave owners, who bought slaves to work their crops.

European traders such as Nicolas Owen waited at these forts for slaves; African traders transported slaves from the interior of Africa. Equiano and others found themselves sold and traded more than once, often in slave markets. African merchants, the poor, royalty -- anyone -- could be abducted in the raids and wars that were undertaken by Africans to secure slaves that they could trade. The slave trade devastated African life. Culture and traditions were torn asunder, as families, especially young men, were abducted. Guns were introduced and slave raids and even wars increased.





After kidnapping potential slaves, merchants forced them to walk in slave caravans to the European coastal forts, sometimes as far as 1,000 miles. Shackled and underfed, only half the people survived these death marches. Those too sick or weary to keep up were often killed or left to die. Those who reached the coastal forts were put into underground dungeons where they would stay -- sometimes for as long as a year -- until they were boarded on ships.

Slave Traders,

Africa's west coast was known as the "white man's grave," and for good reason. The slave traders who worked along the coast lived in an inhospitable land. Exposure to the hot, damp climate and to diseases that their bodies had little resistance to resulted in short life expectancies. There was a reason to be there, though, and that reason was money. Every slave trader had the hope of making a quick fortune, and although many would become successful, there were many more -- such as Nicolas Owen -- who wouldn't.

An entry in the journal of Nicolas Owen reads as follows: "I have found no place where I can enlarge my fortune so soon as where I now live, wherefore I entend to stay in order to enlarge my fortune by honest mains." Owen was sincere when he stated that the slave trade was a way to prosper "by honest means" -- nowhere in his journal, which he kept for five years, does he show any compassion for slaves or the least bit of remorse for being involved in the slave trade.

Owen had sailed to Africa with his brother. Once there, they were captured and imprisoned. A slave dealer named Richard Hall rescued the two and offered them jobs as his agents. With no money to return home, the two brothers accepted the offer. Like all traders at the time, Owen did not capture slaves himself.

it was Africans who acquired slaves and traded the captives for various European goods. Sometimes the captives would be prisoners of war. Other times, groups would venture deep into Africa's interior for the sole purpose of capturing slaves.

passages illustrate the inherent dangers of being a slave trader. In one account, Owen tells of how some Africans had seized an Englishman who was walking at night on a trail. "As soon as their prize is secure they devour him without mercey along with their ascociates in the bushes, who has prapared a fire for that purpose.

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