3 - The Barnes Review

PAGE 26 the barnes review MAY/JUNE
dred from East Africa. The survey noted
that up to one-third of the slaves had been
captured in war, and another third had
been kidnapped as children and sold into
slavery. Of the remaining third, many had
been sold by their parents or tribal elders
and some were sentenced to slavery for
some crime or another.
Because Africans themselves conducted
the African slave trade, Portuguese traders
never ventured far from the coast. For four
centuries after Diego Cao discovered the
Congo River, European explorers did not
even know where the river came from.
Every slave in Africa was first enslaved
by fellow Africans. Europeans had no part
in choosing who was reduced to slavery.
Most establishment historians who
even mention the role of Africans
themselves in the African slave trade
mainly consider the intra-African slave
trade as a monopoly of a powerful African
tribal elite. This is not true, as slavery was
so widespread in Africa that many individuals
took part in the slave trade. Even
though the slave trade in African states
such as Ashante, Dahomey and Benin was
controlled by an African elite, the meticulous
records of Richard Miles indicate that
many Africans took part in small scale
trading to supplement their incomes.
Richard Miles was an agent of the
Company of Merchants, which succeeded
the Royal Africa Company in 1750. Miles
resided on the Gold Coast continuously
from December 1772 until April 1780. The
records of Miles detailed every individual
dealer from whom he bought slaves during
his eight years on the Gold Coast. He purchased
a total of 2,352 slaves during 1,308
separate transactions. His deals were
made with no fewer than 295 individuals,
only 11 of whom sold slaves frequently. It
appears from the record that any African
who was able to acquire slaves did so
whenever an opportunity arose. This pattern
of individual Africans supplementing
their income from the slave trade seems to
be the established pattern as other British
traders recognized a similar trend.
The sub-Saharan African cultures were
sub-literate, so the Africans themselves left
no records for a modern historian to study.
But at least one African leader named
Antera Duke learned to write pidgin
English and kept a diary in a ship’s logbook
that he had been given by a British officer.
Stephen Raper, who resides in Tennes see,
is a longtime student of American and
European Revisionist history.
Duke sold slaves to ships calling at Old
Calabar in eastern Nigeria and his diary
records events from 1785 to 1788. His diary
was eventually found by missionaries and
taken to Scotland where it was later translated
into Standard English. It should be
noted that Duke was a member of the Efik
tribe that occupied the islands of the Cross
River estuary, close to the border between
Nigeria and Cameroon. In the 18th century,
the Efik were a major supplier of slaves
and even their tribal name translates as
“the oppressors.”
Duke had sold slaves for nearly two
decades before he began keeping his diary
in 1785. His name appears in the ship
records of an English ship, the Dobson,
which stopped in Old Calabar in 1769.
During the six months the Dobson was in
Old Calabar, Duke sold a total of 37 slaves
over the six-month period. By the time
Duke had begun his diary in 1785, he was
a very wealthy man, and his house was
built of materials that had been imported
to Africa from Liverpool, England. In his
diary he notes more than 20 ships entered
Old Calabar and left with more than 7,000
slaves. Duke rarely mentioned his own contributions
to these numbers but did write
extensively on the African treatment of
slaves. In fact Duke wrote extensively
about the practice of the Efik sacrificing
slaves during numerous rituals.
The Efik practiced witchcraft and sorcery.
These practices led to torture
and human sacrifices, which were thought
to placate their gods and ancestors. Slaves
were also allowed the “honor” of accompanying
departed members of the Efik tribe
on their journey into the afterlife. In July
1786 when a prominent member of the
tribe departed, Duke mentioned that “nine
men and women went with him.” Four
months later Duke wrote “we got ready to
cut heads off and at 5 o’clock in the morning
we began to cut slaves’ heads off, 50
heads off in that one day.” Two days later
Duke mentions sacrificing four more
slaves, and three of these were sacrificed
be cause a European ship arrived in harbor.
In the language of Duke’s diary, there is no
embarrassment or guilt over either the sacrifices
or the selling of the slaves.
The Efik were not the only African tribe
that engaged in human sacrifice. The king
of Dahomey was not only believed to have
sold his own people into slavery, but sacrificed
hundreds of them in an average year.
The British consul to the Dahomean court
in 1663, Richard Burton, stated that nocturnal
sacrifices were a normal part of life
and that the annual destruction of human
life was “terribly great.” During one night
Burton estimated that 80 men and women
were sacrificed and that on the average the
Dahomean kingdom sacrificed about 500
slaves during the course of events in a normal
year. Burton also stated that during
years with grand ceremonies, upwards of
1,000 slaves might be sacrificed.
There were also other kingdoms in
which human sacrifice took place. The
Ashante, in what is now Ghana, also sacrificed
their own slaves on special occasions.
Many slaves would be sacrificed in the
African kingdoms on the death of a king.
Still more slaves would be sacrificed in the
normal course of events. Whenever an
African village suspected that witchcraft or
sorcery was being practiced, they had a
tendency to put all the suspects to death
regardless of guilt or innocence. In some
kingdoms, when the king had some piece of
information he wanted to pass on to his
departed ancestors, he would whisper the
information into the ear of a slave who
would then be immediately put to death.
But the fascination with African tribal
customs of human sacrifice was al -
ways of a secondary interest to the Euro -
pean powers. Originally Europeans were
interested in Africa because of commercial
aspects. But after the Europeans became
aware of the grisly barbarism that the
Africans practiced, the European states be -
came more and more convinced of the mission
Christianity had to play in civilizing
Africa. For this reason, the Atlantic slave
trade had been virtually ended by the
United States and Great Britain by 1810.
Domes tic slavery would continue in the
United States, but the anti-slavery feelings
of Americans in the North would reach a
peak in the 1860s, leading to the abolition
of slavery and involuntary servitude.
After the anti-slavery fervor in America
in the 1860s, slavery in Africa continued.
The African kingdoms had developed an
efficient slave-trading system, and the
Europeans could not easily stop it. Without
a European market, the African kingdoms
continued to look for overseas markets. On
the island of Zanzibar, slave traders continued
to sell African slaves to “Arab” plantation
owners on the island itself, as well as
selling their human cargo as far as Persia,
Madagascar and the various sultanates of
the Arabian peninsula. Even though the
slave traders operating out of Zanzibar
were normally described as “Arab,” they
were mainly Swahili-speaking Africans
from what today we would call Kenya and
Tanzania. These Africans had adopted
Islam and Arabic dress and some habits