They came, by and large, from kingdoms along the hot and humid Guinea Coast of West Africa--the area stretching from the Senegal River in the north to the Bight of Benin and south as far as the mouth of the Congo. Their tribal identities were Ashanti, Fanti, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Dahomey, and a hundred other foreign-sounding names we find recorded on slave ship manifests. Mostly, they were captives taken in tribal wars, then sold to Arab middlemen who marched them shackled and in single file to the sea,. There, in ports called Bonny and Calabar, Yankee slave ships loaded them for the "middle passage" to ports in the Caribbean and along the Gulf of Mexico and southeast coasts of North America.
The ships often carried as many as 250 Africans. The men were chained two by two--ankle and wrist--in such cramped quarters that there was no room even to sit upright during the entire voyage. Women and children were sometimes allowed to go on deck for short periods. There the women were often sexually abused by members of the crew. Some captains were "loose packers," preferring fewer slaves and therefore more live deliveries. "Tight packers" argued that if you start with more you are likely to arrive with more, in spite of the extremely high mortality rate. But regardless of method; the profits were enormous--$40,000 on the average for a ninety-day voyage. Then there were further profits in the New World when the slaves were exchanged for sugar and tobacco, which was then delivered to European brokers in England, France, Portugal, and Spain.
The "good Christians" who bought the slaves to work the plantations and farms of the West Indies and American colonies rationalized their purchase and bondage of these human beings as acts of mercy--the rescue of "savages" and "heathens" from the barbarity and idolatry of African tribal life. They had "saved" these souls from hell and cultural depravity and therefore saw themselves as benefactors of the blacks, although many of these slave owners slept with pistols under their pillows as protection from the occasional misguided ingrate.
While the people of what was generally referred to as the "dark continent" were viewed by the Europeans of the New World as somewhat less than human--capable of little more than common agricultural labor--these Africans had, in actuality, been participants in some of the most advanced and complex cultural systems in existence anywhere in the world. Products of lifestyles very different from European (and therefore judged inferior), the people of the Guinea Coast of Africa were descendants of those who first smelted iron, who established universities and centers of learning in the thirteenth century at Timbuktu and Jenne, and who had developed elaborate state political systems and trade economies. They had also built great cities such as Benin, described by a Dutch traveler in 1602 as follows:
The town seemeth to be very great; when you go into a great broad street which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam; it is thought that that street is four miles long besides the suburbs. The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand. The King's Court is very great, within it having many great four-square plains, which round them have galleries, wherein there is always watch kept. I was so far within the Court that I passed over four such great plains, and wherever I looked, still I saw gates to go into other
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