Enslavement in Africa

Enslavement in Africa

Many people think that African slaves came from Europeans (Portuguese, British) invading Africa and stealing large amounts of slaves, but this is not true. Europeans did not build colonies in Africa until much later. This is because the Africans in West Africa were very skilled at protecting their coastlines.

Since the Africans would not allow Europeans to build colonies in Africa, they decided to trade with them. The British, which had the Triangular Trade, would give powerful African chiefs guns, rum and other goods that could not be made in Africa in exchange for slaves that would be sent to the West Indies.

This means that most slaves were enslaved by other Africans. One powerful tribe would use the guns they received from the British and conquer weaker tribes and take all that were still alive for prisoners/slaves.

At first all of the slaves were from Africa’s west coast, but once it was de-populated, slaves came from further inland. It is estimated that up to 60 million Africans were captured during the slave trade; that is 200 times the population of Buffalo, or in other words, if the HSBC Arena was filled 3,158 times.

1.) Why couldn’t Europeans colonize Africa like they had in North and South America?

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2.) In your own words, who, and how captured the people that were made slaves?

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3.) The economy can be very cruel. How do you think Africans justified enslaving their own people?

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The Middle Passage

Once slaves were captured, they were traded to Europeans on the Western coast of Africa. About three hundred slaves would be able to fit on a slave ship at a time. The Africans were chained together and crowded next to each other in the bottom of the ship. They were not treated as people, they were treated as cargo. They would be packed together so tightly, that many would die immediately from suffocation. The trip from western Africa to the West Indies could take anywhere from 3-5 months. The trip across the Atlantic was known as the “Middle Passage”.

If the trip took too long disease would always break out among the slaves because they were so tightly packed together in dirty conditions. The sick, and those chained to the sick would be thrown overboard.

If the trip took too long and there was a shortage of food, slaves would either be starved, or the ones that would be sold for the least amount of money would be thrown overboard.

If there was a serious enough outbreak of disease and it seemed too many were sick, the sailors would throw all of the Africans overboard and go back to Africa to fill up their ship with healthy slaves.

* The sailors were able to be so wasteful with the slaves lives because they could always make their money back with future voyages. Even a ship with half of its original cargo of slaves could make the sailors rich.

1.) What did the Europeans see the Africans as? Explain.

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2.) This is one of the worst tragedies in human history, if not the worst. Can you justify what forced the Europeans to treat other humans like this? If yes or no, explain in your own words why.

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The Slave Auctions

When African slaves arrived in the West Indies they were sent to a slave dealer. The slave dealer would lock them up in crowded into pens. The slave dealers would cover some of the slaves in tar to make them look healthier. Also, each slave dealer would take a hot iron and burn each of their slaves with a symbol showing that they were his property.

The slaves would then be sent to wherever they were going to be sold. It may have been an island of the West Indies, or one of the Southern 13 Colonies. There were two main types of auctions: “To the Highest Bidder” & “Grab and Go”.

To the highest bidder slave auctions were open auctions in which slaves would be brought out from pens and sold individually to the person willing to pay the highest amount for them.

A grab and go auction was when a person seeking a slave or many slaves would buy tickets. For each ticket he would receive a slave. All of the ticket holders would gather in an open area, and all of the slaves would be brought out at once in chains, and a slave owner could just grab a slave or slaves that he wanted and walk away with them.

During the auctions the slaves were entirely confused. Everything was different, the language, architecture and people. Also, it was during the slave auctions that families were sold to different slave owners, and the Africans would see their family sold away from them, they would usually never see them again.

The slave owners very rarely bought an entire family. They usually went to auctions to purchase slaves for specific purposes (farming, housework, etc.). The slave owners and auctioneers saw buying and selling the slaves like buying and selling cattle.

1.) What was one of the ways that slave dealers would try to get more money for their slaves?

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2.) What were the slave auction’s effects on African families?

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3.)Try to imagine that you were a slave at one of the auctions. Imagine all that you have been through. What do you think the Africans thought was going on?

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French and Sugar Plantations

The Spanish were the first to bring a crop called sugar cane to the Western Hemisphere. At first, the Caribbean islands owned by the French and Spanish tried to grow cotton and tobacco, but they could not grow enough to compete with Britain’s 13 colonies. The Spanish began growing coffee and small amounts of a plant they brought from Africa called sugar cane.The reason the Spanish did not grow much of the sugar cane, is because it is so hard to harvest, and after you cut it from the field, you only have 24 hours to boil it and get the sugar.

It was not until the French colonized the Caribbean that sugar production increased. They built tremendously huge plantations, with sugar mills right on the plantation. Of course, since the Europeans could not work too hard in these climate conditions, and there were not enough of them to make large profits, they had to find people to do the work.

At first they tried Native Americans that lived on the Caribbean islands. The work and European disease quickly killed the 11 million Native Americans that lived in the Caribbean. The French and Spanish then joined the British and Portuguese in the African slave trade.

The French and Spanish were not like the British when they bought slaves. The British would by male and female slaves of all ages for their cotton plantations, the French and Spanish would only buy teenage boys or younger. The reason that they did was because the work was so hard, that most slaves - - even these strong young men, would rarely survive more than 5 years on a plantation. This means that the slaves on sugar plantations were also different from the slaves in Britain’s 13 colonies because they rarely had children and lived to old age - - most slaves on these sugar plantations were from Africa, when they died the owner would purchase a replacement.

The work that they had to do was the main cause of their deaths. They had to cut down each stalk of sugar cane individually and make a neat pile. Then when they had a large enough pile, they would have to carry it to a wagon and stack it. They would do this from sunrise to sunset while slave masters whipped them and beat them to go faster. Many would often dehydrate and die in the fields - - but this just meant that the rest had to work harder and faster.

When they were finished cutting the cane for the day, they took the cane on the wagons to the sugar mill where it quickly had to be boiled. The same slaves that did the cutting did the boiling as well. The building that the boiling was done in was usually well over 100 degrees, and sometimes the boilers would explode and kill all of the slaves inside. They would many times work up to 30 hours in a row - - or until they died. Also, the slaves on sugar plantations received very poor food and shelter, this caused a lot of disease and death as well. Over 1 million slaves died during this process until rules were changed at the beginning of the 1800’s.

1.) I did not give you any information about how much the sugar cane was worth - - but after reading this information, what do you think its value and demand were back in Europe?

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Slave Life on a Cotton Plantation

Slaves that worked on a cotton plantation in Britain’s 5 Southern colonies worked from sunrise to sunset year-round on every day but Sunday. These plantations were mostly located in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. These four colonies, by the mid 1700’s, had so many slaves - - that slaves made up one fifth of the entire population of the 13 colonies.

Slaves on cotton and tobacco plantations received two new shirts, two new pair of pants, maybe one coat and maybe one wool hat a year for clothing. They were given mostly cornmeal and salted fish for food, and over the length of a month they may have been given eight pounds to of pork to spread out over a months time.

Their homes were wooden shacks with dirt floors. During the winter they were cold. Slaves had to find pieces of cloth to stuff in holes that were in the walls and the roof. During the summer they were extremely hot. The beds were usually piles of straw. Many times slave owners would force twelve people at a time to live in these small, one room shacks.

If these slaves had children, the owners would either keep them and use them as slaves, or, if the mother seemed too attached and did not do her work, sell them or trade them to other plantation owners. If slave owners found out that slaves were married, they would often sell one of them away. Children as young as four years old would begin work by cleaning up barns and bringing field slaves water. Also, if slave owners ever saw slaves participating in any type of African cultural custom, they would immediately stop it and punish them. It was STRICTLY forbidden that they were NOT ALOUD to be taught to read or write.

The field slaves work was mostly clearing fields of weeds, planting seeds and harvesting cotton. Harvesting cotton was a bad job because cotton plants have lots of thorns, and slaves were often expected to pick large quantities or they would be punished by being beat, missing meals or extra chores. If field slaves ran away, they would never get far. All slaves were taught by their owners to tell on slaves ran away - - they would get extra food or a day off. Field slaves that ran away and were caught would be whipped and beaten, but rarely killed….

House slaves had the duties of keeping the house clean, cooking and often being nannies for the slave owners children. If these slaves ever did not perform a duty correctly, their punishment would be to wear a painful mask, missing meals or extra work.

On the other hand, the plantation owners would become very rich through selling their crops, slaves and land. Their children, after being taught how to run a plantation, would go to college in Europe and learn how to live like nobles. The slave owners were often the richest people in the area and usually influential in colonial governments.

1.) Slave owners would often say that they were doing Africans a favor by bringing them to the New World. Choose two things from this reading that would cause you to make the opposite argument. Also, explain why you chose those two facts.

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2.) Why do you think that slaves did not have to work on Sunday?

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3.) Compare and contrast the lives of slaves in French and Spanish sugar plantations, and the slaves that lived in Britain’s 13 colonies on cotton plantations.

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4.) Why do you think the slaves’ African customs and reading were not allowed?

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4.) Why do you think runaway slaves were only beaten and not killed?

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5.)

Summarize the journey of a slave from Africa to the plantation in your own words.
What do you think was the worst part of the journey?
How did Europeans justify what they were doing?
What do you think some of the long-term effects of the African Slave Trade were?

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