0:47 One of the most tragic chapters in human history is the transatlantic slave trade, when at least 12 million enslaved Africans were violently and cruelly uprooted from their homes and sent across the Atlantic Ocean to strange lands. It's thought that as many as two million died before they even got there. In this episode, we look at how, where and why this slave trade began and the devastation it wreaked on Africans and their continent. There was not a single spot of a continent that was out of reach of enslavers. It is more than the physical destruction of people. There was no hope for
1:37 anyone for centuries. The consequences is the development of Africa. just because they chose as the youngest and the strongest. The transatlantic slave trade that existed between the 16th and 19th centuries was as catastrophic as it was extensive. This is Ghana's Atlantic coast, and I've come here to give you a sense of just how many European nations were involved in the slave trade. There are more than 30 old slave trading forts along a 250-kilometre stretch of beach
2:28 today built by various European powers. Cape Coast Castle was built by the Swedes in 1653, but it changed hands five times over the next 11 years, ending with the British. Now, when the castle was originally built, it wasn't done very well. The roofs would leak, the ceilings were pretty dodgy, and the walls were quite insecure that they could even collapse. And so the whole castle was rebuilt in the mid-1770s. I want to point out something to you. Where those boys are going in is one of the male slave dungeons, and above it, is what was a church. Today it's a library. So I just want you to reflect on that. Many metres below, a male slave dungeon
3:17 and above ground, a church which the European slave traders would worship at. Much has been written about the experience of enslaved Africans in Europe and the Americas. but less about what slavery meant for Africa. First, it's important to understand that the Europeans were not the first to trade in enslaved Africans. The Arabs had engaged in this centuries earlier on a massive scale across the continent, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Also, Africans themselves had long practiced a form of slavery, using captives from battle as
4:07 unpaid laborers, soldiers or domestic servants. Cameroonian academic, Professor Augustin Hull, is president of the Scientific Committee of UNESCO's General History of Africa, on which the series bases its facts. He says, Africans were treated very differently in indigenous slavery from how they were put to use in the transatlantic slave trade. The main difference is that people were captive were not sold. People were enslaved through war, through debt, but they were able to become included in the families of the captors. They were supposed to be taken
4:56 care of. It doesn't mean that they have wonderful life. but they couldn't be sold to somebody else. They were slaves of these families and they were doing the work for this family. That's really the major difference. They were deprived of freedom, of course. They would have to work for the masters or for the mistress, but they were not a commodity. But Professor Pirri says indigenous slavery helped enable the transatlantic trade. In fact, when you talk about what became later slave trade, it was something that was benefited from the internal African slavery itself, the system, as it existed. Because those are people that became the first targets
5:41 of people to be sold as slaves. Because it was difficult to sell people from your own village as slaves. So it was these people that had been conquered because they were weak, and then you easily sell them. Ghanaian professors Akosua Perbi and Essie Sutherland Adi are two of the most prominent academics in Africa on slavery. There's always been an indigenous internal aspect of slavery, and then there's been an external aspect of slavery. And the indigenous aspect had to do with the need for labour, mainly for the farms, for the mines, for the fisher folk, and so on. And then also, what made the indigenous slavery a bit peculiar was that people also needed slaves as wives. There were slave markets,
6:29 but women always fetched a higher price than men. When they would marry the women, have children with them, and the children became part of the family. And what I found in my research was that in the indigenous system, women always price higher than the men. But in the Atlantic system, the men price higher than the women. Women, mainly in Africa, were needed for marriage and to help with household chores. The men were needed to go and do their bank-breaking labours across the Atlantic. And also, I suppose, the internal slave system. They were not accorded in inferior status simply because of the race that they belonged to. No, it wasn't a question of race. It was a question of who had power over who, prisoners of war, people
7:16 who were exchanged for ritual purposes, various reasons. The coming in of the transatlantic slave trade definitely exacerbated a quest to buy and sell people. I mean, there's no question about that. To find out about the origins of the transatlantic slave trade, I make my way to Senegal, where the biggest ethnic group are the Wolof. I'm invited to join local women from St. Louis for a traditional meal, chebuchen, made up of rice, fish and vegetables.
8:06 The ancestors of these women could have been amongst those who received the first Europeans to arrive in this part of West Africa, Portuguese sailors in 1444. The Portuguese first disembarked on West Africa's Atlantic coast on a small island which they called Il de Palma. It later became known as Il de Gore. For the first few years, the Portuguese were trying to find routes from Africa to India for the spice trade. However, to see exactly where the Portuguese began to use Africans for forced labor, we must go from Senegal to Cabo Verde.
9:03 About 500 kilometres off the coast of Senegal is Cabo Verde, sometimes called Cape Verde. This is made up of 10 islands, all but one inhabited. And this is Praia, the capital, on the biggest island, Santiago. Cabo Verde is Africa's most western point. It lies on the Atlantic Ocean crossroads linking Africa, Europe and the Americas. This gave it a strategic position, a significance not lost on the Portuguese. In 1462, around 100 Portuguese and Spanish settlers arrived on this island. It was then uninhabited. They called it Santiago and made it their capital. One
9:52 of the first Portuguese to come here was Diogo Gomez, and there's a statue of him here. Portuguese traders built settlements in Cabo Verde like here in the old town of Santiago, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Just off the main square is Rua de Banana, a narrow cobbled road with single-story thatched cottages dating back to the 16th century. That makes this probably the oldest road in the oldest town established by Europeans in West
10:39 Africa. Antonio Monteiro and his partner Nina Ferreira have lived here most of their lives, and Antonio says his family have owned this house for generations. Hello. Nice to see you. So this is your home? The Portuguese grew food crops for themselves and reared domestic animals. But they also wanted to make money. So they decided to plant crops like sugarcane and
11:28 cotton for export. And for that, they needed an unpaid labor force. So thousands of Africans were brought in from some of the main communities of West Africa, like the Wolof. Professor Antonio Correa is one of Cabo Verde's foremost historians on the transatlantic slave trade. behind the diamond, gold and diamond. They saw that the African diamond was not only important as a trade, but as a knowledge. The African knowledge was very important to create the first plantings not sugar, not sugar,
12:17 but of cotton. And this technology was African and not European. The technology of the tessal and fiat technology is made here. This is extremely important. And these slaves who come to Cabo Verde, they provide a base of knowledge. Not only the muscular brute force, but the Europeans will learn to live in the tropics, to produce tropical agriculture. Adilson Dias from the National Heritage Institute in Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde, says
13:04 the cotton grown by the slaves was woven into fine cloth by enslaved weavers and this was highly valued and indeed became a chief currency of trading. Mais uma mistura do veio da Europa e do que o escravo fazia aqui em Cabo Verde. É uma invenção de Cabo Verde. Normalmente temos aqui o algodão. O algodão que depois de decolhida é feito um tratamento para separar da semente e depois temos o algodão aqui trabalhado. Depois temos aqui a urzela, que é uma planta tintoreira, uma planta que é utilizada para produzir a tinta que No final, vamos ver aí, que é para produzir assim, para fazer a tinta, que é essa
13:52 aqui. É igual a um pão, dizemos, o nome é pão. 60 anos, 60, 70 anos mais ou menos. Normalmente são feitos por tiras de mais ou menos 15 centímetros. São essas tiras que normalmente são depois cozidas uma na outra para produzir o maior. However, the supply of cotton and foodstuffs from Cabo Verde was not profitable enough for the Portuguese settlers, so they turned to two other activities. They used Cabo Verde's strategic position to repair and resupply ships, and crucially also to trade in slaves to
14:43 sell to the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe. They based themselves at forts like this one, Real de San Felipe, built in the 16th century in the old town of Santiago. The Portuguese were supplying a market. In fact, there was a high demand of enslaved workers in the Caribbean. The Caribbean was a superpower at that time because of the... The sugar industry was requiring lots of labor and the native population was exterminated by forced labor and enslavement. So they provided these workers to the Spaniards
15:30 first and to the settlers in Brazil also. The market at Cabo Verde was easy to access from all directions from the Atlantic. This marble column in the main square of the old town of Santiago is where enslaved Africans were brought from the mainland of West Africa to be sold by Portuguese traders. Slaves who were considered to be disobedient might have been tortured here or even executed. I have to say, inclusive, Cabo Verde é o primeiro entreposto oceânico
16:19 de tráfico de escravos. Os homens aqui da cidade eram armadores de navios, eram proprietários de terras e de escravos. Então, eles dominavam a Câmara Municipal, o poder local. E o pilorinho é o símbolo do poder local. E era também um lugar onde se fazia justiça pública. E muitas vezes se punia os escravos in the Pilorim. So in Cabo Verde, there was a real Babel, African. The Africans who came here came as slaves, but they kept their languages and cultures for some time. The ability of Europeans to
17:07 neutralize this was not great. So, this experience of interaction The Portuguese began exporting enslaved Africans from Cabo Verde from around 1510. A short time later on the Atlantic coast of mainland Africa, they also established a big slave trade center on the Ile de Gorée. It's impossible to know
17:57 exactly how many enslaved Africans pass through here, but the island was basically a warehouse consisting of more than a dozen slave houses. I visit one of the best known of these, the House of Slaves. Amongst its most striking features is the door of no return, the point of departure across the ocean. The House of Slaves attracts hundreds of visitors every day from Senegal, other parts of Africa, and from all over the world. The spacious, airy living quarters of the masters is in strong contrast
18:46 to the dark dungeons in which hundreds of slaves were kept before they were sent into a life of enslavement. When you go inside one of the cells at the House of Slaves, it's so difficult to imagine that at any one time there were dozens of men, women or children held in these dark concrete dungeons. It was a systematic, organised, yet the most barbaric of all trades. The director of the House of Slaves, Eloy Colley, has worked here for three decades. So, when someone come to the House of Slaves, I didn't see... I never didn't
19:34 see the skin colour. It's just a question of heart, finally. to consider that what's happened between the 16th until 19th was not a normal thing. You feel so energies here, but sad energies. And you feel a pain inside you. There are no words for that. There's a possibility that your distant relatives may have had to go from here, and kind of feeling like There's some sort of connection between here and where we are now, especially coming from America. In his time at the House of Slaves, Eloy Colley has given this talk countless
20:22 times. The raid was for one slave taken over ships to America. Six or seven other Africans died in Africa as victims of the slave trade for four centuries. What are the long-term consequences of that? The consequences is the development of Africa, just because they chose the youngest and the strongest from Africa to America. And do you believe that this has contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa? Absolutely. because the population of Africa, they destroyed completely. So the African family structure, it's the first step. And the second step is in population, in terms of population
21:08 in Africa. And also in terms of workers, because they need the strongest and the youngest. Eloy Colley shows me how the enslaved Africans were divided into different categories. that category there says young women, and then over there... Temporarily unfit, they call the value of a man was depending on his weight or his muscle. So that's why the minimum weight for a man was 60 kg, 120 pounds. I also noticed the very small holding cells for the recalcitrant slaves who were obviously rebelling against their captivity. Yes, absolutely. You can see. how they load the slave on
21:54 board. So it will explain that they don't take into consideration that they are a human being. So they would have shackles on their arms, their feet bound together. They use one chain for two slaves. One leg of the first slave and the rest of the chain was in the second slave. And between the two legs of the slaves, was attached to a very big iron bowl, which was about 10 kilograms, 300 grams. Eloy Colley says the door of no return helps conjure the past horrors of what it meant to leave your home and family never to go back. After the door was a kind of wooden bridge, but what is important to take into consideration, having
22:44 this kind of door is very useful in terms of history, What is important is exactly what's happened during that period. You've spent 30 years based here, surrounded by tragic circumstances that you confront every day. Don't you go home depressed every evening when you leave your office? No. Because... the necessity was to know exactly what's happened during that period. Again, the thing is to try to go back to the period and to learn
23:29 more what's happened during that period. It's the only way to better grasp or to understand what's happened. If you understand what's happened exactly, so it's possible to communicate. The only reparation we need is first to consider that what's happened is a part of the history of human beings. Secondly, to teach this part of the history and also to preserve the memories of the victims. It's the only thing that we need today.
24:15 As I say my goodbyes to Eloy Colley, I'm left wondering all the same how difficult it is to be custodian of an institution with a history as tragic as the House of Slaves. After the break, how the slave trade spread and why some Africans themselves were complicit in the acquisition and sale of their fellow Africans.
25:05 Transatlantic slave trade extended right across the West African coast. A fertile stretch of this along Nigeria today was in fact known as the slave coast. It was then one of the most densely populated parts of Africa and one of the most important centers with the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th to the 19th century. The slave trade was part of a wider network known as the triangular trade. It is a triangle between the ship leave from Europe, go take the cargo of enslaved people in Africa
25:54 and ship them to Caribbean or South America or exceptionally North America. and they take the sugar and different products from the Caribbean. It was really sugar that was a hot product at the time and later it was cotton and shipped it to Europe for manufacturing purposes and transformation. So this is kind of, this is what I call a triangular trade. So the ships were never empty of cargo, human or non-human? Exactly. Whiskey, weapons, beads for Africa, humans for the Americas and Caribbeans, and sugar and different products from the
26:42 Caribbeans to Europe. The transport of slaves to the Americas and Caribbean was known as the Middle Passage. Slaving ships made calls along Africa's Atlantic coast, including here in Lagos, Nigeria's main port. Africans were also acquired from the interior of the continent, for instance, from the Kingdom of Congo, which includes territory today that makes up the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Congo, and Angola. The colony of Luanda was established by the Portuguese in 1575, They were
27:28 mostly interested in the slave trade. They conquered the coastal areas which could serve as slave trading hubs, and Luanda was the biggest of these. They built this fort, San Miguel, where statues of former Portuguese dignitaries still tower over visitors attending a cultural festival here. A large number of enslaved Africans were sent by the Portuguese, mostly to Brazil, then the Caribbean and North America. Charleston in South Carolina was the main point of entry in the United States.
28:13 As we've seen, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to export slaves on contract to the Spanish from 1510, and over the decades, the trade gained momentum, attracting several European nations. The English began trading in slaves across the Atlantic in 1562, the Dutch in 1626, the French in the 1640s, and the Danes and Swedes in the 1650s. In the mid 17th century, the French established St Louis in what is today Senegal as the main base for their operations in West Africa. These extended across the region, including modern-day Côte d'Ivoire.
29:04 As part of the triangular trade, Europeans not only transported humans from Africa, but also commodities like ivory. The Atlantic Ocean in Côte d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, this country got its name because It was a part of Africa where ivory was obtained and traded. These children in Cote d'Ivoire visit the National Museum in Abidjan where a huge elephant skull is on display, tusks and all. This region of Africa is called Cote d'Ivoire because on this portion of the land So the ivory trade and
29:53 the slave trade really worked hand in glove. The slave trade is intimately lié to the esclavage. These are the slaves who transport these ivory and go to the commerce. In fact, if Haveri was in demand at all, it was for European markets mostly, because they're using it for piano, they're using it for different furniture in elite houses in Europe. Its proportion in the trade was very minor, in fact.
30:44 So in the transatlantic slave trade, Africans were reduced to mere goods, and they could also be used as a form of currency or exchange. The west coast of Africa, in what is today Ghana, has grim concrete reminders of this horrific period of history. In 1482, the Portuguese had been built a trading post, a stone fortress by the Atlantic Ocean at Elmina, which they later used to hold slaves. Not all countries affected by slavery have such historic monuments of the European presence, like
31:32 here in The Gambia. The beaches of what is the Gambia today, a very popular tourist destination. But in days gone by, this was a part of West Africa known as Senigambia. There were shipping ports and slave markets right along here. The Mandinka people of this part of the continent accounted for many slaves. This is a sales manifest from the 18th century, written by an Englishman called Robert Hazlehurst. A cargo of 152 prime, healthy, young Negroes just arrived in said ship from the River Gambia after a
32:20 passage of 35 days. The Negroes from this part of the coast of Africa are well acquainted with the cultivation of rice and are naturally industrious. Conditions of sale. To approved purchasers, bonds payable the 1st of January, 1786. And to those who make immediate payment in cash, rice, or any other produce, a proper discount will be made thereof. The slaves acquired for sale were at times captured by their fellow Africans, for whom this was a business that was in large part under their control.
33:10 One cannot expect the Europeans to mount expeditions in the hinterland of Africa to catch slaves or to enslave people. It is coastal political groups that organize the expedition. Coastal people were armed with the latest technology, guns, and they were able to capture the neighbours. So you have this kind of economic system based on the use of lethal force to be able to provide the commodity needed for the system. That couldn't work without the participation of local African coastal states. Why did they do it? It is really hard to say
33:56 but we have to remove morality from this kind of issue. What is the common expression for that? It is called real politics, meaning there are no sentiments there. Coastal power used the power to save people and sell them for the profit. Were they fully aware of the kind of fate that might befall these Africans whom they had sold to Europeans. As African we have to face it. They knew that enslavement is not a garden party. Selling somebody, whatever you think about it, is not for the pleasure of that person. Even the treatment of war prisoners suggest that they knew what the fate of these people would be. once they are sold but you
34:44 know this argument is often used by some non-african historians to almost in a way explain and to some extent excuse the actions of the europeans and north americans yes i'm very very well aware of that and aren't you just bolstering that argument i'm not i mean we have to be true to ourselves europeans didn't launch war to capture Africans in the hinterland. They use the local system to have provision of people. And maybe they subvert it a little bit by providing weapons, by providing alcohol, by providing the symbols of power.
35:32 But we have to clean our house, okay? And to really have a kind of a healing process because Sorry to say that, but Africans contributed to the shipment of Africans in the Americas. It should be pointed out that not all coastal Africans actively participated in the transatlantic slave trade, even though some coastal people made huge personal fortunes from this trade in human beings. Another reason why some Africans took part in the slave trade is because there was a fall in demand for African
36:18 gold after huge reserves were found in Brazil in the 1690s. Along with coastal people, there were also two other main groups of Africans who collaborated with Europeans in the slave trade. And they were those who were either of mixed race or had become acculturated into European ways. One example is the community known as the Signaras of Senegal. These were powerful women who owned houses and businesses and who played an important role
37:03 in the local economy. They were the daughters of wealthy European merchants and African women. When occasion demands, local girls in the Ile de Gorée dress up to show visitors the ostentatious wealth these women were known to have displayed. Annie Juga is the deputy mayor of Gorée and is descended on both sides of her family from the Signaras. As Annie shows me around Gorée, she tells me about her namesake, her great, great, great, great aunt, Angelique Juge, who played a substantial role in the civic life of Gorey in the 1700s. Annie takes me to the house where Angelique Juge had lived. It's now owned by the
37:50 church. How do you feel when you come to see this beautiful house of your senior ancestor? It's touched me, of course. But everywhere in Gorey, but here especially. because I can think that one of my family, part of my family, was in this house. And all the atmosphere of Goree is like that. You feel the weight of history in the air? I feel it. I feel it. Not me only, everybody, I think, feel something when you go to Goree Island. You feel something. So is this a typical house that the Signars had? It's very grand. The heart, the courtyard.
38:38 So there's a courtyard. And around the principal rooms in the middle and bedrooms on the side. They had relationships with the European settlers. Some of them were their mistresses and so on. And wife also. And wives. And real wife. And they did the economic power. They did it. If you see an old map, of Goree Island. You can see the name of the owner and most of them are women. Signar. Angelique Jugar was born around the early 1700s. And I have to ask you that I've read that some of these Signar actually kept slaves themselves. Surely some of them,
39:25 but not all of them. Did she? I can't tell you that. I don't know. I really don't know. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Whether Angelique Jouger did or did not keep slaves, there were plenty of mixed-race Africans who did. The Ile de Gorée is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and these beautiful colonial houses have a prettiness which belies their controversial history. No cars are allowed on Goree. And wandering around these alleys, you come across children playing, artists selling their paintings in an open-air market, and a pelican taking a
40:12 bath. It's hard to reconcile all this with the sinister transactions that went on just five generations ago. The mixing and interaction between Africans and Europeans happened from the very start, as soon as Europeans arrived in Cabo Verde. This Afro-Portuguese heritage in Cabo Verde is plain to see. And Portuguese is the official language. But the people's West African roots are still very much in evidence. The market of Sukupira
41:03 in Praia seems to offer just about everything for sale and it has a real West African quality to it. I find the same food I'd enjoyed with the Wolof women of Senegal, Chebuche. Very nice. Delicious. The slavery creates intermediate classes. There are intermediate classes between men and slaves. Many
41:49 slaves ascend to important positions, such as the actors, as language interpreters. Many slaves are important and travel in the ships. The languages have a lot of power. Some languages then asked for nobles, for nobles to be recognized. So, a Afro-Portuguese class came here, on the island, which collaborated with the slave. It is extremely difficult to imagine a
42:36 situation in which you everybody became a prey to everybody around and it is really what happened people have to be suspicious of everybody around because you could end up being just a prey for somebody what is the consequences of this the consequences of is a rivalry and conflict that became endemic
43:23 in different parts of the continent, there was no situation of peace anymore because you have to be ready either to flee or to fight. So this kind of constant uncertainty has significant impact on people's well-being. Although some Africans were complicit in the acquisition of captives, the barbaric treatment and racism that slaves endured whilst awaiting transport across the Atlantic and at their destinations was perpetrated by the white slavers, as we see in the next episode. Also, what were the main reasons behind
44:12 abolition and what was the fate of freed African returnees?
