The eighteenth century has been rated as the period when the largest numbers of slaves were exported to Europe (1701-1810). During this period, the trade was dominated by the English who drew the bulk of their slaves from the Iboland. Ikime (1969) maintained that throughout the period of the slave trade, the vast majority of the slaves purchased at the Delta ports were Ibos, though some were Ibibios, and those sold in the Western Delta were mainly Urhobos. The effect of slave trade in Igbo nation in particular and Nigeria–
Africa as a whole will be discussed in the subsequent sections of this work.
As early as the 16th century, the Europeans particularly the Spaniards had been shipping African slaves to their colonies in South America to work in the mines. Britain joined this trade in 1662 when John Hawkins persuaded other British traders to join with him in shipping slaves to the Americas. From Lisbon, the dealers in slaves loaded their ships with dry gin, rum, firearms, swords, cloths, ornamental goods and other items and sailed to the West African coasts. These items of trade were exchanged for slaves. The slave trade was encouraged indirectly by the gold miners and the tobacco, cotton and sugar-cane plantation investors in the Americas.The slave trade was organized as a commercial enterprise. Liverpool and Bristol grew rich on the slave trade and the trade was often referred to as ‘the great support of our people’. Liverpool boasted of being the principal slaving port not only in England but in Europe.
The other Western European powers were of course, not to be outdone by the British.
The Dutch founded a company for the West African trade and set up ports in order to challenge the positions of the other rivals. The Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, Danes, Germans, Swedes, Spaniards and the British were all involved in the traffick in Negros.
They built ships designed to carry the largest number of slaves in the minimum deck-space. The African chiefs have been grossly indicted in the sale of their subjects and neighbours. Buah (1970) asserts:
The European slave dealers did not generally go themselves into the interior of Africa to buy slaves. They had agents who bought the slaves mainly from the chiefs and brought them down to the European castles on the coast. (pp. 57-59).
Local African potentates obtained the slaves and transacted sales with the European slavers on the coast. For instance, in Nigeria, the states of Lagos, Bonny, Benin and many others were ruled by chiefs who themselves made fortunes out of the slave transaction.
The slaves were therefore produced by an interminable chain of middlemen, which ramified into all parts of the hinterland. The provisioning stations of West Africa became slave-raiding ports. The new market greatly encouraged slave raiding. The chiefs of Benin coast took the opportunity to enrich themselves and by bargaining with the competing European powers. The desire for European goods seduced many African chiefs into co-operating with the traffick, consciously helping to inflict much misery on their brothers and unconsciously co-operating in the destruction of their own dignity.
Thus for Adetoro (1969), “All the blame should not be put on the Europeans who took part in it. Our own people were as much to blame” (p.27).
The African rulers had a certain status and authority and when bamboozled with European goods, they began to use that position to raid outside their societies as well as to exploit internally by victimizing some of their subjects. In the simplest of societies where there were no kings, it proved impossible for Europeans to strike up the alliance which was necessary to carry on a trade in captives on the coast. The tribes that had long-standing hostilities toward one another took the opportunity to capture and sell members of the neighbouring tribes as slaves. The Europeans were content that war-like African rulers should make war against their weaker neighbours in order to maintain the flow of slaves to the stations established along the West African coast.
According to the report written by the Propaganda Fide, Secretary to the Portuguese ambassador for the Kongo in 1833 (cited by Baur, 2009),
The greatest hindrance of missions is the slave trade, operated by the (Portuguese) Christians of Angola. It renders our religion odious to the Africans who keep in mind their chains instead of seeing the freedom brought to them by Jesus Christ.
(p.94).
Early missionaries have been associated with slave trade. What perhaps was most detrimental to the work of evangelization was the sad fact that Portuguese priests and religious men actively participated in the slave trade. While people tolerated that laymen engaged in the infamous trade, they found it bad and unbearable when it was done by religious priests. The participation was not only a scandal but it almost entirely diverted them from their pastoral ministry.
Writing on the reasons for the failure of the early missionaries in West Africa, Agwu (1978) added that inadequate funds hampered the work. “Most Portuguese missionaries took to slave trading to cope with their financial requirements. The Spanish Jesuits too also traded in slaves from Angola to Brazil in order to support themselves” (p.12). The quest for wealth, and desire to trade resulted to missionary work being sacrificed. Some clergy missionaries were reprobates whose moral lives were questionable and were involved in a number of illegal activities. Afonso (cited by Buar, 2009) wrote:
Unfortunately, the life of “These holy servants’ was anything but holy: Although they were regular canons bound to a common life of poverty, they at once started living in separate houses, filled with slave girls. They gave great scandal and people laughed at the king, saying that “everything was a lie.” (p.59).
On the European side, cupidity was also to blame. But how could the Christian conscience permit slavery. True, Christianity had grown up in a world where slavery was an undisputed institution. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians restricted enslavement to non-Christian prisoners captured in a just war, limiting it in practice to Muslims, who also prohibited the enslavement of their faithful. Consequently, Pope Nicholas V and his successors felt justified in giving to the Portuguese crusaders the permission to subdue and enslave pagans and all other infidels and enemies of Christ along the Guinea coast.
This point was never clarified in Rome, perhaps because Africa remained the “dark continent”, beyond the Europeans range of knowledge and interest. The Pope and other religious leaders in Europe were rather concerned about the enslavement of Indians in America, which was severally condemned. Meanwhile, the Portuguese crafted the argument which in the eyes of most Europeans seemed to justify the slave trade. In the interior of Africa, they argued, there were very underdeveloped tribes which led to a sub-human life, similar to animals. Through enslavement they would learn a more decent way of life and the captured slaves when baptized, they could win citizenship in heaven. But if they remained in their own regions where a missionary would never penetrate, they would die in their sins and go to hell. This argument taken from the report of the first Capuchin Prefect shows to what extent the rigorous application of the then generally accepted principle “outside the church there is no salvation” could lead. The worst thing that could happen to an already baptized slave was, in the eyes of the Capuchins, to be sold to heretics, i.e. to Protestant country, where they would loose the Catholic faith and certainly, their eternal salvation. Hence they prohibited selling of baptized slaves to Protestant traders. Pope Clement XI in 1711 approved such a view when he permitted the baptism of the king of Angola, provided he would give up selling slave to heretics.
We could see that during about three centuries of exploration, that the European Christendom and early missionaries tolerated slave trade and closed their eyes to its evil and excesses. It was latter that they slowly began to perceive that it contradicted the dignity of the human person. Thus, when in the 19th century, missionaries became the main antagonists of the trade, there still remained in their sub-conscious minds, the image and perception of the ‘sub-human’ African which in turn infected Euro-African relations like a virus.
Another significant agents of the slave trade were the Arab traders and Muslim missionaries. We have already discussed the slave trade via the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic. We must point out that Arab traders were engrossed in slave trade in Africa as far back as the seventh century. Islam insisted that a Muslim should not buy a fellow Muslim into slavery, so that Arabs who had become Muslim turned to Africa for slaves.
The slave trade across the Sahara brought great misery as did the slave trade across the Atlantic. Johnston (cited by Buah 1978) gave this vivid picture:
When they entered the desert country, they began to see signs of the slave trade across the desert. Round most of the wells where they stopped to get water, there were hundreds of human bones lying about in thousands. These were the bones of slaves who had died of thirst or hunger and were then left by the caravans. The road to the Sudan, indeed, was lined on either side by human bones. (p.65).
Jones (1958) asserts that:
It is one of the harsh and unpalatable facts of history that the principal-almost the only industry of tropical Africa for many centuries was the trade in slaves carried on mainly by the Christian people of Western Europe and by Muslim Arabs. (p.89).
The missionaries of both Christianity and Islam were grossly indicted in the slave trade.
Their quest for financial gain made them use their missionary enterprise and the opportunity to trade in African slaves, thereby abandoning their primary assignment. This hindered the earlier evangelization as it became a stigma to the faith they wanted to spread. We shall see the implications of their involvement in the slave trade in the next subheading.